Lead Bullets (2011)

When I first became a product manager, my director, the amazing Chrix, taught me about Lead Bullets. It proved true and useful again and again. When you sell to engineers, there are no alternatives to a good product. You can't BS your way out of a product that is inferior to the competition on key dimensions.

The money quote: The customers were buying; they just weren’t buying our product. This was not a time to pivot. So I said the same thing to every one of them: “There are no silver bullets for this, only lead bullets.” They did not want to hear that, but it made things clear: we had to build a better product. There was no other way out. No window, no hole, no escape hatch, no backdoor.