Resource constraints breed creativity

The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.

Think unconstrained first. Think about a 15 out of 10 experience, design the ideal end state first. Pick one location. But you know how to get in one location a barista who can create coffee, you know in one location how to get the best seats. Build the best possible lovable product first.

What we need to do in a shaping session is we come out with some kind of diagram where engineers, product and design, they're saying, 'We understand that.' So the first thing is we are not going to start something unless we can see the end from the beginning.

In this product development framework, "shaping" means defining a feature's scope and approach, while "empty spaces" refers to available time slots in a calendar feature they were designing.

Here's a good rule of thumb. If it's shaped well, you can usually describe it in less than 10 moving pieces. If I can say, 'It's going to have this, this, this, this, this, and this,' and that's how we're going to let people see the empty spaces, that's a good indicator that it's clear enough that it's shaped well.

In finance, "alpha" means outperformance/upside and "beta" means volatility/unpredictability. MacInnis applies these concepts to business processes and team management.

Processes in a business exist for the sole purpose of lowering beta. Processes are for decreasing volatility in the output of the system. The downside of a process is that it suppresses alpha.