Sunil Pai's mental models

Their wordswe say we want disagreement, but every disagreement costs the person making it a little social/political capital. do it often enough and you become the negative person. people stop evaluating the argument and start evaluating the source.

Their wordsan ai is oddly well suited to this job. cassandra doesn’t want a promotion and doesn’t need the people in the channel to like her. disagreeing with the vp three times this month won’t show up in a performance review. she doesn’t have an ego invested in being right either.

Their wordsbig projects are not done with big efforts. it’s a big marathon, just slow, steady, incremental work.

Their wordsyou just help people, and then ten years later something happens and all these relationships that you didn’t even realise you were building suddenly become visible.

Their wordsbuuuut my roadmap is’nt ten times shorter. and I’m definitely not ten times better at deciding what is worth building. teams haven’t started casually shipping a year of product work every month. you can look around and and it’s hard to say what software has gotten meaningfully better in the last year.