Chris Hutchins
Chris Hutchins recently left his position as Head of New Product Strategy at Wealthfront to focus full-time on his podcast, All the Hacks.
Career Skills
Prioritizing company impact over pleasing a manager is the most reliable path to high performance and advancement.
"the people that I've had work for me or I've worked alongside that seem to always be the outperformers, are always the people that are just solely focused on having the most impact on the company. I t..."
Communication Skills
Internal excitement and cross-functional buy-in are as essential to product success as external customer validation.
"you think that customer research is all you need to build a product at a company, but figuring out how to create excitement internally and get buy-in from other teams because they're the ones that are..."
Explicitly stating your intent to help the company succeed prevents colleagues from interpreting strong product opinions as self-serving.
"when you push so hard for your ideas and you have really strong beliefs, you have to also make sure you state your intent. Because sometimes people think you're acting out of self-interest... 'Hey guy..."
Growth Skills
Product-market fit is identified when customers are so eager for a solution that they are effectively 'reaching over the table' to get it.
"Andy, he's legendary. If anyone listening to this, wants to learn about product market fit, Andy is your guy. I believe he coined the term, he teaches the class at Stanford. And the lesson was really..."
Leadership Skills
In high-risk innovation, the magnitude of a single success (slugging average) is more important than the frequency of small wins.
"Andy, he always talks about slugging average, not batting average. He's like, 'I don't care if you hit the ball every time. If one in 10 times you hit a home run that's better than someone who hits it..."
Marketing Skills
Launch success is often driven by concentrated momentum that triggers platform algorithms rather than total volume.
"launching with two or three episodes, either all at once or in a week is a really valuable strategy... the ranking charts are all driven by different variables than you would imagine. They're driven a..."
Leverage short-form video platforms with built-in discovery engines to drive brand awareness for long-form content.
"make clips of your podcast and you could put those clips on these channels that do have that built in distribution... TikTok, YouTube, Instagram Reels... brand awareness for me."
Early community growth is built through manual, high-value interactions answering specific user questions on social platforms.
"he went on Twitter and he looked for every single person that asked a question about wine and he at replied them back... go find everyone that's asking questions about [your topic] and answer their qu..."
Product Management Skills
Metrics should form a hierarchy where individual team goals clearly level up to the company's North Star.
"the GM's goal is to sell out the tickets and win the conference championship and it actually tiers it down... explain how it all levels up to this one North Star metric for the company or two in that..."
Constant repetition of the product vision is necessary to ensure the entire organization internalizes the narrative.
"you have to state your vision and your mission and why you're here, every all-hands. It seems so crazy because it's core to you why we would build this, what it's purposes, why it's amazing... you nee..."
A product vision should describe the desired emotional state or world for the user, while the strategy explains the execution.
"Imagine a world where someone can feel this way about their money.' And it's like, 'And then this thing will do that.' That's the product strategy. It's how you execute on it."
Deep market awareness comes from engaging with external founder communities and monitoring public feedback on new products.
"understanding what's happening outside of the walls of our business better than a lot of people. And maybe that's talking to a lot of other people who are founders talking to a lot of other people, st..."
Pretending a product is already live during interviews can reveal the true depth of user desire and urgency.
"I would start pretending that the product existed in the interviews. Only to find out, at the end, people was like, 'Oh, it's not out yet.' And they're like, 'What I want to use...' You could really f..."
Paid advertising metrics can serve as a quantitative survey to validate product descriptions and content quality.
"run an ad for your podcast... what was my click-through rate on the ad? Which will tell you if someone doesn't click, it's either not a good description or it's not a good set of content... if they do..."