YouSaid · the spoken record

Adriel Frederick

lines on the record: 83
first: 2022-10-20
most recent: 2022-10-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Awesome. Before I jump into that, thank you for having me on here. It's just good to reflect about life and work for a little bit and hopefully share some insightful stuff with the folks who listen to your podcast. So thanks for having me. You can find me on LinkedIn, Adrielle Frederick. There might be one other. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one. And then how can listeners be useful to me? Number one, keep listening to this podcast because if everybody keeps listening to the insights that you're teasing out, a lot of things will work well. And not necessarily me. Another thing they could do to be useful to me is find somebody that's just different to you and talk to them for five minutes. That's it.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While taking a break between jobs, I'm studying climate change and energy because of my background. And I just basically became convinced that nuclear is a bigger answer than we're giving a credit for. A lot of the barriers are political, not technical. But the solution they're working on, I think is a technical solution to have some of the political problems we have around nuclear, which seems really interesting. And I am like really hoping that they pull off what they're trying to do.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look on the discipline, discipline of product management, demonstrate us. I think Justin, in terms of technology development, it's the team behind radiant nuclear.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a work. I have to go through the standard interview questions. But when I got to playing, sometimes when I feel like playing a little bit more, I'll see something like teach me something you don't think I know. It's a really good test of what you've heard me say a lot, empathy. I heard Chamat use it once and I kept trying it to see what it was good for. And it helps you understand how good somebody is at reading you, how much knowledge they have, and their ability to communicate and share knowledge. So it was like, it actually could test a lot of things at once. And a lot of times you learn something. It's awesome.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Last night I discovered mole on Netflix. And it's short from Muhammad. It is semi autobiographical about a Palestinian refugee living in Houston. His journey to seek asylum and live and work and date in this multicultural environment. He speaks Arabic, Spanish, and English fluently. Funny as hell, but also dramatic. It is fabulous.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, of course. It took an easy one away. Revisionist history with Malcolm Gladwell, just gives you a different look into things. And I'm also a huge cornered, like deep into modifying and tweaking and tuning cars. So there's this esoteric one called HP Academy that I'm into, but mostly listeners will not be to that.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The prize and probably now the new map by Daniel Jergen. They are books about the history of oil and the geopolitics of oil. It is a fascinating way to understand the world. Like the best books I've seen to understand geopolitics and how they work and why they work. It does it through the lens of oil, which explains way more than you might think. And so this comes from the early part of my career working in energy.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then able to think about what we as an organization broadly want to achieve and try to put the two shoes on at the same time and find something that works for both of us towards that common objective. And I think that's how I try to approach almost every conversation, especially being a guy who looks different, talks different, comes from somewhere else. First thought they might have is an unconsciously might be like this guy isn't one of us. Then once then make it clear to them that we have the same objectives, we're about the same thing, and I want to know what's going on with you so that I can help you achieve what you want to achieve. Trumps go away.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To having it for a peer in another function or somebody else on one of your teams. And the hardest part of it is they say getting in somebody else's shoes. The hardest part is taking my own shoes off. Basically going, yo, okay, I came into this, there's something I want to do, get rid of that. Now, just talk to this person and try to understand what's going on with them, what they care about for their life's goals and motivations, what they're scared of, what they're excited by, how you might be able to help them. Once I was able to get out my shoes, clear my mind, try to get into their head, then I could be like, all right, cool, let's find a nice, happy middle ground in the middle here about that something that works for both of us together. And sometimes for me was, yo, what I care about, I'm good. I'm going to let you do your thing. I've gotten into your shoes. I need to leave you alone. Like, you're good. Other times, you know, I'm ready to push. But I think once I have.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's nothing meaningful that gets done by any single person, even though people like to make you think that in their hustle porn that they post online. So it may be just a step back and think about what helped me be productive environments when I was productive and how I could do that for others. Because then that would just naturally help me. And so there were simple things like clear goals, helping people feel safe and understand that like you've got their back, making it easy to do their jobs. But my job is to make sure the processes for you doing your work and the people who you have to interact with are just buttery smooth and everything just runs easily. And so that was like lesson one. It was just like designing a good organization, culture skills, people, processes, et cetera, all necessary. That's one piece. The second is like empathy. For a step, but that was just like, you have to have that as a PM for your user. But I think it's different.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And somewhere along the way, I had that idea disabused of me. And I recognized the job's different. It's more about building a great team, creating the right incentives for the team on blocking them, guiding them, and helping them work efficiently. Those matter way more than anything else. And I guess one of the ways I slowly recognize it is like, as I started going up in my career, I recognized that if I wanted to have more impact, I couldn't do everything myself. There was just more that needed to be done. And in today's world, you can't do anything meaningful by yourself. You need a lot of people to do.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a long time, and I think this is, I and many others had this idea that the people who are the smartest are the ones who rise. The people who are the most technically competent are the ones who rise. People who are the best individual contributors of the ones who rise.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those are just numbers I'm putting out there. It's always going to be a got called B somewhere you are. I think depending on the stage your product is at, it should be a different set, a different bias. Very early on when you're building a product, you kind of know what the big things are. You've talked to enough people, you have enough, just go build it. You should not be playing around with experiments. It might be 100% cannonballs. Just go knock the big pieces out. Don't worry, it'll work. Also, the cost experimentation is time. So if you are experimenting on every little thing and waiting for the data to come in and then also screwing up some other part of the product because your experiment's on 50-50, it's just not worth banging the big things out. As you get more mature, the balance needs to switch in the portfolio. Probably aren't that many big cannonballs anymore. Probably just one. And there's probably a lot of the refinements that you need to work on. And by then, you have the scale.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just finding a lot of little things because they're easier to come up with and they're easier to design and think about. It's easier to build. It's easier to talk to your boss and see remove the number by 0.02% and like you feel good about doing those few small things. And so it creates this incremental thinking. We're just trying to do a bunch of small things that just don't meaningfully add up to something big. I think what's healthy is having a good portfolio because basically you say like, look, I'm going to have using our analogy from before. I'm going to have some cannonballs. I'm going to work on a couple cannonballs. I'm going to have a bunch of red bullets. And maybe it's 80% of your energies on those big cannonballs, 20% on the lead bullets. And like having a constraint like that forces you to choose the fewer experiments that are actually probably the really good ones. And it's not just a whole bunch of crap that you're trying out.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, that's a difficult and different question. So I'd say probably 60% successful, 40% like you should turn off. But within that 60%, I think there's a hidden cost to the experiment, which is that like you're futsing around with something small. You could have used your time on something bigger and more meaningful, but you're futsing around with a bunch of these small things. Some of the small things were incredibly meaningful and you needed to do them. So I think this is actually, it's almost like the same problem about, I don't know which of my marketing is best. You have to try a bunch of stuff and then figure out what was terrible. You don't know before you do it, before you do the experiment what the impact is. But sometimes what I've seen is let's take a bunch of them as a program. And let's say you have over the course of three months, you're going to experiment with 10 things. You might have been able to push on two really big ones. And what I've seen is there's a laziness, and this is not, this is broadly, this is not just a face one. This is broader. There is a laziness that can creep in where you”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. So, you know, marginal use, I think, is the fun word to think about because you think of, I mean, you think about the person who's right on the cusp. But I like to go to the worst. It shows me everything that's wrong. But the marginal user thinking helps you prioritize what thing to do next. So that example marginal user I was talking about. They're on a future phone with Edge, dude. There's a lot wrong that's just going to be tough. But I might look at that experience and go, all right, let's see somebody was like perfectly equipped, best phone and a great internet connection in that country. What would still be wrong? I was like, oh, language is still wrong. And the latency to their phone is actually still pretty high to our data centers, which is why it's taking a long time to sign up. I could still fix that. So that's how you can see the worst case to tell you everything, but then decide what is marginal by removing a few of the barriers that you know are difficult for you to attack and then see which ones are closer to being resolved.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, don't get me wrong, like I built the experimentation platform at Lyft. I'm a guy who loves data and loves using it and looking at experiments. I think it's just too easy to try to sit on your laptop, pull up a funnel, or pull up some charts or look at experimental results and think that's going to give you the clue to what to build. It's a complement. It's not the only thing. And I watch people fall into that trap of assuming, especially when you're working at companies with lots and lots of data. You fall into the trap of thinking that you're swimming in answers because you have all this data and just need to like tease it up. Just go on talk, you'll find it faster.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back. And so when you think that about that marginal and you say, you got to go out and look at them, talk to them, watch them use it, try to get into their shoes yourself as much as you can, and then make the call from there on what you do, but that data isn't going to tell you. This is going to give you the answer. I'll just tell you how bad it is.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I think in a lot of these data driven places, somebody will say, great, just create a funnel, figure out all this drop-offs of the steps in the funnel, look at it yourself, and then figure out what might be wrong and go fix those things. But what I think happens is often there's a problem that's orthogonal to that funnel that you can't see from looking at the data. And you have to go look at the person and talk to them. I remember one example we had is like, I was watching someone sign up to the very first time for Facebook in India. And they're about to put their name in it. And I asked them, like, so what name are you going to put in? They're like, okay, my full legal name. All right, cool. Does anybody in the real world call you that? No. And I was like, oh, dude, we're screwed. If you send a friend request, it's not going to get accepted because nobody knows who this person is. And in the reverse, if they find you, they don't know who this is. And so it was like, yo, you're going to look at some problem deeper in the funnel. Yo, what's going on in my accept rate? And then you're going to go TRA, that little mini funnel and then recognize that you had a problem that happened way.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, get their phone number formatted properly. Probably not. Oh, man, it's far from the data center, so the connection's slow. And they're on edge. Oh, that's terrible. And you just see and package up all those. It gives you everything that's wrong. And they can just start figuring out what to do with them. Something I caution people against, though, is don't use the data alone to figure out who the marginal user is. It'll give you a clue where they are and what might be wrong. We'll give you some hints. It's not going to give you the answer. You have to go watch them.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, it's the person who is just on the cusp of taking the action you want to take. I'll give you the concrete example. When working on registration, I would try to find a country where we had a lot of growth, but for some reason, our conversion rates were terrible. So we had a lot of traffic, but conversion rates were terrible. And I was like, okay, that's the marginal news. This is the person who is just on the cusp of coming in, wants to come in, as you can see by the traffic, but we can't get them in. So why? And when you go to the extreme and you find that person who's the worst, right? And they most likely, it was a person on a feature phone on edge trying to access Facebook in a country that was far from one of our data centers. And then you go like, all right, what's wrong with this person's experience? Let's go check it out. You're like, oh, you see everything that's wrong with the product. So then it gives you your list. Okay, the language is probably wrong. What do you think of that? Are we detecting the country properly so that we can.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I was like, you know what? That's fine. That's completely fine because if we didn't get that organizational momentum, that graph would have just been lower. So I could take the kink where it drops. It's fine.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's just go. There are downsides of it. Some of them are really funny. I remember looking at a graph of like retention versus number of friends and like what actually dropped with 11 or 12 versus 10 because somewhere in code, somebody had done something with 10 friends as the limit to help improve retention and it shut off at 11 or 12 and it came back up.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The organizational effect of that is galvanizing. So, what I thought was brilliant about it is, and as I've heard the stories, this is all secondhand, there was a lot of debate about what the numbers should be, what the timeframe should be. And at some point, Zakcha said 10 times, 14 days, go. And it just got people past the academic debate of like, all right, got it. As many friends as possible, as fast as possible, let's go.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That decision came before me. I saw it. I understood the data and I worked on this problem. What I thought was brilliant about that was not there's not the metric. It was the designing it to be understood and communicated. What I think is fabulous about it is that you're talking about it now because it's memorable. And it got people to take the right actions to start chasing the gold. There was literally nothing magic about the number or the date. But basically, it was a way of saying like, get people as many friends as possible as fast as possible. And if you said that generically to someone, they'd be like, yeah, I kind of get it. But yeah, go do that. When you create a discrete number and a discrete time and there is a concrete goal to chase and there's a number and a graph that everybody can look at and see, we are going to go make that thing go up.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sign up with phone numbers, which is now like part of the course. That was a cannonball getting SMSs delivered to people all over the world doesn't sound glamorous, really hard to do. That was cannonball. Good friend recommendations. Another big one. There's more. I'm not going to go into all of them. What I mean by cannonball here is that there was sometimes some really big fundamental changes you needed to make to the product to make these things work.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Above the full, create the right copy, like all of the things that we traditionally associate with growth marketing. You got to do those things. But to me, that stable stakes and just doing good product communication with your user. But then like, you got to think about this person who can't yet figure out your product and is trying to take this action and making it stupid easy, if you're not. I got like a million more examples of that one, but that's the game. It's not just finding some trick to spam a site.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Tom just hit it in a corner. He just didn't let everybody know that we were really going to change the way this product worked. He had a really smart guy working on it as he changed. And like they just hid off in a corner, rebuilt the product in the way it needed to be built to make it easier for us to operate it and scale it. And then put it out there and of course it crushed it. And they were incredibly modest about it. But it was not a hack. And it came from them looking at this deep problem of finding that thing that mattered and then saying we need to make a fundamental change to make it easier to recommend friends to folks and just grinding on it. And so one of the things I recommend for people when they're thinking about growth for their product is figure out what the core actions are and then grind on them. Think about removing them, removing friction in some of them, but just keep staying at it. And as you grind on it, you'll do little hacks. You've got to figure out how to put, you know, write text in the button and get it.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we had a great tool for seeding it. And that was not easy. That was not a hack. That was hard work. I also remember one of my favorites is something Tom Allison. Tom Allison, I think, now is responsible for Facebook app. And when he was working on the engineering manager for one of those teams, there was a change we wanted to do to one of these algorithms. And it was a big change. It wasn't a hack. And it was going to take a few months to pull off.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we would do this thing where we'd have recommendations. If you get one or two friends, you'll be off to the recess and we could find you more people that were in that same friend group. I thought about the way the people you may know algorithm worked. I get one or two friends. They would find your mutual friends and then would help find you more of those kinds of folks. And I was like, you know, what that does is it spirals you down one friend group, but it doesn't get you all your other friends. I remember just like looking at somebody using the product and recognizing that we were only taking them down this one path. So I was like, man, how do I see all your friend groups? And so we had this idea that we came up with that would do it. I'm not going to let that one out. And it was like game changer, like absolute game changer, especially for users helping them find those first few friends in a few different friend groups, which then meant we could get me down one group on another and just continue building up that graph just by using recommendations.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I think another big piece of it is reminding people that there's something interesting here and building the habit of coming back to the product. And it was also part of it. But like, we just grinded on those few things over and over again. And some of the really big wins were tacks. They were just paying attention to Lil Deal. I'll give you an example. I remember sitting one day thinking about how to.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can be a one-hit wonder. I have a flash in the panel into something that might last for a few months, but like people will catch on to it and they'll disappear. So, I think that stuff is helpful, especially early on, to get your initial traction. But you got to have something people like and want to continue using. And when I think back over the products we did that really moved the needle, they were all things that just focus on the marginal user and figure out to make the product easier for. It's easy to get seduced into thinking that there is a fast secret way to do it. And I'm like, no, the vast majority of it was just hard work and finding ways to solve the real problems. And what are those real problems? They were pretty damn simple, but we just grinded on them for a long time and just stayed on it. One, make it easy to find the product. Number two, make it easy to get into the product. Three, stupid easy to find your friends. And then once you did that, you were off the races. And like those were the things we were doing over and over again.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think growth hacking has traditionally defined, like finding those small changes you can make to a product that give you outsized impact, that is absolutely valuable. What I've seen people get lost is they assume that if you do that alone, it will work. You can grow your way into something successful. If you just find those few hacks and patch them together. And there's something about that that I find disrespectful to the people using the prancing. It's like you assume that they have no intelligence and they will catch on to what you're doing eventually. You know, they all sing, fool me once, fool me twice, you know, it kind of applies. So you don't have a product that's providing real fundamental value to people.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Yeah, our brains are good with linear thinking, not exponential. So I've heard that argument that, like, yes, this is increasing exponentially and you can't fathom it. I'm like, yes, then it's definitely potentially true. I completely see that possibility and recognize that I have that cognitive defect in being able to understand it. And even if it's a remote possibility, we should be paying attention to it. So I am all for paying attention to it given the, let's just say the high cost of the low probability outcome is still a high cost. And so it's still worth paying attention to.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am not yet as worried about these visions of them taking over. Thus far, and maybe I haven't fathomed what they can do, they still seem like tools that need our guidance to be useful. Even the most amazing, we've been seeing the image generation and I've seen some cutting edge text generation stuff. They can fool you into believing that they're like mere human capability, but there is a lack of decision making and judgment that I see coming out of them. I see them as being, again, extensions and useful, like text generation algorithms. A lot of them can't write a paper for you. And that's what I think people are scared of because it still requires your judgment to decide. Now, when you decide what the salient topics are and something you've read, let's say you're doing a book report, you've decided what the topics are. You can help you write the paper faster. For sure, but it can't write the paper for you. It can't choose the topics that like.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How In the future. Even then, you've got to make sure the person is still in control. I hear that thought and I go, okay, you build the interface. But then who's in control Right? Is the persistent still in control, or did they become a slave to the machine? And you just made a better interface to make them a slave.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going from that analogy to concretely with ML, you see, look, machine learning is going to be amazing at optimizing for a given objective, but it's not going to understand the constraints or strategic choices I need to make. The constraints and strategic choices that we need in the external world are always going to have to be decided by our person. You make that incredibly easy for people to do and intuitive for them to do. And then you go, that algorithm can then amplify their effect by making decisions on hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of individual decisions to take that person's intent and amplify it, given all the information that they can learn in that single context. So I think about it as designing an interface to make it an extension of yourself rather than a black box on its own that you just need more information to. Is that helpful?”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me refine that a little bit more. It's more about giving people the information that they can use for decisions that they alone are good at and giving machines the power to amplify a person's intent. So one of the ways I like to think about it is all software in any form, including ML, is just a tool, like a screwdriver. And you could try to put a flathead into a Phillips and maybe it'll work a little bit, but it's better to use a Phillips screwdriver. And we're tool designers generally, and especially in product development function, you figure out how much do I put into the tool and how much do I leave it up to the person. And I give the person the ability to choose what they want to do. I give them a screwdriver, a flathead, a Phillips, a torque, and you let them decide how they want to use the tool for the application at hand.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, great. So now with them flips do, oh, we have to choose where we want to win. And so I think one of the things we did that I'm particularly proud of is building products that help people see and understand that game a little bit more and decide where they want to. I think the first few pieces of that are nut chakras, but like that conclusion at the end where you get to, oh, wait, I need to create a tool that gives people information to them, decide how to play this game is actually what's critical.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's assume that you are a person working on pricing. And you say like, great, I have an objective that is I would like to win market share in a region and you less that's an algorithm to see, I need you to optimize prices such that you maximize market share. But what would the algorithm do? Drop your prices to the floor. All the way to the floor. And then you don't make any money. Okay, great. So then you say, okay, what's the next step on that? Let's give it a constraint. Let's set some target that we might want to have for how little profit we might be willing to take. Okay, go do it now. What if the guy on the other side is doing the exact same thing? Both of you will hit your constraints and then the game will stop.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And I think there are probably, I call them techno-utopians who would say feed all data to the algorithm given an objective, and it will do the right thing. And I was like, the reason that falls down is the algorithms don't understand long-term effects often. Nor do they understand how people might respond to it, nor do they understand your intent for the product. And I think it's really important for product managers to play that role. Like that is our job when you are working on algorithmic heavy products. Your job is figuring out what the algorithm should be responsible for, what people are responsible for, and the framework for making decisions.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to think about and i'm not privy to it but i would guarantee that there are people thinking about those same kinds of problems that other companies”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That there's an algorithmic solution to everything. I think as a product manager, and especially product managers working on systems that are heavy on machine learning or operations research and optimization, to think about where you want a person to make a decision and where you want the machine to be off to the races. And to think about that as a product design problem, because there actually is a human computer interface that you have to think about there. You need information about what's going on, let's say Lyft. What's going on with my market? How long does it take for somebody to get picked up? How expensive am I versus the competition? What are my goals in this market? And how am I performing today with that? Give somebody information, but also give them the tools to execute the right decisions without creating trouble. And that's like a product design problem. That's a first order product design problem like anything else that you have.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just wasn't in my domain. There is always a judgment call that has to be made between how often are they going to be ads versus how often are we going to show organic stories from your friends and family? How often are we going to show content that you might be interested in that's not quite in that group? Often might we want to show you things that help you find your friends or help other people find their friends? And that is a judgment call that varies for different markets in different situations. And there may be algorithms behind the scene that are making that call for every single person in real time, but there still have to be people applying some strategic judgment to that. And I wasn't in the position of needing to do that at Facebook. But once I saw how much I needed to do it at Lyft and I kind of looked back at history, I saw that it was there too. But I think there are too many people who don't see this.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's not just treating OPSA as a kind of first order requirement. The bigger picture for me was like when I look across my career is the algorithms need people to help make judgment calls. And so I saw it really, I got a heavy lesson in it at Lyft. But when I look back, I recognized it was there at Facebook too.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People out during a small storm. You don't know exactly how you want to respond. Every snowstorm is different. And a person has to make that judgment call and provide the right information to the product to be able to utilize it. Now, algorithms were handling a lot of that, and they could generally respond, but to be a lot more precise needed a person to help handle that, to make that call.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I'll give you an example. So Lifters in back in the days, Lyft is in 300 cities, probably roughly across the US. And in every single one of those cities, you don't have exactly the same pricing. It's a little bit different. And so sometimes you might need to make a change seasonally because traffic gets worse or because fuel prices were different or because there's a new tax or because your competitor did something that you need to respond to. Your algorithm cannot see this. It has zero visibility into this. And so you need a person in the loop to not only give that visibility, but also to make a decision about how you respond. Because I think also in, let's say you're in Chicago and there is a snowstorm and you need to change the way, let's say, you need to update pricing so that it handles the increases in driver pay that you need to create the gap.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I recognize that we just needed to own up to it, tell everyone we didn't get it right and we needed to come at it in a different approach that was actually more flexible operationally. And we did it. I think the big learning, at least in that business, was you have to think about operational requirements and operational control as a first order requirement. And I think when a lot of us were building product at a lot of the other consumer internet companies, you didn't have to think about operational control. You gave the algorithms an objective, you feed them some data, you let it run, you observe it to nation's doing nothing crazy and you tweak it, but you didn't need to have d2 operational and strategic control over the product. And we just needed to snap our brains into being able to put people in the loop with the algorithm.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A particularly bad week of this and trying to figure out what I was going to do about this thing, like, do we stay at the course? After a while, the answer was kind of simple, even though it was emotionally difficult. And the answer was like, yo, we got to rebuild it. There was no answer where we couldn't have a product like this. We needed some ability to be able to influence prices so that we could actually run an effective marketplace. The current solution didn't work. It wasn't as operationally flexible as we needed it to be because we didn't consider that requirement when we were building it. And we got caught up in the kind of algorithmic complexity and sweet sauce of it.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But this was a fairly big initiative that we worked on. We had experts in revenue management who were like PhDs and the people who wrote the textbook on the subject, helping advise us on this. We built this model. We launch it and you're expecting like this big change and it goes, boof, just does a little bit. And then we work at it and we work at it and work at it. And eventually we get it to be good. And it works really well in three cities. We start rolling it out to more cities. And it's a pain in the butt to roll it out to more cities because it's super complex. And eventually we get it rolled out to maybe a hundred cities. And then someone says, all right, cool. I want to change prices. And oh, we struggled for months to implement price changes. And man, the sentiment like around this product was just rough for a while. And I remember being on our walk after.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source