Defining Product Vision

"At the most basic level, I would say that our product is our journalism, which we then marry with a really compelling and useful user experience, in a way that helps people really act on our journalism so that they can understand and engage with the world around them."

"We have the solar system metaphor where for us news is the sun in the sense that it's why we exist. It is what gives us our brand heritage and reputation. It's what instills trust. It's also where we just have the largest audience when you think about a funnel for our portfolio, and it's also where we just have the most amount of high quality coverage. But then that sun helps you give birth to other satellite planets or products that have a lot of the same DNA."

"One thing that's really interesting is that our impact and our business goals are in service of our mission, which is to seek the truth and help people understand the world, not the other way around. What it means is that the way that we think about impact is growing a giant subscription business. That business exists to strengthen an informed democracy."

"Vision of the company. So when this company is successful, what does that look like?... What that might look like is a big venture outcome that we all read about. And if you are both assuming that you both think the same thing but aren't talking about it explicitly... then what often happens if you have differences is they come home to roost."

"You need coherence about where you're going and the way you get that is by creating a North Star for yourself. It should be in three to five years in the future, it should be very low resolution. It should describe a thing that every single person who reads it who has any kind of knowledge that might be useful or relevant agrees that it is plausible."

"If we all agree that the feeling of something should be, I'm sitting in Dolores Park with my friends on a sunny Saturday, then people will just naturally build something that feels more consistent. You know what the iconography, the designers know what iconography should look like. You know what the communication and join pattern should look like."

"For strategy to be useful, it actually has to change our behavior as a team to create better customer outcomes... What's the change, or coming out with a strategy that'll align people because we have the story, we have the narrative, we have the sequence."

"The one thing I say is it's this one story that the CEO uses to drive success in marketing, sales, but also product. That it becomes like a north star, strategic north star for product roadmap, for fundraising, for recruiting, really everything."

"Strategy is really just an integrated set of choices that outline how you're going to win in whatever marketplace you choose. And so, a good product strategy is going to answer questions like what's your winning aspiration? But maybe more importantly, where are you going to play? What are the markets you're going to go after? What are the segments of those markets? What are the personas in the segments of those markets? And then, how are you going to win with a target audience?"

"When people say, "I want someone that's strategic," what they're really saying is, "I want someone that can come up with and articulate a compelling and simple why behind the decisions and the direction of the company and product.""

"The easiest way to take over a great big market is to define a segment of the market that is underserved by the market leader... knocking over that pin enables us to get to the three pins right beside it. And so now I'm established here as a beachhead and I can go get the next three pins."

"You do want to look for at least two out of these three factors, inflection points here if you want to make a really good product. Number one is there a... Shift is a step function in the tech... The second factor that we should look for is, what is the consumer behavior shift?... And I'd say the third inflection point, particularly I would say in enterprise but also in consumer, is the business model shift."

"Cash App, as a team we really cared about what we could do that was different and better than what else existed in-market. Being different is not enough... Being better is not enough... It has to be better than what exists today in a way that matters to the end user"

"The technical architecture determines strategy in a technology company even more than the what and who we're building for. If you build the right technical how and set yourself up to have a platform that can be adaptable, flexible, that is incredibly valuable over the long term."

"The vision is the nirvana state that you aim to enable for your users and customers in five to 10 years... It should be bound to your target market. So not too wide and not too narrow. And critically it should not mention your company, your product, or anything solution related at all."

"The second one is Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. Just thinking about in a very clear way, how do you build product? It's one of the best strategy books I've read and strategy is a hard word to even think about in many ways."

"You're just the keeper of the vision... somebody who's got to consolidate, get all the good ideas, prioritize them, decide which good ideas we're going to do"

"Disneyland, still the best vision statement of all time, which is the happiest place on earth. So once you tell an employee this is supposed to be the happiest place on earth, then you're signaling all sorts of things about how they need to pick up the trash and how they need to show up on time and how they need to wear their uniform."

"Lyft's vision was always anchored around transportation, people of transportation... Uber had... this notion of being a logistics platform for assets in the world, for transporting people, for transporting things... I think Uber was able to rebound much more quickly because of how diversified the business was."

"put forward a vision for what that team's going to accomplish that year, whether that is a directional change or even specific outcomes in some cases. And we spend time aligning with both Tobi, the rest of the C level exec team, even sometimes the board on what that is"

"At Canva, we're all about visual communications... one of the things that's very particular about Canva is really setting visions. And I'm in visions, not just in the sense of looking forward two, three years, but also visions in the very visual sense. We need to be able to see it. We need mock-ups. We need prototypes. You need to get that idea out of your head and present it to someone in a visual form that helps you talk about and communicate about it."

"The exercise isn't necessarily to say if people say they want to hit a goal, I say, okay, I added a zero, you have to hit that goal. It's more the exercise of what would it take to be 10X bigger or do something 10 times better? Because what you find is when you push people, they will sometimes think about the problem differently."

"What if we inverted the hierarchy here and made the map the canvas?"

"The challenge you practically deal with as a product leader is you end up recruiting, and managing, and growing a lot of executional people who can get stuff done, but if they want to get to the director level or if they want to get to my level, they need to get more strategic."

"Product strategy sits between the mission and vision and the plan... It forces choice to deploy scarce resources to generate maximum impact."

"What does the product look like in five to 10 years? Why is the world better in 10 years? And what is the most exciting version of that view?"

"I want you to imagine the progress on all these strategic pillars and what the headline of that newspaper article looks like. It's called a newspaper headline approach."

"if you think about strategy as a strongly held hypothesis about a way to win in the market and fulfill our vision, then you can say, "Well, our mission is this, or vision..." ... Strategy answers those questions. They say, "We're going to have a game. It's going to be an Apple Arcade. We have a hypothesis that's actually going to help us.""

"the product manager serves the business. That's their role... they need to understand business models, they need to understand how to do a target market, and what is a target market, why is that target market the right one to go after, and how is it going to grow"

"you have to state your vision and your mission and why you're here, every all-hands. It seems so crazy because it's core to you why we would build this, what it's purposes, why it's amazing... you need everyone to be able to... have a very cohesive narrative in their head."

"Imagine a world where someone can feel this way about their money.' And it's like, 'And then this thing will do that.' That's the product strategy. It's how you execute on it."

"Ultimately, we came up with the idea that we were in the belong anywhere business. Airbnb was not in home sharing, we were in belonging anywhere."

"The customer pyramid, briefly... is meeting expectations is the base, meeting desires is in the middle, and then meeting unrecognized needs."

"The category makes the product, the category makes the brand, the category makes the company."

"Legendary entrepreneurs don't just think they know the future is going to be different, because they're designing that different future. And the problem they're focused on matters to them so much that the fact that the problem continues to persist makes them batshit crazy."

"The mission is one line... you need a little more meat behind that... Articulating that, because until I said that to you... you might not understand why we invested in certain things or why it meant so much to us in terms of our user experience and the mission."

"We really do have to help people think about, 'It's not about the past. You're actually creating the future.' And we really talk to people and emphasize the idea, 'This isn't a name you're creating. We're creating an experience for you.'"

"It is only a tarpit if it seems like it's not. If it's just a regular idea that is hard, that is not a tarpit. The weird aspect of what we call a tarpit idea is an idea that a lot of people come up with and then it seems like an unsolved problem and you get lots of positive feedback for. Right? And you have a really good set of arguments that it's a really good startup idea. And that's different than a bad startup idea."

"I think for us we had a framing of, we're going to go trace a workflow. If you've got an idea, go express it through Slides or hop in FigJam and brainstorm with your team. Okay, what's next? Go design, hop in Figma Design. If you need to go to development after that, Dev Mode will help you take you there."

"You have to go from strength to strength, and you can't always just be obsessed with what's the next biggest TAM... we looked to the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the start of Figma, and it was like 250,000 designers in the world was what it said. Probably wrong at the time, but also it was a point in time and the industry is about to change."

"I would say don't pivot. Don't put scale. Don't hire that Stanford grad who simply wants to add a hot company to your resume, just build the one thing only you can build, a thing that wouldn't exist without the insight and expertise that only you have."

"Crazy Ideas... David will send out a blank doc to the org and it's titled Crazy Ideas. The Prompt is, 'Crazy ideas are ideas that we shouldn't, obviously, do. There's a 90% chance that they make no sense. But in the 10% chance that they do, they will make a 10x to 100x difference.'"

"Strategically we were all over the place and I said, 'We're doing service.' ... It was the type of decision that where I had to practice the professional CEO approach, which is, 'Hey folks, what do you all think? Let's take everyone's input. Let's put it all down on a spreadsheet.' ... I said, 'Sorry, this is what we're doing.'"

"WebContainer was the bet, that we made the company on. Just to be clear. StackBlitz was a browser-based, deep technology play on, 'Can we make a web assembly based operating system that can boot in a browser, in like a hundred milliseconds, and run full on development tool chains?'"

"Your brain is going to sort those ideas into believed, believable, kind of conceivable and inconceivable... A lot of the vision thinking and dialogue that happens inside of businesses directly activates people's inconceivable response without any self-awareness that, that's a personal problem, not a objective problem."

"To invent systematically, first you do need to be somewhat of an expert in whatever area you want to invent... then the second thing people don't do is they don't spend dedicated time actually thinking. They feel like, 'Invention is just going to come to me.' When I want to invent, I get away from all my devices. I go in a room with the problem I have, and I force myself to actually concentrate on what do I know and how can I invent?"

"The way I think about product work... first, feature work... second is growth work... third is what we call product market fit expansion... and then there's the fourth that is always forgotten by a lot of PMs which is scaling work."

"A lot of it was done based on this type of pillar-based thinking of this is our mission, this is what we're trying to do, does it fit within or is it outside?"

"Strategy is about how do we get to our goals? And it's not a roadmap and it's not a vision, it's something right in between that... Figure out why we're uniquely positioned as a company to get after that goal."

"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 that magnitude."

"to delight customers in hard to copy margin enhancing ways. So, there's kind of these three parts, customers, hard to copy, margin enhancing."

"As a very young company, you don't have a separate product strategy from a company strategy. The product and company strategy are the same. As you start growing, you have a go-to market strategy, product strategy, et cetera, et cetera."

"Power requires a benefit and a barrier, so he's taking care of the benefit part by saying a castle, you have to have a pretty good understanding of why it's a castle and not a shack."

"Strategy is a long time concept. You're looking far out in the future... if you focus on value that narrows what you think about and allows you to get rather concise and offer up advice to founders about what they need to pay attention to."

"the best way to innovate on the product is not incrementally split over all these different little surface areas, but actually to have a bigger, more step function vision of how this product needs to make a leap"

"At our scale we got to hunt for bigger elephants. And so I think at any scale as a PM, whatever your idea is or whatever your solution or the problem you're solving, take a minute at the beginning to say, could this be bigger? Could this be a bigger thing and more impactful than the initial idea, even if the initial idea sounds big?"

"Most people operate within a box... take that really wide view of what product is across disciplines... take that really wide view of what success for your product is and not have the blinders on its product or tech. It's anything. It's anything that influences the success and your customers' success."

"Our realization is actually let's hide our vision, which is everybody can create their software in the form factor that people do care. So what kind of tool do people use every day? Productivity software. It took us two years to realize we need to build a productivity tool. We called it sugar-coated broccoli. People don't want to eat the broccoli but people like sugar, so it gave them the sugar then hide your broccoli inside of it."

"Building for something you want the world to have is building for your value. You have some taste. You have some aesthetic. There are different energy. You need to create a balance. Too much of yourself. Then there's no users. Then you're just doing our project. And too much for business, you're building a commodity."

"We ship non-Lego pieces into our product. We're still there. We're still cleaning up part of it. That's a realization. It's like going back to the value part, it's like if you create this thing called a product or business, you attract people are value aligned to it. Then if you're trying to optimize too much on this competition revenue side of things, forced to introducing something anti-your-value, then the system, it's like there's organ rejection with your employees, with your customers."

"I basically realized that there's three key components to strategy... Vision: This is your inspiring picture of what the future looks like... Strategic framework: This is where you're saying, 'Here is the market we're going after. Here's what success looks like. And here are our big bets on what we think it takes to win that market.'... And then the third part is the roadmap."

"I think a good strategy is all about connecting the dots. Connecting the dots from this high level business goal of, 'We want to increase revenue by this much' to, 'This is the feature we're going to do.' And it might have many, many dots in between to help get people from one to the other."

"One of the great ways to learn strategy is to cross apply strategy from other places... consistency versus comprehensiveness. They said 'Is our product the kind of product where it's better to have consistent results all the time... or is it better to have comprehensiveness where even though the experience will be different each time we give you a result every time?'"

"If we solve this problem for this customer with this approach, we think they're going to choose it over the competitors because of differentiator one and differentiator two."

"The product vision template, you might actually recognize it from the Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm book. It's the elevator pitch template... It asks things like, for your target customer, who the statement of need or the opportunity. The product name is a product category. What's the reason to buy? And then say, unlike this alternative our product, and then say what this statement of differentiation is."

"From an entrepreneurship standpoint, it truly is about what insight do I have? Why am I so lucky to have this insight? Why in a world of a million entrepreneurs who are thinking, who are smart, who are trying everything, why am I in the position where I likely have an insight that others do not?"

"understand why people love you, double down on that and then whatever else you build around it... go back to, again, what's the core of our advantage and how can that be something we leverage in delivering a really great product experience for our users in X adjacent area or x add-on?"

"The Jeff Bezos thing, that the success of today was set in motion three years ago, that product is a layer cake and that you are layering on decisions, the success you're having now is a layer cake of decisions from the last bunch of years that you're doing it."

"I try to just close my eyes and imagine the future as far out as I can. It's like five years from now, 10 years from now, whatever. And it's develop a really salient picture of what that looks like. It's like, we could do this right now, it's okay. 10 years from now, what could San Francisco look like? Or some city? What happens to the parking spaces? Are there still parking garages? Are those parks now?"

"One example might be, why do we need a 4,000 pound vehicle to move a human three miles? Okay, well... Or even a couple of humans. We do an Uber Pool or a Share, and you move two humans or three humans, even then that's pretty inefficient. If you think about just the physics there, the energy expenditure."

"What I do specifically is I try to identify what's the best practice for something. For example, let's say strategy... Can you help me understand what are people at this company... where you think have done a great job at strategy or what are examples of artifacts? Then I get these artifacts and I reverse engineering them."

"Purpose is like, 'What are we here to do? What's our North Star?' And I think it's very hard to actually convey that if you don't have conviction yourself... you have to really check in with yourself on like, 'Wait, I know we're told to do this and this is what we have to do, but how do we really feel about it?'"

"Reach for the stars and land on the moon. And what I mean by that is that vision work is really important... vision work that absolutely does look at the entirety of the experience, a comprehensive approach, a journey approach, and thinks about how these various things may come together to be better, and sketch out the ideal version... show what that ideal version is, because if you don't know what that is, what are the chances that you're going to increment yourself to the right outcome in the end?"

"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."

"What would it be like, in my case, to lead with purpose and be decisive and lead with vision and to have other people felt like they're being brought along and listened to and participated and create safe spaces for other people?"

"Probably the craziest one is just that this thing is going to be the voice of the people. It's going to represent the voice of people. It's not going to represent the company's voice. So it is not a tech company deciding what shows."

"I personally have this belief that productivity software should be, and especially company software should be opinionated... Being opinionated, I think the value it provides people is you don't have to think too much or spend more time on the tool than you do on your actual work."

"Don't just copy, because Gojek was not an Uber clone, even though that was kind of how some investors or analysts talk about us, we were focused on a solution that was uniquely an Indonesian phenomenon, the motorcycle taxi driver. And this led to both product and branding innovation."

"Every time you see that the product efficiency delta is greater than or equal to four, three things happen. It is irreversible. Second is that you have a very high tolerance for it to fail. If Uber fails a little bit, will you say, “Oh my God, I'm going to really stop using it?” No. And the third thing is what I call the UBP, ‘Unique Brag-worthy Proposition.’ Every time humans unlock a Delta 4 product or service, they cannot stop talking or sharing about it."

"The core insight here is that you want your teams to feel like they're building a cathedral and not laying bricks. And I think it's really, really easy to do when PMs are really busy on a day-to-day to just be one task after the other, really execution oriented and maybe not take the time to help the team take a broader frame, open the aperture a little bit and have a view of what the cathedral is."

"I want to get to the future first and welcome our customers there."

"Even when I'm at work and I am trying to come up with a nice mission statement, when we're PMs will come up with mission statements, it's just crucial part and it's where the core begins. You want to get people excited, you want to get people inspired. There is nothing I can write that's going to be as good as what ChatGPT looks like."

"Generally you would say the CPO is responsible for driving the product vision for the company, and that product vision cannot be divorced from the company vision. Oftentimes this is actually what also creates conflict within the leadership team, where the product vision is... people are coming up with these grandiose plans... but then it's not really grounded in the reality of where the company is. Anyways, it's around product vision and making sure it's coherent with the company vision."

"You should be able to walk all the way from your company's mission down to the individual priority on your team and see the logic chain and why you got there."

"Product teams don't do product strategy. Product leaders do product strategy. They need to do the product strategy... that is the job, is to make these strategic decisions, the focus decisions, the bets you're going to place."

"And I think your audience in particular, is great software ever created by committee or does it more often reflects a vision of a leader or something that can allow us to... and I think particularly WordPress not just remaining relevant but actually accelerating growth over huge technological shifts over the past two decades."

"As a chief product officer, ARR is interesting to me, but it's not as interesting to me as ARR by customer segment. It's not as interesting as ARR by product line. It's not as interesting if I take that and then look at it by retention or adoption by product or feature set... When we start to put those lenses on it, they now become a really powerful strategy insight."

"Strategy is a little bit overrated for product. For most product managers, your strategy should be, 'How fast can I go from hypothesis to data?'"

"I really like to start by just imagining what is the future that you actually want Right now? I have a wall in my house in my office, which is my vision for what I'd like the world to look like in 2050."

"So we have this concept of chaos to clarity. Every idea starts in the chaos side, and then you have to work all the way to the other side, which is clarity. That very first step at the far end of chaos was quite an embarrassing step actually, because you don't have mastery at that point."

"So our mission, empower world design, empower everyone to design anything with every ingredient in every language on every device, and just take those things very literally."

"I once asked all the executive team at a healthcare company, what's the vision for this company? And they said, to be the backbone of healthcare. And I said, what does that mean? And they couldn't elaborate. Nobody could elaborate on that. And I said, cool, that's a tagline, but it's not a vision."

"A vision should be concrete enough where people can picture what it will be in their head. It can't be a fluffy... be the backbone of healthcare. What does that mean? I don't get it. So people need to be able to look at a vision and say, I can understand that we're going to get there one day."

"I love reading a vision that's like, we're not going to be like that. And that, to me, is so powerful because you're like, oh, okay, we're not going to copy that. We're not going to go after that."

"SAFe is not good at describing how you do discovery work."

"Our goal with Cursor is to invent sort of a new type of programming, a very different way to build software, that's kind of just distilled down into you describing the intent to the computer for what you want in the most concise way possible, and really distilled down to just defining how you think the software should work, and how you think it should look."

"I think that more and more, being an engineer will start to feel like being a logic designer, and really, it will be about specifying your intent for how exactly you want everything to work. It'd be more about the whats, and a little bit less about how exactly you're going to do things under the hood."

"My take is that vision is everything. It is really important to create a vision that you believe in, that your team believes in and that your company believes in. Because the reality of the product development cycle is that it's so messy, it's so chaotic... it's so important to be anchored on that singular vision because then any step along the way feels like forward progress."

"I think that when you're actually presenting a vision, one of the most important things is that there is a single artifact that the team is creating together... you want for everyone to feel incredible ownership and incredible passion about this combined deliverable, so that it's a unified team who believes a singular set of insights."

"Great founders, pattern breakers back cast, they say, it's a given that the future has to be radically different for me to be a big winner, and so, I'm going to look for radically different futures and work backwards from those radically different futures."

"The way startups win is because it proposes a radically different future. Disorients the incumbent and chaotically moves people to that different future."

"Movements have a five act structure... dream, leap, fight, climb, arrive. So, the torch bearer, the reason we called that is the leaders know where they're headed, but they might not ever see it super, super clearly."

"I always used to say you can't retrofit collaboration. You have to be collaboration-first. And a lot of companies now really take that for granted. But back in mid-2000s, this was kind of a new way of building product. And so we missed that bridge."

"What we envision is this entity that can help you with any task, whether or not that's at home, or at work, or at school, really any context, and it's an entity that knows what you're trying to achieve. So, unlike ChatGPT today, you don't have to describe your problem in menu to detail because it already stands your overarching goals and has context on your life"

"ChatGPT feels a little bit like MS-DOS. We haven't built Windows yet, and it will be obvious once we do. ... I think natural language is here to stay, but this idea that it has to be a turn-by-turn chat interaction I think is really limiting."

"But to get to recommendation, you're going to blow your user socks off. You have to give them an experience they didn't know was previously possible. And when you are in that place of doing something that no one has ever done before, that's when you get it. So the bar is all the way up there. And to put that in context, that means figuring out how to move money instantly. That means figuring out how to drop the price all the way from six all the way down to 0.35."

"Forest time is the idea that you make time within your week, within your month to see the forest for the trees... to elevate, to get some bird's eye view, to see the entire landscape and see the alternative paths through the current problems that you're escaping."

"At Thumbtack, we had principles about which sides of the marketplace we wanted to serve in which order and when we serve Thumbtack. So it was customers first, pros second, and then Thumbtack last. ... Saying Thumbtack last is the easy thing to say. Actually doing it in action I think is a very different thing."

"A strategy is a design for overcoming a high-stakes challenge. It's a mixture of policy and action designed to deal with a challenge."

"The kernel... if anyone in three is missing, something's wrong. It's not really a strategy, it's something else. There has to be an understanding of the situation. There has to be a guiding policy, how are we going to deal with it? And then the coherence and action is critical."

"Don't call it strategy, call it an action agenda. It's huge numbers of people out there willing to sell you advice on mission and your vision and your values... That's not true. Begin to try to identify the one or two key challenges that can actually be addressed and what are we going to do about it?"

"Uber and Airbnb are selling you the taking away of something, which is a weird thing to think about. What they're taking away is the friction of finding a place to stay. They're taking away the friction of finding a driver. In economics, we call those things transaction costs."

"Maybe we shouldn't talk about the concept of a marketplace founder. Really there's founders. And I think every entrepreneur... it means literally any founder is a marketplace founder. It'll be a choice they make after they grow as to whether they want to build a platform."

"The product strategy stack is a system that helps people understand what framework they're using in order to make decisions and what's going to drive value for the business. The top of the stack is the company mission... The second thing is strategy... The next level of the strategy stack is the product strategy. And the product strategy is the connective tissue between what is the company trying to accomplish and what are the day-to-day things that the product team is doing."

"One of the things that we said with stake that we put in the ground was the strategy doc wouldn't be complete without wireframes... the reason is that oftentimes when you talk about strategy in words alone, everyone takes away a different interpretation of that strategy, whereas when you actually can show people wireframes of what the product will look like when that strategy is implemented, it creates much more alignment."

"Strategy is an integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action."

"You have to have answers to five questions. What's your winning aspiration? Where to play? How can you win? What capabilities do you have to have that your competitors don't? And then, what enabling management systems do you have to put in place?"

"One- one regret is we should not have tried to expand horizontally. We should've just focused entirely vertically and- and served the tech community, you know, better and- and with more things, which is effectively what we're doing now."

"Choose your customers, choose your future. Choose your competition and choose your future. Choose the source of validation and you choose your future. Choose your distribution, and you're also choosing your future."

"Tension is at the heart of every art form and every innovation. What we do when we launch a new product, we say, we have this thing that can do X, and now the person is imagining what their life might be like if that were true. If they fall in love with that possibility, now there's tension."

"Google taught me the... power of thinking really big. And I know it sounds like a platitude, but really big. And I only actually realized that when I left Google and I started working with the other teams and these were all capable teams and I was struck by how many teams just limited the potential of what they could achieve."

"Most execution problems that I encounter in a high performing environment where everybody has the right intentions are actually not execution problems, they are either strategy problems or interpersonal problems or cultural problems."

"Twitter's biggest problem is a product strategy problem. The reason they're struggling is they don't have a real product strategy. Now, of course, attempts were made to create a product strategy, but it wasn't a real compelling, cohesive product strategy."

"If you can't see almost limitless opportunities to improve, then you shouldn't be designing the product. ... I feel like what we have right now is just a giant piece of shit. It's just terrible and we should be humiliated that we offer this to the public."

"In terms of the product, whether you're working for a big company or a startup, the core product management tenant is still the same, which is, you have to work backwards from the customer problem or the user problem. Building a technology for the sake of it doesn't really go that far, so you really have to focus on the, what are you building, who are you building it for and what problem are you solving?"

"To really set the new purpose for it, which was this is not a springboard for other products, this is not a traffic jumpstart for, it's not an app self feed, it's really about people that matter talking about things that I care about professionally. It's about knowledge exchange."

"Product strategy for me is where you are able to define that while somebody defines that this is the mountain that you're going to climb, but okay, how are you going to climb that mountain is basically the product strategy piece."

"If you are the leader in some core product, our takeaway here is you should continue to out invests everyone else in that core and then invest the profits that come out of that core into the next venture. Invest profits and not people"

"This design driven initiative was really about how can we think about the system architecture of our product? What are the key building blocks of Mixpanel? Where do they need to fit? How few of them can we have, which is a really important step?"

"four things. So it has to be lofty, it has to be realistic, it has to be devoid of any tech or limitations of today, and it has to be grounded in a very clear and potent problem. User problem."

"Once upon a time, write the problem and then write something and then write something, and then one day something happened. And as a result, the state of the world where we're trying to be. It's very simplistic, but in its simplicity of the magic because you are like, 'I'm a PM, I'm trying to solve problems.'"

"I write an article. I'll write in the headline because if the vision has come to pass, right? And it's gone well, someone's going to be writing hopefully some sexy headline about the thing that you've built. So I go to the future and I write the headline I would see. And I write the subtitle, just that, and I'll actually use the... I'll [inaudible 00:18:01] it into the page of TechCrunch or [inaudible 00:18:04] or something just so it looks realistic."

"I actually took a screenshot of the Google Play Store... and then I created rounded rectangles, just blank rectangles, four panels. And then I printed that out and I gave everyone a sheet and I said, 'If we solve these problems... what would be the screenshots?'"

"we want to be to the web browser, what the iPhone was to the cell phone. Yes. The iPhone replaced your cell phone, but it really was something much more. And so, we want Arc to be the iPhone for the internet, and that yes, it replaces your default browser... it really is that interface, this new type of computer."

"I really like the vision mission strategy pyramid... At the top is vision. Below it is mission and strategy, and then objectives. And this is a very simple framework... where do you need to go long term? In 10 years, if you could zoom up and look at what an ideal path for you would be, what is that? Write it down."

"I would pre-fill out the Miro beforehand... create them as headers in the Miro document... give everyone the space and the freedom to think existential and to frame it that way, 'we are going to be thinking in a five to 10 year timeline. Do not worry about what's happening today.'"

"You have to plan your chess moves out in advance. You have to really think before you act and build systems that were going to let you go sustainably faster."

"The thing that I learned from him was intentionality... You got to have intentionality. Where do you want to go? What is the world you want to create for your customers? And then create out A/B testing to get you the fastest route to that end state world."

"What Brian taught us was think unconstrained first. Think about a 15 out of 10 experience, design the ideal end state first. In most companies, the designers and PM start by saying, 'Okay, 10 is perfect. We can probably do seven. Let's start at seven.' It's a very constrained minded thinking."

"In 2014, he wrote a master plan for Slack, which was build a product people love, build a network. That's Slack Connect. Build a platform that makes all of your other SaaS products more valuable. That's Slack Platform. And then do some magic AI stuff... It literally was. There was a grid with four boxes in 2014 and it never changed."

"I talk about look in the future and then think backwards a lot, right? It's like what would we want to have done 20 years ago on this? We have very long-term plans. At 100 years you can't talk about this software project but you can talk about the mission itself, whatever things that will survive for 80 years that are left on this particular timeframe."

"The positional game is like, what is the territory on the map that you are taking? What role do you play? How much trust do you have of merchants? Do merchants want more from you or less? Are you the kind of thing they're trying to optimize out of their software spend, or the one that they ask to subsume all other software spend? ... If you do that well, the tactics are yours."

"We're not trying to be incrementally better, we are trying to be fundamentally different."