Kayvon Beykpour

Explosive top-line growth can dangerously mask underlying retention issues.

"The reason that the Periscope app failed, it really comes down to a few things. One, we did not address the core problem that retention wasn't good. Our poor retention was mapped by just an incredible..."

Asking about failure reveals a candidate's capacity for self-reflection, risk-taking, and learning.

"The thing that I find is both very illustrative and helpful is just asking people to talk about something they worked on that failed and talk about something they built that succeeded as well. But I t..."

Cultural stagnation in product teams often stems from a lack of visible progress and creative ambition.

"We wanted to change the lack of ambition, the lack of creativity, the lack of customers feeling that the product had changed at all."

The most impactful product improvements often lie in the areas the organization is most afraid to touch.

"The sacred cows are like their own roadmap. What are all the things that you think we're not allowed to change? Let's start there."

Driving change requires absolute alignment; leaders must decisively manage out those who resist the new direction.

"I think one of the really important things about driving cultural change at the leadership level is you've got to identify whether someone's on the wagon or off the wagon and either quickly convince t..."

Skillset is secondary to an 'irrational obsession' with the problem when building something from nothing.

"You need to staff projects with the team of people that are well equipped from a skillset standpoint, but more importantly have an obsession with the idea they want to pursue."

Product leadership is fundamentally about balancing customer benefit with business outcomes, which are not always aligned.

"The difficulty in making product decisions comes down ultimately to making these trade-off decisions and you have to look at things through the lens of the customer. You have to balance that with what..."

Functional organizations require highly active leadership to resolve the inevitable deadlocks between opinionated heads of product, engineering, and design.

"One of my biggest points of feedback and points of consternation was the structure of the company in that we had a functional organizational model... the combination of that model and the type of lead..."

Internal alignment on product vision requires constant, repetitive storytelling to stick.

"It was also just storytelling and just repetitive storytelling around this is the vision, these are the bets we're making. Here's why. And you can't just tell that story once."

Over-reliance on OKRs can lead to building for metrics rather than building for the customer.

"If the only way the organization is trained to think about what to build and what not to build is OKRs, it's equally unhelpful at the limit because sure, you can have a good sense of what you should b..."

Strict adherence to a single North Star metric (like DAU) can incentivize keeping features that users actually dislike.

"One of our key metrics that we always optimized... was DAU... but we often had features that would not lead to a good customer experience and the team would just be blind towards leaving hostile custo..."

Copying features from competitors is acceptable if done with 'taste' and focused on customer needs.

"I think it's always about doing the right thing for the customer. Everyone has always been shameless to be shamelessly inspired by other people's ideas. I don't think there's anything wrong with that...."

Frameworks like Jobs-to-be-Done become counterproductive when followed religiously without common sense or nuance.

"I was not a fan of how we leveraged jobs-to-be-done at Twitter. I thought it was exhausting and not particularly helpful... every framework at its limit is followed to such a religious extent it's jus..."

Focusing exclusively on 'refining the core' can return a company to growth but may calcify the organization's ability to take risks.

"Literally the first two years I was at the company, the stated product strategy for Twitter was refine the core. It was like, we're not making any big bets here, team. Our goal is to keep turning the..."

The guest emphasizes that building great consumer products relies on 'muscle memory' and 'taste' developed by being a voracious user of products.

"The best cheat codes for getting better at building products is just being a voracious user of products... There's just no replacement for that."