But they won't say it.
If I had a dime for every "idea person" that wanted me to realize their harebrained AI-powered cheese straightener, for nothing, and they get all the money and credit, because it's "their idea," I'd be rich.
Yeah, I'm cynical.
I've prototyped enough of my own ideas to know that most ideas are shit.
I believe that a lot of these colossal startup failures are great ideas; poorly executed.
The people I'm working with now, had a great idea, but didn't have it "thought through."
I said "I'll realize it, but expect big changes. I'll be developing a running prototype, and we'll be tossing out things that looked good on paper, but fall flat, in execution."
That's exactly what has happened. It takes a lot of patience; on both the "idea person" level, and the "execution person" level. I need to take their ideas seriously, and they need to shut up and pay attention when I catalog the costs of their ideas in the real world.
It'll work out, and won't look at all like they thought, but I'm designing an excellent baseline for creativity. It will work very well, will be localizable, accessible, and will allow creatives to put a lot of chrome on things.
Take Noah Kagan’s term “wantrepreneur” as the groundwork for what I mean:
Person A’s ideas are: Get business cards, build a website, get pamphlets, buy equipment, buy a business car, and so-on.
Person B’s idea is: find 3 clients first, do the rest after.
Person A’s ideas are all objectively good, but many of us who have seen businesses come and go won’t count those as ideas, and therefore will say “you have a good idea that needs refining” when talking about the core idea for the business.
I think for startups in general you gotta blend a bit of those two strategies to be successful too. You gotta build a nice landing page to convince people you're serious to get some of those early meetings to convince other people you're serious.
A healthy attitude, in my experience, is for others to workshop an idea that has a potential for a good payoff; both finding flaws and finding workarounds. This occurs with an open, collaborative culture.
An unhealthy attitude is expecting somebody with a good idea to put in 100% of the effort themselves, because that requires them to relearn/reinvent everybody else's specializations. This happens more with a rigid or competitive culture.
A survival strategy in the latter environment is to keep one's ideas secret, and (theoretically) solve future problems before anybody else knows that they'll crop up. In this way, an ideas person becomes the clinch-problem-solving-person because when the house is burning down, people are more willing to collaborate.
If your idea is that good, and you can't trust your "executor," then it's an idea that will either die in the crib, or will come out as a mutated, unhealthy monster.
Collaboration, between dedicated, creative ("execution people" can be very creative, you know) team members, working on an equal footing, with mutual respect and authority, works well (in my experience).
The company I worked at for years was not an especially creative one, but it had some heavy-duty science going on. Some of the folks they had in their R&D department were some of the best in the world.
But they also had a codified system, that worked fairly well, to realize their inventions in a way that could be commoditized, and that was because some of their "execution" people were also among the best in the world.
Echoing me here :) -- main problem with the article is that it represents, no, encourages, black-and-white thinking at a management level. Most of us are quite flexible, and tick both boxes, but we'll identify stronger with the label that feels more rewarding.
Yeah currently suffering from this... losing my mind coding the fifth 'refactor' (or better, learning I did everything wrong the last four times) so I can get to a product to generate enough revenue to appreciate a teammate's time by putting bread on their table. Self-inflicted.
I'm lucky I don't need many calories to maintain a healthy body weight, but I may have traded all this for some crispy dendrites.
Same. And I don’t worry about having enough work, or whether or not my big idea will work.
Pick the achievable ideas and make sure your team delivers. As capability improves, goals can get bigger.
Life is good.
Execution is the most important thing :)
Ideas are necessary. Without ideas, execution is hollow. I really value "idea people."
We just need to work together.
I used to put a lot of energy into making clear that "execution guys" are allowed to climb up out of scope and change their minds about an approach. But at a point I think it's reasonable to look at this pattern and make the assessment that I do indeed possess some kind of skill.
One of the issues I have had with "idea people," is that they think that every deviation from their Big Idea is "bikeshedding."
On the other hand, I like to keep the product at "beta" quality from as close to the beginning as possible. That often means that I spend a lot of time developing infrastructure scaffolding (like persistent preferences, error handling, security, accessibility, localization or messaging systems).
This means that I'll suddenly stop producing new features for a few days, while I set up some infrastructure (that will result in an explosion of features in a few days).
In fact, I'm doing that, right now. I am writing a "developer" screen for the app I'm developing. It won't ship, but will allow other technical team members to do things like set up test servers, and evaluate REST interactions. The non-tech people aren't gonna see much for another week or so. They'll have to be happy with what I've already given them (and they are quite happy).
That's probably a confusing example.
I don't mean that implementers aren't doing anything. What I mean is something like this: the people who are building (or planning to build) a bike shed are often the last people to realize an obvious problem like a) the target audience is birds and b) birds don't ride bikes.
My professed skill is that I can get people to shift to working on a birdhouse. That avoids the danger of ending up with something like a bike shed retrofitted with pneumatic tubes designed to pump in birds from the outside world.
I'm not claiming this is a unique skill. But things like SVG's path arc syntax exist, so it's not ubiquitous.
You get a +1 for that. ;)
Totally get your example.
Somewhat of a false dichotomy.
I, personally, find substantially greater value in a person that produces something and is now sitting idle thinking of the next original product to complete opposed to the person who is busy or hard working.