Kevin Yien
Kevin Yien leads product for merchant experiences at Stripe. Before that, he meandered his way from being a technical designer to a product manager, built the restaurants business and ecosystem team at Square, and most recently was head of product and design at Mutiny. He also makes ice cream and teaches for fun.
Career Skills
The best foundation for product management is starting in a role that directly builds or sells the product to understand the core value loop.
"I discourage people from going straight into product management. If they want to become product managers, you encourage them to start somewhere else first. Why is that? ... The people that should be d..."
Career setbacks like layoffs can trigger identity crises, but it's crucial to separate personal competence from business needs or environmental fit.
"I land my first official, by title, PM job at a startup. I made it. I've arrived... the company is really struggling and so we go through a series of rolling layoffs and I'm round 4 something... my id..."
Communication Skills
Writing is the primary tool for a PM to scale clarity and demonstrate a deep understanding of the customer's voice.
"Writing is clarity at scale, and a key component to a PM's job is creating clarity both internally and externally... if you can't sell or support your own product, I don't trust you to build the produ..."
Developing writing taste through high-quality consumption is the prerequisite for producing compelling writing.
"Good writing comes from consuming as much good writing as possible... the more you index towards developing your own taste for what you think is good by consuming others, then you can shift into produ..."
Silent document reviews accelerate the feedback loop by reducing the latency between a question and the author's response.
"I think there is a lot of value to saying, 'I need 20 minutes of focused time to interrogate something that I've done. We're not going to talk. I'm literally going to force us into a room or Zoom. You..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
The 'unsell email' ensures long-term retention by front-loading the most difficult aspects of a role before the candidate signs.
"When you get to offer stage, I send an email with no more than eight bullet points and I say all the terrible things that are probably going to reinforce their fears. If you can tell them that upfront..."
Leadership Skills
Product sense is developed by making high-volume decision reps, documenting them, and reviewing the outcomes.
"PMs need as many reps as possible in making decisions, documenting the rationale behind those decisions, and then crucially seeing the outcome of them... Look around you. There's other teams that are..."
The PM's role is to define the constraints (the perimeter) so that engineers and designers can maximize their creative potential within a safe space.
"PM should be doing everything in their power to draw the perimeter of the space, of the problem space. And it's within that, eng, design, everyone else that you're working with, they can go as crazy a..."
Product Management Skills
Automating the sourcing of user interviews ensures PMs maintain a constant pulse on the customer without the manual overhead of recruiting.
"PMs need direct exposure to raw material. End of story. And so that's where I think you just need to constantly be talking to or interacting with whoever is your customer... you can set up workflows e..."
Quality and customer value should take precedence over arbitrary launch deadlines.
"We were given a pretty strict deadline that we needed to launch by and I pushed it out three times. That's not because of this one animation, but it's because of a series of decisions where we said, '..."