The brown compromise is an analogy from the painting world. The story goes like this: if you ask a family of five folks living in the same house which colour they prefer, you may end up with a dataset like this one: green, yellow, blue, violet, and I don’t care (yes, this is not a colour!). You may also end up in a family (like mine) where one of the users (me!) is colour-blind and has a very different perception of the world than the other four family members.
Our mind operates with two main paradigms. Open or closed.
Openness is the feeling we experience when connecting directly with our experience. It can be while being in the flow state, as identified by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi where we lose our sense of time and solicit our brain effortlessly. We have multiple expressions for these states.
What better moment to reflect on life, life choices and happiness than a day after you were laid off?
Ultimately, the reasons do not matter much and will not be exposed here.
I realized today that quitting your job (without another one planned) or being fired is a 1-to-0 transition. In physics, this is called a non-linear transition. It describes rapidly evolving phenomena like phase transitions and the exponential growth of tiny lifeforms. We don’t practice (mentally) this 0-to-1 transition! It is, in fact, the exact opposite of a prevalent mental model of the product & business world. Pether Thiel popularized the 0-to-1 mental model in a well-known book of the same name.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the concept of “trifecta” (also called triad in some organizations) that I have seen used successfully in the past both at start-up and even at large scale organizations (ex: Shopify).
Let’s start with a definition. The trifecta represents a subset of a product team whose goals are to capture systematically:
I will use the term craft in this article and would also like to define it: a craft is one or more people inside the product-team with their hierarchy, rituals and specialties. Example of craft includes engineering (sometimes back-end, front-end, mobile), UX (designer, researcher, content specialist, etc.), Product (product manager, product owner, product lead, etc.), data-science (data-scientist, etc.), commercial, legal, etc. Each organization is different and has a different structure to execute its mission. In this article, I will refer to “craft” as the various specialties & hierarchies that exist within the organization.
Very much like Prometheus and the fire or Icarus and the sun they are powerful analogies and ideas that shape our view of the world. A tribute to their power is that, thousands of years after their creation, we still relate to them even if their initial context is long gone.