Narrative clarity drives better prioritization than metrics alone

It becomes the strategic north star for the product. We are constantly getting feature requests through sales, through customer success. And we had sort of no way, bar to decide well what do we take on, what don't we take on? And this clearly has become our bar.

We get a lot of requests for features and a lot of them are basically about opinions, some way to record opinions. We're not going to do those.

"This principle of control" refers to Substack's core principle that writers and readers should have control over their content and experience, rather than being subject to algorithmic recommendations.

All things equal, do the one that holds constant this principle of control. We could talk about a few other examples like this, but I think from a prioritization standpoint and from a strategic standpoint, Substack is a pretty principled company.

Is this actually going to help us get to AGI? So there's a huge focus on there's this potential shiny reward right in front of us, which is optimize user engagement, or whatever it is. And is that really the thing? Maybe the answer is yes. Maybe that is what is going to help us get to AGI sooner, but looking at it through that lens I think is always the first step of deciding any of these problems.

One of the most impactful things we did pretty early on in my tenure here was to hone in on our overall product strategy, but a core piece of that being what's the actual market we're going after? What are the segments of that market? Who are the personas within the segments of that market?

The moment a metric becomes a goal it's no longer a useful metric. The overlap of most valuable things you can do with a product, and for things that happen to be fully quantifiable, it's like maybe 20% which leaves 80% of a value space unaddressable by the people who will only look at quantifiable things.