Nov 1, 2023 · 1h 16m · news
David Meyer: Why You Should Hire People Who Aren’t In Product Already | E1076 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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In this comprehensive interview, Databricks SVP of Product David Meyer joins host Harry Stebbings to unpack the realities of modern product management, rejecting industry myths in favor of truth-seeking, empathy-driven leadership, and non-traditional hiring.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 19.7% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 2.1 Guest teaching 3.4 Guest disagreement 2.8 Harry pushing back 2.1
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 43:26 Calling 'simple' the dumbest word in product
David aggressively rejects Harry's premise that simplicity is a core goal, calling simple the dumbest word in product.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 43:35 Refusing the rejection of 'simple'Harry refuses to let David dismiss the concept of simplicity and forces a concrete definition regarding UI options and color schemes.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 10:12 Debunking the 'CEO of Product' mythDavid dismantles the romanticized 'CEO of product' concept, reframing the job as surviving a constant stream of impossible compromises.
Harry holds his own ▶ 18:35 Defining non-gameable retention metricsHarry demonstrates domain expertise in content metrics by introducing high listener completion rate as a true quality signal.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coming Up: Highlights and Contrarian Insights | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | Harry asks standard biographical intro questions about how David transitioned into product. David shares how he criticized product managers while in engineering until he was forced into the role. | |
| The Power of Naivety and Systems Thinking in Engineering | 2 | 3 | 3 | 2 | Harry shares a brief anecdote about his own naivety when launching his podcast. David explains why naivety is a superpower and why he prefers angry customers over happy ones. | |
| The Art of Customer Questioning and Truth-Seeking | 2 | 4 | 3 | 2 | David reframes customer obsession into collective customer obsession to avoid overfitting. He also explains why a good product manager is usually disliked by both sales and engineering. | |
| Debunking the Myth of the "CEO of the Product" | 2 | 4 | 4 | 2 | David forcefully debunks the CEO of product trope, arguing the job is really about making impossible compromises. Harry asks how to identify implicit product leadership in candidates. | |
| The Dark Side of Data and Truth-Seeking Over Metrics | 2 | 4 | 3 | 2 | David explains how data can be weaponized to defend any premise, leading Databricks to change its value from data-driven to truth-seeking. Harry asks about the cadence of metric adjustments. | |
| Speed of Learning vs. Speed of Shipping | 2 | 4 | 4 | 3 | Harry asks if PMs use data as a crutch, and David strongly agrees, calling his own habit of checking daily metrics dashboards a complete waste of human energy. | |
| Identifying Non-Gameable Metrics and True Value Indicators | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | Harry uses podcasting metrics to discuss gameable vs non-gameable KPIs. David reiterates that PMs are roadies rather than rockstars. | |
| Are Product Managers Worse Today? | 2 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Harry asks if PMs are worse on average today and questions if company scale slows innovation. David admits average quality drops with rapid corporate scaling. | |
| Managing Engineering Cynicism Through Collaborative Logic | 2 | 4 | 3 | 3 | David explains his method of brain massaging cynical engineers by walking them through logical trade-offs until they reach the desired conclusion themselves. Harry asks if unemotional leaders make better pivots. | |
| Loving What You Do and the Art of Product Management | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | David recounts choosing between fine art and engineering at UPenn. Harry challenges David's compassionate leadership view by pointing out how hard he works himself. | |
| Is Product Art or Science? The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness | 3 | 4 | 3 | 2 | David introduces the fallacy of misplaced concreteness to warn against over-rigorous financial and strategy models. Harry shares his own practice of tailoring leadership styles. | |
| Handling Employee Transitions and 'Seagull' Management | 2 | 3 | 2 | 2 | David shares how he supports employees looking to transition out of the company and warns against seagull management. | |
| Optimism, Cynicism, and Biting Off More Than You Can Chew | 2 | 4 | 3 | 2 | Harry discusses the risk of becoming cynical in venture. David uses an Ozempic and fast food super-user analogy to show why products need core fanatic users. | |
| Designing for Fanatics and the Fallacy of 'Simple' | 3 | 4 | 5 | 3 | Harry asks if simple is always better in product. David aggressively rejects the word simple as dumb and recounts trying to acquire Atlassian in 1998. | |
| Product Reviews, Large Meetings, and the Importance of Context | 2 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Harry and David discuss meeting hygiene, agreeing that meetings with more than 6 to 10 participants are performative ceremonies rather than decision-making sessions. | |
| The PM Hiring Process: Technical Rigor and Working Together | 3 | 3 | 2 | 3 | David details how he probes PM candidates until finding their technical limit and advocates for including cross-functional antagonists on hiring committees. Harry questions candidate exercises where context is missing. | |
| What Breaks When Scaling Product Orgs & Sales-Engineering Friction | 2 | 4 | 3 | 2 | David identifies engineering and sales as the most friction-prone relationship in tech companies, explaining his tactic of finding a third way with customers. | |
| The CPO and CEO Relationship: Rock Stars vs. Roadies | 2 | 4 | 3 | 2 | David asserts that the CEO is always the true CPO, making the head of product a roadie to the CEO's rockstar. Harry asks about asynchronous communication with CEO Ali Ghodsi. | |
| Leadership Vulnerability and the Impact of Words | 2 | 3 | 2 | 2 | David reflects on his tendency to underestimate how much his body language and offhand words affect employees. | |
| The Exhaustion of the Spotlight and Customer Engagements | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | In quick fire, David warns PMs against expecting total agency under founder CEOs who naturally stay involved in details. | |
| Onboarding Advice for Product Leaders in the First 90 Days | 2 | 3 | 2 | 1 | David advises new product leaders against making major structural changes during their first 90 days, closing with reflections on parenting and business models. |
Statements from this episode (51)
Meyer: Upset customers offer better opportunities to shift perspectives than happy ones
“Because I don't like happy customers. Because the opportunity to shift reality in the meeting is low. If there's a customer coming in ripshit about something or upset about the product, you have an opportunity to totally reframe the way they look at the world.”
Meyer: Great product managers inherently alienate either sales or engineering
“If you're rocking it as a product manager, everybody thinks you suck. If sales loves you, engineering hates you. Because you're chasing deals and you're not thinking about the long-term future. If engineering loves you, sales hates you, because you're just doi…”
Meyer: Code is not complicated, just a logical system
“Code is not complicated. You know, I don't, I can't write it well, but I can understand it. You can look at it. It's just a logical system.”
Stebbings: I might have quit early if I knew audience growth took years
“It's hard, but I didn't know, actually, that it would take years and years to build a following to the millions. If I had have done, I might have quit earlier. I thought it would come much sooner, and actually, it was just fun, and so I went along with it.”
Meyer: Interrogate customers until you can do their job
“I use the same methodology for like everything I do. Go in knowing nothing and then interrogate the person until you feel like you could do their job.”
David Meyer: Humans cannot avoid leading the witness during customer interviews
“I'm a human, so I'm terrible at customer questioning because it's impossible not to lead the witness.”
David Meyer: Open-ended customer questions often fail to extract useful signal
“The problem is open-ended questions. Oftentimes you can't get to where you want to go. Right? So then it's just like open-ish questions that are kind of leading.”
Meyer: Be collective customer obsessed, never listen to feature design requests
“People like to talk about being customer obsessed. But I think of there's the customer, and then there's the collective customer. So you have to be collective customer obsessed. So you never want to overfit to a customer because then it'll be a tiny town, righ…”
David Meyer: Product management is making incremental progress while surviving
“It's finding a way to make baby steps towards the vision while staying alive, basically.”
Meyer: Only hire people who instinctively act like PMs without the title
“But if you can live as a sales engineer or an engineer without doing that, if you can take the spec and build it without fighting, you can never be a, so if you cannot not product manage, then you should be a product manager.”
Meyer: Uncover hidden PM potential by interrogating a candidate's past impact
“You ask them where their biggest impact was, right? And if it has nothing to do with product, You know, if it's like calming down an angry customer, but it has nothing to do with the value, the, you know, so you just tease it out, and then interrogate from the…”
Databricks replaced 'data-driven' with 'truth-seeking' as a core value
“Databricks used to have this value called data-driven. Where we wanted everybody to be data driven, but it has a dark side because you can weaponize data, right? You can argue any point of view with any set of data if you're clever enough with numbers, right? …”
Meyer: Metrics exist to reveal blind spots, not to hit targets
“The data in your progress serves one purpose only, which is to figure out your blind spots and where to ask questions. The goal is not hitting your target. The goal is seeing where you're varying or going way above your target.”
Meyer: Large Companies Should Only Adjust Targets Annually Unless Facing Existential Threats
“When you're a company of 6000 people, you gotta be very careful, right? They, you know, there's a lot of grumpiness to do it more frequently than annually. Just because it's hard to, you know, a lot of people have built up flywheels that are organizationally c…”
Meyer: Speed of Learning Matters More Than Speed of Shipping
“Like, speed of learning is everything. But that doesn't mean shipping. That doesn't mean, you know, people talk about one-way doors, Two-way doors, type one, type two decisions, and all this stuff. Like, the key is maximizing your learning curve, and there's s…”
David Meyer: Data-driven product management wastes massive human energy without actionable metrics
“The human energy waste that goes in to data-driven product management When it's not becoming actionable.”
Meyer: Active usage is the most ungameable product value metric
“Things like, ah, active users, like daily, weekly, etc., depending on, you know, enterprise or consumer, time is so precious. If people are spending time in your product, there's value there. Now, it might be never, ah, credible to revenue value, right? That's…”
Meyer: Student-run college consulting firms advising companies are a racket
“There's people hire consultancies because it's a top school of people in college to advise their companies. It's like a racket.”
Meyer: Product managers are roadies, not rock stars
“Most people don't have, like, the hunger and the curiosity to keep going, because it's a thankless job in a lot of ways. You think you're going to be the rock star, you're the roadie.”
Meyer: PM success at hypergrowth companies like 2000s Google is false attribution
“If you were at Google during the aughts, or, you know, you think it was because of you. It wasn't because of you know? So how they accomplish extraordinary things At companies that aren't ramping.”
Meyer: Databricks employs 1,000 engineers and over 100 product managers
“But again, we're, you know, a thousand engineers and, you know, more than a hundred people in product, so.”
Meyer: Founders build startups because they reject authority and having a boss
“The person, the founder, why are they doing it? They're doing it probably because they're the kind of person that, that has a problem with authority and can't have a boss.”
Meyer: Engineers need belief in product vision to maintain high velocity
“Whether you're talking to engineers, engineers have to believe, right? Otherwise, they're just not gonna have the same velocities.”
Meyer: Guide engineers to discover product decisions themselves rather than issuing directives
“You know, you need to take them down your mental travel because you're not, well, you might be stupid, but you probably have a point of view of why this is the right thing. And you need them to discover that.”
Meyer: Leaders must acknowledge abandoned work during pivots to avoid team churn
“When you're gonna change target and people have been working their ass off to build something meaningful to the old target, you just have to give it the morning cycle, you know? You have to be empathetic and human because you need them to come along with you o…”
Meyer: Unemotional product management only works for incremental optimization
“That's great if you're doing something incremental. If you're like, let's grow revenue 10% on a product that has product market fit. Yeah, you can be, you can have no emotion then. A lot of the job is not about speccing the product and building the product. A …”
Meyer: PMs who do not obsessively track post-launch usage data are insane
“I've known a lot of product managers That ship a product and don't observe how it's behaving in the wild through data. I think they're fucking insane. Like, you spent all this energy and willpower creating this thing, and you're not obsessively watching exactl…”
Meyer: Publishing on a website is not true marketing
“Putting something on your website is not marketing. You gotta get in the mindshare of the person whose problem you're solving, they're never gonna look at your website.”
Meyer: More Detailed Models Create a False Impression of Correctness
“The gist of it is the more detail you see, The more correct you think something is.”
Databricks SVP David Meyer: Excessive Mathematical Rigor in Product Is Wasteful
“Because humans are not mathematically definable, and products are for humans. So, over rigor is just waste in the system, I think.”
Meyer: Employees Follow Leaders Who See Them, Not Formulaic Managers
“I think a lot of leaders are formulaic. And I think the people follow people that see them.”
Meyer: Leaders Must Get Feedback on Their Feedback to Retain Employees
“When you give people feedback, you need to get their feedback on your feedback. Because, you know, you might not give them any space to talk about the why or, you know, what they're going through. That doesn't mean not to be resolute on the feedback. Like, I n…”
Meyer Promises to Help Departing Direct Reports Find Their Next Role
“If you're gonna leave the company, I'm gonna help you find the best job imaginable. But first, I'm gonna figure out if you're running away or running towards. Like, if you're running away from the company because something's broken, I wanna fix it. If you're r…”
Meyer: Products serving everyone lose the fanatic power users driving viral growth
“If your product becomes everything to everyone, you lose the fanatics. But your fanatics are the ones that talk about it in bars. Bring their friends in, have the viral coefficients and stuff, but they're also the ones that push you to do unimaginable things, …”
Meyer: Plumtree attempted to acquire Atlassian early on, but was rejected
“We tried to acquire Atlassian back in Like, 98 or something. We thought we should get them cheap. They're a little dinky company, but they had a plan, you know, and they're like, pound sand, there's no way.”
Meyer: Developers drive CFO software purchasing decisions at Databricks
“For Databricks, the developers are, we, developers have to love us, right? Because they're going to be the ones influencing the decision that the CFO makes.”
David Meyer: Meetings with ten or more people cause damaging miscommunication
“If you get 10 people in the room, they'll oftentimes, it'll be like damaging. We'll say something, we'll understand each other, they'll interpret it differently, and they'll report the news to other people that's wrong.”
David Meyer: Employee mistakes stem from management failing to provide context
“Well, if someone does stupid shit on my team, I didn't give them the context because they're smart people. I hire smart people. So if they're doing something dumbass, it's because I failed to give them the context And the framework to understand why it's dumba…”
Enterprise PMs must understand underlying tech to avoid bad decisions
“In enterprise software, you got to know how that shit works, because otherwise you'll give, make bad decisions because you won't understand the dependencies, right?”
Candidates fail if the hiring committee lacks full conviction in them
“So if you can't enroll the hiring committee to believe that this person's great, they're gonna fail.”
Meyer: Enterprise hiring committees require an active naysayer to maintain rigor
“So you have to have antagonists in the system. A small number should be cross-functional. You need to have someone technical. Well, in enterprise software, you need to have someone, you know, product, Someone technical, and some naysayer, as like the core thre…”
Meyer: Product managers waste 60% of their time on administrative tasks
“Like, a third of their time should be talking to customers. A third of their time should be using the product and working with engineering. And a third of their time should be thinking properly, you know? But it never works out that way, because usually, 60% o…”
Meyer: Databricks engineering and sales each blamed the other for ruining the company
“When I came into Databricks it was bimodal, right? Engineers thought sales ran the company. And we're destroying it. And sales thought engineering ran the company and we're destroying it.”
Meyer Operates on Implicit Approval Model with Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi
“It's oftentimes, I send a lot to him that I don't necessarily get responses on unless he disagrees.”
Meyer: Product leaders expecting complete agency under founder-CEOs will fail
“Not being clear about the level of agency they'll have. Meaning, a founder CEO is gonna be in the details of all the shit, and that's good. And some people expect, you know, complete agency calling the shots as a product leader, and they will fail.”
Meyer: Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi insists on deep founder involvement in product work
“And I tried that for the first six months at Databricks. And that's not what Ali wanted to hear. He didn't want me to go off and do something and then show him how awesome it was. You know, he wanted to be deeply involved and have the founders deeply involved …”
Meyer: New product leaders should minimize operational changes in first 90 days
“Do as little, like, changing the world of how the company works as possible in the first 90 days.”
Meyer: Early product wins should prioritize human relationships over technical achievements
“If the early wins are human, more than technical, you'll build the followership you need.”
David Meyer: Having kids inverted my perception of work-life selfishness
“I used to think when I left work to go home, I was being selfish until I had kids. And then I thought when I stay at work and don't go home, I'm being selfish.”
Meyer: Solving environmental and economic challenges requires creative business models
“It's very complicated to pull things off like that, but like figuring out to the big problems of environmental transformation energy efficiency you know, social and economic equity, you have to come up with really creative business models to tackle those thing…”