Podcasts

Mihika Kapoor

Guest: Mihika Kapoor - Product Manager at Figma. Mihika is known for her expertise in leading zero-to-one product initiatives at Figma, including her work on FigJam. She has a background in design and engineering and has previously worked at Meta. Key Takeaways: Vision is Crucial: Craft a compelling vision by being deeply connected with your users and team. Use prototypes and designs to communicate your vision effectively. Strong Conviction: Develop strong conviction by building a repository of user insights. Present ideas with confidence but remain open to feedback and willing to pivot. Building Hype: Take responsibility for creating momentum around your projects. Use company-wide forums and demos to generate excitement and buy-in. Culture and Empathy: Invest in team culture to build trust and passion. Understand and cater to individual motivations within your team to foster collaboration. Adaptability: Embrace change with optimism and view setbacks as opportunities to learn and grow. Be scrappy and willing to adjust your approach as needed. Topics Covered: Vision creation, user empathy, building hype, team culture, adaptability, zero-to-one product development, internal hackathons, entrepreneurial culture, direct communication, and leveraging user insights.

Dalton Caldwell

Guest: Dalton Caldwell - Managing Director and Group Partner at Y Combinator. Dalton has worked with over 1,000 startups at YC, including early days of Instacart, DoorDash, and Webflow. He co-founded imeem and App.net, bringing deep experience in startup growth and pivoting. Key Takeaways: Resilience is Key: A core mantra is "just don't die." Many successful startups, like Airbnb, faced near-death experiences but persevered through sheer will and continuous effort. Avoid Tarpit Ideas: These are ideas that seem promising and get positive feedback but have historically failed to succeed, like apps for coordinating social outings. Effective Pivots: Successful pivots often move closer to the founders' expertise and build on previous learnings. For example, Brex pivoted from VR to FinTech, leveraging founders' past experiences. Customer Engagement: Spend significant time talking to customers in person to validate ideas and build products they truly want. Aim for at least 20% of your time in customer interactions. Investor Mindset: Investors often say no not because your idea is bad, but because they have limited slots and are looking for the most compelling opportunities. Topics Covered: Resilience in startups, tarpit ideas, pivot strategies, customer engagement, investor decision-making, startup idea generation, YC's request for startups, personal anecdotes from Dalton's career.

Todd Jackson

Guest: Todd Jackson - Partner at First Round Capital. Todd has a rich background in product management, having led products at Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and Dropbox, and founded a company acquired by Twitter. Key Takeaways: Four Levels of Product-Market Fit: Understand the progression from nascent to extreme product-market fit, focusing on satisfaction, demand, and efficiency at each stage. Four Ps Framework: If stuck, consider changing the Persona, Problem, Promise, or Product. Examples include Lattice changing their problem and promise, and Vanta changing all four. Customer Discovery: Use dollar-driven discovery to assess the real value and willingness to pay, focusing on extreme value, ability to pay, and willingness to pay. Signs of Being Stuck: Recognize when you're plateauing at a level, such as struggling with demand or high churn, and be prepared to pivot significantly if needed. Program for Founders: First Round Capital offers a free, intensive program to help early-stage B2B founders find product-market fit, focusing on practical, actionable insights. Topics Covered: Product-market fit levels, Four Ps framework, Customer discovery techniques, Signs of being stuck, First Round Capital's program for founders.

Claire Vo

Guest: Claire Vo - Chief Product Officer at LaunchDarkly. Claire is a seasoned product leader with experience as a chief product officer at Color and Optimizely, a two-time founder, and the creator of ChatPRD, a popular AI tool for product managers. Key Takeaways: Pace and Quality: Claire emphasizes setting a faster pace by expecting leaders to bring in the clock speed one click faster. This means if something is planned for the year, aim to complete it in half the time. Feedback Culture: Normalize feedback within teams. Claire believes in being clear and direct with feedback, as it sets clear expectations and helps maintain a high talent bar. Empowerment and Agency: Claire advocates for taking control of your career by knowing what you want, asking for it, and making it easy for your boss to help you achieve it. AI in Product Management: AI will likely shift the skills required for PMs, particularly in communication and strategy synthesis. Claire's tool, ChatPRD, helps PMs by automating parts of the PRD creation process. Role of CPTO: Combining product and engineering under one leader (CPTO) can optimize for organizational goals rather than functional silos, providing leverage and accountability for R&D investments. Topics Covered: Career growth, setting pace and quality in teams, feedback culture, empowerment, AI in product management, CPTO role, women in tech, ChatPRD, sales-led product strategy.

Dharmesh Shah

Guest: Dharmesh Shah - Co-founder and CTO of HubSpot. Dharmesh is a renowned thinker and entrepreneur, co-founding HubSpot, a leading CRM platform, and steering it to a $30B valuation. Key Takeaways: Zigging vs. Zagging: HubSpot's success partly stems from doing the opposite of conventional advice, such as focusing on multiple areas rather than just one. No Direct Reports: Dharmesh has never had direct reports, allowing him to focus on his strengths and avoid becoming "passively okay" at management. Culture as a Product: Treating culture as a product that evolves over time is crucial; it's not about preserving it but iterating on it to meet the team's needs. Decision-Making Framework: Use a systematic approach to decision-making by considering potential, probability of success, passion, and prowess. Fighting Complexity: As companies grow, they must actively fight complexity to avoid stagnation and maintain simplicity. Topics Covered: Culture creation, zigging vs. zagging, decision-making frameworks, simplicity in business, public company dynamics, HubSpot's growth strategy, Dharmesh's unique role and approach.

Archie Abrams

Guest: Archie Abrams - VP of Product and Head of Growth at Shopify. Archie leads a team of over 600 people across product, design, engineering, data ops, and growth marketing at Shopify, a major player in e-commerce, responsible for about 10% of U.S. e-commerce. Key Takeaways: Long-term Experimentation: Shopify runs long-term holdout experiments to truly understand the impact of changes, often finding that short-term wins don't always translate into long-term success. Focus on Absolute Numbers: Teams are encouraged to focus on absolute numbers of users progressing through the funnel rather than conversion rates, to avoid the trap of optimizing for local metrics at the expense of overall growth. Monetary Friction: Reducing monetary friction, such as trial dynamics and pricing incentives, can unlock valuable user segments by giving them more time to succeed. No KPIs in Core Product: Shopify's core product teams operate without KPIs, focusing instead on building the best product based on taste and intuition, driven by a 100-year vision. Sales and Growth Integration: Shopify has integrated sales into its growth strategy, creating hybrid journeys that combine self-service and sales-assisted paths, requiring new approaches to attribution and incrementality. Topics Covered: Long-term experiments, growth metrics, monetary friction, Shopify's organizational structure, sales integration, product development without KPIs, founder-driven vision.

Kunal Shah

Guest: Kunal Shah - CEO and founder of CRED. Kunal Shah is a renowned entrepreneur and product leader in India, known for founding CRED, a FinTech startup valued at over $6 billion, and previously Freecharge, which he sold for over $400 million. Key Takeaways: Delta 4 Framework: A product must be at least four points more efficient than the existing solution on a 10-point scale to be considered irreversible, have high tolerance for failure, and generate organic word-of-mouth. Trust and Focus in Low Trust Markets: In India, brand trust is crucial due to low institutional trust. Companies often become super apps, offering multiple services to leverage concentrated trust. DAUs vs. ARPUs: Indian startups can quickly grow daily active users (DAUs) due to cheap data and high smartphone penetration, but struggle with average revenue per user (ARPU) due to low per capita income. Curiosity and Second-Order Thinking: Staying curious and practicing second-order thinking—predicting the consequences of actions—are essential for long-term success and adaptation. Cultural Insights: Indian CEOs excel by maintaining the 'dharma' or core principles of a company, balancing innovation with sustaining foundational values. Topics Covered: Delta 4 framework, Indian market dynamics, trust in business, second-order thinking, cultural influences on leadership, challenges and opportunities for Indian startups, curiosity in learning.

Emilie Gerber

Guest: Emilie Gerber - Founder and CEO of Six Eastern, a PR agency. Emilie has extensive experience in PR, having worked with over 100 tech companies, including startups and publicly traded companies. She previously led PR for Uber's business development team and B2B programs and worked at Box on product communications. Key Takeaways: Targeted Pitches: Be concise and direct in your pitches. Clearly state your intentions and the news you're offering. For example, when pitching a funding story, mention the amount raised, investors, and the market space. Publication Strategy: Different publications have different focuses. TechCrunch is ideal for funding announcements, while VentureBeat is strong for AI news. Tailor your approach to each publication's strengths. Human-Centric Stories: Avoid jargon-heavy language. Instead, focus on clear, relatable storytelling that highlights incumbents you're challenging or unique aspects of your story. Social Media and Newsletters: Incorporate podcasts and newsletters into your PR strategy as they are integral parts of modern media. For social media, focus on executive presence rather than just corporate channels. Creative Approaches: Use innovative formats like interactive presentations to make your pitch stand out. This can help convey your message more effectively and capture media interest. Topics Covered: PR strategy, pitching to media, publication targeting, storytelling in PR, social media strategy, creative PR approaches, working with PR agencies.

Noam Lovinsky

Guest: Noam Lovinsky - Chief Product Officer at Grammarly. Noam has a rich background in product management, having led teams at YouTube, Thumbtack, and Facebook, where he built the New Product Experimentation team. Key Takeaways: Prioritize Business Needs: Always align your projects with the broader business strategy, even if it means advocating for changes that might affect your role. Diversify Growth Channels: Avoid relying on a single growth channel, as seen with Thumbtack's reliance on SEO. Explore multiple avenues to ensure sustainable growth. Create Space for Innovation: In large organizations, establish environments where small teams can experiment without the constraints of the mainline business processes, as done with Facebook's NPE team. Embrace Resilience: Growth often masks underlying issues. Experiencing and overcoming downturns can provide invaluable insights and resilience. Focus on Personal Growth: Choose roles that stretch your abilities and offer learning opportunities, even if they come with challenges. Topics Covered: YouTube's early challenges, Thumbtack's turnaround, Facebook's New Product Experimentation team, Grammarly's growth strategy, career development advice.

Marty Cagan

Guest: Marty Cagan - Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group. Marty Cagan has been a leading voice in product management for over 20 years, having worked with more product teams and managers than anyone else. He is the author of the influential books "INSPIRED" and "EMPOWERED," and is releasing a new book, "TRANSFORMED." Key Takeaways: Many companies have overhired for roles that do not add significant value, such as agile coaches and product owners, leading to what Marty calls "product management theater." Real product management focuses on delivering outcomes, not just outputs. Product managers should be creators, not facilitators. Empowered product teams are given problems to solve, not roadmaps of features to build, and are measured by the outcomes they achieve. Product managers should focus on developing skills in understanding customer value and business viability, especially in the age of AI. Transformation to a product operating model involves adopting principles like embracing experimentation, instrumenting everything, and ensuring small, frequent releases. Topics Covered: Product management theater, overhiring in tech, empowered product teams, skills for product managers, transformation to product operating model, impact of AI on product management, principles of successful product companies.

Boz

Guest: Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth - Chief Technology Officer at Meta. Boz joined Facebook (now Meta) in 2006 as one of the first engineers, where he played a pivotal role in developing key products like the Facebook News Feed and mobile ads platform. He now leads Meta's efforts in AR, VR, and mixed reality. Key Takeaways: Leverage Leadership: Regularly engage with your manager for guidance and support. Use structured updates like the "State of Lenny" email to communicate progress and blockers. Communication is Key: Effective communication is essential for leadership. Understand your audience's perspective and tailor your message to guide them from their current understanding to your intended outcome. Embrace Passion: Passion significantly enhances productivity and creativity. Be open to finding passion in unexpected areas of work. Adaptability in Career: Variety in experience can be more valuable than rapid promotions. Early career should focus on learning across different domains. Handling Criticism: Balance internal expertise with external feedback. Use criticism to refine understanding but maintain confidence in your knowledge. Topics Covered: Early Facebook challenges, News Feed development, leveraging leadership, communication strategies, Meta's transparency culture, Meta's organizational changes, AR/VR technology, Meta's market perception, career adaptability, handling criticism.

Donna Lichaw

Guest: Donna Lichaw - Executive coach, speaker, and bestselling author. Donna helps founders, CEOs, and executive teams enhance their leadership skills and scale their impact, having worked with leaders at companies like Google, Disney, Twitter, Microsoft, and Adobe. Key Takeaways: Identify Superpowers and Kryptonite: Reflect on peak experiences from your past to uncover your strengths and weaknesses. Use these insights to leverage your superpowers and manage your kryptonite. Embrace Imposter Syndrome: Instead of denying imposter syndrome, explore how it might be serving you, such as motivating you to learn and grow. Story-Driven Leadership: Your personal story is central to becoming a better leader. Understand and own your story to unlock leadership potential and connect with others. Experiment with Change: Use small experiments to test new behaviors or approaches in your leadership style. This iterative process helps in making informed and impactful changes. Vision and Goals: Envision your ideal future and work backward to create a roadmap. This helps in setting clear goals and aligning your actions with your desired outcomes. Topics Covered: Identifying superpowers, managing kryptonite, embracing imposter syndrome, story-driven leadership, experimenting with change, envisioning future goals, leveraging product frameworks for personal growth.