Chennapragada: Personalizing Google Search based on user profiles failed
Aparna Chennapragada · 20 Product: Robinhood CPO on The 3 Stages of Product Management, How to Structure and Execute Great Product Reviews, The Secret to Building a World-Class Hiring Funnel in Product Team Building with Aparna Chennapragada · Apr 20, 2022 · at 30:58
Aparna Chennapragada, Chief Product Officer at Robinhood and former Google executive, reflects on a 2011 product hypothesis regarding mobile Google Search personalization.
0:00 / 0:19exact quote · 19.6s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Long story short, that hypothesis didn't pan out, and it turns out that actually the most important signal wants you in something like search is what you specifically or I specifically put in. I mean, other than, like, location, if you, of course, you type in pizza or I type in pizza, you want different results, but for the most part, that wasn't actually, like, making a big difference to customers' happiness.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Aparna Chennapragada
Chennapragada: Differentiate PMs who drove growth from those riding tailwinds
“So you have to differentiate between people who were in the parade versus help the parade. And you certainly have to look for the jerks who pushed everybody aside and somehow got to the front of the parade.”
Chennapragada: Fintech and crypto represent the next major platform shift
“I'm biased because I'm really, really bullish on finance and intersection of tech as one of those big platform shifts with crypto, but also broadly financial services.”
Chennapragada: Large consumer tech products suffer from PMs becoming disconnected from users
“This is a big disease in consumer product management, as I see in large companies or large products, where you're so abstracted away from the individual.”
Chennapragada: Early founders risk more hiring wrong PM than waiting
“The biggest risk here is an act of commission, not omission. What I said was, you're going to make a bigger mistake, and like, it's a bigger negative impact on the company if you hire the wrong person versus hire the right person. So it's a high leverage hire,…”
Chennapragada: Early-stage startups should avoid hiring generalist PMs
“Do not hire a general athlete PM is my advice.”
Chennapragada: Interviewing accuracy weakly correlates with performance in judgment-heavy roles
“In fact, actually, like, I think studies have over and over proven for things that are kind of like, there's a lot of practitioner judgment and decision-making discipline involved. The interviewing correlation is only weak.”