(2021-07-01) Winters Fire Every Bullet

Casey Winters: Fire Every Bullet. In crisis situations, a new style or management and prioritization has to occur. Andy Grove famously called this “wartime”, and he and others like Ben Horowitz have described what it’s like to be a “wartime” CEO. I haven’t ever seen anything written about being a wartime CPO though.

there’s one big thing that needs to change for wartime CPOs I want to cover today, and that is prioritization and evaluation.

Eventbrite has been in a wartime situation for over a year now. Let me give you some background. In February 2020, Eventbrite started to become aware of a big problem. While the company was off to a fantastic start to the year, we could see the tidal wave of a global pandemic coming.

More specifically, on the product side, we shifted all of our focus to help our creators prepare for the reality of a global pandemic and what that meant for their businesses.

His (Luc Levesque) response was basically, “Dude, you do ALL of it.” We could figure out which one mattered the most after we’re successful. This is the approach we took at Eventbrite when the pandemic went into effect. (More Dakka)

We built every possible thing we could to help creators and the company... We fired every bullet we had at the pandemic problem. We did not prioritize. It didn’t matter how much effort each activity was. We were going to do it all, and do it fast. We released things that would not meet our normal quality bar.

You never want to be on the other side of a catastrophic event having failed saying “we could have done more,” and that has been top-of-mind for us throughout the pandemic. What is interesting when you take the approach of doing everything is some of the tactics work really well, and some do not. There is a tendency to evaluate those tactics in isolation for their success and failure. This is a mistake. You have to evaluate success or failure via the aggregate of all the bullets you fired. Did we save the company? We did. Did we save a lot of our creators’ businesses? We did. You can’t do an experiment or results review on those tactics individually. You have to look at the portfolio.

(I'd counter that at least a bit of thinking/prioritization makes sense.
It also sounds like this is "breadth-first" - build MVP of many features, don't iterate (yet).
You don't do these as experiments, you just roll them out 100% and move on.
Maybe at some point, before building MVP of idea7, you build v2 of idea3 because it seems like a better bet? (But you ignore the sunk cost of the MVP, and consider the incremental value from the incremental work.))

firing every bullet makes a lot more sense for extreme downside scenarios than extreme upside scenarios.

That doesn’t mean firing every bullet in upside situations is wrong; it’s just not as clear of an answer as in the extreme downside scenario.