How to Engineer your Business into a Consumer’s Only Choice

Read Adrienne's 10,000 word essay here.

The common narrative is that a startup founder needs to have certain qualities and run their company in a certain way in order to succeed, but the fact of the matter is that these things vary greatly depending on the type of company you are building. Specifically, there are three types of risk that a company should be focused on aggressively removing, and these risks differ depending on the life cycle of the company and their industry. This essay will deep dive into those risks, take a quick survey of several prominent companies, and describe how their risk levels have changed over time and how they have overcome them. Most literature on building products tends to be abstract (e.g. “here is a 5-step design process”), but we learn best from stories. I will include examples of how various companies aggressively removed risk in order to deliver successful product launches.

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Adrienne is a Product Manager at Tesla building the in-car experience in your Model S/X/3. Before Tesla, she founded a biotech company focused on automating drug development with computer vision. The company was later acquired and she led product design at the parent company. Previously, she has worked at Google, Bridgewater, and Y-Combinator Research.