The Exchanges

Q sense. I love the challenge of discovering Discover. Um, the meta problem there is quite hilarious, to be honest. Um, another element that you worked on, which is crucial as well, is the gaming platform, which I think a lot of people don't actually recognize. I heard about trips to Australia, um, we can get into that later, but what are the biggest lessons from working on Snap's gaming platform?

A Building that Snap Games, what it was called, was One of the most valuable experiences I've ever had. I had a lot of lessons from it. I got to meet some incredible people. I got to see that the game developer community is very global, and vast, and diverse, and so creative. I think some of the best product thinkers actually come from game design. Um, I think for me, Snap Games, the biggest lesson was actually very personal learning, and sort of building the confidence and the courage In myself to overcome challenges, as sort of corny as that sounds, I was in my twenties, and I had never before managed a team. I had never before acquired different companies in pursuit of a vision, and I remember actually the launch of Snap Games was quite chaotic, and I think one of the most stressful periods of my life, where We tried, we, we, we ended up launching it with this sort of grand keynote on stage where I was, it was the first ever keynote for Snap, and I was talking in front of thousands of really important people, and public speaking really terrifies me, and I had never actually before spoken to a, a, a reporter, a journalist, and then, so my first time ever speaking to a reporter was actually speaking to a whole room full of really, uh, prestigious reporters, and they were all sort of like cross-examining me, and it was just, all of this was happening Right at the same time, while…

AI assessment note: “the biggest lesson was actually very personal learning, and sort of building the confidence”

Q What questions do you ask to uncover user needs? Because it's hard.

A For me, the first thing that comes to mind is, you know, I'm at Match Group thinking about how to continue to spark online connection around the world and What's your approach to dating? Which, if you were to try on, have you tried online dating before? If you were to try online dating for the first time, which apps would you consider if you've gone through online dating already? Like, what are some of the struggles that you have? What are some of the challenges? Tell me your problems. You basically just want to hear about what problems they have so that you can, you know, so someone might say that, oh, getting started with online dating is actually really challenging. There's tons of different apps out there that you can choose from. How do you know how to make A dating profile. It's just incredibly challenging. It's like a little awkward to figure out how to represent yourself with photos and some texts online in front of, you know, potentially millions of strangers in a romantic setting. So just thinking, hearing, listening to their problems, formalizing those problems, writing them down, and then bringing together really smart, creative people from Different backgrounds, that art and science background, to really think about how to solve those problems.

AI assessment note: “What's your approach to dating? ... what are some of the struggles that you have?”

Q No, I totally agree with you. Listen, I want to talk about the future, and then we're going to do Quickfire, because I've roamed around here. I do, we have to talk about kind of the impact of AI. First, impact of AI on product design. How does AI change the actual process of product creation and design, do you think?

A First of all, as a product designer or a product manager, I think AI has already created a bunch of tools that we can use to be super product designers or product managers. I mean, thinking through like, you know, I have already some product designers on my team who are using tools like mid journey or Dolly to come up with different UI concepts or visual concepts. I actually think I was experimenting with these large, I guess they're called LMMs, these large multimodal models that are both like, they can talk with like language, like a chat GPT, but they can also see, they can, they can, they can see imagery and photos and analyze and understand them. And I think there's probably going to be an AI tool in the near future that gives you instantaneous user feedback and testing. Like you create a mock-up or a prototype and you Hand it to the AI, and you say, hey, AI, give me feedback on this new experience as if you were a eighteen-year-old male living in Los Angeles, or as if you were a fifty-five-year-old woman living in New York. And I, I've already actually started, like, playing with some of these LMMs in this way, and I think it's definitely just right around the corner. So I think, like, making sure that you understand how to utilize these latest AI tools is probably really important towards making sure you've got The right tools at your disposal to do a good job. And then …

AI assessment note: “using tools like mid journey or Dolly to come up with different UI concepts”

Q great brand, and I'm like, they came from, you know, Jack's product team at Snap, obviously not this, but they must be amazing, and they're like, nah, not really. Um, or like, I go, amazing product, they're so innovative, they're so innovative, and then they're just, like, not a good culture fit, and I didn't take that into account. What have been your biggest mistakes product, like, product hiring wise?

A For me personally, I mean, I, I think that I can get overly invested in people. I can give people a lot of room To fail because I like to see the best in people, I guess. I'm like a glass half full kind of guy, and my friends always actually give me a hard time about this because I tend to like everyone. Even people who are, who most people severely dislike, I, I, I love them because I just like see them for who they are, and I think they bring something special to the world, but I think that does make it so that sometimes I give people a long leash, and, you know, I may need to sort of, like, read the signs from the team earlier to figure out that maybe they aren't a great culture fit, or maybe they're just in this for the money and not that passionate about our mission.

AI assessment note: “I think that I can get overly invested in people.”

Q What questions do you ask to uncover user needs? Because it's hard.

A For me, the first thing that comes to mind is, you know, I'm at Match Group thinking about how to continue to spark online connection around the world and What's your approach to dating? Which, if you were to try on, have you tried online dating before? If you were to try online dating for the first time, which apps would you consider if you've gone through online dating already? Like, what are some of the struggles that you have? What are some of the challenges? Tell me your problems. You basically just want to hear about what problems they have so that you can, you know, so someone might say that, oh, getting started with online dating is actually really challenging. There's tons of different apps out there that you can choose from. How do you know how to make A dating profile. It's just incredibly challenging. It's like a little awkward to figure out how to represent yourself with photos and some texts online in front of, you know, potentially millions of strangers in a romantic setting. So just thinking, hearing, listening to their problems, formalizing those problems, writing them down, and then bringing together really smart, creative people from Different backgrounds, that art and science background, to really think about how to solve those problems.

AI assessment note: “what are some of the struggles that you have? What are some of the challenges?”

Q What are the mistakes that product teams get when it comes to culture? How does product culture go bad?

A I like to create a culture where everyone is Growth-minded, where everyone practices humility, empathy, and listening to one another, but what I personally don't like is when you've got folks that are very egocentric, really ego-driven, people who think that they know everything, because that can be poisonous to your team culture. It can stifle the voices of other people in the room, and it can plant these seeds in the team that over time You know, can tarnish, uh, you know, the, the rest of what you're doing. I think a lot about team culture, and how every single person is like a, a seed in your team, and those seeds over time blossom into trees, and I guess your team is like a, a field of trees, but if you've got the wrong people on the team, it can be like a, I don't know what the right analogy is here, it could be like a, like a parasite, or something like that. That can grow over time, so you have to get rid of it really quickly.

AI assessment note: “what I personally don't like is when you've got folks that are very egocentric”

Q Do you cap it at a certain number of people? How do you determine who to invite? I'm just intrigued to really get to grips with kind of the bare bones.

A It's actually really important to have a small group of people, because otherwise you just get into these situations where there's too many cooks in a kitchen, and there's too many people that can sort of shoot down ideas, which I think is the worst thing when it comes to creativity. I mean, it could just, you know, shooting down ideas is something that I just Really try to avoid in the sort of like product culture that I create, because any idea can have merit if you look at it under a certain lens. But yeah, I try to cap it to maybe like Five people max. I mean, there's like a rough rule of thumb, but I think it's really important. It's like people that you trust, you know, the way their minds work, you're all coming at a problem from a different perspective. Maybe someone has, maybe someone's formally trained in product design, or maybe someone is an engineer and you can think about it from those different lenses.

AI assessment note: “I try to cap it to maybe like Five people max.”

Q What do you want to see in the products that they've built?

A I think, I guess it depends on the product, but you know, I think of, actually, ok, so when I was first building Snap Games, Actually, this goes back to the Australia comment that, um, that you made earlier. I had this kind of crazy vision, vision of, uh, Creating these multiplayer games in Snapchat that were fun and vibrant and colorful and featured your, your Bitmoji so you could play as your Bitmoji in Snapchat with your friends. Snap didn't have game development expertise already within the company, so I started looking for game studios out there in the world that we could potentially acquire through M&A to sort of bring that expertise into the company, and I found a game that just really spoke to me. It was multiplayer, real-time multiplayer. It was super fun and colorful. I remember, like, the music had the right energy that I was looking for.

AI assessment note: “It was multiplayer, real-time multiplayer. It was super fun and colorful.”

Q What do you want to see in the products that they've built?

A I think, I guess it depends on the product, but you know, I think of, actually, ok, so when I was first building Snap Games, Actually, this goes back to the Australia comment that, um, that you made earlier. I had this kind of crazy vision, vision of, uh, Creating these multiplayer games in Snapchat that were fun and vibrant and colorful and featured your, your Bitmoji so you could play as your Bitmoji in Snapchat with your friends. Snap didn't have game development expertise already within the company, so I started looking for game studios out there in the world that we could potentially acquire through M&A to sort of bring that expertise into the company, and I found a game that just really spoke to me. It was multiplayer, real-time multiplayer. It was super fun and colorful. I remember, like, the music had the right energy that I was looking for.

AI assessment note: “It was multiplayer, real-time multiplayer. It was super fun and colorful.”

Q Can I ask, how do you prevent feature creep? It's so easy over time just to add more, add more, add more, and then you look at the product and it's like, oh, that is cumbersome. How do you retain simplicity with time?

A I mean, this is really where I think there's a lot of art involved. You have to think through the right Level of abstraction with features. You don't, you don't want to open up an app and see hundreds of toggles in different settings and different switches. It's just overwhelming and confusing and hard to understand. You do want to make some of those settings and toggles available for a power user, someone who really wants to push your product to its limit. So it's figuring out from a design perspective how, like what the information architecture should look like. How to tweak the interface to be Approachable for a lay person, but to have depth for a more power user, if that makes sense.

AI assessment note: “How to tweak the interface to be Approachable for a lay person”

Q What are the mistakes that product teams get when it comes to culture? How does product culture go bad?

A I like to create a culture where everyone is Growth-minded, where everyone practices humility, empathy, and listening to one another, but what I personally don't like is when you've got folks that are very egocentric, really ego-driven, people who think that they know everything, because that can be poisonous to your team culture. It can stifle the voices of other people in the room, and it can plant these seeds in the team that over time You know, can tarnish, uh, you know, the, the rest of what you're doing. I think a lot about team culture, and how every single person is like a, a seed in your team, and those seeds over time blossom into trees, and I guess your team is like a, a field of trees, but if you've got the wrong people on the team, it can be like a, I don't know what the right analogy is here, it could be like a, like a parasite, or something like that. That can grow over time, so you have to get rid of it really quickly.

AI assessment note: “folks that are very egocentric, really ego-driven, people who think that they know everything”