Gaurav Misra

Focus AI strategy on lowering the barrier to entry for non-professionals by bridging skill and time gaps.

"Our goal specifically for video is not to build professional tools... We're building for the person who could not have created video before."

Use internal prototypes to generate excitement and 'internal virality' to align a large organization around a new direction without traditional meetings.

"As the company gets bigger, you can actually create alignment by causing internal virality... we would create these prototype products... and then we would just share the build and it would explode."

Technical debt is a strategic tool for leverage, allowing startups to move faster by deferring non-critical infrastructure work to future hires.

"I actually think as a startup your job is to take on technical debt because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company."

Creating hybrid roles like 'Design Engineering' allows for faster innovation by merging craft and reducing handoff friction between functions.

"I eventually joined the design team... a big part of what I did there was create this function called design engineering... The person who can think of the UX design it and also build it and launch it..."

The guest discusses the creation of a specific 'Design Engineering' function at Snap and Captions that merges UX design and engineering to prototype and ship faster.

"I eventually joined the design team... a big part of what I did there was create this function called design engineering."

A small, elite team with direct access to leadership can maintain granular control over product quality and vision even as an organization scales.

"The design team was like 10, 12 people. Basically, pretty small, even at 5, 6,000 employees it was that small still... everything needed to be approved by Evan."

Use the one-way/two-way door framework to determine the appropriate level of rigor for technical and product decisions.

"As long as it's possible for wherever it's like a two-way door, you can do whatever you want... If it's A one-way door, it's worth thinking about and sort of doing correctly."

Reversing the traditional PM-to-Design flow can lead to discovering unique product opportunities that metrics-first approaches miss.

"We'll first design something without even having any idea of what or why we're doing it, but we'll design a bunch of different things and then we'll sit down with the PMs and look at the designs and j..."

AI-driven localization and creative generation allow for rapid, high-performance global product launches.

"We found that just translating it with AI was able to get performance almost as good as the original, in the original language. So this is going to fly to the entire market."

Use a clear mission and core pillars to filter out distracting trends and decide which features to reject.

"A lot of it was done based on this type of pillar-based thinking of this is our mission, this is what we're trying to do, does it fit within or is it outside?"

Balance user-requested features with a 'secret roadmap' of non-obvious, revolutionary ideas that change user behavior and provide a competitive edge.

"We have what we think of as the public roadmap. This is basically what people have asked us for... So we have a second roadmap which we think of as a secret roadmap."

Setting a high-velocity goal for shipping marketable features ensures the product stays relevant and provides constant user feedback.

"Our engineering goal is every engineer should ship a marketable product every week."