Podcasts

Kevin Yien

Guest: Kevin Yien - Leads product for merchant experiences at Stripe. Previously built teams at Square and was head of product and design at Mutiny. Known for his unique perspectives on product management and has a background in competitive eating. Key Takeaways: Decision Logs: Kevin emphasizes the importance of maintaining a decision log to improve product sense, which he defines as making good decisions with insufficient data. This practice involves documenting decisions, the rationale behind them, and reviewing outcomes to refine decision-making skills. Unsell Email: At the offer stage, Kevin sends candidates an email outlining potential negatives about the role or company. This approach ensures that candidates are fully aware of challenges and remain excited about the opportunity, leading to better long-term fits. Automating User Research: Kevin suggests using tools like Gong and userinterviews.com to automate the process of gathering user insights. This allows PMs to maintain direct contact with customers and gather raw data without extensive manual effort. Writing Skills: Kevin believes that great PMs need to be great writers as writing provides clarity at scale, essential for both internal alignment and external communication. Drawing the Perimeter: PMs should define the constraints and boundaries of a problem space, allowing engineers and designers to innovate within those limits, ensuring focused and efficient product development. Topics Covered: Decision logs, unsell email, automating user research, writing skills for PMs, drawing the perimeter in product development, hiring strategies, AI in product management, personal growth from failure.

Evan LaPointe

Guest: Evan LaPointe - Founder of CORE Sciences. Evan is a four-time founder, including Satellite, which became the fourth largest analytics product on the internet and was acquired by Adobe. He later led product strategy and innovation at Adobe's digital business. Key Takeaways: Understand Brain Systems: The brain functions like a college campus with different departments (science, art, history). Most people rely too much on the history department (past experiences) instead of the creative and experimental departments for better decision-making. Influence Through Character: Choose your influence style based on your personality, whether it's being a devil's advocate, a storyteller, or a behind-the-scenes operator. Align your influence strategy with your natural strengths. Effective Meetings: Start meetings with priming to align on principles and objectives before diving into decision-making. This helps avoid unnecessary conflict and ensures everyone is on the same page. Build Relationships: Focus on being a positive experience for others, as this is more crucial than ability or trust in professional relationships. Ask yourself, "What kind of experience am I for others?" Create a Productive Habitat: Culture should be about shared beliefs and permissions rather than just mission statements. A supportive environment enables faster, more effective decision-making and innovation. Topics Covered: Brain function and decision-making, influence strategies, effective meetings, relationship building, company culture and habitat, personality assessments, strategic thinking.

Joe Hudson

Guest: Joe Hudson - Executive Coach. Joe is a sought-after executive coach for tech leaders, having worked with companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, and Apple. His approach integrates spiritual, psychological, and neurological practices to help leaders create fulfilling lives. Key Takeaways: Embrace Emotions: Avoiding emotions invites them into your life. Instead, experiment with different ways of interacting with your emotions to understand and manage them better. Voice in Your Head: The critical voice is often wrong. Experiment with responding differently to it each day to reduce its negative impact. Enjoyment as Efficiency: Increasing enjoyment in tasks by 10% can boost efficiency and quality. Focus on how to enjoy what you're doing more rather than changing the task itself. Gratitude Practice: Engage in a daily seven-minute gratitude exchange with someone else, focusing on the felt sense of gratitude to transform your mindset and life. Five-Star Meetings: Aim to make every meeting enjoyable and productive. This can highlight underlying issues and improve overall company culture. Topics Covered: Emotions and productivity, critical inner voice, joy and efficiency, gratitude practice, decision-making, team dynamics, company culture, personal authenticity.

Brian Tolkin

Guest: Brian Tolkin - Head of Product and Design at Opendoor. Brian has a strong background in product management, having been an early employee at Uber where he led the launch and global expansion of uberPOOL and started the product operations function. Key Takeaways: Product and Ops Synergy: Successful tech-ops companies like Uber and Opendoor operate most efficiently when product and operations teams work harmoniously, akin to a "twin turbine jet plane." Deep Customer Understanding: Starting in operations provides a deep understanding of the business and customer needs, which is crucial for building scalable tech solutions. Product Reviews: Effective product reviews should focus on improving the product rather than being intimidating. They should foster a culture of open, constructive feedback. Jobs to be Done Framework: This framework helps teams empathize with customers and understand the broader context of their needs, especially in complex, infrequent transactions like real estate. Handling Stress: Maintaining calm under pressure is vital. Reflecting stress onto teams can be counterproductive, and learning from past stressful situations can build resilience. Topics Covered: Product and operations synergy, product reviews, jobs to be done framework, handling stress, scaling Uber and Opendoor, experimentation with low sample sizes, Zillow partnership, intuition vs. data in decision-making.

Timothy Davis

Guest: Timothy Davis - Performance Marketing Lead at Shopify. Timothy has extensive experience in performance marketing, having led efforts at Shopify and consulted for companies like Pinterest, LinkedIn, Redfin, and Eventbrite. Key Takeaways: Paid Growth for All: Timothy believes paid growth is essential for all companies, especially given the dominance of paid listings on platforms like Google and Meta. Signs of Life Tests: Start with small tests on platforms where you already see user engagement. Use your own data to create lookalike audiences and test incrementally. Platform Prioritization: Begin with Google Search due to its user-driven nature, then expand to Meta and YouTube if video resources are available. Creative Impact: Creative is often underestimated but crucial for ad success. Emotional connections in ads can significantly enhance performance. Team Structure: Start with a data-driven growth marketing specialist, then add a creative person and a data scientist as you scale. Topics Covered: Performance marketing essentials, signs of life tests, platform prioritization, creative impact, team structure, attribution, incrementality, AI in marketing, and training new hires.

Roger Martin

Guest: Roger Martin - Author, advisor, and speaker. Roger is a renowned strategy advisor and Professor Emeritus at the Rotman School of Management. He was named the world's number one management thinker by Thinkers50 in 2017 and is the author of "Playing to Win," a highly regarded book on strategy. Key Takeaways: Strategy is about making an integrated set of choices that compel desired customer actions, focusing on either differentiation or cost leadership. The Strategy Choice Cascade involves answering five key questions: What is our winning aspiration? Where will we play? How will we win? What capabilities must we have? What management systems are required? Playing to win requires understanding customer needs deeply and ensuring your strategy is not easily replicable by competitors. Focus on betterment over perfection by addressing the most significant gaps between current and desired outcomes, iterating towards improvement. Great strategists are made through practice, not innate ability; consistent effort in strategic thinking leads to mastery. Topics Covered: Strategy definition, Strategy Choice Cascade, Differentiation vs. cost leadership, Competitive advantage, Betterment over perfection, Practicing strategy.

Jess Lachs

Guest: Jessica Lachs - VP of Analytics and Data Science at DoorDash. Jessica has been with DoorDash for over 10 years, helping build one of the most impactful data teams in tech. She was the first GM at DoorDash and previously founded GiftSimple. Key Takeaways: Centralized Data Teams: Jessica advocates for a centralized data team model, which ensures consistent talent standards, growth opportunities, and uniform methodologies across the organization. Proactive Analytics: Data teams should not just answer questions but also identify opportunities and provide actionable insights. Carving out time for exploratory work is crucial. Simple Metrics: Avoid complex composite metrics. Instead, choose simple, understandable metrics that align short-term actions with long-term outcomes. Focus on Edge Cases: Pay attention to rare but impactful negative experiences, like 'Never Delivered' orders, to improve overall service quality and reduce churn. Diverse Backgrounds: Hiring people from various backgrounds, including non-traditional data roles, can enrich the team and bring new perspectives. Topics Covered: Centralized vs. embedded data teams, proactive analytics, metric selection, edge case focus, diverse hiring, early DoorDash stories, global data management, AI in data work.

Jeff Weinstein

Guest: Jeff Weinstein - Product Lead at Stripe. Over his six-plus years at Stripe, Jeff has led teams responsible for scaling Stripe's payment infrastructure and has spearheaded several zero-to-one initiatives, including the scaling of Stripe Atlas. Key Takeaways: Customer Obsession: Jeff emphasizes the importance of direct customer interaction. He suggests leaving meetings to respond to customer issues immediately, as this direct signal is invaluable. Metrics as a Customer Value Indicator: Metrics should reflect the value provided to customers. Jeff highlights the importance of choosing metrics that measure success from the customer's perspective, such as tracking the percentage of users who have zero support tickets. Study Groups for Empathy: Jeff introduced "Study Groups" at Stripe, where employees role-play as customers to experience the product firsthand. This practice helps teams understand customer pain points and improve user experience. Silence in Customer Conversations: Allowing silence in conversations with customers can lead to deeper insights into their primary problems, which can guide product development. Long-Term Compounding: While maintaining a go-go-go attitude, Jeff stresses the importance of long-term strategic thinking and investing in areas that will always be beneficial, like reducing latency and improving reliability. Topics Covered: Customer interaction, metrics selection, product market fit, user experience, Stripe Atlas, Study Groups, long-term strategy, empathy in product design.

Mike Maples Jr

Guest: Mike Maples, Jr. - Partner at Floodgate. Mike Maples, Jr. is a renowned early-stage startup investor, known for his early bets on transformative companies like Twitter, Lyft, and Twitch. He has been on the Forbes Midas list eight times and is a pioneer in seed-stage investing. Key Takeaways: Inflections: Identify external events that create potential for radical change, such as technological advancements or regulatory shifts, which can empower new business models. Insights: Develop non-obvious truths about how inflections can be harnessed to change behavior. Insights should be non-consensus and right, offering a unique advantage. Founder Future Fit: Align the founder's background and passion with the future they are creating. This alignment increases the likelihood of identifying and executing on breakthrough ideas. Movements and Storytelling: Create a movement by appealing to a higher purpose and use storytelling to draw a stark contrast between the current world and the future vision. Disagreeableness: Successful founders often exhibit a healthy level of disagreeableness, challenging norms and being willing to pursue their vision despite skepticism. Topics Covered: Inflections, Insights, Founder Future Fit, Movements, Storytelling, Disagreeableness, Startup Idea Generation, Early-Stage Investing, Asymmetric Warfare in Business, Product Market Fit, Corporate Innovation.

Dylan Field

Guest: Dylan Field - CEO and co-founder of Figma. Dylan is a prominent figure in the design and tech industry, having built Figma into one of the most beloved and widely used design tools globally. Key Takeaways: Time to Market: Dylan emphasizes the importance of getting to market quickly, sharing that Figma took too long to launch its MVP and advises founders to avoid this mistake. Second Product Launch: Transitioning from one to two products is challenging. FigJam's success came from differentiating it by making it fun, highlighting the importance of unique product positioning. Role of Design: In the current software landscape, design is crucial for differentiation. Companies must strive for excellence, not just "good enough," to succeed. AI and Product Development: AI is reshaping roles, with more people engaging in design-centric tasks. Figma Make aims to facilitate rapid prototyping and production-ready applications, emphasizing the need for high-quality design outputs. Cultural and Leadership Insights: Maintaining a strong company culture involves hiring creative, maker-oriented individuals and ensuring clarity in communication and vision. Topics Covered: Product differentiation, second product strategy, AI in design, company culture, leadership evolution, time to market, role merging in product development.

Jessica Livingston

Guest: Jessica Livingston - Co-founder of Y Combinator, author. Jessica Livingston is a pivotal figure in the startup world, having co-founded Y Combinator, the first and most renowned startup accelerator, which has funded over 5,000 companies including Airbnb, Stripe, and Reddit. She is also the author of "Founders at Work" and hosts "The Social Radars" podcast. Key Takeaways: Social Radar Skill: Jessica's ability to read people, dubbed the "Social Radar," is crucial for evaluating early-stage founders. She looks for signs of defensiveness, commitment, and whether co-founders get along. Hustle and Commitment: Indicators of success include founders' willingness to "make shit happen," such as the Airbnb founders' cereal box story, and their readiness to quit their jobs to focus on their startup. Earnestness and Authenticity: Successful founders often exhibit earnestness and authenticity, showing genuine passion and understanding of their product and market. Co-founder Dynamics: Observing how co-founders interact can reveal potential red flags. A history of working well together is a positive sign. Operationalizing Insights: Y Combinator has systematized some of Jessica's insights into their application process, flagging issues like equity splits and job commitments. Topics Covered: Social radar skill, early-stage founder evaluation, Airbnb founding story, co-founder dynamics, operationalizing founder insights, podcasting insights.

Ami Vora

Guest: Ami Vora - Chief Product Officer at Faire. Ami was previously at Meta, where she played a pivotal role in launching the Facebook developer platform and led product for Facebook ads and WhatsApp. Key Takeaways: Curiosity Over Ego: Embrace curiosity in disagreements to learn and reach better outcomes. Ami emphasizes the importance of saying, "Fascinating, tell me more," to understand different perspectives. Metaphors in Communication: Use metaphors to align teams and convey complex ideas simply. For instance, Ami uses the "hill climb" metaphor to illustrate the journey from local to global optimum. Execution Over Strategy: While strategy is important, execution is crucial for success. A good strategy without execution leads nowhere, whereas good execution can refine strategy over time. Customer-Centric Goals: Align team goals with customer outcomes to avoid "toddler soccer," where everyone chases the same metrics. Break down goals into smaller, team-specific objectives that ladder up to the main company goals. Authenticity and Growth: Ami highlights the importance of being authentic and expanding one's toolkit to work with diverse people and challenges. Topics Covered: Disagreeing skillfully, using metaphors, product reviews, execution vs. strategy, setting goals, being a woman in tech, transitioning roles, working with visionary founders.