Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
21 transcript-backed records
01 / prediction
“" Because for me, any time a team goes to like 50s, and 100s, and beyond, it is a law of corporations that you're going to have to spend a lot of time at the optics level.”
02 / evaluation
“Yeah. And look, taste is about the ability to identify what is really good, without needing to see its results, because, look, it requires zero taste right now for anybody to say, "Oh, that CEO of NVIDIA is a genius, right?”
03 / evaluation
“You know, we talk about taste, we all talk about taste, and it's about the beautiful pixels, and the perfect product, and the whatever else, the Steve Jobs-esque passion, and all of that, whatever it is. And yes, taste is about that, but I think there is something that we as product leaders, and certainly I did, needed to recognize about taste as just a factor in pretty much everything we do, which is like, do we have good taste around the beliefs we choose to create within ourselves as product leaders?”
04 / evaluation
“There's also what I learned at the time when I started asking this question is that our jobs get frustrating when we behave, most of the time, in misalignment with our superpowers and who we truly are at our core.”
05 / disagreement
“" is I realized that I am so busy because I'm not making good product decisions.”
06 / evaluation
“And so now, planning season came along. And the interesting I found is that because I had a real product strategy, not one of those fake ones, a real product strategy that I had gotten alignment on with everybody, my planning for this major product for Stripe took me like three days.”
07 / prediction
“I used to like working out of a calendar, those types of things. And I think you're all familiar with those things, but what I wanted to call out is that, at some point in our product career, we reach something, we reach an immovable force that will just overwhelm us, no matter what we do.”
08 / evaluation
“It's all these kind of spreadsheets to fill out, and meetings to have, and dependencies, and priorities, and stakeholders to meet, and so on. And so I noticed, for instance, that at some point, that was making me really busy, and then that was making me feel guilty now, because I had my team to look after and to support, and then I had product decisions to make and various other things, and I've gone on some planning retreat or whatever.”
09 / belief
“Oh, I mean, I saw that all the time, the work I did at pretty much every company. And again, I've been guilty of this myself, where I think typically the type of situation where I have seen this, as an example, is you are trying to prioritize the next quarter.”
10 / evaluation
“Like this team is always slow, right? And so you put the bandaid, but the bandaid doesn't work.”
11 / belief
“I was in meetings with Larry, Sergey, Eric Schmidt. And I think I particularly, if I were to pick one thing, I really appreciated Larry's strategic insight and particularly his ability to simulate the future to make better decisions.”
12 / evaluation
“He's just a great marketer and um i just learned a lot about how to think about talking about the product in terms that uh you know again obvious stuff but talking about product in terms that customers really understand and then sometimes emphasizing things that we as product people might not think are really important and because maybe we didn't spend much time on building it And we want to talk about things that we spent a lot of time that are sort of truly innovative, etc, etc.”
13 / evaluation
“Can I bring up this tiger? And all of a sudden it became okay for people to bring those things up, which I think is perhaps the best part about a premortem is that shared vocabulary.”
14 / evaluation
“Now, of course, there's the other side of it, which is I think Google missed out on some trends simply because of this filter or this high bar where sometimes it's not clear if something is a hundred million dollar opportunity or a billion dollar opportunity.”
15 / recommendation
“The point is to identify threats that we are not talking about openly or that we might just be missing.”
16 / evaluation
“In fact, it is obvious to team members, some team members, but the problem is that they perhaps haven't created that psychological safety and that vocabulary to be able to talk about it in an objective way and to decide with intent, are we going to solve for this or not?”
17 / recommendation
“I do not recommend trying to quantify opportunity costs because it's a lost cause.”
18 / evaluation
“I realized that I would never be a great engineer, that I would never be a top 10% engineer because I saw those engineers and the fortune of working with them.”
19 / preference
“Instead, you are thinking, is this the best use of my time? And it's a subtle but profound shift in our thinking, because when we think about opportunity cost, we will pick certain things that we would have never picked if we just had the ROI mindset.”
20 / evaluation
“Or like that is the more often the cases, the reason we are misaligned is because we don't know what the strategy is.”
21 / evaluation
“But there are many examples. And something I realized is that the same type of of activity can actually be either an l task or an n task or an o task so what's an example so say like a classic pm task activity of filing a bug report right and so many companies have these bug templates etc etc right like that you use to file a bug report Well, it turns out that filing a bug report, depending on the situation, depending on what type of bug it is, can actually be an L task, high leverage task.”