Insight
Hudack: Product teams should be 6-8 people and PMs are optional
“I think every product team should be probably between six to eight people. Most of those people should be engineers. If possible, one of those people should be a data scientist. One should be a designer. And then I think a PM is optional.”
Insight
Hudack: Respect founders who shut down with cash over burning to zero
“I can speak for myself as an angel investor. The level of respect I have for somebody who comes to me with half of the money still in the bank and just says, hey, we were wrong about this, and has a conversation either about selling the company or shutting it …”
Disclosure
Hudack argued strongly against Monzo shipping crypto products
“I argued very strongly against, against shipping crypto products. You know, I didn't think it was the right thing to do for our audience, for our user base at the time.”
Insight
Mike Hudack: Big tech managers often fail at zero-to-one startups
“Don't mistake Good, you know, managers or ICs at a large company for people who are going to do well going from zero to one in a startup, you know, think about what that means.”
Insight
Hudack: Founders should not write code before establishing a theory of the world
“I really believe that before you build something, you should have a theory of the world. You should, you know, understand who your user is, what they want to accomplish. You should understand your strengths and weaknesses in doing that and have a, you know, a …”
Insight
Hudack: Users lie in research and tell builders what they want to hear
“You can do user research along the way, but, you know, the reality is that, that users lie when you talk to them, and they will always tell you what they think you want to hear.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Mike Hudack: Deliveroo was late on 40% of deliveries when he joined
“We were late. 40% more, you know, 40% of the time.”
Opinion
Hudack: Deliveroo's backend logistics mattered far more than consumer app
“Most of the work in Deliveroo for a really long time was actually in what we called the Delivery organization. We created an organization called Delivery, and that was core machine learning systems, dispatch systems, rider pay, rider app, all that kind of stuf…”
Insight
Hudack: Products should empower consumer trade-offs rather than restrict choices
“One of the great insights, one of the things that I really learned here was that it's so important to allow people to make their own choices. It's just so important to let people make their own choices. Like, if somebody wants a soggy burger, and you've given …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hudack: 99% of Facebook users opening the "dive bar" did so by accident
“I think something like 75% of Facebook users opened the dive bar, and so, There was an argument to be made that it was a great surface to ship into. The thing is that like, 99% of those people opened it by accident.”
Insight
Hudack: A leader's job is not always to cheerlead
“First of all, I don't think that a leader's job is always to cheerlead. I think sometimes a leader's job is to say, hey guys, we're in a really tough situation here, or-”
Insight
Mike Hudack: Startups should delay hiring a CPO as long as possible
“Really depends on the founder but probably very, very late. I wouldn't do it too soon. I think that the best CEOs are very product minded and should stay involved in product for as long as possible.”
Insight
Hudack: Product design is helping users achieve goals with minimal effort
“I think the real art of product, the true thing, is understanding what people want to achieve and helping them achieve that with the minimal amount of work.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hudack: Every founder I've worked with operated in 'founder mode'
“Every founder that I've worked with or for has operated in one way or another in founder mode.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hudack: 'Founder mode' discourse won't trigger increased bad founder behavior
“I don't think it's going to lead to, like, a dramatic increase in bad behavior.”
Opinion
Hudack: Facebook is the best-run company I've ever worked at
“Facebook is still very much the best run company I have ever worked at.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hudack: Mark Zuckerberg personally reviewed code diffs from entry-level engineers
“Mark was always in founder mode, you know. I remember once he, like, commented on a diff. Somebody was making a change to the composer on the web, and he commented on the diff and was like, I don't like this change. It was like a, You know, he's like an entry-…”
Insight
Hudack: Developer focus time is worth far more than $100 tech accessories
“They understood that the value of the time that you were spending that day, like your focus and writing code at that moment, Was more valuable than the hundred dollars that the headphones cost. I've never seen anyone else do that, you know, before or since, bu…”
Insight
Hudack: Revitalize underperforming teams by rapidly shipping quality on unloved products
“I kind of looked around and tried to find something unloved without a team on it, where we could just very rapidly ship something where the only thing that was necessary, it didn't need to Even be successful was that everybody in the organization would say, oh…”
Insight
Hudack: Advertisers care about sales outcomes, not complex targeting tools
“They don't really want to target their ad. They don't want to think about optimization. They don't want to think about, like, they want to sell more products, you know, and so the simpler machine you can give them to do that effectively, the better.”
Insight
Mike Hudack: Product teams should prioritize customer outcomes over shipping goals
“That team should work together against, like, clear, coherent, outcome-based goals, which are not SHIP goals, but are like, we are going to increase the, you know, the revenue that we generate for this thing by 10% is like a decent goal, but a better goal is w…”
Insight
Hudack: Product leaders often give up too early after initial product launches
“Then the thing that people often do, one of the big mistakes I think people make, is they then give up too early. So, you know, your theory of the world might be 20% wrong, but that means that it's 80% right. And one of the hardest things to do in product, I t…”
Insight
Hudack: Founders and employees know in their souls when products fail
“Well, I really believe that, you know, people in their soul know that long before you tell them that, and I think that that's true of people who are, You know, doing a bad job in a job, or it's true of people who are building a product.”
Insight
Hudack: Nice-to-have features cost more and deliver less than expected
“I think that I've learned over the years that everything which is nice to have has a higher cost than you anticipate and a lower value returned.”
