35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest and beyond | Bob Baxley

As product managers, we feel like every decision we make is high stakes. It's good occasionally to think about, hey, what's the magnitude? And then, is it reversible?

At some point, understand that you are responsible for your career, not your workplace.

In your career, it's just a lot like building a product. You have theories and hypotheses, you find ways to experiment with them, and then you were successful or you failed.

Have a point of view yourself, and then get everybody's feedback. That's frankly, when I would join a new company, I would give myself two weeks to develop the product strategy for that company, which is a little outrageous, but I would just do it fast.

The job of an entrepreneur at the beginning is just to find out something that's 10X better. Delight is trying to work in that magnitude.

Begin your day with intent, okay? What are the three to five things I'm hoping to do today? Second, minimize meetings, okay? Minimize meetings. That sucks the life out of everybody, including you.

Don't ask a person to be your mentor. That's really awkward. First, identify them. Say, this is a person I think that could be helpful to me. And then, find ways to be helpful.

The only reason people need managers is that we need someone to force us to do the things that are important that we don't enjoy doing. So, I'm always self-managing myself.

As a rule, I never used rules as thumbs, but these two percenters, I would kill them. If I launched something and it was only 2% we'd, we called it scraping the barnacles, just get rid of it.