Gibson Biddle
Before getting into teaching full-time, Gibson Biddle was VP of Product at Netflix and CPO at Chegg (a textbook rental and homework help company). He now spends his days speaking, writing, and hosting workshops on product leadership, strategy, and culture. There are very few people in the world who’ve worked with, and had an impact on, more product managers.
Career Skills
Build mentorship relationships organically by offering value to the mentor first rather than making a formal request.
"The first rule of thumb is, don't ask a person to be your mentor. That's really awkward. First, identify them. Say, this is a person I think that could be helpful to me. And then, find ways to be help..."
Treat your career as a product by running small experiments to test hypotheses about new roles or industries.
"In your career, it's just a lot like building a product. You have theories and hypotheses, you find ways to experiment with them, and then you were successful or you failed."
Communication Skills
Protect productivity by actively minimizing the number of meetings in your schedule.
"minimize meetings, okay? Minimize meetings. That sucks the life out of everybody, including you."
Growth Skills
When growth slows, providing customer choice through tiered pricing or ad-supported models may outweigh the benefits of product simplicity.
"In this case, customer choice may be more important than the complexity of advertising, or maybe the stinky experience."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Early-career PMs should join interview loops to develop the critical leadership skill of talent evaluation.
"If you're early in your career, ask if you could be on interview teams, even if you're not hiring, because then you're starting to practice something that's really important as you want to grow your c..."
For senior product roles, prioritize leadership traits like vision communication and proactivity over purely technical skills.
"When I'm interviewing any of those kinds of candidates, I am looking for leadership skills. Can they do inspired communication of a vision? I do look for product strategy skills... I look for people w..."
Culture is a high-leverage leadership tool that defines expected behaviors, reducing the need for rigid rules and processes.
"I look for folks who understand how important culture is, because culture helps people to understand the skills and behaviors that are wanted of everyone within the building, and they let you provide..."
Leadership Skills
Categorize decisions by their magnitude and reversibility to determine the appropriate level of speed and caution.
"Is this a high stakes decision or a low stakes decision? ... magnitude ... and then, is it reversible? Amazon calls those, this was a two-way door decision. It's reversible. The one way door, those ar..."
Use A/B testing to quantify the actual retention impact of 'delightful' features to see if they justify their costs.
"The hardest part in that model is, how do you balance delight versus margin? ... In this case, both right, right? We saw a very small change in retention. That was the surprise. And so, it went from s..."
Product Management Skills
Product vision should aim for 10X improvement rather than incremental satisfaction to truly delight customers.
"The job is to delight customers. Like Peter Thiel, his book, From Zero to One. The job of an entrepreneur at the beginning is just to find out something that's 10X better. Delight is trying to work in..."
A robust product strategy must simultaneously delight users, create defensible advantages, and improve business profitability.
"to delight customers in hard to copy margin enhancing ways. So, there's kind of these three parts, customers, hard to copy, margin enhancing."
Maintain product simplicity by removing 'two percenters'—features used by only a tiny fraction of the audience that add unnecessary complexity.
"As a rule, I never used rules as thumbs, but these two percenters, I would kill them. If I launched something and it was only 2% we'd, we called it scraping the barnacles, just get rid of it."
Align leadership by force-ranking Growth, Engagement, and Monetization (the JAM model) to resolve fundamental strategic conflicts.
"I just need you to force rank these three factors for me: growth, engagement, and monetization. And I need the two of you to agree."
True differentiation comes from building 'hard to copy' advantages like brand trust, unique technology, and scale rather than just matching features.
"What makes Netflix hard to copy? ... Original content ... Brand ... Personalization ... Economies of scale ... Network effects."
Implement a consistent, simple feedback loop for every output to drive continuous improvement through data.
"I'm a feedback freak, so you'll notice at the end of every talk I do, every essay... there's a link to give me feedback. And it's always the same question: On a scale of zero to 10... how likely would..."