10x not 10% - Product management by orders of magnitude

Most people try to improve their work by 10%, follow the same path as everyone else, and spend their time avoiding small mistakes. In this talk from Mind the Product 2015, Ken Norton argues that aiming for a 10x improvement, a factor of ten, forces you to tackle a problem completely differently and to go after the big external constraints instead. His example: 1.5 billion smartphones made Kodak obsolete, 40 times the number of film cameras sold in its best year. It is the classic tension between optimization and innovation.

Kodak’s innovator’s dilemma is also a case of loss aversion: losing hurts more than winning feels good, so teams under-promise and avoid big bets. Adding a zero to a goal challenges your assumptions and opens up new ideas and solutions, but it also takes a new mentality and a new way of working.

Startups often think only cash-rich companies like Google can work this way, while big companies think only risk-taking startups can. Ken outlines eight things every company can do to organise itself for moonshot thinking, and makes the case that if you set very ambitious goals and miss them, you have probably still achieved something remarkable.