pdurlej blog

My personal notes, and highlights from this inspiring interview. Enjoy.

• Founders in a conflict with employees = lack of clarity.
• Founders can be leading factor driving company clarity.
• Founders need to be able to be in the details, and this is not the same as telling people what to do.
• Leaders „own” and drive the details, but founders should be able to know the details.
• If you don’t know the details as founder, you don’t know if your employees are doing great job.

• What to do with product managers?
• What I actually meant & why designers cheer when I told that I will be deleting this function?
  • Nobody would cheer for laying off engineers.
  • Way of working together designers (I was on designer conference) x product managers make them dislike PMs.
    • Designers in the SV are frustrated by PMs, as they feel they are compromising. They are designers administrators.
  • We mixed inbound and outbound (marketing) product manager & offboarded program manager functions from PMs to program managers. Both groups are senior & small group of experts.
    • Program managers oversee the fulfillment of larger organizational goals. They coordinate activities between multiple projects without directly managing them. Instead, they manage the main program, giving detailed attention to program strategy, project delegation, and program implementation. This manager has a large responsibility to ensure that all the team members understand how to work together and coordinate their efforts on the way to a larger goal.
  • You need to know the market, as Product Manager. You need to know what is the problem to be great Product Manager. There are three drivers of failure:
    • Bad product.
    • Bad market (bad distribution).
    • Bad execution. 
  • Product Managers manage by influence (their functional expertise), not control on designers or engineers. And it works.

• Problems with getting bigger – different groups start run different technologies, more & more tech debt, a lot of dependencies, and people start to give up to work together. People start having own groups & own internal divisions. Each group have own agency & need to push for themselves – this creates politics. Subdivision grows -> bureaucracy grows -> lack of accountability -> complacency (detachment).
  • Fast company dies, there is slow bureaucracy nightmare now.
  • Each departament don’t talk to each other.
  • KPI how bad it is – how close is engineering & marketing?
    • Marketing should talk 24/7 with customers.

• Performance marketing should be a laser, brand marketing work as chandelier. Performance marketing doesn’t create very good accumulating advantages, it’s not an investment.
• Marketing = Education. We are educating on our unique benefits, most companies do brand marketing or performance marketing. If marketing doesn’t support the product changes, nobody uses them. 
• PMs understands marketing.

• We have rolling 2 year product roadmap strategy, updated every 6 months, as every 6 months we release a new version of our product. Now most people don’t focus on extensive planning, we just budget for week or two. Entire company can work together on all of this.
  • We focus on telling story through Product x Marketing, as it helps to sell and develop a cohesive product.
  • Single roadmap for across the entire company.

• Cycle of company – CEOs manages directly, then empowers employees and then manages directly. Founders delegate their core competences, and then don’t do what they are the best.
  • CEO = CPO, but if you want to be tech company you need to understand product.
  • I sometimes got involved and it was dysfunctional, but I learned how to become an asset to the product.
  • When I empowered people, they didn’t move as fast as they want, as there was more politics.
    • Politics definition – individual interest > company; it is ineffective.

• A/B testing need to have hypothesis. Without understanding environment/system – A/B test make no sense.
• „The initial what make us move fast make us move slow”

• Inspiration how to move on: Hiroki Asai – creative director for Apple. Marketing design the apps. Jony Ive – from Apple. Inspiration – running company like an Apple.
• I created „everybody-want-to-be-an-manager” culture Airbnb, and it lead to very difficult organisation to turn. This change my work from from proactive to reactive.
• Nightmare: „I found a company that on the one hand had amazing culture and people with a great mission, with a brand people really loved, but we lost our design roots. We weren’t investing in the longterm. We were obsessing over hitting metrics. We didn’t actually have any cohesive understanding of what we were doing. It was really hard to get work done. A lot of the great people were leaving and cost was rising and growth was slowing.”
• After near business death experience, people want leader so Brian to get more involved. Changes/tips:
  • Everything we do need to be written down. There were people who couldn’t write down what they were doing.
  • Lean it down to 20% most important things. 3 teams doing one thing, not a way around that.
  • Remove management ladders. Functions of startup. Fewer people, and only senior – and things started moving faster.
  • Every executive = expert in their own functional domain. 
  • Design/Tech/Product/Marketing… Leaders first, Design/Tech/Product/Marketing… Manager second. You need to be in the details.
  • „I created one shared consciousness […] One shared conversation with 30-40 top people”
  • Metrics subordinate to the calendar (of releases).
  • „Roadmap changes every day.” Not next month goals, but 2 year goal is getting changed constantly.
    • Everything need to be on the road & you can’t ship something unless it’s on the roadmap
    • You will need to have a reserve resources to pivot your plan, as world changes.
  • Product managers -> Program managers & Product marketing managers
  • „CEO review schedule” – all the product, all the marketing, every 2-3 months.
  • PMs scoring all the projects – green, yellow, red on track, or not on track model of updating initiatives each week.
  • Fight back bureaucracy, I will stop meeting if something wasn’t happening and we will collaborate on that. This ensured that there couldn’t be a situation when a team wouldn’t be able to collaborate.
  • Through reviews I was able to fight back bottlenecks & track progress, and thanks to that I didn’t need to force people to go to the office.
  • We use external partners, creative agencies, but not big names for big names. We mixed communication with marketing. We house creative agency – creative group, ands & product.
  • UX writing & Marketing writing = One voice = Head of Writing.
• Founders are apologising for how they want to run the company, and they have a middle point, and nobody is happy. Everyone wants clarity, and row in the same direction quickly.
  • People commit the company to the projects, and then they left, and we are still doing the project.
• Leaders are in the details.

• Let’s do the awesome product, and tell people about it’s the approach I have in Airbnb. It’s inspiration, and it can work for other companies.
  • CEO if it’s not a product person, should think as a product person. If you are not functional, at least work together with product.
  • Every PM should be interconnected and know what’s happening. Fight back siloses.
  • Leader should be expert in what they are doing, you can’t have managers without being experts.
  • As few people on their team, as possible.
  • Do changes, but pack it together into a story. Use data, but have a story & use your intuition.
  • „You can’t delegate understanding”
  • Intuition comes from understanding.
  • Enginering & Design should report to founder Product-led person, not Design under Product
  • PMs should understand distribution & marketing = „understanding the customer”.
  • Product = art & science, not pure tech.
  • Marketing & Engineering = interconnected,
  • CEO few layers, direct to direct, know that layer below are doing
  • Each release, a new chapter story of the product.
  • Everybody should row in a one direction.

• Every home is different, this is a big problem. You know what you get in hotel.
• We don’t split between guests & hosts, as review affects both of them. Product Marketer can move between given domain, but should be focused experts are in domain. Designers and engineers to cover much larger surface.
• UI – back to the sense of dimension in design, we want to replicate nature but not how it was back in the days.
  • Not possible without AI.
• 2 side maketplace is a relationship, and to have this relationship you need to give great tools for providers.
• Often you ask „How do we 10x this?” – ambitious goals, is as an excercise to make people think diffrently. This helps in first principles thinking.
  • Founder sets the pace for the team. Focus not on how hard people work, but how decisive they are.
  • If you want to improve the speed of the company – make faster decisions. Have bias for action.
  • „I just ask my players ask to do the very best” see potential in the people, even if they don’t see it.
  • You can demoralize people if you are saying you are not good enough, or you can inspire them if you say to believe that you can do better.
  • Andy Grove says there is competency & motivation, and leader’s job is motivate them through seeing their potential.
• Paradox – the more details I can see, the more time I have.
  • It will be a lot of work for one-two years, but then everybody start rowing in the same direction it’s easy. This is the culture – „my decision making become the culture, even if I’m not in the room”.
  • I was getting involved as it was only dysfunctional, and now I’m getting involved now much earlier.
  • I’m 42, I don’t have family, I have only dog. You have temptation to work, more and more, but you need go away to catch big picture & think.
    • I don’t work each 2nd weekend.
    • Eat & bodybuilding & sleep & healthy relationships.
    • You are happy if you keep relationships, work and health in the good shape.
    • CEO is very lonely.
    • Secret of happiness = relationships. So I’m non stop in touch with my friends & have new shared experiences constantly.
      • I was reacting, as everybody (friends & family) think I’m constantly busy.
      • Founders react too much.
      • Your life is finite, and you will die soon = you start saying no to things.
        • Say no to fake work, and yes to meaningful work & people
        • This say yes to introverts, not only to extravert who are seeking actively attention
• How to be inspiration? „I hasn’t made it yet„, but I’m grateful and I don’t need to prove myself. Beginner mindset = key. See the world in the eyes of the child, not to have too many judgements.
  • Understand things & ask for help.
  • Curiosity of a child, & constant learning and getting wiser.
  • I wanted to be artist.
    • „An artist has to be in a constant place of becoming and so long as they don’t become something, then they’re going to be okay” – Bob Dylan (?)
• We need to pay it forward, to keep culture of SV still alive.
• Art & Industrial Designer = enable to create extraordinary products.
• Being whole-thinking person, enables to create something amazing.