Matt MacInnis: recommendation

Transcript context

…I love hearing this because so many people have teams that are not functioning incredibly well and hearing from someone that is not a longtime product person come in and try to fix these problems, I think is really useful and interesting for people to hear. To dig into this a little bit more, was the big lesson and kind of eye-opening moment that there's a lot of foundational work that needs to happen to achieve this outcome that you're trying to achieve, which is measure engagement and adoption well? Is it like tracking and metrics and data science? Is that kind of the lesson there? The lesson is that everything must be done in its time and order, and you can move really, really quickly. There's no sort of excuse not to move with urgency on all of these things, but you got to do them in order and you have to lead bottom up. You got to lead from the specific circumstances you observe. And I think for me, one of the best things that's happened over the last 11 months is that I've gained a greater trust in my own instincts, that sort of patterns I've matched across other functions do indeed apply in product, but I have both the advantage and disadvantage of not having led a product function before and therefore must think about every problem from first principles. I have no choice. I can read shit on the internet. I can listen to clear thinkers on topics and import their ideas, but I'm very reluctant to import an idea without breaking it down into its constituent parts and figuring out how it applies at Rippling. And so I don't actually give a shit about adoption metrics as a matter of principle. I care about adoption metrics when I care about adoption metrics. I realize that that's a total logical statement, but it's like I'll get there. And so in certain parts of our product, I really do care about adoption metrics. I care a lot about adoption metrics in our applicant tracking system, our recruiting product, because it's in a really good place from a usability standpoint, it's very well instrumented, it's got very happy users, it's got an awesome growth profile, and so we should still ... It's got an awesome growth profile. So we should be really focused on the adoption metrics because I think that's going to be an important ingredient to low churn over time, removing friction from the implementation process as an example. There are other parts of our product where I would say I don't care at all about adoption and am much more focused on foundational things like I said earlier, test coverage or whatever, just to make sure that the thing is stable and good and delivering exactly what it's supposed to deliver once it's adopted. Now that you're on the inside of the product team, what's something that you think people outside of product, say Matt two years ago or other, I don't know, go to market leads, other execs should hear, need to understand about product that they don't until they're on the inside?…

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