The Exchanges

Q I think there'll be a lot of founders who listen to this and go, shit, I don't feel like we're moving fast enough. And I don't feel like we have that urgency. What would you advise them to instill that sense of urgency in product deployment development? How can they inject their organization with urgency?

A The first thing is that I think humans respond the best when they're like, I am making an impact on other humans. Like, humans in general feel very motivated when they can see the results of their work. So the first thing I'd recommend is founders should really bring that impact to life, right? Like, that impact is on the users out there, whether they're perspective, because they're a really early startup, or, you know, they're existing, right? Because you have a more established user base. Bring that to your company, you know, show people what that looks like. At Linktree, we have, we bring a user literally every, almost every single all hands, which happens every other week. We bring a linker to that all hands to show people how they use Linktree, the things that they're struggling with, the things that they love about Linktree, and that builds that user empathy where you're like, I just know that the thing I'm doing is going to help that person. And when you're like, ah, man, the thing I'm doing is going to help that person, you're motivated to do it faster, to do it really well. So I think that's the first thing, which is like, bring your users closer because humans are driven by making an impact on other humans. I think the second thing is like you, you want to model that behavior, right? Like it's really unproductive to be like everyone move with urgency and you're, you k…

AI assessment note: “founders should really bring that impact to life”

Q Business metrics at the top, then we have what?

A Then when you flow down, then you have the input metrics that drive these output business metrics, meaning in order for our revenue, our AR to grow a certain way, these things have to happen. We have to get these many subscriptions to happen. We have to get these many people to not churn. So now you're getting a little bit closer to product metrics, and then we get even further out into like the lower branches. This is where you have your actual product metrics, which is for most product teams, a thing you are measuring right out the gate is adoption. It's like, hey, is someone using, out of the target audience that could use this product, how many people are using the product? And are they liking it? Like, generally, if you were to survey a random sample or could just go talk to people, like, what's their MPS? And then it's like, okay, are they actually seeing real behavior changes because they're using it, because they're happy with it? And that's when you're like, oh, okay, like, we are actually seeing churn go down, or we are seeing retention go up, or we are seeing activation go up, right? And then those you can see are even more closely tied To the, the top of the tree that I talked about, which are these like output business metrics, which is like when you literally do the math of like, okay, signups have gone up. Activation has gone up. Conversion has gone up. You know,…

AI assessment note: “Then when you flow down, then you have the input metrics that drive these output”

Q Totally get you. Okay, so that's number two. What's number three in terms of the ritual?

A Yeah, so the last thing I care about, so the first one, again, transparency, which is why I have scorecard. The second one is, um, this idea of like co-creation. And like the best ideas out there and being able to move really, really fast, which is why you have jams. The last principle for me where like last thing I really try to get out of teams is this idea of like pride of ownership and accountability of their work. And that's where I really believe in this concept called like demo power hour. And so I brought that, you know, to Webflow, brought that to Linktree. And this idea is like, you literally have an hour and it's very free flowing. It is like people just showing you what's in progress. And I think that there's so many times where teams feel like things have to be so polished. You know, designers have this fear of like showing something before it's like pixel perfect. Engineers have, you know, sometimes this fear of like, I don't want to like show you the thing in my sandbox or before it's ready. And, you know, it could break during demo power hour. And I really encourage this idea of like, let it break. Let us see like the, you know, the work in progress because it shows, it actually reinforces this concept of velocity. If every demo power hour Is packed to the gills with stuff that people are shipping and showing at all the different stages. You're, you're able to s…

AI assessment note: “The last principle... where I really believe in this concept called like demo power hour.”

Q Now, I am very excited for this. We're going to take this in a couple of different twists and turns. We always need like a good starting point. I think it's good to understand where the love of product first comes from. So when and where did you first realize that product was really where you wanted to commit your life and time towards?

A When I was an undergrad, I had no idea that this was even a thing. I was an econ major. I graduated, did what's expected, you know, consulting. Then after a few years of doing that, I was just like, I'm always just advising. Like I'm spending all this time getting all this knowledge and getting so passionate and worked up about what a company should be doing. And then I just hand it off and I'm like, here's a deck. Good luck. Um, and so I was kind of like, what can I do? What kind of job would actually let me build? Like take the things that I've researched and understood and go make them true. And so this is when I was like, oh, there's this thing called product. Uh, so I was living in Boston, you know, thing called product. A lot of them happened to be in San Francisco. And then as I did more research, I was like, well, the best places to do this thing called product is at a place like Google, and they only take people with a CS degree, which I did not have, right? Or they only take people from Stanford, MIT, which I did not go to. And so I basically got in by being like, well, what could I offer that people would actually value? And from my analytics work, my economics work, I was like, I can bring you analytics. And so that's how I basically became a mobile gaming PM. How did you find your love for product there? And for me, it's like, well, at the end of the day, like the,…

AI assessment note: “what kind of job would actually let me build? ... oh, there's this thing called product.”

Q Okay, so number one thing I have to ask you there is, like, when you think about advice to young people or to people who want to enter product, having had that less conventional route of not having the CS or not having the Stanford, like, What would you advise them knowing all that you know now who want to enter product?

A I think the first thing I'd advise is, you know, and also assuming that you can't get into these, like, rotational programs that have these specific requirements, go somewhere, work on a product that you have a lot of passion for, and most importantly, where you can get those learning reps in. Kind of like what I just mentioned about gaming, right? Like, I learned so much. Like, every single week I was shipping a new app to the App Store. That, in terms of reps, is so different than I think a lot of companies today where you're like, I spent a whole quarter, or I spent a long time, And so get somewhere where you can get those reps in.

AI assessment note: “go somewhere, work on a product that you have a lot of passion for”

Q How do you think about prioritization of user data? When you think about, I don't know, Demi Lovato, Robert Downey Jr., Halsey, some of these amazing names that use Linktree. Very different, I'm sure, product feedback to a restaurant or to a creator who's got respectfully very little following. How do you think about the prioritization of user feedback and where people should spend time and not spend time?

A You know, it is a question that I think I've wrestled with almost at every company that I've been at. What I've actually found is that if you really laid out the customer types you care about, and then you laid out their needs and their problems, oftentimes you can find that there's a lot at the intersection of what I call that Venn diagram. So the first thing to do is to be very clear of like, who are not your users? Who, who is not your quote unquote ICP, right? Ideal customer, uh, profile. Um, That is very important, but a lot of times you go through that exercise, and you're like, I still have way too many people. I still have way too many things that I want to, like, solve for it and the people's needs that I want to solve for. My goal there is not to be like, let's artificially constrain, because I think that actually artificially constrains your business. That's when you draw that Venn diagram, and you say, hey, you know, for Linktree, it's, yes, it's SMBs, and yes, it's creators, but if you put those two, you know, circles together, you actually look at what they need. There are a lot of similarities. At the end of the day, first, They want to have some way to unify their digital presence because the world is getting increasingly fragmented with every platform out there and like what you need to do on every single platform. So like that is a universal common need. Secon…

AI assessment note: “find that there's a lot at the intersection of what I call that Venn diagram”

Q kind of focus on the product strategy very intimately. But then you've said to me before about planning not existing and maybe planning should not exist. And I'm like, It seems in, in paradox. Can you talk to me about why planning should not exist? And does that not go against everything that we've just done with KPI trees, metrics, prioritization? How do you think about planning should not exist?

A I think that a lot of people spend a lot of time talking about planning, and they talk about process. And those two things I would really, um, turn on their heads. So what I believe in is if you could spend your time doing anything, I spend 80% or more of your time on your strategy and on your rituals. Like, those are the two things I really believe in. So let me talk you through, like, what that means. The strategy, we talked about this earlier, is like, where are you going? What's the world that you believe in? And like, How does that world become different because your product exists, right? Your strategy has a couple of key pieces. So it has that piece as a piece of like, what makes you uniquely positioned to win? Like, if you can't articulate that, like, keep figuring that out. And then it also includes like, what are you not doing? I talked to you about this concept of having these investment areas and also having this concept of like, okay, well, if these are what we're investing in, these are not what we're gonna do. This, this is not in focus, right? You have to articulate all those things and you can call that a plan. That's fine. But I really like to call it a strategy because I think so many times you go through planning cycles as a company, whether big, medium, or small, and then literally by Q one of the next year or like fiscal year rolls around, like everything …

AI assessment note: “I really like to call it a strategy because I think so many times”

Q Okay, so number one thing I have to ask you there is, like, when you think about advice to young people or to people who want to enter product, having had that less conventional route of not having the CS or not having the Stanford, like, What would you advise them knowing all that you know now who want to enter product?

A I think the first thing I'd advise is, you know, and also assuming that you can't get into these, like, rotational programs that have these specific requirements, go somewhere, work on a product that you have a lot of passion for, and most importantly, where you can get those learning reps in. Kind of like what I just mentioned about gaming, right? Like, I learned so much. Like, every single week I was shipping a new app to the App Store. That, in terms of reps, is so different than I think a lot of companies today where you're like, I spent a whole quarter, or I spent a long time, And so get somewhere where you can get those reps in.

AI assessment note: “go somewhere, work on a product that you have a lot of passion for”

Q So you come into Linktree, what are the rituals that you instill to have a healthy product or?

A I believe in three really important rituals, and it's because I believe in three principles. The first thing I believe a lot in is this idea of like transparency. If you don't know what's going on across the organization, it's really hard to get work done. And Linktree is a Remote culture. You know, our founders are in Australia. We have people on the west coast, but also people in London where people around the world. And so you, if you don't have transparency, it's very, very difficult to get people to do their jobs well. And so for transparency, um, a thing I've done at Web, uh, Webflow, even, uh, for my teams, you know, at, at, um, we work, I do this thing called scorecard and scorecard is essentially like, these are the most important projects. It's not everything. I think like once you get to everything, you're like, we might as well just use like linear or a tracker, right? But it's like, these are the 10 most important projects at a company that we all need to be rallying around, right? And, and again, if that number could be less than 10, that's great. Like five, even better. Um, but you know, what are the most important projects that we need to be looking at and have transparency around? Because it involved multiple teams getting their act together and working in unison. So scorecard is really important. I think the thing I want to teach, going back to the gym concept…

AI assessment note: “I do this thing called scorecard and scorecard is essentially like, these are the most important projects”

Q So when you think about gaming, On a day-by-day basis, you have metrics. It's very quick feedback cycles. On, say, a PLG SaaS product, it's quickish, but it may not be day. It may be week or month, and so the feedback cycles are slower. How do you think about industries where the feedback cycles are slower, and does that change your perception of how you think about the three?

A Here's what I would challenge people, which is, like, there are things that you can get back. Data is just a term. Data just means, like, information, right? So there are things that you can get back in an hour, in a day, in a week, In a month and so on and so forth. And so what I challenge even, you know, I've worked in B to C, B to B, right? Like what I challenge people is like, what is it that you are able to get back in a day, an hour, a week? And that is a leading indicator of things that might take a little longer to converge. So for example, I worked at Webflow, right? There are things where it's like, yes, the sales cycle is not overnight. It takes time. So if you're saying I ship this thing and I want to see how this thing impacted the sales team being able to sell this thing, that takes a little bit longer. But the thing that you can learn and literally An hour is, hey, I have all these customers out there who've been wanting this very specific feature, and now, now I have an alpha version of it. I'm gonna go out to these people, these clients, these customers, and say, here, like, go use it. What do you think? They will play around with it, and they will give you data in literally an hour sitting with them, being like, this is it. This is like localization. This is the thing I've been wanting for so long. I'm so excited for, and that is data. And so I think that what…

AI assessment note: “what is it that you are able to get back in a day, an hour”

Q How long does it take to prove a hypothesis? Like, sometimes I find that founders slug too long as something that just isn't working. How, how much data is enough data to know that something's not working?

A Great question. It brings us back to what we were talking about earlier, which is, you know, yes, there are things that can take a long time if you're looking for this, like, end end result, but there's also early signal they can get in literally an hour or a day, right? And so for something like that, being able to prototype something and actually put it in front of A restaurant and say, hey, if we created this link tree for you, are you likely to use this as opposed to going out and trying to figure out how to create your own website using Squarespace, Wix, whatever it is, that signal is signal, right? And so there's every point in the process, there's something that you're getting back. That's the first signal. The second signal would be like, you don't have to build out the entire flow. You can literally do a landing page that allows people to pick templates and you can see if people are picking some of them. Like, that in itself is data. So you're always, like, you've got the big picture in mind, but you're testing small little increments to make sure that you're on the right path.

AI assessment note: “there's also early signal they can get in literally an hour or a day”

Q How do you encourage growth or, sorry, product leaders to, like, push their product teams to the user base? I find often product teams can kind of sit in isolation building product and not spend enough time with the actual people using it. What advice do you have to product leaders who are like, hey, go meet customers, go sit in support. How do you do that?

A I think the first one is just that remembrance of So much of your role is understanding that user. I think it's so easy to get caught in the day-to-day execution. You forget that you've got to be close to the user and talk to the user. Then it comes to the point of, okay, how do I do that scalably? And that is where you do lean on your cross-functional partners. You get so much data from your sales team. You get so much data from your support team. And so like actually sitting down with them and being like, what are you hearing? What are you seeing? What are you doing manually for creators? What do creators really wish we actually like offered as a platform to make their lives easier? You get so much Data that way, and it's also more scalable.

AI assessment note: “lean on your cross-functional partners. You get so much data from your sales team.”

Q How do you think about prioritization of user data? When you think about, I don't know, Demi Lovato, Robert Downey Jr., Halsey, some of these amazing names that use Linktree. Very different, I'm sure, product feedback to a restaurant or to a creator who's got respectfully very little following. How do you think about the prioritization of user feedback and where people should spend time and not spend time?

A You know, it is a question that I think I've wrestled with almost at every company that I've been at. What I've actually found is that if you really laid out the customer types you care about, and then you laid out their needs and their problems, oftentimes you can find that there's a lot at the intersection of what I call that Venn diagram. So the first thing to do is to be very clear of like, who are not your users? Who, who is not your quote unquote ICP, right? Ideal customer, uh, profile. Um, That is very important, but a lot of times you go through that exercise, and you're like, I still have way too many people. I still have way too many things that I want to, like, solve for it and the people's needs that I want to solve for. My goal there is not to be like, let's artificially constrain, because I think that actually artificially constrains your business. That's when you draw that Venn diagram, and you say, hey, you know, for Linktree, it's, yes, it's SMBs, and yes, it's creators, but if you put those two, you know, circles together, you actually look at what they need. There are a lot of similarities. At the end of the day, first, They want to have some way to unify their digital presence because the world is getting increasingly fragmented with every platform out there and like what you need to do on every single platform. So like that is a universal common need. Secon…

AI assessment note: “find that there's a lot at the intersection of what I call that Venn diagram”

Q kind of focus on the product strategy very intimately. But then you've said to me before about planning not existing and maybe planning should not exist. And I'm like, It seems in, in paradox. Can you talk to me about why planning should not exist? And does that not go against everything that we've just done with KPI trees, metrics, prioritization? How do you think about planning should not exist?

A I think that a lot of people spend a lot of time talking about planning, and they talk about process. And those two things I would really, um, turn on their heads. So what I believe in is if you could spend your time doing anything, I spend 80% or more of your time on your strategy and on your rituals. Like, those are the two things I really believe in. So let me talk you through, like, what that means. The strategy, we talked about this earlier, is like, where are you going? What's the world that you believe in? And like, How does that world become different because your product exists, right? Your strategy has a couple of key pieces. So it has that piece as a piece of like, what makes you uniquely positioned to win? Like, if you can't articulate that, like, keep figuring that out. And then it also includes like, what are you not doing? I talked to you about this concept of having these investment areas and also having this concept of like, okay, well, if these are what we're investing in, these are not what we're gonna do. This, this is not in focus, right? You have to articulate all those things and you can call that a plan. That's fine. But I really like to call it a strategy because I think so many times you go through planning cycles as a company, whether big, medium, or small, and then literally by Q one of the next year or like fiscal year rolls around, like everything …

AI assessment note: “you go through planning cycles... literally by Q one... everything goes out the door.”

Q How do you spot something going wrong? Is it just about analyzing data?

A No, I mean, honestly, I think that's actually, it's, it's less about data and more about judgment. Like, you should be able to, at any given point in time, you should be able to ask a product leader of the team, a design leader of that team, and also an engineering leader of the team, and you can be like, is this on track? And I think, first of all, the first thing, the first thing to do is to just articulate what success looks like. If you, if that team does not know what success looks like, it's gonna be really hard for them to report out that anything's off track. But if you know what success looks like, it's actually quite easy for you to go around and be like, hey, You three, you guys are the, you know, functional leaders of this area. Is this thing on track based on what you've outlined as your goals? Very easy, right? For the engineering leader to be like, I am really worried about this dependency on this other team, on this platform team, not thinking we're gonna make it. And again, you start to see, like, you know, sometimes the product leader thinks it's on track, the engineering leader thinks it's off track, and the design leader, like, doesn't know. And that's a whole nother problem that you have to diagnose. You have to be like, okay, everyone, we gotta get on the same page, right? And so, like, it's actually, um, The judgment piece and the ability for each person …

AI assessment note: “No, I mean, honestly, I think that's actually, it's, it's less about data”

Q Who do you invite to jams and how often do you do them?

A Yes, it depends. It does depend on the stage of the product. So if you are doing a zero to one product, I actually feel like a product jam should be happening almost daily. Like I think when you're doing a zero to one product, you either need to be in a synchronous, like physical space, or you may approximate that as much as possible based on like getting that team working on it, including sometimes the founder or the head of product just in there because any small degree of like Misalignment is gonna just cause a bunch of problems. And you're also learning at a pace that is really hopefully fast, right? You're like, I just tested this thing. I just put this in front of users. I just went and asked this question. Like you're learning all the time. So that's what I believe like in a zero to one product. If you're a little bit more further along, I think I would say the jams are most important when you are at certain stages of the product where you have to go, like, you'll have to go figure something out. So maybe you, you want to jam at the beginning because you're like, we need to jam on what success actually looks like here. It's not enough for us to say, like, we want to beat the competitor. That's never a, you know, user human driven, um, statement, right? Like I want to be ex-competitor. Instead, we got to like jam on what's the real problem here? What is the thing that we'…

AI assessment note: “getting that team working on it, including sometimes the founder or the head of product”

Q I think there'll be a lot of founders who listen to this and go, shit, I don't feel like we're moving fast enough. And I don't feel like we have that urgency. What would you advise them to instill that sense of urgency in product deployment development? How can they inject their organization with urgency?

A The first thing is that I think humans respond the best when they're like, I am making an impact on other humans. Like, humans in general feel very motivated when they can see the results of their work. So the first thing I'd recommend is founders should really bring that impact to life, right? Like, that impact is on the users out there, whether they're perspective, because they're a really early startup, or, you know, they're existing, right? Because you have a more established user base. Bring that to your company, you know, show people what that looks like. At Linktree, we have, we bring a user literally every, almost every single all hands, which happens every other week. We bring a linker to that all hands to show people how they use Linktree, the things that they're struggling with, the things that they love about Linktree, and that builds that user empathy where you're like, I just know that the thing I'm doing is going to help that person. And when you're like, ah, man, the thing I'm doing is going to help that person, you're motivated to do it faster, to do it really well. So I think that's the first thing, which is like, bring your users closer because humans are driven by making an impact on other humans. I think the second thing is like you, you want to model that behavior, right? Like it's really unproductive to be like everyone move with urgency and you're, you k…

AI assessment note: “The first thing I'd recommend is founders should really bring that impact to life”

Q Do you care if they've had domain expertise in the domain that you're building for?

A It, again, it depends. If you really need that domain expertise for that area, because you don't see it on the team today, and that's actually what's gonna be the differentiator between okay to, like, good or great, then of course, like, go get that domain expertise. In general, I, I, like, again, it depends on people on your team versus, like, the head of product. In general, I've personally found, at least for myself, that there's a lot of benefit. There's, like, great power in being a journalist. And, you know, we can talk about that really quickly, but it kind of boils down to a few things. Like, as a journalist, I think that, like, I always go into a situation without that expertise. It's like, I don't assume I know it. I'm, like, going in, eyes wide open, really uncomfortable, because I'm, like, I don't understand the space, right? So, like, the rate of learning that I, I push myself to have in any given role is really, really high. And I think that's really valuable, because you can have, like, you have a lack of bias. You have a lack of, like, pre-existing assumptions. I also think you can take like mental models from different places and apply them. So then the number of times I've been like, hey, I built a marketplace and that's really interesting. What if at Webflow? Yes, we have a SAS business. PLG, but like if you actually put a marketplace here so you can connect …

AI assessment note: “It, again, it depends. If you really need that domain expertise for that area”

Q So you come into Linktree, what are the rituals that you instill to have a healthy product or?

A I believe in three really important rituals, and it's because I believe in three principles. The first thing I believe a lot in is this idea of like transparency. If you don't know what's going on across the organization, it's really hard to get work done. And Linktree is a Remote culture. You know, our founders are in Australia. We have people on the west coast, but also people in London where people around the world. And so you, if you don't have transparency, it's very, very difficult to get people to do their jobs well. And so for transparency, um, a thing I've done at Web, uh, Webflow, even, uh, for my teams, you know, at, at, um, we work, I do this thing called scorecard and scorecard is essentially like, these are the most important projects. It's not everything. I think like once you get to everything, you're like, we might as well just use like linear or a tracker, right? But it's like, these are the 10 most important projects at a company that we all need to be rallying around, right? And, and again, if that number could be less than 10, that's great. Like five, even better. Um, but you know, what are the most important projects that we need to be looking at and have transparency around? Because it involved multiple teams getting their act together and working in unison. So scorecard is really important. I think the thing I want to teach, going back to the gym concept…

AI assessment note: “I believe in three really important rituals, and it's because I believe in three principles.”

Q How do you spot something going wrong? Is it just about analyzing data?

A No, I mean, honestly, I think that's actually, it's, it's less about data and more about judgment. Like, you should be able to, at any given point in time, you should be able to ask a product leader of the team, a design leader of that team, and also an engineering leader of the team, and you can be like, is this on track? And I think, first of all, the first thing, the first thing to do is to just articulate what success looks like. If you, if that team does not know what success looks like, it's gonna be really hard for them to report out that anything's off track. But if you know what success looks like, it's actually quite easy for you to go around and be like, hey, You three, you guys are the, you know, functional leaders of this area. Is this thing on track based on what you've outlined as your goals? Very easy, right? For the engineering leader to be like, I am really worried about this dependency on this other team, on this platform team, not thinking we're gonna make it. And again, you start to see, like, you know, sometimes the product leader thinks it's on track, the engineering leader thinks it's off track, and the design leader, like, doesn't know. And that's a whole nother problem that you have to diagnose. You have to be like, okay, everyone, we gotta get on the same page, right? And so, like, it's actually, um, The judgment piece and the ability for each person …

AI assessment note: “it's less about data and more about judgment.”

Q When should we do the KPI tree? Should this be on day one or should this be when we hit a certain customer account? How do you think about advising startups on when's the right time to have that kind of metric infrastructure in place?

A I think a company should always have The skeleton of the tree, and the reason for that is this is basically how your product works and how things flow through the business, right? You're like, hey, I know that these are my levers, and I know that these are, like, if I pull these levers, this is the outcome. I think, you know, there's that classic saying where, like, growth masks all problems. I think that a lot of times the company's growing, growing, growing, and everyone's like, things are great, and then it doesn't grow, and you're like, oh my god, what do I do? And usually at that point, they're like, we have no idea what this tree looks like. Like, we don't know what's on the bottom, and what feeds up to another thing, and then what that then outputs to the next thing. They don't actually, ooh, fireworks. They don't actually know what that, like, chain of events looks like, and then they start to panic. They're like, oh my goodness, we gotta try this, we've tried that, we gotta do all these things, and then they do this, like, slow learning to get to the point where they have that understanding of these are the inputs that lead to our outputs. So I'd really actually advise companies to try to put even a skeleton that together, which is, like, an easy way to think about it is, tree might feel complicated to someone, but it's like, what are my levers That drive the outcomes …

AI assessment note: “I think a company should always have The skeleton of the tree”

Q How long does it take to prove a hypothesis? Like, sometimes I find that founders slug too long as something that just isn't working. How, how much data is enough data to know that something's not working?

A Great question. It brings us back to what we were talking about earlier, which is, you know, yes, there are things that can take a long time if you're looking for this, like, end end result, but there's also early signal they can get in literally an hour or a day, right? And so for something like that, being able to prototype something and actually put it in front of A restaurant and say, hey, if we created this link tree for you, are you likely to use this as opposed to going out and trying to figure out how to create your own website using Squarespace, Wix, whatever it is, that signal is signal, right? And so there's every point in the process, there's something that you're getting back. That's the first signal. The second signal would be like, you don't have to build out the entire flow. You can literally do a landing page that allows people to pick templates and you can see if people are picking some of them. Like, that in itself is data. So you're always, like, you've got the big picture in mind, but you're testing small little increments to make sure that you're on the right path.

AI assessment note: “there's also early signal they can get in literally an hour or a day”

Q But I would then say the web flow sits in the messy middle. They say people who really want like advanced features, but not that advanced that they're like on the most pro tools. And then do you see what I mean?

A I know what you mean. And it is something I wrestle with, but here's what I actually believe. I think you're right. It is in the middle. But you're competing against, so, so I think the ultimate question is how much of the stack can you get for Webflow, right? So the reason we bought Intel, I can't talk, Intelimize recently is because at the end of the day, like you build a website, that's what Webflow is really great at, but there's all this other stuff you do, and there are all these companies out there. There's like Optimizely, there's like all this other stuff. If you can actually build that full website development stack, like I'm at Linktree and I'm actually like now a customer, And I am not even pushing Waffle. I'm like, hey Safranaz, hey team, like you guys decide, but like, you go do the research. I think they're doing the research. They're like, I'm looking at one, just putting my own engineers on it. No go. So expensive, not a good use of time, right? Like not gonna happen. Two, they look at like software-esque tools, like a Vercel, and they're like, oh, that's still gonna require a non-truthal amount of engineering work. Like that's also not gonna happen, right? And so ultimately you're kind of like, okay, well, how do I get like the brand, um, Like flexibility and like the pixel perfectness that I want. We decided on Webflow cause we're like, Hey, these are all the…

AI assessment note: “I think you're right. It is in the middle.”

Q But, but my point is, like, it seems so cross-functional. Do you ever find you're stepping on other people's toes? How do you think about, like, where product ends and where others start and, and that challenge?

A I think that is a fantastic question. It actually encapsulates everything I believe about product, which is the product role is the most chameleon role out of all of the functions, which means at some point you're like, I need to lean into sales because Like that's actually how I can build the best product by getting that information from my large customers or my, you know, sometimes you're like, I need to lean into support because I'm not even at the sales point yet. I just need to understand what's happening, right? So you're always wearing all of these different hats because that is the job of the product leader to be able to be that chameleon, to be that glue with that exact team and to be able to spot like what needs more work and, and go like fill that hole, not necessarily yourself, either with a higher Or, you know, pushing the exec team or the founders to get there. But that's actually how I think about the role.

AI assessment note: “the product role is the most chameleon role out of all of the functions”

Q said about pushing your founders there. I do want to ask about like hiring and they go through a couple of different lenses because it's really hard. But so many people said that you're incredible at it. So I do want to spend some time on it. First, when's the right time to hire a CPO? And how do you think about hiring a CPO versus a head of product?

A Let's put aside the titles for a second. Let's talk about like, when do you hire a product person? And let's talk about it at each scale. So I do think a classic mistake is that you hire a product person too quickly and you delegate the responsibility away. You're like, I'm a founder. I need to scale myself. And therefore you like bring in a product. Leader. I do not think you do that. I think that is very dangerous. You need to stay really, really close to your product for as long as possible. In fact, I do recommend a lot of early stage founders. I'm like, look, if you want leverage, look at your existing team and think about the people that can create that leverage for you. It might be the engineering manager. It might be the designer. It might be the customer support person who's really, really close to the user feedback, and they can play that PM like role to give yourself a little bit more leverage. So I think the first caveat is like, do not hire too quickly and try to delegate away that responsibility. Okay. Then if you're like, I am definitely not delegating away that responsibility. We have, you know, product market fit. I'm really trying to scale this thing. Like I really cannot physically be in all these places and there's not enough internal people to really like kind of lean in. And then I would say, okay, go hire a product leader. The biggest advice I usually giv…

AI assessment note: “do not hire too quickly and try to delegate away that responsibility.”

Q How do you want your teams to codify or document the data and learnings that they have to ensure that teams and product can progress in unison with them? Because you don't want people just kind of having it in their head, isolated. And it not be valuable and shared amongst team. How do you think about having that cross functional benefit and like team wide benefit?

A And almost every company I've been at, I've been doing something called like a KPI tree. You're like, what is that? So really what it is, if you think about a tree, right, you have the top of a tree and then it kind of like flows down all the branches at the very top is what I call your business output metrics. So it's like, these are your financial health metrics. So Usually the things that appear on a CEO dashboard. You're like, these are my signups. These are my subscriptions. These are my, um, you're just like high level. Like imagine Airbnb. It's like, these are the number of nights booked. These are the highest level metrics and their output metrics. Okay.

AI assessment note: “I've been doing something called like a KPI tree.”

Q But I would then say the web flow sits in the messy middle. They say people who really want like advanced features, but not that advanced that they're like on the most pro tools. And then do you see what I mean?

A I know what you mean. And it is something I wrestle with, but here's what I actually believe. I think you're right. It is in the middle. But you're competing against, so, so I think the ultimate question is how much of the stack can you get for Webflow, right? So the reason we bought Intel, I can't talk, Intelimize recently is because at the end of the day, like you build a website, that's what Webflow is really great at, but there's all this other stuff you do, and there are all these companies out there. There's like Optimizely, there's like all this other stuff. If you can actually build that full website development stack, like I'm at Linktree and I'm actually like now a customer, And I am not even pushing Waffle. I'm like, hey Safranaz, hey team, like you guys decide, but like, you go do the research. I think they're doing the research. They're like, I'm looking at one, just putting my own engineers on it. No go. So expensive, not a good use of time, right? Like not gonna happen. Two, they look at like software-esque tools, like a Vercel, and they're like, oh, that's still gonna require a non-truthal amount of engineering work. Like that's also not gonna happen, right? And so ultimately you're kind of like, okay, well, how do I get like the brand, um, Like flexibility and like the pixel perfectness that I want. We decided on Webflow cause we're like, Hey, these are all the…

AI assessment note: “I think you're right. It is in the middle. But you're competing against”

Q Business metrics at the top, then we have what?

A Then when you flow down, then you have the input metrics that drive these output business metrics, meaning in order for our revenue, our AR to grow a certain way, these things have to happen. We have to get these many subscriptions to happen. We have to get these many people to not churn. So now you're getting a little bit closer to product metrics, and then we get even further out into like the lower branches. This is where you have your actual product metrics, which is for most product teams, a thing you are measuring right out the gate is adoption. It's like, hey, is someone using, out of the target audience that could use this product, how many people are using the product? And are they liking it? Like, generally, if you were to survey a random sample or could just go talk to people, like, what's their MPS? And then it's like, okay, are they actually seeing real behavior changes because they're using it, because they're happy with it? And that's when you're like, oh, okay, like, we are actually seeing churn go down, or we are seeing retention go up, or we are seeing activation go up, right? And then those you can see are even more closely tied To the, the top of the tree that I talked about, which are these like output business metrics, which is like when you literally do the math of like, okay, signups have gone up. Activation has gone up. Conversion has gone up. You know,…

AI assessment note: “Then when you flow down, then you have the input metrics that drive these output business metrics”

Q Which one are you most willing to trade off?

A I am most willing to trade off scope, and that's because I believe that it is very, very important to get speed. Speed for any company, any product is what gets you your learnings, and if your speed at learning is slow, you are going to die or you're going to fall behind. I also do not believe that you can trade off on quality because so many times you'll be like, okay, well, I did this thing. No one used it. It doesn't work, and you're like, well, it's really because, you know, this is what you did. You did not You know, do you do not do it to a level of, um, of quality, right? That, that is going to be accepted by the market because, you know, in the market, there's already so much out there. And so it's actually really interesting because quality and scope have like this relationship with each other. And what I mean by that is in some markets, quality is literally just how beautiful the thing is, you know, in a world where you have a notion versus a Google docs, right? Like notion really sweated quality to be this like beautiful, delightful, simple experience. But in a world where, so again, it also depends on your customer. So there are times when you're like, I can't give you just, ah, like you can actually be like quality to some customers is a combination of how beautiful the thing is, but also how much scope there is. Meaning today, if you are doing something really man…

AI assessment note: “I am most willing to trade off scope”

Q What's the most recent wow moment you've had with a consumer product, and what was it about it that made it so special?

A I'll give you two actually. I think that one obviously is like ChatGPT, like with every version, you're like, oh my gosh, like yesterday's announcement, you're like, ah, we are in the world of her, and this is really amazing, multimodal, like being able to take all these inputs, video, audio, super cool. Um, but I would also say, you know, Quest has actually come a really long way. I think that when Zuck first bought Oculus, I was like, huh? Like, what? Um, and, and then I actually give Zuck a lot of credit for, like, really seeing, like, the long-term view, and using the most latest version of, uh, the Quest, so like Oculus, Oculus Quest, you know, Quest, so on and so forth, like, I'm pretty blown away about how far it's come, because before, the earlier version that I tried is, like, made me sick, It had to like, had all these sensors is really plugged in and being able to just like put the thing on and do a workout. It's been amazing.

AI assessment note: “I'll give you two actually. I think that one obviously is like ChatGPT”