Adriel Frederick
Adriel Frederick is VP of Product Management at Reddit X, where he helps incubate and scale new products. He is a former Product Lead at Facebook, as well as a former PM and Director of Product at Lyft. Adriel shares anecdotes from his time at Lyft and Facebook, insights about how to lead through tough times, why there isn’t an algorithmic solution to everything, why R&D teams need to be a part of the core mission, the tangible benefits of working on diverse teams, and his thoughts on the future of AI.
AI & Technology Skills
The core role of a PM in AI products is defining the boundary between automated algorithmic decisions and human judgment.
"When you are working on algorithmic heavy products, your job is figuring out what the algorithm should be responsible for, what people are responsible for, and the framework for making decisions."
AI should be designed as a tool that amplifies human intent rather than a standalone black box that operates without human constraints.
"It's more about giving people the information that they can use for decisions that they alone are good at and giving machines the power to amplify a person's intent... I think about it as designing an..."
Communication Skills
True alignment requires 'taking your own shoes off'—temporarily setting aside your own goals to understand a stakeholder's motivations and fears.
"The hardest part is taking my own shoes off. Basically going, Yo, okay, I came into this, there's something I wanted, I wanted to get rid of that. Now just talk to this person and try to understand wh..."
Engineering Skills
When a technical solution lacks the operational flexibility required by the business, a full rebuild is often necessary despite the emotional and resource cost.
"The answer was like, Yo, we got to rebuild it. There was no answer where we couldn't have a product like this. We needed some ability to be able to influence prices so that we could actually run an ef..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Diversity is a business efficiency driver that allows teams to internalize global user perspectives and make faster product decisions without constant external research.
"You got to have your teams look like the world, it just makes you so much faster. It's not perfect... But it helps a lot. To your second point about diversity and how to foster it... When you recogniz..."
Product Management Skills
The value of a North Star metric lies more in its ability to galvanize and align an organization than in its mathematical perfection.
"What I thought was brilliant about it was not the metric, it was the designing it to be understood and communicated... Zuck just said 10 friends, 14 days, go. It just got people past the academic deba..."
A healthy product roadmap balances high-investment 'cannonballs' with incremental 'lead bullets' to avoid the trap of purely incremental thinking.
"I'm going to have some cannonballs. I'm going to work on a couple cannonballs and I'm going to have a bunch of lead bullets. And maybe it's 80% of your energies on those big cannonballs, 20% on the le..."
Directly experiencing the product as a user or provider reveals fundamental flaws in problem definition that metrics might obscure.
"I went from wanting to curse Rick out for making me drive 15 minutes to come pick him up to feeling like, all right, no, no, no, there's real value I'm providing you in driving him just two minutes. B..."
Focusing on the 'marginal user'—the person most likely to succeed but currently failing—is the most effective way to prioritize friction removal.
"For me, it's a person who is just on the cusp of taking the action you want to take... I like to go to the worst. It shows me everything that's wrong, but the marginal user thinking helps you prioriti..."
Observational research reveals 'orthogonal' problems that are invisible in data funnels.
"Don't use the data alone to figure out who the marginal user is. It'll give you a clue where they are and what might be wrong, will give you some hints. It's not going to give you the answer. You have..."