Insight
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…”
Opinion
Meyer: Product managers today are worse on average than years ago
“On average, yes.”
Opinion
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.”
Disclosure
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? …”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Insight
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.”
Opinion
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.”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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.”
Opinion
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.”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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 …”
Opinion
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…”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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?”
Insight
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.”
