Caveat: my understanding of this is built around talking to Colin about these questions.
People often talk about Bezos being ‘relentless’ and ‘wanting to get things done yesterday’. They talk less about his role as ‘chief slowdown officer’ — a name he gave himself.
I believe that you can see this with lower skilled vs more skilled entrepreneurs. Lower skilled entrepreneurs are a frenzy of activity, and throw everything at the wall hoping that something sticks. More skilled / experienced entrepreneurs do do a bit of that, but they’re more deliberate about it. (They might not tell you that they’re being deliberate; if you ask them they’ll look at you funny and go “that’s dumb, why would I want to make that bet without doing some thinking beforehand?”)
The PR/FAQ process is used for big, one-way door type bets. Most new product attempts are costly, and can lock up company resources for months if not years. You’re not getting that time back. The more costly the bet, the more rigorous the PR/FAQ process. The less costly the bet, the more likely the executives would say something to the effect of “Bias for Action” — just go and do it.
My understanding is that the concepts of ‘one-way vs two-way doors’ was invented to illustrate this dynamic … amongst other things.
To add a concrete example of my application of these ideas:
- I’m currently working out a sustainable and repeatable way to hire case writers. Hiring writers in the context of a summer internship and getting it wrong is cheap, so I just went ahead and hired a bunch without writing a PR/FAQ.
- We know from our WBR that one thing that results in exceptional variation across a number of metrics we care about is getting a link from a sizeable newsletter / Substack. But we need to run a set of experiments to figure out what types of Substacks are best (size? topic? familiarity?). Running these experiments require purchasing newsletter ads, that can (and has!) cost us thousands of dollars per ad. We have a full 6-pager for that.