Editor’s Note
I’m not much of a Jeff Bezos stan, but there is this quote he has about customer expectations that I think nicely introduces this week’s Editor’s Note:
"One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent….their expectations are never static — they go up. It's human nature."
In his annual shareholder letter, Bezos goes on to explain that human progress from hunter-gatherer days was not made by "being satisfied. "People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday's 'wow' quickly becomes today's 'ordinary'“, he writes.
If the idea that satisfaction is an unattainable state sounds familiar that’s because it’s similar to Duḥkha - a concept important to Buddhism and Hinduism and one of the three marks of existence. It’s also almost a foregone conclusion that you’ve experienced Duhka at some point in your life. That job, promotion, relationship, vacation, house, connection, a product that was supposed to be that one thing you needed in order in order to be satisfied, but wasn’t.
It’s funny then, given how universal this feeling of unsatisfactoriness is, in both ancient and modern times, just how ignored it is in product development. We talk daily above solving customer problems and rarely, if ever, about dynamic customer expectations and desires. But the truth is that customer problems rarely get solved. At least in any long-term meaningful way. Instead, they get satiated. Temporarily filled until the next hunger arises.
Sometimes that meal can last a while. Or the customer will be okay with eating the same thing, but after enough repetition, the meal will lose its meaning. There are, of course, exceptions to this - utilities probably being the most notable among them- but the exceptions are rare and tend to be in products/services that have been fully commoditized. Instead for most customers, problems are not solved they are satiated.
Dynamic customer expectations and desires are good of course. They are the underlying force that drives progress through capitalism (and beyond the moral considerations, the reason why monopolies, crony capitalism, and regulatory capture stand in the way of that progress). They are networked. Expectations and desires are formed mimetically and as the expectations and desires of your models change (often driven by a change in their model’s expectations and desires), so do yours.
Taste is a good example of this. Cool is often the cherishment of taste. Cool itself creates no physical value. It does not mine ore or fell trees. It does not manufacture items nor transport them overseas. But cool also creates almost all value. For without cool, there would be no color. As your model’s tastes change, so do yours.
What does this all mean though? What is the point of any of the last few paragraphs? My point is simple. Just as we evolved to have dynamic desires, we have also evolved a predilection for goals. Goals are a useful hack because they can add structure to ambiguity. They can a sense of finality to an infinite world. But the world is indeed infinite. And goals are just an overlay we place on top of the world in order to make it feel less so, not a true rendering of the world we actually inhabit.
The problem comes when we forget that goals are just a trick. When we buy too hard into the illusion set ourselves up for failure. We trick ourselves into thinking, “when we ship this feature”, “when we solve this problem” it will be all over. And become exhausted when it isn’t all over. I often hear the story of Sisyphus referenced when building products and this trick we play on ourselves is why. We think we’ve finally gotten the boulder to the top of the hill, only to have it roll down each time.
A far healthier approach, I think, is, to be honest, that we’re playing an infinite game. That even if we satiate a customer today, we need to be ready to entice them with a new meal tomorrow. And to hijack our evolved predilection for goals and refocus it toward processes. The old saying goes “process over outcomes”. And I think this is incredibly true.
A member of a Discord server I’m in talked a few days ago about the time he was in the Special Forces in Iraq fighting Al-Qaeda. After some time, they realized that AQ was operating as a network, not a hierarchy, and leveraging technology and ideology in a way they had not seen before. In order to evolve to meet the threat, the org had to adapt from one structured hierarchically, to one structured like a network. Their mantra became “it takes a network to defeat a network”. They flipped from “need to know” to “who doesn’t know? We need to tell them right now”. They aligned daily and then re-aligned the next day based on new information. In other words, the objectives became the process.
This story should be illustrative to us as product teams working in a world of dynamic customer desires and expectations. Forget the goal and focus on the process.
Anyways, onto this week’s newsletter. Below we have a recommendation for one of my, if not my, favorite and most played Spotify playlists. An anthropological argument for why natural wine is the greatest social technology. Some excellent articles that are Worth Your Time (I especially enjoyed Mark Richards article the place Keith Jarret’s music has in his life) and then the most badass skate magazine cover of all time.
Have a great week and don’t forget to reach out!
What I’m Listening To
Eothen Alapatt, aka Egon, is the founder and president of Now-Again Records, the Los Angeles-based music imprint that specializes in reissues and compilations of funk, soul, and psychedelic rock from 1960s to the 1980s. Egon founded Now Again Records in 2002, while he was General Manager of Stones Throw Records, a well-known label most commonly associated with releasing 2004 Madvillian and Donuts by J Dilla in 2006.
Now-Again’s original mission was to focus on reissues of regional American funk and soul. Funk bands such as the L.A. Carnival, Ebony Rhythm Band, Kashmere Stage Band and Amnesty have seen their music released on the label. But, in recent years, Egon has taken Now-Again on a journey across the world, tracking down artists, brokering licenses, researching and issuing anthologies from the 1970s musical scenes of countries as varied as India (Atomic Forest) Indonesia (Those Shocking Shaking Days), Zambia (Rikki Ililonga and Musi-O-Tunya, WITCH, Ngozi Family, Amanaz etc.), Zimbabwe (Wells Fargo), Ethiopia (Ayalew Mesfin), Nigeria (Wake Up You!), and Iran (Kourosh Yaghmaei).
It is this journey that informs Egon’s masterpiece playlist on Spotify. Updated about twice a month, the playlist is now at over 70 hours of music. Representing a wealth of discographies that range from Nigerian fuzz-funk to Swedish hard rock to Brasilian psychedelia to the jazz, funk, soul and disco that Now-Again is known for, I can and often do just hit shuffle on this playlist and let Egon take the wheel. Single-handily justifying the price of a Spotify subscription, Now-Again Egon’s Selections really takes the pressure off trying to figure out the best of the most obscure tracks in the billions of tracks now available at the streaming behemoth.
Find it here.
What I’m Reading
The premise of Edward Slingerland’s Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, And Stumbled Our Way to Civilization is quite simple, alcohol is a feature for our species, not a bug. Drawing on recent experiments, Neolithic burials, eclectic myths and global literature, Slingerland teases out the evolutionary advantages and enduring benefits of getting blitzed.
Slingerland, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, first struck on the evolutionary benefits of alcohol while researching his last book, Trying Not to Try: The Ancient Art of Effortlessness and the Surprising Power of Spontaneity, a fascinating book that brings together ancient Chinese philosophy and contemporary cognitive science to solve the secret of wu-wei—the art of acting effortlessly and spontaneously, of being active and effective, even brilliant, without ever trying. Also a topic I touched on in Week 5. While doing that research, Slingerland kept finding references to alcohol and how it was used as a tool in order to enter a state of wu-wei.
Drinking not only allows wary, self-interested individuals to drop their guard and collaborate, Slingerland writes, it also facilitates the creativity and playfulness our species needs to innovate and survive. A negroni will essentially wipe out the prefrontal cortex, the site of pragmatic, grown-up thinking. In other words, booze is a handy, low-tech tool to get goodwill and fresh ideas flowing.
For our ancestors, the lowering of inhibitions was especially essential, “a robust and elegant response to the challenges of getting a selfish, suspicious, narrowly goal-oriented primate to loosen up and connect with strangers…… It is no accident that, in the brutal competition of cultural groups from which civilizations emerged, it is the drinkers, smokers, and trippers who emerged triumphantly”. In other words, Slingerland contends in Drunk that the discovery of alcohol was a precondition for larger society. Without it, Slingerland writes, it is entirely likely we would have never been able to get past Dunbar’s number. Natural wine is the ultimate social technology.
In fact that last line (“Natural wine is the ultimate social technology”) is a great summary of the way that Slingerland addresses the more devastating effects of alcohol on people as well. While he is adamant that chemically induced communion is just as valuable in modern times as it was for our ancestors, he punctuates that point with an important asterisk. First, drinking is a social technology. This means it doesn’t deliver the same value (and can actually be very destructive) when you drink alone. Second, he points out that for most of human history, the libations we chose to partake in had a relatively low ABV - distillation is a much more modern phenomenon. And with distillation comes a host of adjacent problems that just weren’t available to our ancestors.
So, in conclusion, do drink natural wine with friends. Don’t drink whiskey alone.
Not convinced? Read Edward Slingerland’s full argument in Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, And Stumbled Our Way to Civilization here.
Worth Your Time
How tools from ecology can help predict and prevent financial crashes (Institute for New Economic Thinking) - A team of economists and scientists including SFI External Professor Doyne Farmer have published a new study illustrating how tools from ecology can help us better understand financial markets.
Product Lessons Learned: A Conversation with Shreyas Doshi & John Cutler (Amplitude) - John Cutler publishes an interview with Shreyas Doshi - a PM at Stripe and probably my favorite product thinker right now. Pretty much every tweet thread of his is an instant retweet and this interview is chock-full of incredible insights.
The Shimmering Piano (Varyer) - Former Pitchfork editor-in-chief, Mark Richardson, writes beautifully about the place of Keith Jarret’s music in his life and listening to jazz more broadly. A real love letter.
Finance as culture (Luttig’s Learnings) - “What Instagram did to body image, wallstreetbets and Twitter are doing to bank account image.” We’ve always had a lottery culture, but lottery culture has exploded into the stock market in the past few years. Social media makes income inequality noticeable in a way it never was before. The winnings of lottery culture, combined with winnings from equity culture (e.g. IPOs), have led to new forms of mimetic investing that have rendered financial metrics of the past obsolete for many sectors. How does this play out?
One by One, My Friends were Sent to the Camps (The Atlantic) - An magnificent piece of journalism. In a five-part series, Tahir Hamut Izgil tells us what it is like to live through - and escape - the Uyghur genocide.