Last year, when Eric Nehrlich was writing his (excellent) book You Have a Choice, we buddied up to be “accountability partners”. I started out wanting to write about my perspective on product development and team leadership, but I beat my head against it for a month before giving up. There was too much, it was too interconnected, and I couldn’t figure out how to make it all sensible. I ended up writing my little resume booklet.

I thought this year, I’d revise that booklet into something better – but I bounced off of that, too, because while it’s not perfect, it actually says everything I need it to say. I’m sure parts of it could be clearer, it could use a real example resume that goes from being bad to good, etc. But all the knowledge I wanted to get into it? It’s in there already. So I keep rewriting little bits of it, but I go back and re-read them, and they’re maybe marginally punchier, but there’s no new knowledge in there. So it got to feeling like I was running on a treadmill for no reason.

Tonight, my subconscious finally solved the first problem, after a year of working on it. I always feel like these answers emerge like a submarine breaking through the water’s surface or something. But it hit me:

For how to communicate ideas to a team well, read Simon Sinek’s Start With Why. Or better yet, just watch his YouTube video about The Golden Circle. It’s everything great in the book without the fluff.

For how to incentivize and structure a team & peoples’ responsibility, and how to think about motivation, read Daniel Pink’s Drive. There’s an RSA Animate thing about that book, but I found it worth actually reading the whole thing.

For how to lead a team in a really interesting way, and to harness everyone’s complete potential, read L. David Marquet’s Turn This Ship Around. The entire book is essential reading for anyone in a position of power, and it will totally discombobulate your concept of what a leader’s real role is.

Those books are not exactly my worldview, but much like the current version of my resume book, they’re also “close enough”, and the things I’d have to add to that are mostly practical examples of how to put this stuff into practice in reality.

So now that I’ve completely buried the lede, the point is this:

Those books exist. They describe most of my perspective on team leadership and product development. But there is something that I’ve found that isn’t in those books, that was spawned by my specific experience, and is deeply fundamental to how I now think about product development and communication. And I think if you’ve followed my posts on LinkedIn for a bit, this next section will be really obvious.

The book I’m gonna start working on now I think will be called Anima. The subtitle will be something like “How to solve every single problem with your product in one sentence.”

Maybe that’s too hoity-toity. I dunno. But that was the submarine that emerged from the deep. I can offload all the team leadership & most of the communication stuff onto those other books. They’re “good enough”, and unless I can contribute something substantial and worthwhile, you should just read those. The thing that I can contribute is this.

One sentence.

It’s a way to think deeply about every single bit of your product. It’s your North Star. It’s the sword you use to hack away the unnecessary parts. It’s how you empower everyone on your team.

And yeah, I know – grandiose claims. Sounds delusional. But the number of times over the years that it’s helped – and the number of times I’ve resisted doing it and failed, only to realize that not doing this process is *why* it failed – I think this is something that is uncommon in product development. And it’s uncommon in team leadership. And most important of all, I think when people think about giving a team responsibility and autonomy, this is the missing link – you can’t give people responsibility and autonomy without *understanding*, and *so frequently* when I talk to folks who are having team leadership/communication/product problems, it all comes back to this issue. That most people, most of the time, hand wave away a lot of uncertainty and lack of clarity, but that uncertainty/lack of clarity causes communication problems, prevents people from acting with autonomy, creates bottlenecks, etc. etc. etc.

So yeah. The one thing I want to communicate, it turns out, is the concept of “one thing”, and how you can totally supercharge everything you do in a startup or product development process by figuring out how to communicate what you’re doing to your customers and your team in one sentence.