As a freshly promoted staff engineer I am also interested in some more details, because it is not easy to find some good resources on this topic.
> Kill stupid things early on
Can you give some examples of stupid things?
> have strong opinions
This is one of the things I hear a lot, but again, what are those, any examples? My opinion could be wrong and I can't keep it strongly, especially when surrounded with smart people.
X department (usually marketing/sales) is asking for Y thing without understand that Z thing is actually the thing customers want to solve their root cause.
You have to stay on top of the 'signal strength' of feature requests. If one customers asks for a thing then okay maybe note it down. If 10 customers ask for the same thing ASAP, then clearly go make it a priority to go build the thing.
> have strong opinions
Being a subject matter expert / domain expert you can start to see an understand the 'shape' of the market, the customers, the problem being solved. You get a sense of the how/what/why that will really be impactful.
Some products are built with huge leaps forwards that 10x the previous experience. Others are build with 1000 tiny improvements that make for a delightful UX. Both are equally valid.
Having strong opinions means balancing those two operating modes. Figuring out when to bet big/when to refine/when; when to say no to little thing #342 because it's actually not helping anything.
“We see a need to build X. Its fancy and shiny new technology. It is right thing to do. What problem does it solve? Dont worry about that. We are going to strong arm a few teams to adopt this, even though it costs money to build and support. Sure, we can make investment in Y instead but dont want to because solving Y doesn’t let us increase head count or write promotion documents. Plus, X is very complex. It guarantees job security for people who understand it. Let’s not worry about what happens if these people then quit and make this thing everyone elses problem”
Its not always outright nefarious reasons but there’s always an incentive structure incentivizing wrong behavior because it benefits individuals or is cool or fun thing to work on, without having meaningful impact or business value
The way you kill such things is 1) by telling the truth about how much it's going to cost to do, and 2) by asking for evidence that the idea will pay back the effort required. (I mean, to some degree all development is done on faith that there will be a market there. But an idea that will take 6 months for the team needs a more solid basis than an idea that will take an afternoon for an individual.)
You are making 2 hardest questions sound easy.
1. Sometimes you need to seed optimism to get buy in and sponsorship, even though it might cost higher.
2. Not everything pays back in short term. Of course product team might care about 10% increase in revenue in short term, but 10x idea might disrupt them. That's the reason Blockbuster lost to Netflix, Rackspace lost to AWS
This is obviously stupid, my gut feeling says OP wanted to say totally different type of stupidity, because your example not only stupid thing, but complete incompetence of how products are delivered, unless those 3 people are willing to pay 30B$ each.