Will Wu: Separate revenue and innovation into two distinct product teams
Will Wu · Will Wu: Top Five Product Lessons from Creating Snapchat "Discover" and "Chat" | E1111 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Feb 2, 2024 · at 30:42
Will Wu, CPO of Match Group and former Snap executive, discusses product organization design and balancing short-term monetization with long-term innovation.
0:00 / 0:43exact quote · 43.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I have found that the best approach, or at least what's worked in my experience, Is having two separate teams dedicated towards each of those two independent goals. So one team dedicated towards revenue generation, another team generated towards innovation, because oftentimes there's a really strong tension between those two when you're building a product. You might Have to deteriorate your revenues, you know, with a new feature in order to find, in order to experiment with some really innovative new idea. And if it's the same team making those decisions, that conflict of incentives can be paralyzing for development, if that makes sense.”
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 Will Wu
Will Wu: Prompt engineering AI startups lack long-term defensibility
“I do think the hype is warranted, but I'll caveat by saying I wouldn't just invest in every single generative AI based company that comes across my radar. I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs right now who have a great idea maybe for how to apply Something l…”
Will Wu: Biggest hiring mistake is keeping poor culture fits
“Not getting rid of Poor culture fits fast enough.”
Will Wu: Zero-to-one product development requires faith, not market research
“When you're taking a product from zero to one, you know, no amount of data or market research is going to tell you exactly whether it's going to work. You have to take a leap of faith. But then oftentimes when you're iterating beyond that, you can use data to …”
Will Wu: Over-relying on data in product design risks long-term damage
“I think it can get lost if you, again, sort of lean on data too much, because oftentimes, you know, a data, a signal that you're seeing in the data might tell you to do one thing, but if you don't stop and sort of think about how whatever feature change that i…”
Will Wu: Enterprise SaaS succeeds by serving buyers, not end users
“I mean, it's like an enterprise SaaS product, and they can have a really successful product because they're solving the right needs for an enterprise customer, another company that they're selling to, but I don't know if that product was designed from the grou…”
Will Wu: Product teams should prototype with code, not just Figma
“I'm a huge fan of rapid prototyping, like not just creating interactive Figma mockups that you can click on, but literal prototyping with real software code so that you can just rapidly experiment and feel out using your intuition and your instinct”