Opinion
David Lieb: Domain experience anti-correlates with top PM performance
“Most of the really strong PMs that have emerged, say, on the Google Photos team came from backgrounds with no experience in this domain. I would probably go so far as to say that it's anti-correlated with the top performers.”
Insight
Lieb: Prior domain experience is anti-correlated with top product performance
“In my experience, most of the really strong PMs that have emerged, say on the Google Photos team came from backgrounds with no experience in this domain really at all. Like you talked to some of them. In fact, I would say, I would probably go so far as to say …”
Insight
Lieb: Over-indexing on past team scale ruins product hires
“The number one failure mode when people hire product leaders is they over index on previous scale. How big of a team have you previously managed or tenure?”
Insight
Lieb: If you are unsure about product-market fit, you lack it
“If you don't know if you've got it or not, you don't is the simplest answer, right? It is a thing where something clicks and people just use your product or demand your product so much more than you could have ever fathomed. That is generally when you've got s…”
Insight
Lieb: Analytical product design prevents failure but caps upside
“Using science kind of bounds your variance of your outcomes. It makes sure you don't, like, totally blow it, but it also makes sure that you don't, like, find something that no one else would have found because you would never try it. And that's where I think …”
Insight
Lieb: Human gut instinct is the ultimate machine learning model
“I think your gut is the world's most sophisticated machine learning model ever created. It is like the best supercomputer we've got.”
Insight
Lieb: Early-stage startups shouldn't scale teams before finding product-market fit
“This is another meta mistake is people think like, oh, I like, I've raised my seed round. I have four million dollars. Like, let's go hire a team of 20 people. That's what I see all my cohorts cohort members doing. That's probably the wrong thing to do unless …”
Insight
Lieb: Joining remote meetings late intentionally builds team culture
“The technique that I found, like, the most successful, it's the simplest thing I could think of, is for every meeting that I was kind of, like, the top person in, I would just intentionally show up, like, five to seven minutes late. And I would, it creates thi…”
Insight
Lieb: Product managers should oversee design, engineering, and analytics
“I think the product manager role as defined by the world is way too pigeonholed. I think we should broaden the responsibilities of the PM role. I think they should be much more responsible for design, much more responsible for engineering, for analytics. Like,…”
Disclosure
Lieb: Bump prematurely hired a product lead before reaching PMF
“I made this mistake myself at Bump. We got to like, maybe it was 30 employees. All of our vanity metric graphs were like going way up. We were feeling really good. And I thought our company is going to need to like figure out our business model. Eventually we'…”
Insight
Lieb: Founders must not delegate their startup's primary problem
“Generally, that is a very dangerous place to be where the founders or the CEO of the company is not working on the most important problem for the company's success.”
Insight
Lieb: Founders delegate sales and core roles too early
“You certainly need to make that trade off at some point, but I think most founders do it too early. They think they think like, oh, we have a product that like shows some glimmers of, you know, product market fit. Let's go hire a sales team. And that will be t…”
Disclosure
Lieb: 20% of Bump app opens were accidental taps meant for Facebook
“We thought we were like hot shit because everybody's using our app, but turns out like 20% of the time it was accident. They didn't mean to use it.”
Insight
Lieb: Ambition is the single most important trait when hiring early PMs
“I would say at the early stage, the number one thing I would filter for initially for product people, and product people at an early stage company is a very broad set of skills. Like, you're kind of looking for people who can kind of do anything decently well.…”
Disclosure
Lieb: Prematurely hiring a product lead at Bump was a key mistake
“At bump, you know, we got to like, Maybe it was 30 employees, and we were, all of our vanity metric graphs were, like, going way up. We were feeling really good and I thought, oh, like, our company is gonna need to, like, figure out our business model eventual…”
Insight
Lieb: Over-indexing on scale or tenure is top product hiring mistake
“I would say like the number one failure mode when people hire product leaders is they over index on Either like previous scale, like how many, how big of a team have you previously managed? Or tenure, like how long have you been doing this? What experience do …”
Insight
Lieb: Modulating angel check sizes by success probability is counterproductive
“So if you modulate your check size based on like probability of success or like how big the market is or whatever, you'll probably be doing the exact opposite of what you should do.”
Assertion Supported
Lieb: I was asked to leave my Google team twice
“I didn't get fired from Google. I did get asked to leave the team twice.”
Insight
David Lieb: Concentrating generalist skills in few people yields extraordinary results
“And I think that's a skill, this like generalist skill that generally people don't have at big companies because they don't need to. There's experts at big companies that do everything, but I think magic happens when you bring all that stuff together in a very…”
Disclosure
Lieb: Google Photos intentionally rejected social features and photo editing
“And we said internally at Google, like, we're not going to build a social tool. This isn't a social network. Like, that's not what we're doing. We're not going to build some crazy, like, photo editing product. Like, it's not about being, quote, creative with y…”
Insight
Lieb: Great products are always built by tiny, obsessed teams
“If you look at like truly great products, pick any product that you use that you're like, that product is just really well done. Generally there are a very small set of people behind that product That really love it. That obsess over every single thing about i…”
Insight
Lieb: Startups should ship early to learn, while big companies need polished launches
“For most startups, the answer is you should probably ship something and learn something from someone. And then you can make it better. If you're a big company, you might need to make something like quite good before you want to launch it.”
Insight
Lieb: Cohort retention is the single most important early product metric
“I think that's the number one thing you should look at when you're building a new product is what is your cohort retention curve look like?”
Disclosure
Lieb: Bump reached 150 million installs, on 20% of global smartphones
“In, in, in the Bump kind of heyday, we had a hundred and fifty million installs on, on phones when the market for phones was only like, I don't know, maybe a billion phones in the world, or probably less than that, probably hundreds of high hundreds of million…”
David Lieb