Cale Reid

How I Work

My explanation of these principles

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01

Learn by doing

Plan enough to start, then learn by doing. Iteration beats speculation.

02

Seek feedback at 30%

Share work before it feels ready. The earlier you get feedback, the faster you learn.

03

Focus means saying no (or not right now)

Pursuing everything results in mediocrity. What makes product work hard is being explicit about what you're not doing.

04

Write to think

You don't really know what you think until you've written it down.

05

Stay in the weeds

Context is the job. Without understanding how something works, there's no way to help make it better.

06

Responsible urgency

This work is urgent. It's also a long game. Move fast in a way that's sustainable.

07

Own the narrative

In the absence of a coherent story, people will come up with their own.

08

Shared clarity, distributed ownership

Align on the problem as a team. Let the people closest to the work own how to solve it.