Guest: Casey Winters - Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite. Casey has extensive experience advising and working with top consumer companies on product and growth strategies, including Pinterest, Airbnb, and GrubHub. Key Takeaways: Communication is Key: Effective upward communication involves starting with the company strategy and assumptions before diving into specifics. Role-playing and pre-meetings can help prepare for executive questions. Balancing Simplicity and Complexity: Eventbrite aims for "perceived simplicity," where advanced features are discoverable but don't complicate the user experience for those who don't need them. Justifying Non-Sexy Investments: Align with peer leaders to prioritize essential but less glamorous projects like performance and stability improvements. Demonstrating potential future risks can help justify these investments. Product Management Spectrum: PMs range from idea generators to execution-focused individuals. Moving towards the middle, where strategy meets execution, is crucial for career advancement. Growth Strategies: Early-stage companies should focus on "kindle strategies" to unlock scalable "fire strategies." Consider product-led sales for B2B growth and build growth loops into the product early. Topics Covered: Product management communication, balancing product complexity, justifying infrastructure investments, product management spectrum, growth strategies, product-led sales, data network effects.
Guest: Casey Winters - Former Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite. Casey is a renowned figure in the growth and product community, having advised and worked with top companies like Pinterest, Reddit, Canva, and Airbnb. Key Takeaways: Frameworks as Tools: Frameworks should be seen as tools to be used when relevant, not as rigid processes that stifle creativity and risk-taking. Founder Intuition vs. Team Expertise: Founders should direct until team members demonstrate they can make better decisions, but employees should signal when they are ready to take over. Network Effects: Understand the different types of network effects (direct, cross-side, data) and how they can evolve over time to strengthen a business. Consumer Subscription Challenges: Consumer subscription models lack the net dollar retention of B2B SaaS, making them harder to sustain without network effects or unique growth loops. Marketplace Dynamics: Grubhub's disruption by DoorDash highlights the importance of reacting to market changes and the potential need to overreact to existential threats. Topics Covered: Product management frameworks, founder intuition vs. team expertise, network effects, consumer subscription challenges, marketplace dynamics, Grubhub vs. DoorDash case study.
“People just way under communicate upward inside of companies.”
“If you got a product that retains well and you can't find more users for it, I don't think that's product market fit.”
“Data network effects are underrated.”
“It's very hard to keep product-market fit as a CPO within a company for a long time.”
“You want to show that you are caring and paying attention to the overall business first before just taking care of your own product designers, product managers, researchers.”
