Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don't yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight them will drive you to invent on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create Prime, but it sure turns out they wanted it.

Process as proxy is a Day 2 disease: the process becomes the thing, and people defend bad outcomes with 'well, we followed the process.' Always ask: do we own the process, or does the process own us?

Market research and surveys can become proxies for actual customers. Good inventors study many anecdotes rather than averages, develop deep intuition, and live with the design. A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste — you won't find any of it in a survey.

Most decisions should be made with about 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, you're being slow. Being wrong is cheap if you course-correct well; being slow is expensive for sure.

Use 'disagree and commit.' Rather than wearing each other down to consensus, say: 'I know we disagree, but will you gamble with me on it?' Bezos greenlit an Amazon Studios project he was skeptical of by writing back, 'I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we've ever made.'

Recognize true misalignment early and escalate immediately. Without escalation, the default dispute resolution is exhaustion — whoever has more stamina carries the decision. 'You've worn me down' is an awful decision-making process.

Treat reversible decisions as two-way doors and use a light-weight process for them. One-size-fits-all decision-making is a Day 2 trap that drags large organizations into making every call as if it were irreversible.