I wanted to make sure you have this. Here are my three most valuable, all-time favorite practices – Those that I wish I had started 20 years ago. There are also [[My “Biggest Misses”]] and [[My “Greatest Hits”]] (in case you’re curious.) Have a look and see what tickles your fancy! ## Care for your team > “It’s a marathon, not a sprint” I learned this in 2015 from [Micah Young](https://github.com/micahyoung) at [Pivotal Labs](https://tanzu.vmware.com/labs) New York and implemented it with dozens of teams since then. Team well-being is my single go-to priority that I even practice in my private life. Hence: If I could implement just ONE SINGLE thing in my team(s) it is this: **Schedule only the following two, non-negotiable, mandatory team gatherings EVERY WEEK** 1. Iteration Planning Meeting (IPM), Monday 9:00 - 10:00 2. Weekly Retrospective, Friday 16:00 – 17:00 That’s it. Two events. IPM on Monday to plan this week’s top priority and a Retro on Friday to look back and make small improvements. Every week. **So, why these two?** 1. We have to provide a space to experience and celebrate us and our team-mates as sentient, capable and and emotional beings 2. We have to respect that makers (developers, designers, dev-ops, etc.) live and work on a different schedule than as managers and minimize the amount of painfully wasted time during meetings 3. We have to recognize that this whole sheband is a marathon, let’s optimize for creating and maintaining MOMENTUM, not burn ourselves out ourselves on SPEED ## Care for your customers > “Become a detective rather than creative genius.“ – Dane Maxwell I learned this from [Dane Maxwell](https://danemaxwell.com/) at The Foundation in 2013. [[300 In-Depth Interviews Challenge|To “become a detective”, I spent the last 2 years full-time interviewing more than 300 people.]] It was a humbling experience yet I believe it is the single most effective way to make business: **LEARN TO LISTEN – and I mean *REALLY LISTEN* – to your customers. And CONTINUE TO LISTEN even if it IS NOT what you want to hear** 1. Practice and master the art of conducting open-ended, long-form an in-depth interviews 2. Practice and master the science of qualitative data analysis tradecraft **It is about them. Period.** Your only job is to detect *their* pains, appreciate *their* dreams, improve *their* hacked-together solutions and speak *their* language. ## Do ONE Thing really well > “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times” – Bruce Lee I learned this process from Owen at the [Lean Startup Machine](https://startupstash.com/tools/lean-startup-machine/) back in 2012 You and I are VCs. Yup. You, too, are a real venture capitalist! Your capital just isn’t money but time. And just like money, our time is a limited resource. **Learn to repeatedly run experiments in parallel so that you have time left for that one “HELL YES!” after saying “NO.” ten times:** 1. Repeat the scientific method to get to “NO.” sooner and more often. 2. Paralellize at least 3 ventures to get really smart about your testing. **Keep it simple** [[⭐️ How To Make Better and Faster Investment-Decisions With Lean Experiments|I simply *repeated and parallelized* the “One Kick” with 52 experiments to weed out 11 of 12 ideas]] and be left with one 40X asset. Just start with the biggest risk and stop if the answer is “NO.” 1. Would I work on this in my free time? 2. What’s the growth-rate in this niche? 3. How much do I care for this specific customer? 4. What keeps them up at night specifically? 5. What are they doing to fix this themselves? 6. What does their ideal solution look like? 7. How much is that worth to them?