Matt MacInnis

AI value is moving toward platforms with broad, first-party data sets rather than isolated point solutions.

"Point solutions don't have enough data in the age of AI to be useful. You got to be able to provide the AI with a lot of context about a lot of data so it can do things. It can do joins. It can do cor..."

LLMs are highly effective as non-judgmental thought partners for refining communication and synthesis.

"I turn to AI... help me come up with pithy ways to articulate these things... It is a thought partner, a non-judgemental thought partner where in 20% of the stuff it comes out with, I'm like, yeah, it..."

Joining a successful, high-growth company provides more valuable learning than joining a struggling one.

"It's why as an early career product manager, or it's why frankly at any stage of your career when you want to learn, you should join a winning team... I want to hear what they learned from being part..."

PMF is binary and obvious; if there is any doubt about whether you have it, you likely don't.

"Product market fit is a sort of thing where you absolutely know it when you see it, and therefore if you don't absolutely know it, you don't have it."

The market is immutable; you cannot market your way into PMF if the underlying 'receptors' for your 'drug' (product) aren't there.

"The market's either going to latch onto your product and run with it or it's not. Do not ship the product, find a lack of success, and then try to market your way through that, because the binding rec..."

Using a single, extremely difficult case study for all levels allows you to see the ceiling of a candidate's ability.

"Every product person at every seniority level is given the same case study. And the case study is extraordinarily difficult. It requires you to think about many, many dimensions simultaneously, to thi..."

The SPOTAC framework provides a structured way to decode intuition about a candidate's core attributes.

"One of the frameworks that I use for this is SPOTAC... it's that people are smart, passionate, optimistic, tenacious, adaptable, and kind. Those five things. Six, can't even count... The framework is..."

Deliberate understaffing prevents organizational politics and ensures the team remains focused on high-priority tasks.

"It is really important to me that we feel that we've deliberately understaffed every project at the company. If you overstaff, you get politics, you get people working on things that are further down..."

High-performance cultures require staying out of the comfort zone and maintaining a high level of intensity.

"If you want to be in the 99th percentile in terms of outcomes, it's going to be really difficult. You got to sort of remind people that if they ever find themselves in the comfort zone at work, they a..."

Leaders must actively fight the natural tendency of teams to prioritize comfort over results and prevent the dilution of intensity as the org grows.

"Teams will always optimize for local comfort over company outcomes. The purest form of ambition and most intense source of energy in the business is the founder CEO. Every next concentric circle of ma..."

Withholding critical feedback is a selfish act that prioritizes the giver's comfort over the receiver's growth.

"Fundamentally, the most selfish thing you can do is withhold feedback from someone. When you think a thought that would help someone improve and you avoid giving it to them because it would make you u..."

Customer escalations are the best source of data for identifying systemic failures in the product or process.

"There's no greater gift to me as a product executive than receiving an escalation from a customer... Escalations are a gift... it's people who are just particularly skilled at pistol whipping other pe..."

A standardized 'Product Quality List' (PQL) acts as a factory inspection to ensure consistent shipping standards.

"We have a product quality list, which we lovingly at Rippling call the PQL... it articulates in the simplest ways the standards we want you to meet when you ship a product. It doesn't apply to every p..."

Excessive feature flags create technical debt and hidden failure points during product launches.

"Feature flags are the bane of my existence... I added a line to the fucking PQL that said, 'You are allowed to have one feature flag that governs your entire product at ship.' It's an extreme standard..."