Jeremy Epling, Chief Product Officer at Vanta, outlines his philosophy on documentation culture and product management efficiency.
Insight
Epling: Product leaders lose touch when acting as purely professional managers
“The more disconnected you get from those, like when you start to become more of like a professional manager, I'm just guiding the team, giving strategy and things. I think you lose a lot in making sure you're building the right thing for customers. Cause if yo…”
Insight
Epling: Great companies do not necessarily require well-crafted product design
“Hey, I care a lot about product quality and building an experience that's like well-crafted and beautiful and usable and customers love it. And you don't necessarily have to do that to build a great company.”
Insight
Epling: Habitual devil's advocacy is counterproductive on executive teams
“I think when it gets, when it feels like someone's just becoming devil's advocate, that becomes negative from my perspective, because it's just like, I'm just trying to find issues in everything and any plan you can find issues in, you know what I mean? So I t…”
Insight
Epling: Unifying product and engineering leadership accelerates cross-functional trade-off decisions
“I think what you gain is a faster decision-making process. So when you want to go through and decide, hey, do we need to do this big technical re-architecture, and that's gonna trade off against some product features, you need to go through and, like, make tho…”
Insight
Epling: Leaders at companies under thousands of employees must stay in details
“I think when you're still in the thousands, though, like, you should still be doing it, and I think that's part of our philosophy. Like, at Vanta, I think we really expect people to be in the details, and that's something that I believe a lot. Like, It's just …”
Opinion
Epling: NPS is not useful compared to workflow-specific satisfaction surveys
“I'm not a big believer in NPS. I know some people like it. Like, I don't think it's like that useful, but I think Going and doing customer satisfaction surveys for, like, core workflows of, like, hey, did this make your life better? Did it not? What were the g…”