Eeke de Milliano, Head of Product at Retool and former early Stripe product lead, explains why technical developer-focused companies delay hiring product managers.
“I think actually both in the Stripe case and the Retool case, the thing that both of these companies have in common is you're building for developers. The people who are building the product are the customers in a lot of ways. So like they get it, you know, there's really no, no reason why you should have sort of some, in some ways, like a middleman trying to figure out like, hey, who's the customer and what is it that they need and what are their pain points?”
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More from Eeke de Milliano
Insight
Process is variance-reducing and pulls down an organization's highest performers
“Process by definition is variance reducing. Like you're introducing it because you worry that the variance in your org is too high. Like you want people to sort of meet a certain standard. And the cost of that is obviously is like while you're reducing the sta…”
Eeke de MillianoFeb 2, 2023▶ 39:47How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe)
Insight
Aspiring product managers should start their careers in sales
“And to this day, when people ask me, hey, like, what's your advice for going into product management? I'm like, well, you should go get a sales job. I think it's like pretty, pretty valuable.”
Eeke de MillianoFeb 2, 2023▶ 5:12How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe)
Insight
Pricing isn't a trapdoor decision because existing users can be grandfathered
“I think a lot of people, for example, think pricing is a trapdoor decision, but actually like it's really easy to grandfather your existing users into some existing pricing model and change pricing for future users.”
Eeke de MillianoFeb 2, 2023▶ 16:23How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe)
Insight
Company 'operating principles' are more effective than personal 'values'
“Stripe would call them operating principles, actually, which I think is actually better, because values is almost like, you can't really tell people what to value, like everyone has their own value set, but you can tell people like, hey, here's, Here's how we …”
Eeke de MillianoFeb 2, 2023▶ 19:10How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe)
Insight
High performers pair macro-optimism with micro-pessimism on details
“Micro-pessimists, macro-optimists. Yeah, it was just like this idea that like long, in the long term, we expect the curve to go up. Like, we believe, like, you know, we very much believe in the upward trajectory of just about everything, but like, on the sort …”
Eeke de MillianoFeb 2, 2023▶ 20:26How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe)
Insight
Retool separated new product teams to avoid core product-market fit drag
“And we eventually decided that we were going to run it as a separate team because we wanted the team to be able to move really, really quickly. And we didn't want it to get bogged down in what are just the realities of running a product that has product market…”
Eeke de MillianoFeb 2, 2023▶ 37:09How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe)
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