One of the reasons you might want to go into a conversation with low intentionality is that it provides a wider area to explore and you can discover more potential exciting products to build. Another reason is that it doesn’t make you lose sight of your other products/intentions as you’re going (for instance, a chance to build the relationship while you’re talking about a technical problem.)
One move I think is useful is to deliberately signal when you’re changing your levels of intentionality. For instance, someone says something and I reply with “Now THAT’s interesting, lets talk about that.” Alternatively, when a particular product feels like its’ fizzling out “I notice that I’m not as interested in this topic anymore. Do we want to keep talking about it?”
Something which might or might not be confusing here (I can’t tell from the way you phrased things) is that I see “intentionality” as sort of orthogonal to “are we building a product or not?”. This might make the metaphor more confusing than helpful.
(Since, even at a literal company building literal products, there’s value in conversations that are exploratory. But in that case the “sub-product” that you’re working on might be “an exploration of the space.”)
Since, even at a literal company building literal products, there’s value in conversations that are exploratory. But in that case the “sub-product” that you’re working on might be “an exploration of the space.”)
I think even in this case (as well as the conversation one) there’s “levels of intentionality” that restrict your conscious and subconscious search space. For instance, at LW you probably have conversations that are “What features could be good?” and some conversations that are “What would this feature look like?” and some conversations that are “How might we solve the problem of common knowledge and peer review”.
I see these sorts of things as levels of intentionality, and still fit into the frame of babble/prune, explore/exploit etc.
Similarly, you could have a conversation where you’re building a product, a conversation where you’re exploring different products to build, or a conversation where you’re open to working on multiple products at once.
On the other hand, this is stretching the metaphor a bit.
There’s a general mental slider I use called “intentionality” which is something like “how much am I treating this situation as a product vs. an exploration. It seems related to explore/exploit and babble/prune distinctions, as well as the concept of blending with or unblending from subagents.
One of the reasons you might want to go into a conversation with low intentionality is that it provides a wider area to explore and you can discover more potential exciting products to build. Another reason is that it doesn’t make you lose sight of your other products/intentions as you’re going (for instance, a chance to build the relationship while you’re talking about a technical problem.)
One move I think is useful is to deliberately signal when you’re changing your levels of intentionality. For instance, someone says something and I reply with “Now THAT’s interesting, lets talk about that.” Alternatively, when a particular product feels like its’ fizzling out “I notice that I’m not as interested in this topic anymore. Do we want to keep talking about it?”
Something which might or might not be confusing here (I can’t tell from the way you phrased things) is that I see “intentionality” as sort of orthogonal to “are we building a product or not?”. This might make the metaphor more confusing than helpful.
(Since, even at a literal company building literal products, there’s value in conversations that are exploratory. But in that case the “sub-product” that you’re working on might be “an exploration of the space.”)
I think even in this case (as well as the conversation one) there’s “levels of intentionality” that restrict your conscious and subconscious search space. For instance, at LW you probably have conversations that are “What features could be good?” and some conversations that are “What would this feature look like?” and some conversations that are “How might we solve the problem of common knowledge and peer review”.
I see these sorts of things as levels of intentionality, and still fit into the frame of babble/prune, explore/exploit etc.
Similarly, you could have a conversation where you’re building a product, a conversation where you’re exploring different products to build, or a conversation where you’re open to working on multiple products at once.
On the other hand, this is stretching the metaphor a bit.