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Nan Yu

Published podcast speaker

Claims
20
Episodes
1
Shows
1
Named items
2

Books, apps, and tools

The evidenced stack.

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book / recommends

The Design of Everyday Things

“I think the one book that I recommend the most is The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.”

Lenny's Podcast · 30 Jan 2025

Evidence receipt · Source ↗

app / uses

Linear

“We use Linear every single day to write software and do our own work, so we have that kind of advantage and then once we feel like it's good enough, we'll put it into some beta customer group, and again, as early as we can in the process.”

Lenny's Podcast · 30 Jan 2025

Evidence receipt · Source ↗

Claim ledger

What Nan said.

20 transcript-backed records

01 / recommendation

Recommends The Design of Everyday Things.

“I think the one book that I recommend the most is The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. I read it originally in college for an HCI class I was taking, and I think of everything I've ever read, it's the thing that caused me to see the world from the perspective of everything you interact with as a product. Every pencil that you use, every door that you open is a product that somebody designed.”
Speaker
Nan Yu
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

04 / belief

I can tell you about the exact thing that I'm doing this quarter, and then you'll have some level of intelligence about what people are actually trying to solve because I think often we just get stuck in these very high level general types of questions like, "What's the company goals sand all that kind of stuff, and it's like, no, you can get really specific.

“I can tell you about the exact thing that I'm doing this quarter, and then you'll have some level of intelligence about what people are actually trying to solve because I think often we just get stuck in these very high level general types of questions like, "What's the company goals sand all that kind of stuff, and it's like, no, you can get really specific.”
Speaker
Nan Yu
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

07 / belief

You mentioned like being opinionated, and I think sometimes when people talk about being opinionated, it can feel like they're almost saying like, "Hey, this is arbitrary," like your opinion and my opinion, they're just too opinions, man.

“You mentioned like being opinionated, and I think sometimes when people talk about being opinionated, it can feel like they're almost saying like, "Hey, this is arbitrary," like your opinion and my opinion, they're just too opinions, man.”
Speaker
Nan Yu
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

08 / evaluation

You're calculating cost of acquisition and all that stuff probably comes equipped with a tool because those are the right practices to do when you're doing this sort of marketing exercise. And whether you knew about it before or you learned it from the tool, like as a buyer for this kind of product, what I'm doing is I'm saying like, "Hey, I'm going to bring in this baseline level of marketing competency into my organization, that this is the worst we can do is whatever the tool defaults are.

“You're calculating cost of acquisition and all that stuff probably comes equipped with a tool because those are the right practices to do when you're doing this sort of marketing exercise. And whether you knew about it before or you learned it from the tool, like as a buyer for this kind of product, what I'm doing is I'm saying like, "Hey, I'm going to bring in this baseline level of marketing competency into my organization, that this is the worst we can do is whatever the tool defaults are.”
Speaker
Nan Yu
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

09 / belief

You can ask them," and I think that being able to tie it all the way back to reality in that way is a big part of how we really think about and discuss these things.

“You can ask them," and I think that being able to tie it all the way back to reality in that way is a big part of how we really think about and discuss these things.”
Speaker
Nan Yu
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

10 / belief

I actually hadn't really put that part together, but I think some of the reason we've done it this way is because we don't have the bandwidth to action everything.

“I actually hadn't really put that part together, but I think some of the reason we've done it this way is because we don't have the bandwidth to action everything.”
Speaker
Nan Yu
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

11 / belief

I think the job that I do that we see it as is you're taking the building side of the organization and the selling side of the organization and bringing it together.

“I think the job that I do that we see it as is you're taking the building side of the organization and the selling side of the organization and bringing it together.”
Speaker
Nan Yu
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

12 / evaluation

I think a trap that a lot of times PMs will fall into is they'll make something, and they'll make some choices in it because maybe it's beautiful or it's elegant, but they don't go the step of like, "Is reality also beautiful and elegant?

“I think a trap that a lot of times PMs will fall into is they'll make something, and they'll make some choices in it because maybe it's beautiful or it's elegant, but they don't go the step of like, "Is reality also beautiful and elegant?”
Speaker
Nan Yu
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

13 / evaluation

Capacity planning is a thing that's been sitting in our backlog, and it's something that we see managers struggle with all the time, which is like I have a limited amount of personnel and resources, and I need to deploy them in such a way where we can theoretically accomplish our roadmap, but also we don't get blocked by some bottleneck that we don't end up blocking all of the projects because this one engineer is stuck on some info thing, and that's a thing people struggle with all the time.

“Capacity planning is a thing that's been sitting in our backlog, and it's something that we see managers struggle with all the time, which is like I have a limited amount of personnel and resources, and I need to deploy them in such a way where we can theoretically accomplish our roadmap, but also we don't get blocked by some bottleneck that we don't end up blocking all of the projects because this one engineer is stuck on some info thing, and that's a thing people struggle with all the time.”
Speaker
Nan Yu
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

14 / evaluation

I'm just making modifications in place. So, we made this very specific choice of on a brand new issue, we will interrupt you, and then on an existing draft that you're messing around with, we're just going to auto save everything and someone doing a analysis.

“I'm just making modifications in place. So, we made this very specific choice of on a brand new issue, we will interrupt you, and then on an existing draft that you're messing around with, we're just going to auto save everything and someone doing a analysis.”
Speaker
Nan Yu
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

15 / evaluation

There's a lot of project management tools, and I think the more competitive your industry is, the more the low-hanging goal-oriented stuff is already picked because every PM from every one of these companies has been asking like, "Well, what's your goal?

“There's a lot of project management tools, and I think the more competitive your industry is, the more the low-hanging goal-oriented stuff is already picked because every PM from every one of these companies has been asking like, "Well, what's your goal?”
Speaker
Nan Yu
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

16 / evaluation

It's doing deep surgery. They have to redo all of their internal processes and the way they manage inventory and all this kind of stuff, but they're willing to do it because they know that this is a battle-tested way of making sure that you're actually doing good management of resources.

“It's doing deep surgery. They have to redo all of their internal processes and the way they manage inventory and all this kind of stuff, but they're willing to do it because they know that this is a battle-tested way of making sure that you're actually doing good management of resources.”
Speaker
Nan Yu
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

17 / evaluation

" I was like, "Why is this labeled Bible Study Kit?" And it was literally just the pen in four different colors, and it was because the thing doesn't bleed through pages.

“" I was like, "Why is this labeled Bible Study Kit?" And it was literally just the pen in four different colors, and it was because the thing doesn't bleed through pages.”
Speaker
Nan Yu
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

18 / evaluation

" This is the question that we're going to get. So, we hear it quite a lot, and it's very sensible for them to ask it because they see history being littered with the corpses of startups trying to compete in this space and not making it, and I think when we examine this problem, we look at, "Well, what kind of feature requests can we debate and what kind of feature requests do we absolutely have to say no to?

“" This is the question that we're going to get. So, we hear it quite a lot, and it's very sensible for them to ask it because they see history being littered with the corpses of startups trying to compete in this space and not making it, and I think when we examine this problem, we look at, "Well, what kind of feature requests can we debate and what kind of feature requests do we absolutely have to say no to?”
Speaker
Nan Yu
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast
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