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In 2010, Seth Godin asked people to make a list of what they shipped. I did the exercise in 2010, 2012, 2013,  2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017. In April, I stepped out of my role at IT Revolution, something I had been involved with since 2013. Walking away from something that was a significant chunk of my life and professional identity made it feel like I didn’t accomplish much this year.

In the past few weeks, as some of the Valley’s most mature internet companies have faced crisis after crisis, there’s been a theme circulating that these companies, and Facebook in particular, has lost their product way. It’s an oh-so-familiar theme in the Valley where every VC and entrepreneur you meet will tell you “product wins” and that the quickest way to a $1 billion—or $1 trillion Facebook’s detractors like to say that despite its success, it has only created one product: newsfeed, based on the once-novel idea that people wanted to be entertained with a stream of updates from people, businesses and publishers. More importantly, it perpetuates Silicon Valley exceptionalism—the idea that tech companies aren’t like other companies.

Beowulf Sheehan oftens takes photographs of writers. He wrote an article for Literary Hub about what he learned from taking pictures of that cadre. Sheehan mentions advice he got from fellow photographer Nigel Parry: In particular, authors should do the same with the books they write.

In this episode, I talk with Michael Schrage about designing customers and running experiments in the world of book publishing. Michael Schrage is a visiting fellow at MIT and the author of several books including Who do you want your customers to become? In the first half of the interview, we talk about an better way to think about customers and why cheap experiments are than good ideas. In the latter half, we apply these ideas to readers, authors and the world of book publishing.