Product Development

“I don't subscribe to the view that we're all going to sit at like a blinking terminal line with that blinking empty cursor and you'll be able to type anything in and it'll just happen, right? I think that that's I think that is an oversimplification of how har…”

“Instead of waiting till the product is done a hundred percent, wait until it's done 20% and call a paying customer.”

“And once you have a video that really pops off, you want to like work backwards and ask yourself, What is a product that I could naturally insert into this video that would help the virality and also solve a problem that people are facing? Their first thought …”

“For a lot of new product developments, the team now can consist just of one person and they can maintain fast pace of developments.”

“Planning, planning when the world is stable, there's a really good ROI. When the world is unstable, put all your planning time into building better product faster.”

“Marketing is, is an integral part of a product development basically.”

“Making someone program 20% faster doesn't make you build a product 20% faster. And so starting to think about, like, what is the broader infrastructure you need so these companies can develop software and product faster?”

“For a completely novel product experience or form factor, you should actually not start with evals and you start with vibes, right? Meaning like, you know, you need to go and just kind of test in a much more open-ended way. Like, does this even work? Like, you…”

“75% of product development in technology is human beings teaching consumers how to interact with back-end engineering databases and transactions.”

“It's not a matter of getting their buy-in. It's a matter of them being a part of it, you know, that it's like, it's, I don't know, it's a part of their soul in a really deep, meaningful way. And I don't, I'm not sure you can graph that onto somebody after the …”

“When a product or an idea has no legs and you're proving it out, you should actually have very few people working on, on an idea”

“You built the thing. People are buying the thing, find more people that will buy that thing. Because the insight there is that a lot of times what we tend to do is we tend to look past the people that are already paying us. Right. And you go and you look and y…”

“The reason you call it magic is because that person can't explain it. It isn't actually magic. It's just science. It's just, you are not smart enough to explain yourself.”

“When you look at the solve stage, There are wide lurches. You gotta be very comfortable with the fact that you're day one thinking about, hey, a plant detection tool, and then day 15, you're like, oh, actually, the tech is really good for translating, you know…”

“A lot of people talk about localization on a website when it comes to language, when it comes to local payments, when it comes to shipping times, but when you truly localize within your product development, that's when you really win entering a new region.”

“Pick the word first. And then figure out what the product does behind the word, because the word has a promise to it.”

“And so typically you're bottlenecked by the middle kind of part where your ideas are kind of like, there are a lot of them and they're not fitting in because like they need to be made and they need to be made quickly. And so now you open up that bottleneck. So…”

“Really know how you're going to sell something and who's going to do the selling before you actually go build out the product. Because if you don't have that right focus, You may build out the best product and yet it's going to get zero adoption because no one…”

“A big lesson for me is that chaos is good. And chaos is actually great. And sometimes you want to create chaos in an organization to push the organization to think creatively and to actually like make leaps in, in product development.”

“And I think craft is kind of a. Dessert that you get after the meal of does your thing solve a real problem in the world? And are people clamoring, needing it badly?”

“I find proof of existence to be an incredibly powerful proof rather than proof by theory or proof by Debate. It's just like, look, we did it one time.”

“And when you develop something, you only make one change at a time. It's not a question of brilliance. Oh, I wonder if this complete thing would work. A, it doesn't. And B, you don't know why it doesn't work.”

“I think it's a very underrated aspect of great PM and great product development is this act of breaking things down into small chunks so that you don't overcomplicate what you ship.”

“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…”

“The best research doesn't like leave it at that. Right? It tells you, and it's like the what, the so what, and then the then what. But the problem with that is some researchers go too far in the other direction where they're like, we ran the study, it yielded …”

“And when you do research, I think the failure is higher than, like, when you're building a product.”

“If you don't know what that is, like, what are the chances that you're going to increment yourself to the right Outcome in the end. And, you know, as I talked about before, like building the house, like you want to see what that picture looks like. In the, you…”

“The uniqueness that we found for product development specific with AI is that You know, we define product best in class product development as a product manager and a minimum designer starting from the very beginning of ideation and building a product spec and…”

“Our code is not as malleable that as we think. Right? We just think, oh, we're going to write this code, ship it, and then, ah, if it doesn't work, we're going to undo it. We're going to change it. We're going to learn, et cetera, and all of that is good. But …”

“If somebody is looking to build product ahead of insight and a deeper appreciation for what really the problem is, I think I've seen that as a recipe for disaster in most companies. What they will have is a hundred member tech team. ... Very average product be…”

“I think when to involve the founder CEO in a project is really important. And the short version, I think that works the best is almost like a U curve where the X axis is time and the Y axis is level of involvement. I think you want to get the founders, you kno…”

“So no more than three reviews on a given piece of work where people are blocking one approver. And If a meeting has more than 10 people on it, we ask the person hosting the meeting to kick out the other people and write better decision notes.”

“I think the best way to execute is just to have that be front and center from the start. What is our go-to-market strategy? How are we thinking about monetization and having that infused into how you think about product development?”

“Out of a really mature feature area, it's more science than art, because it's about optimization, and you have so much data on the scale. So there, I would say, 80, 20, science, art. I think, if you're at an early stage company, or at a really early, you know,…”

“So I love bringing design upstream. Like that's, in fact, that's probably been the cheat code of my career as a product leader, as has just been disproportionately empowering design throughout the process.”

“And again, we are, I think in the product development space gotten a little bit lazy of actually showcasing that enterprise value in product. So we rely on excellence of sales team to tell that story.”

“When your product development work is never done, neither is your pricing, and you need to combat that along the way.”

“What is very important at that point to avoid group thinking is having a culture where it's okay to realize that you've made a huge mistake, actually, not just a small one. And that you have to go back to do it from scratch.”

“I think as you go through successive versions, you get better and better data from people who are actually paying for whatever it is you're doing. You know, you're getting revenue in some form. So those people have real opinions because they're using it and th…”

“I think in a software business, product development is your capital allocation function. How you determine how you deploy your engineering resources is your, the idea of being a great capital allocator.”

“There's just a whole bunch of things like that, that you cannot pick up unless you're there kind of like what they call in situ. You're basically in the situation watching it all happen and you'll see both those nuances of the customer, but you'll also see stu…”

“So I think if you get it back until the basics, like it's product development and distribution start at day zero, because as a founder, you're developing a product, but you're also creating awareness and you're trying to get those first customers in.”

“We often try to make every part of the product development of a customer experience awesome. You just need one A++++ moment. That is then how the psychology works so that you end up having a great experience.”

“Unlike product development, when you are exploring new marketing channels, a lot of them don't go well, and that has to be something you expect at the beginning.”

“And when you use the word growth, we don't really mean growth hacking, but it's more like product development through the philosophy of growth, which is really about being fast, being very data, being highly data informed. You know, it's not necessarily data d…”

“Product and technology advantage is short lived. Your product decays, new entrants want to come in with a better, smarter version, all of those things. And so what keeps the best companies growing bigger and bigger is not product development, but owning the li…”

“In product development, in product design, when you're sitting there day to day reprioritizing product priorities, trying to ship product, trying to get things out the door, sometimes you lose the overall context of where the company is going. Because you're m…”

“Six weeks is enough time to make substantial progress on something that's important, and it also forces us to make sure that we understand exactly what it is that is important. In any feature that we're building, because if you give it three months, it'll take…”

“And so there's like all this history, so it's pretty much impossible to enter a space like that and make a thing that appeals to everyone. And if you try to do that, what you end up making is just like a mediocre product that nobody really loves. And so my phi…”

“I think if you just talk to two or three customers, you're probably going to end up building the wrong things.”