# Operations Guide FY2

This may not be the only way to work. But this is the way we work. 

### DESIGN LIFE

When writing a Product Plan document, write out the Target Customer Story. In it, compare how a person may be living now and how the person can be living better by becoming a customer of our product. It is important to remember that the main characters of our story are our customers, not our products, because there is a real difference in outcome events between planning how products will benefit customers and planning how customers will benefit from products. 

To be specific, do not first write out an idea for a cool product and then try to fit customers into the story of the product. Feel free to come up with creative product ideas during the ideation stage, but once we transition from ideation stage to planning stage, we must make sure to start from the story of the customer and then check whether the product, which sounded interesting in the ideation stage, can really fit naturally into the life of the customer. 

### HOLD OPINIONS

If we follow our plan to keep our company full of talents who can and desire to think more deeply than other people, then it will only make sense for us to trust our expert opinions. 

Many other teams follow the opposite principle and rely on asking customers what they want and copying competitors blindly without forming their own opinions. This makes sense when they have no other options. Any team infested with weak lazy minds have no other options but to follow what others say or do. 

As for us, customers hired us to think for them. We will indeed think for them and not ask them to think for us. After all, we do not want to get fired, but also we enjoy thinking. When doing so will help us form better opinions, we will ask customers and study best practices, only to inform our own opinions for which we will always take full responsibility. We will make sure that every product we let our customers hold feels reliable. Remember. To earn the trust of customers, we must let customers feel confident in entrusting us to think for them. 

### PLAN TO REDO

When a pen stops working, we just get a new pen and resume working. A tool is just a tool. A technology stack is also just a tool, but developers often make wrong technical decisions due to hoping that the tool they pick and learn will remain optimal in all future scenarios. Admittedly, I also still sometimes catch myself developing emotional attachments with the tools I use, but we must all learn the skill, and this is a learnable skill, to use tools rationally. 

As a radical case study, at the end of FY2, I started experimenting with a new way to develop programs, then after witnessing the power of the new way, I made the decision that day to abandon the entire codebase I had been working on for the past year in order to move to the new codebase. Did it feel like a big loss at the time? Yes, I remembered all the nights I stayed up working on the old codebase and all the small bugs I fixed to make it what it is. But it also felt like a big win. And it was fun to work with the new software stack once I had made the brave decision. And what I can say now is that we can even rewrite entire codebases. So when making technical decisions for technology plans, do study hard and make wise decisions, but do not worry too much about the future. Even if the most extreme scenario happens, we will just redo the entire work. It will take effort, but we will live. So choose the tool that works best now. 

If we can keep advancing technology, then future technology will surely be better than present technology. So use present technology to make products that are great now, then use future technology in the future. 

### DO BUSINESS

Business elevates humanity by producing products that are worth more than the sum of the inputs. But by the same logic, the opposite of profit is also taking away the assets and the opportunities that the humankind could have enjoyed otherwise. 

To truly benefit the humanity, it is not enough to only plan out the utility of the product. We must also make sure to plan out the economics of the product. If our plan for the economics of the product loses us money, we cannot make business operation sustainable. If our plan for the economics of the product fails to generate profit, we cannot contribute to the elevation of the humanity. 

### SEE THE PEAK AND HIKE THE TRAIL

![Topograph.png](Operations%20Guide%20FY2/Topograph.png)

Our journey is like a hiking trail. We want to reach the peak, but the best way to get there may at times lead us in other directions for the moment. To keep our eyes on the destination but to follow a reasonable trail, we write plans in pairs. In Enterprise Plans (blue dotted lines in the mountain map image), we take a look at the destination and the road ahead, discussing what we think from the present position the destination position will be like and what road we can see from the present position to hike to reach the destination. In Product Plans (orange solid lines in the mountain map image), we plan out what we can do now in accordance with the Enterprise Plan. It is not that Enterprise Plans unilaterally inform Product Plans. Product makes Enterprise possible and vice versa. This is the reason why we plan both plans seasonally.