Not down the river. Just with passion. So says Kevin Rose:-
As the founder of Digg it was my job to drive the product vision through design, development, and finally into the hands of our customers. As we grew in size (both traffic and headcount) it became harder to get alignment around our (6-month) product roadmap.
Common office chatter: “this isn’t scalable,” “this will take months to build,” “I’m not sure this will work,” “can you cut out this feature to save time?” “have we tested this in a focus group?”
It was my job to counter these doubts by selling the vision. This is something I failed to do. In the end I compromised on functionality, building the easier “me too” features that were standard in the industry, while leaving dozens of deeper features on the cutting room floor.
A team aligned behind a vision will move mountains. Sell them on your roadmap and don’t compromise — care about the details, the fit and finish. Only work with those that have (as Larry Page puts it) “a healthy disregard for the impossible,” and push everyone on your team until it’s uncomfortable.