Josh Miller: recommendation

Transcript context

…One of the other things that, hopefully, you're picking up in this interview, so far, is we are a very prototype-driven culture. It goes back to the "assume you don't know" ethos. We try a lot of experiments, and we try them related to product features related to how we work together, related to the stories we tell. So, this isn't a category of, "I'm not sure it's going to work, but we're trying it," and it seems to be working so far, at least for us. What Lenny's referencing is, we have a handful of teams. I'll pick two just as an examples. We have a membership team and we have a storytelling team. And though you probably recognize or are obviously familiar with those terms, those aren't historically startup orgs, or startup disciplines and teams. And let me tell you about the intention behind both. Membership. Membership was, when I was at Facebook, the most impressive thing to me about how Facebook built product was their user research team. Shout out to Lowie and Jane. I don't know why you'd be listening to this podcast, but you deeply inspired me when we were at Facebook together. They had the most incredible team of user researchers. And it always felt odd to me. And this isn't Lowie and Jane's fault. Actually, in fact, they suffered from this. That user research almost felt like a service organization, relative to product engineering design. There'd be a PM. The PM would get assigned a researcher and the PM got to decide how to use the researcher, and ask them what to do and ask them questions. But seeing the potential for when you really get to know the people that you are building for, that you're serving, at a really deep way, it is extraordinary. How do you build product any other way? And so, we took that to the extreme at The Browser Company, which we said, "Let's not think of it as customer support, customer service, customer success, user research. Those are just business terms. Those are just industry terms." At the end of the day, what we're saying is if there is a human being, from the moment they touch our software or our products for the first time, to, if they have it last, we need to have a deep, genuine, ongoing relationship with them. And on day one, that may be air quote, "customer success." "How do I use this thing?" On day 37, that might be, "I have a bug. Do you mind helping me fix it?" And on day 58, that may be, "Hey, we're shipping the mobile app soon. What do you want from mobile? What do you want on your phone?" Other companies view that as different orgs and disciplines. We view that as, there are a bunch of people at the other end of this that we are serving from the moment they touch our product the first time. Let's own that relationship full stack and think about it holistically. And so that's the membership team. On the storytelling side, very similar, different type of person. Again, we're a humanistic the company. So, the theme here is the people on the company, the people at the other end. membership team. On the storytelling side, very similar, different type of person. Again, we're a humanistic the company. So, the theme here is the people on the company, the people at the other end. So if the membership team takes people from the moment they touch our product for the first time to the last, the storytelling team is about people we don't have the privilege of serving yet. They don't use Arc, they don't know what Arc is. That could be an investor, air quote, "investor relations." That could be members of the press, air quote, "PR." That could be just people out in the world, air quote, "marketing" and one-day sales. But at the end of the day, it's telling our story to people. It's telling our story to people and thinking about that holistically in full stack. So that's how we think about teams is, we start with first principles asking, what are we really trying to do here? And what is the most direct way to manifest that, even if it's not how other people do it? In practice, one of the benefits of that is I do think it leads to certain pieces of content. For example, that people go, "Oh, wow! I've never seen that before." But again, I think anyone's capable of this. I think we have an extraordinarily talented storytelling team and membership team, but I really think it's as simple as the intentionality of what is the team? What are their incentives? What are the disciplines on the team? Even hiring a video editor, for example, as a small company. But the video editor, not having make a TikTok account go viral. But think about it more holistically in terms of the people. So, again, there's a lot that breaks down. There's a lot that's not going well about it. I have no idea how the scales, the 500 people ... Yeah. So this is not me saying this experiment is ultimately going to be a huge success, or right for everyone or even us at different times. But that was the intentionality of the membership team, the storytelling team and others. And even product management. We don't have PMs at the company. My title at Facebook was Product Manager. I love product management. But, we view it not as a team. We view it as a leader, a role on a project, on an effort. And depending on the projects, different types of people should be a PM. So, we have a performance-related project going on where, of course, an infrastructure engineer should be that air quote, "PM. " We have a product project, where actually I think someone from membership should be the PM, because ultimately, yes, we're building software product, but it is really about serving our members in a specific way, so we should have someone for membership be a PM. Again, as you can imagine, as is going through the heads of everyone listening, "That must break down in 18 ways?" Oh, it definitely does. And so I'm not promising one day it won't change. But again, continuous through the company is, assume you don't know. Start by asking what could be, and let's just try some things and see what happens. Start with what could be. I love that value. This episode is brought to you by Linear. Let's be honest, this sheet tracker that you're using today isn't very helpful. Why is it that always seems to be working against you, instead of working for you? Why does it feel like such a chore to use? Well, Linear is different. It's incredibly fast, beautifully designed, and it comes with powerful workflows that streamline your entire product development process, from issue tracking all the way to managing product roadmaps. Linear's designed for the way modern software teams work. What users love about Linear are the powerful keyboard shortcuts, efficient GitHub integrations, cycles that actually create progress and built-in project updates that keep everyone in sync. In short, it just works. Linear is the default tool of choice among startups and it powers a wide range of large, established companies such as Versel Retool and Cash App. See for yourself why product teams describe using Linear as magical visit linear.app/lenny to try Linear for free with your team and get 25% off when you upgrade. That's linear.app/lenny. So, I was going to ask you actually, you talked about why you don't have PMs. Do you think you'll hire PMs in the future, having a PM background? Do you think you'll get there or do you think you'll try to stick to this? People do the PM role, depending on the project?…

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