Podcasts

Geoff Charles

Guest: Geoff Charles - VP of Product at Ramp. Geoff Charles has played a pivotal role in Ramp's rapid growth, helping the company become the fastest-growing SaaS startup in history, reaching $100 million in annual run rate in just two years. Key Takeaways: Velocity as a Core Value: Ramp prioritizes speed in product development, empowering small, focused teams to move quickly and independently, which has been crucial to their success. Empowerment and Context: Teams are given autonomy with a focus on context over control, allowing them to make informed decisions without micromanagement, fostering innovation and ownership. First Principles Thinking: Ramp encourages solving problems from first principles rather than relying on past experiences, which is essential given their unique business model. Avoiding Burnout: High velocity is balanced with meaningful work and empowerment, which helps prevent burnout by ensuring that team members feel their work is impactful. Efficient Use of Meetings and Planning: Ramp minimizes meetings and planning time, focusing instead on execution and maintaining flexibility to adapt quickly to changes. Topics Covered: Velocity in product development, team empowerment, first principles thinking, avoiding burnout, efficient meetings and planning, Ramp's growth strategy, product management best practices.

Ronny Kohavi

Guest: Ronny Kohavi - Former VP and Technical Fellow of Relevance at Airbnb. Ronny is recognized as a leading expert on A/B testing and experimentation, having led experimentation platforms at Microsoft and Amazon, and authored the book "Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments." Key Takeaways: Test Everything: Every code change or feature should be tested, as even small changes can have unexpected impacts. Failure Rate: Expect a high failure rate in experiments; typically 80-92% of experiments do not improve key metrics. Overall Evaluation Criterion (OEC): Define what you are optimizing for, ensuring it aligns with long-term user value and business goals. Trust in Experiments: Building a trustworthy experimentation platform is crucial; errors can lead to significant misjudgments. Surprising Results: Be cautious with results that seem too good to be true, as they often indicate errors or misinterpretations (Twyman's Law). Topics Covered: A/B testing, experimentation culture, failure rates, overall evaluation criterion (OEC), trust in experimentation, surprising results, Airbnb's experimentation approach, building experimentation platforms, P value misconceptions, starting with experiments, and institutional learning.

Noah Weiss

Guest: Noah Weiss - Chief Product Officer at Slack. Noah has extensive experience in product management, having held leadership roles at Foursquare and Google, making him a credible voice in the field of product development and management. Key Takeaways: Principles for Product Development: Establish clear principles to guide product development, such as "be a great host" and "don't make me think," which help teams align with the company's vision and maintain high standards. AI Integration: Focus on aligning AI capabilities with customer needs and ensure transparency in AI outputs to maintain trust. Use AI to enhance existing products by incubating small, focused teams to explore potential applications. Handling Competition: Stay customer-obsessed but competitor-aware. Focus on building a product that delights users and encourages word-of-mouth growth, rather than solely focusing on competitors. Product-Led Growth: Build a product that users love enough to share with others, which was key to Slack's early success. Understand the importance of activation metrics to drive growth and retention. Facilitating Innovation: Encourage teams to take bigger, bolder bets by creating space for exploration and learning, which can lead to significant product innovations like Slack's huddles and clips. Topics Covered: Product principles, AI integration, competition strategy, product-led growth, innovation facilitation, product management traits, Slack's product development.

Hari Srinivasan

Guest: Hari Srinivasan - VP of Product at LinkedIn. Hari has been with LinkedIn for over eight years, leading the Talent Solutions Product Team, which is LinkedIn's largest business unit, encompassing hiring and learning products. Key Takeaways: Skills-First Hiring: LinkedIn is shifting towards skills-based hiring, allowing candidates to showcase their skills rather than just job titles, which helps balance the job market. Complex Systems Management: LinkedIn employs frameworks like RAPID for decision-making and a five-day escalation rule to manage its complex ecosystem efficiently. Product Management Insights: PMs should focus on their strengths within the triangle of skills (creativity, data science, general management) and aim to work on products that people love. LinkedIn Learning: A valuable resource for professional skill development, with courses created by top instructors to help users gain skills relevant to their career goals. Engagement and Content Strategy: LinkedIn has improved its feed by focusing on delivering knowledge and advice, making it a more engaging platform for users. Topics Covered: LinkedIn's product evolution, skills-first hiring, managing complex systems, product management tips, LinkedIn Learning, content strategy on LinkedIn.

Julia Schottenstein

Guest: Julia Schottenstein - Product Leader at dbt Labs. Julia transitioned from venture capital at NEA to product management, where she now leads the dbt Cloud product and co-hosts the Analytics Engineering Podcast. Key Takeaways: M&A Strategy: Start thinking about M&A when you don't need it. Create plan Bs by inflicting "friendly pain" on potential buyers to get noticed, but maintain open communication. Evaluating Startups: Focus on people, market, product, and distribution when considering joining or investing in a startup. Understand where you can add value to de-risk the company's success. Competition Philosophy: Stay true to your vision, grow the market pie with partners, and lean into your strengths. Maintain a long-term view and foster an ecosystem of collaboration. Pricing Insights: Engage in willingness-to-pay conversations early. Use customer feedback to adjust pricing, ensuring it aligns with perceived value. Product Development: Embrace "worse is better" and view tech debt as a sign of success. Focus on shipping and iterating based on user feedback. Topics Covered: M&A strategy, startup evaluation, competition management, pricing strategy, open source vs. proprietary, product development, company values.

Paige Costello

Guest: Paige Costello - Product Lead at Asana. Paige oversees teams responsible for the core product experience at Asana. She has extensive experience in product management, having previously worked as Director of Product at Intercom and Group Product Manager at Intuit. Key Takeaways: Build Trust with Insight: Gain credibility by deeply understanding your customer, market, competitors, numbers, and product. This knowledge helps in winning over skeptics and building trust. Double Diamond Process: Asana uses this framework to ensure thorough exploration and decision-making in product development. It involves broad exploration followed by narrowing down at each stage of customer, problem, and solution identification. Effective Feedback: Use the "situation, behavior, impact" framework to deliver feedback that is clear and actionable, focusing on the subjective impact rather than objective correctness. AI Integration: Asana has a dedicated team for rapid prototyping with AI, allowing them to quickly assess the feasibility and impact of AI-driven features before integrating them into the product roadmap. Meeting Efficiency: Limit the number of reviewers and approvers in meetings to streamline decision-making and maintain pace in product development. Topics Covered: Building trust, Double Diamond Process, feedback delivery, AI in product development, meeting efficiency, product management training, career growth, Asana's work-from-home policy.

Jiaona Zhang

Guest: Jiaona Zhang - Senior Vice President of Product at Webflow. Jiaona, also known as JZ, is a seasoned product leader with experience at Airbnb, WeWork, Dropbox, and Pocket Gems. She teaches product management at Stanford and is known for her expertise in building and scaling product teams. Key Takeaways: Minimal Lovable Product (MLP): Focus on creating products that users love, not just viable ones. This involves understanding user needs deeply and ensuring the product delivers delight and quality. Roadmapping and Prioritization: Tell a story with your roadmap. Use themes and narratives to guide your team rather than relying solely on spreadsheets and prioritization frameworks. OKRs Approach: Set ambitious OKRs that push the team but ensure there’s a clear qualitative understanding of what success looks like. Avoid sandbagging and encourage risk-taking. First 90 Days Strategy: Quickly build context by speaking with a diverse range of team members across functions and levels. Establish trust and identify strategic changes early. Career Growth: Become known for something specific within your company to build a reputation and gain more responsibility. Topics Covered: Minimal Lovable Product vs. MVP, Roadmapping and Prioritization, OKRs, First 90 Days Strategy, Career Growth in Product Management, Lessons from Dropbox, Airbnb, WeWork, and Webflow.

Sri Batchu

Guest: Sri Batchu - Head of Growth at Ramp. Sri has held significant roles at Opendoor and Instacart, contributing to their growth, and now leads growth at Ramp, one of the fastest-growing SaaS and FinTech companies. Key Takeaways: Growth Strategy Sequence: Start with founder-led sales, hire initial salespeople, engage in low-cost marketing (content, community), and PR. Only later, invest in paid marketing and SEO. North Star Metrics: Use a simple, intuitive metric that aligns with business value and is directly impactable by the team. Examples include monthly active orders (Instacart) and sales qualified lead pipeline (Ramp). Fail Conclusively: Design experiments to maximize treatment effect, ensuring that if they fail, they do so conclusively, preventing repeated efforts on the same hypothesis. Velocity Culture: Emphasize reducing cycle time and bias to action. Use tools like Airtable for sprint planning and Mutiny for personalized web experiences. Hiring Strategy: Identify top companies for specific roles and target their best talent. Pay top performers significantly more to retain and attract high-impact individuals. Topics Covered: Growth strategies, north star metrics, experimentation, velocity in company culture, hiring practices, payback period vs. CAC, tools for growth teams.

Melissa

Guest: Melissa Perri - Product Management Educator and Consultant. Melissa Perri is a renowned expert in product management, having worked with over 4,000 PMs and consulted for more than 30 companies. She teaches at Harvard Business School and runs Product Institute, an online school for product management. Key Takeaways: Strategy Alignment: Ensure all teams can articulate how their work ties back to the company's strategic goals. A lack of alignment often indicates missing or poorly communicated strategy. Hiring a CPO: Consider hiring a Chief Product Officer when your company is scaling, especially when you have multiple products or are entering new markets. A CPO helps align product strategy with business goals. Product Operations: Implement product operations to standardize processes, manage data, and streamline customer research, especially as your company scales. Vision Clarity: A strong vision should be concrete enough for everyone to understand the future direction but lofty enough to require iteration and innovation. Continuous Learning: Focus on execution and identify specific areas for improvement. Engage with other departments and leadership to gain insights and fill knowledge gaps. Topics Covered: Strategy alignment, hiring a CPO, product operations, vision development, continuous learning, scaling product management, aligning product and business goals.

Luc Levesque

Guest: Luc Levesque - Chief Growth Officer at Shopify. Luc has an extensive background in growth, having been personally recruited by Mark Zuckerberg to help grow Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and serving as VP of Growth at Tripadvisor. He has also advised companies like Twitter, Pinterest, Patreon, Thumbtack, and Canva. Key Takeaways: Impact Focus: Prioritize impact over activities. Luc emphasizes that the best companies focus on the outcomes rather than the effort put in. Hiring Excellence: Look for signs of excellence in candidates, such as repeated success and being poached by former bosses. Involve the candidate's family in the hiring process to ensure personal alignment. Growth Advisors: Bring on growth advisors after achieving product-market fit. They can have a company-changing impact with the right insight at the right time. SEO Strategy: SEO can be a significant growth channel for most companies. Differentiate between small sites and those with user-generated content to tailor your SEO strategy. Adapting to Change: With the rise of AI like ChatGPT and Bard, SEO strategies need to adapt as search engines evolve to provide direct answers to queries. Topics Covered: Growth advisorship, hiring strategies, SEO as a growth channel, impact-driven culture, adapting to AI changes in search.

Nikhyl Singhal

Guest: Nikhyl Singhal - Product Leader at Meta. Nikhyl has led product teams at influential companies like Facebook, Credit Karma, Google Hangouts, and Google Photos, and is passionate about coaching and mentoring through his newsletter and podcast, The Skip. Key Takeaways: Think Long-Term: Avoid short-term career decisions focused solely on promotions or immediate challenges. Instead, plan your career like a product, considering your ultimate goals and working backward. Avoid Ex-Growth Companies: Be cautious of companies that have raised substantial funds but lack product-market fit, as they may not offer long-term career growth or equity value. Understand Promotion Barriers: Common reasons for not being promoted include lack of advocacy, absence of available roles, impatience, or unrecognized development areas. Seek real feedback to identify and address these issues. Embrace the IC Path: The rise of the senior IC path offers a viable alternative to management, allowing product managers to focus on building expertise without the need to manage people. Plan for Act Three: As careers lengthen, consider what will motivate you after achieving initial career goals. Focus on giving back and finding new challenges to maintain fulfillment. Topics Covered: Long-term career planning, ex-growth companies, promotion challenges, senior IC path, mental health in leadership, community building, feedback and development areas.

Jeremy Henrickson

Guest: Jeremy Henrickson - Senior Vice President of Product at Rippling. Jeremy previously served as Chief Product Officer at Coinbase, where he oversaw significant growth and helped scale the company during a volatile period in the crypto markets. Key Takeaways: Small Teams with Clear Missions: To maintain velocity, break down large problems into smaller tasks that small, focused teams can tackle independently. Design for Complexity: Avoid MVPs and instead design products for the most complex use cases to ensure scalability and future-proofing. Rapid Decision-Making: Cultivate a culture of fast decision-making by encouraging leaders to dive deep into problems and make informed decisions quickly. Global Expansion Strategy: Use existing customer data to prioritize international markets and start expanding earlier than you think is necessary. Adaptability with Strong Founders: When working with product-minded founders, adaptability and mutual respect are key to successful collaboration. Topics Covered: Product development at scale, decision-making speed, compound startup model, global market expansion, leadership principles, product management hiring, frameworks in product development.