Brian Balfour: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah, that is absolutely true. I think with the Linear post, which we'll link to, just if folks haven't seen that. Something I've found, so I've done these posts on how many different companies have done product, maybe 10 at this point. And I think one of the takeaways, and I'm planning to do a little what have I learned across all these companies, is exactly what you said. There's so many ways to do it. There's the linear approach, we're not going to hire product managers for as long as we can, it's going to be designers and engineers running the show. And there's basically every other company, where they often did hire product managers really early, and it worked out great. So I think there are many ways to do it, I think a lot of it depends on who your founders are, and what they value, and the people you hire, and how much do they want to do product? A hundred percent based on founders, I think the second thing is who your customer and who you're building for are. The thing in Linear's case is that they are building a product for themselves essentially right now, that product is designed for modern software development teams who are most used by engineers and designers. So it makes sense that they have an intuitive sense of what the customer wants, whereas if they're building a product for, I don't know, call it sales folks, the engineers and designers just are probably not connected to that audience in the same exact way. And as a result, you need a specific type of way of developing product that serves that specific customer. But I agree with you, and a lot of it stems from founder, but I think also a lot of it stems from who and what you're building. And I think in that case, it's not like the designer and the engineer couldn't do that well. It's just that is not going to be a fun job, if you're a designer that's spending time talking to salespeople all day and writing research briefs and [inaudible 01:14:37].…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.