Have you seen that amazing video about the “crazy, nasty honeybadger”? If not, watch it and then come back. If so, then let’s go.

The HoneyBadger is nature’s most fearless animal. There are numerous examples of this 20-35lb animal fighting off lions, ridgeback dogs, eating cobras, getting stung by cobras (and living). The HoneyBadger pretty much runs it own show.

Zooming in, you might notice that the HB has a huge amount of cross functional tools. It has long claws (great for climbing), slippery fur (hard for other animals to bite it), runs backwards while defending (basically non existent behavior in the animal kindgom), immunity to cobra venom, ability to subdue honey bees. Most importantly, the HoneyBadger never gives up, it uses its wide array of adaptations to keep turning over challenges, finding new and interesting ways to do what it wants, to eat and sleep and take no gruff from anyone.

Ok great, but what about the HoneyBadger of Product?

I have chosen the honey badger analogy because I think the earlier a product/business is in its life cyle, the more it wins by employing less people who have a high degree of cross functional leverage. I believe this because of few details.

• the more people working on a goal, the more resources get spent on coordinating work rather than doing work
• many ventures start with a founding team that is over-skilled in engineering and under-skilled in sales/growth
• good engineering tends to be expensive in up front costs, bad engineering tends to be expensive in long term costs, minimizing time spent on ALL engineering is the pro move

I define myself as the HoneyBadger because I can;

• Sell
• Write long lasting, scalable code
• Produce growth oriented content marketing
• Get people to attend my online and offline events
• Build good UI as I code resulting in acceptable quality UX
• Manage Data Teams while thinking like a Data Scientist