CDOQ

Musk & The Algorithm

2026-05-25T18:21:23.447-07:00

A few weeks ago, I finished reading Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson.

The book provides a fascinating look into Musk’s life and how he has been able to make industry-changing contributions in business and technology. It also raises an uncomfortable question: can you get rockets to orbit and accelerate the transition to electric vehicles without accepting some of the chaos that comes with Musk?

Isaacson captures this tension well in the final paragraph:

"Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged? Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world."

One of the most useful parts of the book is Musk’s “algorithm” for building deep-tech hardware products:

"1. Question every requirement. Each should come with name of the person who made it. You should never accept that requirement came from a department, such as from "the legal department" or "the safety department." You need to know the name of the real person who made the requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart the person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirement less dumb.

2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn't delete enough.

3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist.

4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted.

5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and bugs were shaken out. "

The chapter ends with a line that summarizes the philosophy well:

“The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.”

I found the algorithm useful because it captures something I have seen repeatedly in product development: most teams optimize too early and question too late.

Customer requests are inputs, not instructions. Requirements are assumptions. Features are costs until they create value.

The goal is not to add more or delete more. The goal is to understand what creates value, remove what does not, and only then optimize or automate.

That is why I liked the algorithm. It is not just a manufacturing lesson. It is a product development lesson.

I recommend the book.

Original Ideas

2026-04-16T09:14:00.000-07:00

With eight billion people in the world, why are truly original ideas so rare?

Birthdays

2026-04-16T09:01:08.342-07:00

Before calendars, did birthdays exist?

Dots

2026-04-16T08:58:00.000-07:00

In the canvas of the universe, Earth is a dot, and we are a dot within it. And still, our problems feel immense to us.

11 Tenets Of A Good Product Manager

2026-03-28T12:05:00.000-07:00

Most product managers don’t fail because they lack ideas; they fail because they don’t make the right trade-offs.

Over the course of my career, I’ve led product organizations building everything from 0→1 products to businesses generating over $600M in revenue spanning hardware, software, AI, and crypto.

What I’ve found is that while the domains evolve, the craft of product management remains fundamentally the same.

In the fast-paced world of product development, the job of a product manager is not to optimize for a single objective but to balance competing forces.

I’ve found that good product managers consistently operate across four objectives:

A. User Experience

B. Profit (Unit Economics)

C. Competitive Advantage

D. Technology Advancement

The most common mistake product managers make is optimizing for one objective at the expense of the others.

These objectives are often in tension. The following tenets reflect how good product managers navigate those trade-offs.

A. User Experience

1. Customer requests are inputs, not instructions. The real work is identifying the underlying user problem.

2. Solving one user problem often creates others. Good product managers think in systems, not features.

3. Customer obsession without prioritization leads to noise, not value.

Tension: Great user experience often increases cost and complexity; how much is worth it?

B. Profit (Unit Economics)

4. A product manager who keeps all stakeholders happy is not a good product manager. Decisions should be driven by outcomes, not feelings.

5. Product is the discipline of resource allocation under uncertainty. Saying no is the job.

6. Experimentation is only valuable if it drives decisions that improve unit economics.

Tension: Short-term revenue vs long-term product quality.

C. Competitive Advantage

7. Good product managers operate at the intersection of user experience, technology, and business model.

8. Differentiation is intentional. If your product can be easily copied, it will be.

Tension: Speed to market vs defensibility.

D. Technology Advancement

9. Technology is both an enabler and a constraint.

Tension: Exploration vs. exploitation.

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Case Study: Building a Wearable Before the Market Was Ready

Early in my career, I worked on building a wearable fitness device at a time when the ecosystem we take for granted today didn’t exist. Bluetooth Low Energy wasn’t widely available, battery technology was limited, and user expectations for wearables were still forming.

Every product decision was a trade-off.

We chose to sync with smartphones instead of building a standalone device—not because it was ideal, but because it was feasible within power and size constraints. We limited the display to preserve battery life and wearability. And we deliberately avoided cramming in features, focusing instead on a simple experience that could drive consistent user engagement.

What became clear very quickly was that product decisions don’t exist in isolation.

Increasing sync frequency impacted battery life
Adding sensors affected size and cost
Improving UX often required compromises in hardware

The product was not a collection of features—it was a system of interdependent choices.

Perhaps the most important lesson was this: constraints are not a limitation—they are what define the product. The role of a product manager is not to wish them away, but to navigate them with clarity and intent.

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Organizational Reality

10. Organizational constraints are real. good product managers navigate and reshape them.

11. Good judgment is knowing when to adapt—and when to hold the line.

Tension: Product decisions vs organizational constraints.

Closing

No matter where you are in your product journey, these four objectives are your guiding stars. How you balance them will define the success of your product and ultimately your company.

Are you intentionally balancing these trade-offs, or reacting to them?

Language

2026-01-25T17:00:00.000-08:00

The fundamental flaw in the idea that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) can be more intelligent than humans is the assumption that language itself represents intelligence.

Agent

2025-12-31T12:30:00.000-08:00

My agent often answers better than I do—not because it’s more intelligent, but because it never forgets and can hold more context at once.

Genes

2025-12-31T12:24:00.000-08:00

If humans are genetically programmed to reproduce, how do some people consciously choose not to have children?

Life

2025-12-31T12:18:00.000-08:00

Why do we realize the finite nature of life only when we’re closer to the end, and not in our youth?

Repetition

2025-12-31T11:37:00.000-08:00

Why do children repeat the same question, even when the answer never changes?

E = mc²

2025-12-30T16:55:00.000-08:00

Human life begins like E = mc²—setting aside c, our energy grows with our mass. Eventually, the equation seems to flip: energy wanes while mass lingers.

Technology

2025-12-30T16:47:00.000-08:00

Technology evolves more through human belief than through natural laws.

Mixing

2025-12-30T16:45:00.000-08:00

Some things don’t mix well, no matter how good they are individually—like Mexican huevos rancheros and French sourdough bread.

Music

2025-12-30T16:42:00.000-08:00

Music doesn’t recognize generational boundaries.

Empathy

2025-12-30T16:39:00.000-08:00

A leader’s empathy for employees should not exceed the team’s empathy for customers.

Pricing

2025-11-04T15:10:00.000-08:00

Your cost structure is not your customer’s problem.

Books That Broaden Business Students’ Perspective

2025-11-02T08:28:00.000-08:00

Business school teaches you the theory of business — the frameworks, the financial models, the case studies. But real understanding comes from seeing how ideas collide with the messy, unpredictable world of people, markets, and technology.

Over the years, I’ve found a handful of books that open your mind beyond the classroom. They explore the mental models, systems thinking, and creative problem-solving that shape great companies and great decision-makers.

Here are eleven that I think business students will find useful:

Charlie Munger

1. Poor Charlie's Almanac - Timeless lessons on decision-making and mental models from Charlie Munger.

2. Making things work - Insight into the systems-thinking approach that underlies modern technology and organizations.

3. The Snowball - A deep dive into Warren Buffett’s philosophy and long-term business perspective.

4. Fooled by randomness - A brilliant exploration of luck, probability, and human bias in business.

5. Art of problem solving - Frameworks for structured thinking and creative problem-solving.

6. Apple in China - A look at global supply chains, strategy, and cultural nuance in business execution.

7. No logo - A critical examination of branding, consumerism, and corporate identity.

8. One from many - The story of Visa’s distributed structure and how collaboration can drive innovation.

9. Only the paranoid survive - Andy Grove’s lessons on strategic inflection points and adaptive leadership.

10. The mythical man month - A classic on software project management and why scaling teams is hard.

11. Diffusion of innovations - The definitive study of how new ideas spread through markets and societies.

I originally prepared this list for Mike Polacek's students at Santa Clara University but it’s one I’d recommend to anyone who wants to understand how technology, systems, and human behavior intersect in the business world.

“The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.”

— Charlie Munger

Normal

2025-10-21T13:33:00.000-07:00

Normal is what a lot of other people like you do.

Joy

2025-10-20T17:08:00.000-07:00

People who love what they do age more slowly.

Momentum

2025-09-25T09:44:00.000-07:00

Climbing a hill from a standstill is a grind. With momentum, it’s a glide. But from a standstill, changing direction is easier than when you’re already in motion.

Conversations With Lions & GenAI

2025-09-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

Imagine teaching a lion to speak perfect English. Every word pronounced flawlessly, grammar impeccable. Yet, a conversation with it would still be impossible. Its frames of reference are so alien to ours that true understanding cannot occur—just as Ludwig Wittgenstein noted in Philosophical Investigations: ‘If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.’

Now imagine a counterpart trained on the vast body of human knowledge: GenAI. Here, conversation is not only possible but also delightful, because its frame of reference aligns with ours. GenAI can reason, explain, and answer across countless domains. On the surface, it seems like a mind without limits.

Conversations

But there’s a catch. Unlike a lion, GenAI can confidently deliver falsehoods. Without deep understanding of the topic in discussion, you may never notice. Knowledge alone isn’t enough. Context, experience, and critical thinking remain irreplaceable—even when conversing with a machine that seems to know everything.

How The World Works

2025-09-22T08:24:00.000-07:00

The world works because not everyone wants the same thing at the same time.

Making Things Better

2025-09-22T08:18:00.000-07:00

If you’re not consistently making things better, they don’t stay the same—they get worse.

Deploy Bravely?

2025-09-12T08:34:00.000-07:00

Driving down Hwy 101 in Silicon Valley yesterday, I spotted this billboard (See image). It reminded me that while the Bay Area overflows with technical brilliance, tech companies often stumble when it comes to marketing and communication.

The ad boldly declares: “DEPLOY BRAVELY.”

Deploy Bravely?

In software, deployment is the last place you want bravery. A good deployment should be boring—built on testing, quality assurance, monitoring, and the ability to roll back instantly if things go sideways.

Sonos once deployed bravely and left some of its speakers effectively unusable. The bravery resulted in the company’s market cap declining by half.

I have no idea what Prisma Airs is—and the ad doesn’t make me interested in finding out more. Can you tell what it’s about?

Testing A Company Culture

2025-09-10T22:24:00.000-07:00

I met a software engineer yesterday at a conference — let’s call him Ted (not his real name). He has worked at well-known Silicon Valley companies like Square, Google, and Yelp.

Ted told me that culture varies widely across companies. I asked, “But how does that affect your job? You’re a software engineer — you just have to code to the requirements.”

He smiled and said, “Culture defines how good the requirements are, how good my code is, and how happy the customer will be with the application.”

Then Ted shared a practical test for culture: measure how much time you spend convincing others. If most of your energy goes into persuasion instead of building, the culture is working against you. In a healthy culture, things just flow — and you spend your day building, not convincing.

In other words, in good cultures, it takes less energy to get things done.

CDOQ

Musk & The Algorithm

Original Ideas

Birthdays

Dots

11 Tenets Of A Good Product Manager

Most product managers don’t fail because they lack ideas; they fail because they don’t make the right trade-offs.

Over the course of my career, I’ve led product organizations building everything from 0→1 products to businesses generating over $600M in revenue spanning hardware, software, AI, and crypto.

What I’ve found is that while the domains evolve, the craft of product management remains fundamentally the same.

In the fast-paced world of product development, the job of a product manager is not to optimize for a single objective but to balance competing forces.

I’ve found that good product managers consistently operate across four objectives:

A. User Experience

B. Profit (Unit Economics)

C. Competitive Advantage

D. Technology Advancement

Read more about the four objectives here.

The most common mistake product managers make is optimizing for one objective at the expense of the others.

These objectives are often in tension. The following tenets reflect how good product managers navigate those trade-offs.

A. User Experience

1. Customer requests are inputs, not instructions. The real work is identifying the underlying user problem.

2. Solving one user problem often creates others. Good product managers think in systems, not features.

3. Customer obsession without prioritization leads to noise, not value.

Tension: Great user experience often increases cost and complexity; how much is worth it?

B. Profit (Unit Economics)

4. A product manager who keeps all stakeholders happy is not a good product manager. Decisions should be driven by outcomes, not feelings.

5. Product is the discipline of resource allocation under uncertainty. Saying no is the job.

6. Experimentation is only valuable if it drives decisions that improve unit economics.

Tension: Short-term revenue vs long-term product quality.

C. Competitive Advantage

7. Good product managers operate at the intersection of user experience, technology, and business model.

8. Differentiation is intentional. If your product can be easily copied, it will be.

Tension: Speed to market vs defensibility.

D. Technology Advancement

9. Technology is both an enabler and a constraint.

Tension: Exploration vs. exploitation.

Case Study: Building a Wearable Before the Market Was Ready

Early in my career, I worked on building a wearable fitness device at a time when the ecosystem we take for granted today didn’t exist. Bluetooth Low Energy wasn’t widely available, battery technology was limited, and user expectations for wearables were still forming.

Every product decision was a trade-off.

What became clear very quickly was that product decisions don’t exist in isolation.

Increasing sync frequency impacted battery lifeAdding sensors affected size and costImproving UX often required compromises in hardware

The product was not a collection of features—it was a system of interdependent choices.

Perhaps the most important lesson was this: constraints are not a limitation—they are what define the product. The role of a product manager is not to wish them away, but to navigate them with clarity and intent.

Read more: https://cdoq.blogspot.com/2013/08/fitness-on-your-wrist-genesis-of.html

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Organizational Reality

10. Organizational constraints are real. good product managers navigate and reshape them.

11. Good judgment is knowing when to adapt—and when to hold the line.

Tension: Product decisions vs organizational constraints.

Closing

No matter where you are in your product journey, these four objectives are your guiding stars. How you balance them will define the success of your product and ultimately your company.

Are you intentionally balancing these trade-offs, or reacting to them?

Language

Agent

Genes

Life

Repetition

E = mc²

Technology

Mixing

Music

Empathy

Pricing

Books That Broaden Business Students’ Perspective

Normal

Joy

Momentum

Conversations With Lions & GenAI

How The World Works

Making Things Better

Deploy Bravely?

Testing A Company Culture

Increasing sync frequency impacted battery life
Adding sensors affected size and cost
Improving UX often required compromises in hardware