When You’re a Hammer Everything Looks Like a Nail
Over the years I collected (or thought up) a series of short-hand phrases to remind me of life’s lessons that are applicable to business. One of my favorite ones is “what you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail.” The definition is kind of obvious. We’re all biased by our backgrounds and tend to put forward solutions that our backgrounds suggest to us. It’s so common to go into meetings where somebody acts a certain way or has a certain point-of-view that leaves me thinking, “Hammer. Nail.”
This post by Mark Suster covers a pretty well known topic, but has his typical unique view point expressed.
For me, there is another way of looking at this, for many teams, they are only walking around with hammers, but they are trying to accomplish something that needs a screwdriver. For many software startups, it is difficult to really get into particular problems if you don’t have the depth of knowledge in a field. In these cases, listening to the customer would be quite key.
For instance, within the task management space, most of the solutions smell like they are either addressing things from a software development perspective or a design consultancy perspective, but many don’t work the way that a small company would work. Or, you get the overblown project management features of a project management driven design that still doesn’t address the core needs of a small team.
In this way, I think the strongest teams are ones that have inter-disciplinary backgrounds. For me I started making toys and consumer products ten years ago, working in development, marketing, and project management. So I was able to take those lessons and put it into developing http://tasksee.com (after learning how to do web development).
It seems like the most disruption in a market comes from when you are able to join disciplines, since the different perspectives wind up producing a new view point. I don’t want a hammer or a screwdriver, I want a multi-tool.
