Time constraints force better decisions than endless planning

We are not going to start something unless we can see the end from the beginning. We're not going to take a big concept and then say, 'What's the estimate for this thing?' We're going to go the other way around and we're going to say, what is the maximum amount of time we're willing to go before we actually finish something? How do we come up with a idea that's going to work in the amount of time that the business is interested in spending?

You can't put 10 pounds of crap in a five pound bag. So, it's a high academic statement and we can't just take any project, no matter how giant it is, and then throw it at a team and say, 'Figure it out and ship something meaningful in six weeks by cutting away scope.'

If we think of six weeks as a maximum, that's going to force us to ask some really good questions to ourselves about what piece of this do we really think we can land? Because if you try to say, in six months, we're going to ship this thing, you can't get your arms around all of the problems that have to get solved for an entire six-month chunk of work to actually happen.

Give yourself a fixed period of time to take some decisive action and see if it feels better. Can we take six weeks to try to make it work? Can we just spend all of our time 100% on the one and only one thing that matters right now?

Don't take on projects that are going to be six months, a year, because you just generally don't have control over the macro.

When you think about return on investment, we could get the data by having some engineers spend a couple of hours implementing it. And that's exactly what happened. Somebody at Bing who kept seeing this in the backlog and said, 'My God, we're spending too much time discussing it. I could just implement it.'