Gaurav Misra: belief

Transcript context

…Big difference. Initially, there were no PMs at all. PMs were introduced with monetization. Once monetization was a big sort of element, that's where PMs came in. Today, I think there's a ton of, or there's an adequate number of PMs across the company, but there was a long period of time, especially when the innovation was happening, when there were a much, much smaller number of PMs and it was very designer led. But at the same time, I think that's slightly misleading in the way that these weren't your sort of average designers. These were designers who were actually PMs as well. That's what the secret sauce was. They were able to not just design but also do the PM part which is a big responsibility. It's a lot of work, especially for that many employees, but it gave the CEO a way to have granular control over what exactly was being launched in which part of the app at all times. Because he could meet with a set of 10 or 12 people and know every change that was happening that was user impacting. A lot of changes were being worked on that were infrastructure and types of things that keep going on in the back end where you're improving ranking and whatever that might be, performance and things like that. And those were not usually his concern. He was concerned with what UI are we adding where? And if you needed to add UI to the app, you needed it designed. And if there's no designers in the company, except for a handful who talk directly to the CEO, you create a very granular control over what's being launched in the company. So everything needed to be approved by Evan. If you hadn't approved it, it's not going out. So the design team actually held a lot of power in that. This is awesome. So what I'm hearing partly is, I don't know if this is true, but it feels true that to make a consumer app that is successful and breaks through, you almost need a singular mind that continues to stay in the weeds on everything. And the way Evan did that is very close to the design team who basically ran product.…

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