Like software bugs, strategy bugs are a failure of understanding of how the real world works and the value your product creates. They also have varying degrees of severity—some which should be solved right away and some which can slowly accumulate without significant harm.
Company and product strategy doesn’t tend to have the same rigor as more concrete practices (like software development), but one could imagine a ‘strategy bug’ tracker or a ‘bug bash’ where you try to rapidly iterate or gather evidence about an issue.
See also:
- 7 Powers lists macro company strategies that could be used to evaluate progress or file ‘bugs’.
- Metacognition and epistemology are a potential corollary for being more rigorous about strategy and spotting bugs (how do we know what we know and does that match reality).
- Gödel Incompleteness For Startups states we are probably wrong about because formal systems (acquiring knowledge about the market) can not also be complete systems
Links to this note
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With so much emphasis on productivity these days, an underappreciated problem is work avoidance—not doing what you should be doing because you are doing something else. This is particularly sinister because there is often too much work to do in any given day and we reduce anxiety with activity.
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When joining a new team, a common piece of advice is to “gain credibility” by doing undesirable tasks others don’t want to do. The problem with proof-of-worth is that, after a certain point, it has the opposite effect—proving no worth. Being in the habit of doing proof-of-worth tasks takes away the time needed to do high leverage work that no one else can which is likely the primary responsibility of the role anyway.