One of the most productive meetings I've had since joining Oddcast was one that I was probably the most cynical about at first. Adi, our CEO, invited me and our VP of Biz Dev to sit down for an hour and just talk about all of our "nightmare scenarios" of all of the worst things that could possibly happen to our consumer product. I'm a bit headstrong and when I think I'm headed in the right direction, I barrel forward without looking back too much. So, to reevaluate everything so late in the game seemed to me to be a little bit of a waste of time.
I was completely wrong. We dove down into the very basic functionality of the product and more
than kicked the tires on every assumption we made... we deflated them. What resulted was some of our best thinking about new ideas for the product and not simply ways that we could hedge our bets, but small things we could do to ensure that our product has as broad an appeal as possible. It was truly out of the box thinking and it got us very excited about our new ideas.
Obviously, you need conviction to your ideas, but conviction doesn't mean burying your head in the sand either. It's important to be willing to turn everything on its head once in a while just to make sure you're still anchored in reality and that your thinking isn't just the rationalization of momentum.