Apr 26, 2023 · 1h 2m · news
Snap's VP of Product Jack Brody: The Future of AR; Snap Glasses; Evan Spiegel's Product Mind | E1006 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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In this episode of 20VC, Snapchat's VP of Product Jack Brody shares his career journey, product design methodologies, and leadership philosophies, highlighting how Snap balances rapid prototyping, psychological safety, and cutting-edge AR hardware to drive global innovation.
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 17.3% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 3.4 Guest teaching 3.2 Guest disagreement 1.1 Harry pushing back 2.6
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 48:36 Rejection of Kakao copycat accusation
Jack firmly rejects Harry's suggestion that Snap copied Kakao stories, asserting that Stories emerged independently from addressing core recipient intimacy dynamics.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 45:54 Challenge on universal product design vs Asian UI preferenceHarry directly confronts Jack's universal global product philosophy by highlighting the stark differences between busy Asian user interfaces and Western minimalist designs.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 19:30 Product design as the scientific methodJack systematically breaks down why product design is 80 percent science rather than art, mapping the product lifecycle directly onto observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and iteration.
Harry holds his own ▶ 27:46 Adding probability of execution to prioritization frameworkHarry steps into the discussion on framework design to inject a missing operational variable—probability of outcome and execution—demonstrating his deep analytical grasp of product management.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jack's Journey into Product Design | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Harry asks a standard conversational opening question about Jack's path into product design. Jack shares his personal journey from feeling average at school subjects to discovering the interdisciplinary nature of product design. | |
| Joining Snap and the Shortest Internship | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Harry prompts Jack to share his origin story at Snap. Jack tells an entertaining anecdote about interviewing with Evan Spiegel and having the shortest internship in Snap history. | |
| Evan Spiegel's Product Approach and Questioning Conventions | 3 | 3 | 1 | 4 | Harry cites an off-air conversation with Jeremy from Jack's team and pushes Jack on how to distinguish conventions worth questioning from those that exist for good reason. Jack clarifies how rapid prototyping de-risks testing conventions. | |
| Prototyping and Fast Decision-Making | 4 | 3 | 1 | 3 | Harry offers a strong product analogy comparing Snap to Apple's design changes like removing the home button. He pushes Jack on how to differentiate temporary user frustration with good design from actual bad product changes. | |
| Case Studies in Product Success, Failure, and Copycats | 5 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Harry demonstrates strong background knowledge by bringing up conversations with Meta leadership regarding copying Stories and prompts Jack on product failures. Harry presses Jack when he initially dodges the failure question before Jack explains shutting down Snap Games. | |
| The Science and Art of Product Design | 2 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Harry asks whether product design is art or science. Jack educates Harry with a structured breakdown showing why product design mirrors the scientific method far more than art. | |
| Diversity and Creativity in Product Innovation | 4 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Harry quotes Spotify CPO Gustav's view that talk is cheap. Jack nuances the quote by arguing talk is only cheap when psychological safety exists, prompting Harry to press directly for concrete implementation tactics. | |
| Prioritization and the Trap of Solution-First Thinking | 6 | 2 | 1 | 3 | When Jack outlines his three prioritization buckets, Harry actively interjects to add probability of outcome and execution to the framework, demonstrating strong product leadership expertise. | |
| Compassionate Performance Management and Candid Feedback | 3 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Harry openly shares a personal struggle about the emotional toll of firing employees he genuinely cares about. Jack reframes performance management as an act of compassion that frees people to find better-aligned roles. | |
| Embracing Imperfection and Balancing Career with Family | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Harry references back-channel feedback about Jack's perfectionism and shifts into a therapist-style line of questioning about managing work, fatherhood, and perfectionism. | |
| Designing a Strategic Hiring Process for Product Orgs | 3 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Harry challenges Jack's structured hiring methodology by sharing his own informal reality of hiring without job descriptions, leading Jack to detail step negative one of defining team gaps. | |
| Overcoming Hiring Mistakes and Navigating the 50% Success Rule | 5 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Harry demonstrates strong founder insight by identifying logo-chasing as a common hiring trap and introduces the 50 percent success heuristic in talent acquisition. | |
| Snap's Strategy for the Developing World and Global Localization | 6 | 4 | 2 | 5 | Harry forcefully pushes back on Jack's global strategy by contrasting busy Asian user interfaces with clean Western designs, questioning whether a single universal product design can work across regions. | |
| The 'Faster Horses' Philosophy and the Origin of Snap Stories | 4 | 5 | 2 | 4 | Harry asks point-blank if Snap copied Kakao stories. Jack directly rejects the premise and uses the faster horses analogy to articulate how Snap Stories was designed to solve broadcast needs without destroying recipient intimacy. | |
| Reimagining the Camera and the Future of AR Utility | 2 | 4 | 0 | 1 | Jack educates Harry on how Snapchat transformed the camera from a passive memory storage device into an active real-time communication interface, opening the path for utility AR. | |
| Snap Spectacles and the Hardware-Enabled Future of AR | 4 | 3 | 2 | 4 | Harry directly presses Jack on whether Snap Spectacles were a commercial failure. Jack pushes back on the financial framing, defending Spectacles as a crucial iterative step toward hardware AR. | |
| Quick Fire: Career Advice, Parenthood, and Imposter Syndrome | 2 | 2 | 0 | 1 | A fast-paced quickfire segment covering career skills, parenthood, imposter syndrome, and AI strategy. Jack speaks candidly about personal vulnerabilities. |
Statements from this episode (31)
Jack Brody: Effective product design requires interdisciplinary breadth over deep specialization
“What makes you a good designer is being able to kind of dip your toes into a lot of different areas and then bring them together and synthesize them into something different, something new.”
Brody: Snap had around 25 employees in December 2013
“It was probably about 25 people when I was interviewing.”
Jack Brody holds the shortest internship in Snap history
“I hold the shortest internship ever in Snap history, and that might extend well beyond into tech history of some sorts.”
Snap prototypes unshippable internal concepts in hours, not months
“That's probably our most active use of a prototype is, you know, our design team or design engineers will come together, come up with the concept. They'll build it in a way that we could never ship it. But they can get it done in, you know, a few hours rather …”
Snap prefers risking user backlash over letting the company die
“You have to choose as an organization. Do you want your customers to hate the products you ship every time you do something drastically different? Or do you want the company to die, right? That's the choice you have in front of you. And so we always choose the…”
Brody: Enduring user backlash requires high conviction in product vision
“If you have a huge amount of conviction, you're willing to take a lot of pain. If you don't have that much conviction, You need to be a little bit more thoughtful with the way you roll things out and the feedback you get around it, and you got to let that info…”
Snapchat Stories took months to gain user adoption after launching
“When stories released, it wasn't immediate, you know, overnight success. This is something that took months for the community to adopt and start to use and kind of get that flywheel, you know, moving and get people comfortable with what this new thing was.”
Snapchat Stories remain more raw and authentic than rival platforms
“While stories has, you know, been successful on other platforms, the way stories are used on Snapchat is still fundamentally different. It's still more raw, authentic in the moment content. There's less of this need to be, you know, pretty or perfect.”
Snap shut down its internal games initiative in 2022
“This last year we had to wind down our games effort.”
Brody on killing viable products to preserve focus on primary goals
“You have to wind down certain things in order to focus on the things that have the biggest opportunity, and it's not always because those things don't have a path to success, but sometimes it's because that path to success is too long, or it's too distracting …”
Jack Brody: Repeatable product innovation requires workplace diversity and varied experiences
“What is the best way to create an environment where you have a bunch of, you know, unique ideas coming together? And that's where the importance of having a really diverse workplace comes in, because you are much more likely to get different ideas merging toge…”
Brody: Product idea quality is limited by initial volume of ideas generated
“The idea we pursue is only as good as the number of ideas we've had to choose from.”
Brody: Publicly rewarding risk-taking is the best way to build psychological safety
“There's no better way to create a culture of psychological safety than to make sure that you are rewarding people when they're taking risks, and you're doing that in a way that's public so other people see that it's okay.”
Brody: Frequent candid feedback leads underperformers to improve or self-select out
“What I've found is that by doing that, you know, the number of times I've had to Let somebody go is actually relatively small, and it's not because I don't take performance management seriously, but it's because through these series of conversations, that pers…”
Brody: Define internal organizational issues before opening new hiring roles
“Before you start the process of actually looking for a candidate, you have to understand and define the problems within your organization that needs solving through hiring somebody new. And I think what you find when you do that exercise is that oftentimes you…”
Brody: When hiring new employees, treat your existing team as the customer
“Just like when you're building a product, you start by talking with the customers. You know, in this world, when you're hiring somebody, your customer is your team. You're trying to make their jobs easier. You're trying to make them more efficient. You're tryi…”
Brody: Snap requires cross-discipline interview panels when hiring product managers
“I think once you get into the interview stage, you know, I think one thing that is really important when we're doing our hiring is making sure that the panel of the folks interviewing this person are diverse and, you know, not just from a Ethnicity standpoint …”
Brody: The biggest hiring mistake is failing to remove bad fits quickly
“I would say that the biggest mistake in hiring is actually not a mistake that leads you to hiring the wrong person. It's how you deal with the moments when you do hire the wrong person. Because, you know, interviewing is hard. It is not a perfect science. And …”
Half of Snap hires end up tweaking or changing their role
“About 50% of the people we hire end up changing their role or tweaking it or working on something slightly different because Over time, we realize that there's a better fit within that.”
Snap completely rewrote its Android app from scratch in 2018
“In, in 2018, you know, we took on this project to Basically rewrite the entire Android app from scratch.”
Snap saw accelerated global adoption after rebuilding its Android app
“So we rebuilt it from scratch. And, you know, because of that, we saw a huge acceleration in adoption across the world.”
Jack Brody predicts Snap will take off in Japan despite LINE
“You know, Japan has been a very interesting market for us. I've always thought that that is a market in which, you know, snap would really take off because there are certain elements to it. It's very visual. It's, you know, it's playful. The lenses that we off…”
Snapchat created Stories to avoid a 'select all' send button
“And with stories, you know, what we were hearing from the community was they wanted a way to send a snap to everyone. They wanted it to be easier for them to go. Take a snap. Tap everybody on the send to list and blast it off. Now we recognize that if we did t…”
Brody: Communicating with friends is far more frequent than taking photos
“Talking with friends is a far more frequent behavior Than capturing an image of something pretty.”
Brody: Future of AR lies in creating real-world practical utility
“I think that the future of augmented reality is going to be around creating more and more utility and through the way of understanding the environment around you.”
Brody: Augmented reality will find its true essence through glasses
“I think ultimately augmented reality will find its true essence through glasses.”
First Snap Spectacles generated little revenue and missed 'iPhone moment'
“So I would say that the first version of Spectacles, you know, obviously it wasn't an iPhone moment. It's not something that has generated an enormous amount of revenue for the company, but it is absolutely helped us hone in on where to take these things in th…”
Brody: Hiring specialized product managers early harms early-stage startups
“If you're hiring for too much specialization, you're not going to find somebody who's passionate enough and excited enough to really get their hands dirty and do all the work that's required at that early stage.”
Brody: New product leaders should embrace vulnerability to learn faster
“I think the most important thing to do when you're starting in a new role or in any role is to be willing to share your insecurities and your vulnerabilities because it then gives you the time and the space to learn and to grow”
Evan Spiegel's future ambitions sometimes obscure present realities
“I would say his ambitions for where he wants things to go can very occasionally get in the way of where things are, and that is the beauty of the fact that he surrounded himself with leaders who are willing to help him see that bigger picture.”