Product Taste and Intuition

"I think intuition is like a hypothesis generator and you're constantly generating these hypotheses and others are generating hypotheses as well. And you then take these hypotheses and you put them forward and you debate them and you try to find data to support them or negate them. And then you winnow it down into what is our working hypothesis? And from that you move forward."

"I also ask a lot of questions and I try to get to root problems and understand where people are coming from and what are they actually trying to solve. Sometimes people are saying, 'Hey, I need X', but they really want Y or Z. And trying to do that myself and engage and dive deeper there, but also to encourage our team to do that, I think leads to really good outcomes in terms of what we ship."

"Taste, sometimes I think we think of as this inaccessible thing that, 'Oh, that person was born with taste.' I see it as a skill that it can develop. I think is extremely important to try lots of products."

"So I tend to talk to my teams about, even though it's all machine learning, I ask them to think of this as something completely different. The recommendation error was one type of machine learning. The generation error is a different type, so don't think of it as just more of the same, think of it as something actually completely new instead."

"I think to really understand the solution space of what's possible, you have to be in the details. I mean, literally, you can't just look at screenshots or a pre-recorded video of a new product feature. AI is something you have to play with, and ideally you're playing with both the packaged up app or solution that you've built with it, but you're also playing around directly with the underlying primitives who are using the models either via API or via a chat interface."

"Most people are better at understanding the feelings and sensations that typography and logos give us than they give themselves credit for, because what we are as people are endless absorbers of patterns, and information, and all this kind of stuff as we move throughout the world. We don't take time to sit and digest it, but it's still coming in and getting logged, and so even as a non-designer, I think you can look at examples of logos where something's not quite right and be like, 'Something's not right here, I just don't know how to name it.'"

"What we do at The Browser Company is we talk about optimizing feelings. How do we want to make someone feel on the other end of our software? Do we want to make them feel joy? Do we want to make them feel fast?"

"One of my big mantras was, "We don't validate, we falsify. We are looking to be wrong." Many PMs, many designers are not in that place. They do not want to be wrong. They're looking to validate, and that's user-centered performance."

"We actually believe that when you start building the thing you actually start realizing more how it should work and how it should be better. A lot of times with the teams we tell them, "Just put it there in, I don't know, the first week almost. After you have some designs in place or some design ideas, just put it into the app and ship it to production." It's only visible to us so we internally can test it out."

"I know there's this saying of it's growth versus quality, but quality is growth. And if you think about how you can make your product easier to use and more understandable, that will of course drive people to use it, and use more of it, and have a better experience with it that they'll want to talk about with others."

"We all talk about product sense. To me, it's just a fancy way of saying you can make good decisions with insufficient data. PMs need as many reps as possible in making decisions, documenting the rationale behind those decisions, and then crucially seeing the outcome of them."

"AI, regardless of your background, is an amplifier. If you don't know what you're doing, you're just going to produce garbage faster."

"And so I think if you're just looking at a list of feature requests, you're not necessarily going to prioritize it in the same way as if you deeply feel those problems."

"Sometimes your product actually doesn't matter. At Uber, I learned this because, really, the price and the ETA at Uber was the product. Looking at it from a holistic perspective, we humans consume the entirety of the product. It's not to say that you shouldn't fix the bug, but it doesn't have as much of an impact as something that is more important to people."

"I think the more interesting ones are the what-if questions, like, what if this does work? Just use your imagination. Think about, how far can I extend the curve? What are the implications of that?"

"First of all, I think the biggest mistakes that teams make is they become very passionate about a solution to a problem they're trying to solve as opposed to do everything they can to develop empathy for the customer that's suffering the problem. And oftentimes, the empathy gives you the solution, whereas the passion you have for whatever you think the solution is might be 30 degrees off with the solution actually is."

"Quality is not luxury. Quality is not perfection. Quality means meeting spec, and if you meet spec, you're done. If you don't think the spec is good enough, make a better spec."

"One of the things that I caution product managers about is that you don't want to be too overly reliant on metrics and you want to also have an intuition. You want product managers who understand intuitively their customers and their product and sometimes you'll make decisions because you just know it's the right thing to do because it feels right and it usually is right if you understand your product well enough."