Casey Winters: evaluation

Transcript context

…Speaking of gaps and opportunities for people in the company to level up, you've been highlighting this trend that I thought was really interesting, something you call the zero interest rate phenomenon product manager. Can you talk about what that is and what you've been noticing? Yeah, sure thing. This is something I started noticing while managing PMs and product designers at Eventbrite, and it's now coming up with Whatnot as I help them hire new PMs, is the environment in which a lot of product managers have come up is very distorted from when you and I started doing this kind of work. I think we used to always describe PMs as this gang of misfits. We all started in all different functions. We all had different strengths and weaknesses, and the PM team gained as a whole from that diversity of skills and previous experiences. What I noticed is, when we started doing product reviews at Eventbrite, if there was any sort of uncertainty in a problem or a solution, the product manager, instead of shipping to learn, would talk about all this research they have to do to really learn the problems, really learn the solution. My feedback would be like, no, user research is a scarce resource. We have to reserve it for the areas that have extreme uncertainty and high leverage for getting to certain, so if you're redesigning the login page for Eventbrite, you don't need to use that resource to learn what to do. Just go see what FANG and the top unicorns did. They probably did a good job, and even if they didn't, all of our customers also use those products, so they're going to be familiar with us copying any approach that they've taken. I think we sort of forgot in the industry that many times, the fastest way to learn is to ship, so that if you actually get them to skip research and just go look at competitors, another thing I was noticing is I'd get a list of options other companies have done, but there would be no analysis of why those companies chose different options and what's most applicable for us. It got me thinking, okay, every new person on the product team is acting like they work at Google and have these infinite resources and infinite time to make sure everything is perfect. It became such this focus on the right way of doing product management that no one's taken any risk. I felt like, oh, am I responsible for this? I've created a bunch of frameworks on Reforge. I'm onboarding these new PMs. Is this my fault? At Reforge, we're building frameworks that are tools in a toolkit. You pull them out when relevant. They're not a coloring book to stay inside the lines of. At one point, I got so fed up, I wrote an internal blog post, and I called it On Best Practices and Breakfast Rituals. I talked about how there were these articles about the morning habits of the most successful people, and if you try to do all those things, it'd take you like six hours every morning. There was this article, I think it was on Business Insider or something, about this futurist at Google. He talked about all the pills and food he eats for breakfast every morning to try to live longer. The reporter estimated that it cost him one million a year to have these habits, so I was like, "Hey, I want to make it clear. pills and food he eats for breakfast every morning to try to live longer. The reporter estimated that it cost him one million a year to have these habits, so I was like, "Hey, I want to make it clear. At Eventbrite, we don't have that much money. We don't have that much time. There's no framework that allows you to not use your brain at this company and just follow some sort of process for success in this profession." I adopted this thing into a public blog post that's on my blog now, but now that I've had some time outside of Eventbrite, I feel like I at least partially missed the mark on what's really going on. I see this with Whatnot, because one of the things I'm helping them with is interviewing, I see PMs again, which I haven't done in a while. It's fascinating interviewing a PM or managers early in their career because Whatnot is a startup, and you know better than most of us as a former founder of one, startups typically require us to wear lots of hats. You have to write SQL. You have to talk directly to customers. You have to prep marketing and sales. Most importantly, you have to make a lot of decisions under uncertainty, which you wouldn't necessarily expect a PM to do at, say, a Google, but it all boils down to using your brain in different ways. Lisa, who's on our legal team, she called Eventbrite a public startup because the pandemic basically erased her business and we had to build it back from scratch. Now that I'm doing these interviews, and whether they come from a small startup, a unicorn, or a public company, they all sort of look the same because there's been so much funding to all these companies. Every company's been acting like they're Google with Google margins, meaning a lot of engineering support, a lot of design support, a lot of research support, lots of analysts around them. They actually seem pretty ill-prepared for a real startup, or even a public company with some uncertainty around it like Eventbrite, so you start getting these weird responses in the interview process. You ask them to solve a problem and they'd say things like, "I can't even begin to come up with solutions until I see all the data and talk to customers." I'm like, "Yeah, I get that's something you would normally do if you took the job, but you don't have the data. You can't talk to customers. Make a decision now. What would you do? I want to see how creative you are. I want to see how much you're intuiting about the real problem and solution," and they can't really answer. Then my follow-up, which I don't ask, but what I really want to ask is like, "When's the last time you used your brain versus followed a process someone else designed at your company?" Because I want the former, not the latter.…

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