Skip to content

Who Not How review

  • by

My company has been talking about this book lately. About how the leadership teams and leads are all being required to read it, about how it’s so insightful and has so many great takeaways, and so I figured why not. It looked like a quick read.

For some context, the five questions for the modern entrepreneur or startup or what have you are:

  1. Why is this a thing to do?
  2. Who will want this?
  3. What is the expected outcome need to change?
  4. What needs to happen in order to make this?
  5. How does it happen?

This book focuses on the the second and fourth question, contextualized appropriately: Who is this for and who will make it happen? It pitches these as the only two question you will need and everything else will fall into place. Mostly because you have now outsourced the other three questions to those two groups, which makes sense in context.

But I work as a product designer. So this is not remotely unique of a take to me.

It also insists that none of this is exploitation at one point which… I have no idea what that was about. Did I miss the part where you said not to pay anyone? It felt so strange, like it was bringing up an issue that didn’t exist unless the author was implementing some very shady business practices.

If you have not read many other business or entrepreneur books from the last decade or so, it’s going to give you some new information. But if you’ve read a bunch, then this is really just a different contextualization and focuses on a different part of the standard process that is preached by these books. So… if that sounds good.