The Ledger, every show

“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…”

“On average, yes.”

“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.”

“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? …”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“I'm a human, so I'm terrible at customer questioning because it's impossible not to lead the witness.”

“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.”

“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…”

“It's finding a way to make baby steps towards the vision while staying alive, basically.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“The human energy waste that goes in to data-driven product management When it's not becoming actionable.”

“There's people hire consultancies because it's a top school of people in college to advise their companies. It's like a racket.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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.”

“Because humans are not mathematically definable, and products are for humans. So, over rigor is just waste in the system, I think.”

“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?”

“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.”

“And I tried that for the first six months at Databricks. And that's not what Ali wanted to hear. He didn't want me to go off and do something and then show him how awesome it was. You know, he wanted to be deeply involved and have the founders deeply involved …”

“Do as little, like, changing the world of how the company works as possible in the first 90 days.”

“I use the same methodology for like everything I do. Go in knowing nothing and then interrogate the person until you feel like you could do their job.”

“You ask them where their biggest impact was, right? And if it has nothing to do with product, You know, if it's like calming down an angry customer, but it has nothing to do with the value, the, you know, so you just tease it out, and then interrogate from the…”

“When you're a company of 6000 people, you gotta be very careful, right? They, you know, there's a lot of grumpiness to do it more frequently than annually. Just because it's hard to, you know, a lot of people have built up flywheels that are organizationally c…”

“Things like, ah, active users, like daily, weekly, etc., depending on, you know, enterprise or consumer, time is so precious. If people are spending time in your product, there's value there. Now, it might be never, ah, credible to revenue value, right? That's…”

“Most people don't have, like, the hunger and the curiosity to keep going, because it's a thankless job in a lot of ways. You think you're going to be the rock star, you're the roadie.”

“Whether you're talking to engineers, engineers have to believe, right? Otherwise, they're just not gonna have the same velocities.”

“You know, you need to take them down your mental travel because you're not, well, you might be stupid, but you probably have a point of view of why this is the right thing. And you need them to discover that.”

“When you're gonna change target and people have been working their ass off to build something meaningful to the old target, you just have to give it the morning cycle, you know? You have to be empathetic and human because you need them to come along with you o…”

“The gist of it is the more detail you see, The more correct you think something is.”

“I think a lot of leaders are formulaic. And I think the people follow people that see them.”

“When you give people feedback, you need to get their feedback on your feedback. Because, you know, you might not give them any space to talk about the why or, you know, what they're going through. That doesn't mean not to be resolute on the feedback. Like, I n…”

“If you're gonna leave the company, I'm gonna help you find the best job imaginable. But first, I'm gonna figure out if you're running away or running towards. Like, if you're running away from the company because something's broken, I wanna fix it. If you're r…”

“If your product becomes everything to everyone, you lose the fanatics. But your fanatics are the ones that talk about it in bars. Bring their friends in, have the viral coefficients and stuff, but they're also the ones that push you to do unimaginable things, …”

“We tried to acquire Atlassian back in Like, 98 or something. We thought we should get them cheap. They're a little dinky company, but they had a plan, you know, and they're like, pound sand, there's no way.”

“For Databricks, the developers are, we, developers have to love us, right? Because they're going to be the ones influencing the decision that the CFO makes.”

“If you get 10 people in the room, they'll oftentimes, it'll be like damaging. We'll say something, we'll understand each other, they'll interpret it differently, and they'll report the news to other people that's wrong.”

“Well, if someone does stupid shit on my team, I didn't give them the context because they're smart people. I hire smart people. So if they're doing something dumbass, it's because I failed to give them the context And the framework to understand why it's dumba…”

“So if you can't enroll the hiring committee to believe that this person's great, they're gonna fail.”

“Like, a third of their time should be talking to customers. A third of their time should be using the product and working with engineering. And a third of their time should be thinking properly, you know? But it never works out that way, because usually, 60% o…”

“It's oftentimes, I send a lot to him that I don't necessarily get responses on unless he disagrees.”

“If the early wins are human, more than technical, you'll build the followership you need.”

“I used to think when I left work to go home, I was being selfish until I had kids. And then I thought when I stay at work and don't go home, I'm being selfish.”