Gaurav Misra: belief

Transcript context

…100%, 100%. That's why it was so hard to find those people who were able to do two things. I actually think there's an insight in there is innovation between when you're merging craft right between two different functions. And I do think there's something special about one person doing two different functions or at least being able to do. And I think a lot of unique insight and innovation can come from that. I actually think on my personal side, I eventually joined the design team. I started at Snap on the engineering team. I eventually joined the design team over the last two years that I was at Snap. And a big part of what I did there was create this function called design engineering. And that was actually a different combination. It wasn't the designer PM. It was the designer engineer. The person who can think of the UX design it and also build it and launch it, all of those things. And we saw both the ability to take designers and teach them engineering and take engineers and teach them design as part of that. Obviously, the reason that we created that function was very different. It was actually to continue innovating as the company got bigger. One of the problems that we identified was that as the company got bigger and bigger and there's like 500 engineers, 1,000 engineers, 2,000 engineers, 3,000, suddenly it just becomes very difficult to do everything. Everything is a six-month project or a one-year project. Every product is a massive investment of 500 engineers and a lot of time. And so you really have to pick your bets. If you get it wrong, if you are innovating and trying to create new products and you spend 500 engineers for a year and it doesn't work, it's a big problem. You're going to be in trouble, especially if we're coming like Snap where everybody was copying what they're doing so they had to constantly innovate, create new stuff and push the bounds. I think Evan's philosophy was always he didn't fight the things that were getting copied, right? Stories got copied pretty much straight up. A lot of things that Snap created got copied, but he was more of the mindset of like, "Let's expand the pie, do something new and push the boundaries." We'll keep innovating basically. And so to do that with that scale of a company becomes really hard. And so we had this idea of let's create a small team where we can go and pretest a lot of these ideas because we had a lot of ideas and we can't go and build all of these things. So the idea was create a small team of these design engineers, people who are able to do the entire product design engineering process in their head and can put together early versions of the product, which we would actually bake into the Snapchat app itself. And we were able to even test, for example, run a test in Australia, see how it's performing. Run a test in a couple of high schools, just a couple of high schools, see how people behave. app itself. And we were able to even test, for example, run a test in Australia, see how it's performing. Run a test in a couple of high schools, just a couple of high schools, see how people behave. And that way we already have data on how this might perform in a real world environment, but we haven't built it to production level. It's a prototype, essentially. It's how a startup might build something. The same idea of what we're doing at our company now, build fast, get it out there, get feedback, understand whether it works or not, and then work with the engineering team to build it at a scale. Once we understand the product and the dynamics, then it makes sense to put on 500 engineers for six months to build it. So that was a big part of it. I think the nice thing that came out of it that was completely unexpected but actually transformational for me in a way was obviously in big organizations, alignment is a big issue. How do you get everybody on the same page? And a big part of a PM's job is actually to create alignment and it can be a lot of work because you go talk to all these stakeholders and get them on the same page. But one of the insights that we had, which was unique was as the company gets bigger, you can actually create alignment by causing internal virality. If there's enough people in the company, it actually starts acting like a consumer base might. If you share something interesting with someone, they will share it with somebody else because they think it's interesting and you can actually create virality inside a company. So one thing that we would do is we would create these prototype products. We would just go into an area, redo a bunch of stuff, create these prototype products that didn't exist in Snapchat normally, and then we would just share the build and it would explode. It would just go viral inside the company. Day after day we would hear from engineers, then managers, then VPs, then eventually from Evan being like, "Oh my God, everyone's talking about this. Why am I the last one to hear about it?" So it would create instant alignment across the company of this is exciting, this is something that we want to get behind. And everyone would be asking, "When are we doing this? When is this happening? I see someone's already working on it." So it was a great way to do that. And once we really understood that the product actually had good dynamics and we had tested it, it was a great way to get it out in front of everybody and create this idea of, "Hey, we're all working on this. This is the future." Today's episode is brought to you by Coda. I personally use Coda every single day to manage my podcast and also to manage my community. It's where I put the questions that I plan to ask every guest that's coming on the podcast. It's where I put my community resources. It's how I manage my workflows. Here's how Coda can help you. Imagine starting a project at work and your vision is clear. You know exactly who's doing what and where to find the data that you need to do your part. In fact, you don't have to waste time searching for anything because everything your team needs from project trackers and OKRs to documents and spreadsheets lives in one tab all in Coda. With Coda's collaborative all in one workspace, you get the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, the power of applications, and the intelligence of AI all in one easy to organize tab. Like I mentioned earlier, I use Coda every single day. And more than 50,000 teams trust Coda to keep them more aligned and focused. If you're a startup team looking to increase alignment and agility, Coda can help you move from planning to execution in record time. To try it for yourself, go to coda.io/lenny today and get six months free of the team plan for startups. That's coda.io/lenny to get started for free and get six months of the team plan. coda.io/lenny. Another thread I want to follow up on is prototyping. It feels like that is where a lot of PM work is going is getting straight to a prototype versus design or versus PRDs. And it feels like that's something that you did and worked super well. Basically, it's a team to prototype ideas that in theory now you can just build really quickly with AI. So I think that's really interesting, seeing where the feature's going, just ...…

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