Product teams default to planning for existing headcount rather than ideal scope
Eeke de Milliano · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · Feb 2, 2023 · at 30:11
Retool Head of Product Eeke de Milliano explains why asking teams what they would build with double the headcount breaks them out of incremental planning.
0:00 / 0:05exact quote · 5.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Like, I think you kind of end up planning towards the sort of the team that you have, not the team that you should have.”
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 Eeke de Milliano
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…”
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.”
Early developer tool startups do not need 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, th…”
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.”
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 …”
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 …”