In startups, roles are fluid. Everyone wears many hats: what’s important isn’t one’s job description but the problems which need to be solved. ​ If you’re going to have a team with continuously negotiated roles, you need a context for that continuous negotiation. These demos unified the “tests” with the real work. Eventually, I came to understand that they put themselves into these terrible situations as a way to force themselves to innovate, that the desperation was productive, not destructive. It was desperation, but by design. ​ We worked from deep desperation, but as Vaughn describes, it was absolutely one of the most exhilarating and dynamic periods of my life. But these big-picture problem statements shatter fractally into a hundred sub-problems, and most of the progress in my work comes from identifying and improving articulations these sub-problems.