Nan Yu

Treat a job interview as a product discovery exercise to identify the hiring manager's 'job to be done.'

"It's your job when you're in the interview process to figure out what that burning problem is. So, put on your discovery hat and go figure out what is the actual job to be done of the hiring manager w..."

Differentiate yourself by performing the role during the interview process.

"Just act like you already worked there. What would you do? ... During the interview loop... you can ask, 'Hey, can you put me in touch with an engineering manager who's working on the same problem?' A..."

The PM's role is to bridge the 'Double Triangle'—connecting the builders (Eng/Design) with the sellers (Sales/Marketing).

"You're taking the building side of the organization and the selling side of the organization and bringing it together. You're taking all of the commercial motivations and goals of the company and maki..."

Marketing launches are finite opportunities in time that cannot be recovered if missed.

"With marketing and communication with customers, you basically have a limited amount of opportunities to do so... If you miss one of those opportunities, you don't get it back again. You can't time tr..."

Avoid product bloat by refusing features that prioritize management reporting over individual contributor productivity.

"The stuff that we absolutely have to say no to is the exact kind of thing that leads to this bloatedness that makes ICs hate their lives. It's customization features requested by middle managers in or..."

Maintain a backlog of opportunities that you continuously research until you reach a threshold of conviction.

"At any given moment, we have probably 20 or 30 opportunities that we could possibly explore, just product opportunities, like problems to solve, areas to improve for our users, but they're not ready y..."

Expand the search space for solutions by intentionally exploring extreme or 'outrageous' versions of a product trait.

"How extreme can you take it? You're designing a product. You're trying to come up with a solution. What's the most outrageous version of this along some trait? ... The biggest risk is you didn't see t..."

Identify problems by looking for 'schlep blindness'—the repetitive, annoying tasks users have become numb to.

"You have to look at things from an angle that other people might not have seen and for me, and for us, it's the angle of where are the emotional hooks that you're experiencing as you go through your w..."

Effective user discovery involves digging past feature requests to find the underlying negative emotion or 'pain' the user is experiencing.

"My goal is to feel bad in the same way that customers feel bad. They come to us with a request, 'Hey, we want X,' and it's like there's something motivating it... What is the actual emotional valence..."

Building deep empathy requires long conversations that move beyond analytical 'jobs to be done' into personal perspective.

"You can ask people directly like, 'How do you feel?' And they're not necessarily going to tell you, but if you have a long enough and deep enough conversation with them, you start to level with them,..."

High speed is often a signal of high competence and craft rather than sloppiness.

"If you look at people who are at the pinnacle of their craft, you can basically tell how good the output is going to be of their work product by how fast they're going. If they're going really fast, a..."

Aim to have a functional, testable version of a product within the first 10% of the total project timeline.

"What it really looks like is you have some rough time budget for how long you think something's going to take. By the time 10% of it has passed, after week one, you have something that works that test..."

Speed is achieved by accepting that the first version will not be perfect and focusing only on core functionality.

"It means you don't need a pixel perfect design. It means you don't need to make sure that all of the little UI bugs and stuff like that are solved because none of that really matters. What matters is..."

Deadlines only work if they are treated as the highest priority (P0) where nothing else matters in comparison.

"The only way to make deadlines real is to take them so seriously that they are basically like a P0 problem, and everything else has to not matter in comparison to the deadline because that's the only..."

Hit deadlines by shipping a functional version early and using the remaining time for iterations rather than relying on upfront estimation.

"We do almost no estimating in order to hit deadlines. What we do is we ship as early as we can. The thing we talked about earlier where if by the time that 10% of the time has elapsed, you have a work..."