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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think the more stressful time was when I had to unwind up that product I did and actually make a better version of it. It was really a pricing algorithm change it was something behind the scenes that nobody would really see.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And I also have empathy for reporters too. The story that with the headline, some Airbnb hosts are annoyed by the child. I mean, come on. When it's not a great headline, I recognize that they have a job to do and sometimes they hold people accountable. Sometimes they're getting people to read a story that maybe has a bit of hyperbole in it. And so. They have to do their job, and I have to do mine too”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's like, yo, plan the work, work the plan. Go back to your job. That's what you're supposed to do. Solve for customers in the middle of this. And then you figure out how to communicate it well.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it clued me into why drivers were complaining. So then I went, got it. I understand what we need to do. So when there were all the PR was going on about AB5 and Prop 22, I was out driving and I was out sitting with the team trying to figure out how we're going to design a product that helps pay a driver for this, still keeps prices reasonable for users, doesn't create bad incentives where you end up with riders not getting picked up when they really need a ride because I didn't want Rick to break his hip. He still needs a price that makes him feel like it's okay for him to take that ride and finding a way to balance this out is actually more complex than you might think. And that's what I stayed focused on whether top 22 passed or not, I was ready for either side with a solution that was going to work for riders and drivers. That was the job. And so I think for PMs, it was so easy to get sucked into like depress.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I went from wanting to curse Rick out for making me drive 15 minutes to come pick him up to feeling like, all right, no, no, no, there's real value I'm providing you and driving him in just two minutes. But I recognized that wasn't embedded in the structure P. Rick would have been happy to P for my 15 minutes to come pick him up. But we weren't, one, giving drivers compensation for that, nor were we finding a way to pass that through into pricing for Rick. It's a much more difficult problem than it seems from that simple example.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Car. I turn on the app, it's time to go driving. Get up ping 15 minutes OE, and I'm thinking, dude, if I go do this right now, it's got my cancel on me. I'm not really getting paid for this, but maybe the ride is worth it. So I drive one over. I'm dodging traffic, pedestrians, drunk college kids, stop signs. I make my way over to Rick. He's coming out Chapinese. And he's about 80 years old. Jumps in the car. And then I push button to figure out the destination. It says the ETA to the destination is two minutes. So I was like, hey, Rick, you get this right? What's going on? It's like, hey, I had a little bit too much to drink. I'm worried about breaking my hip. So that's why I call right.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I say we, but I'm not there. I don't think the problem has been fully solved. But I think as a PM, listening to this, you kind of have to find the truth behind it and try to find a way to work on that and not get too lost in responding to the specific criticism. And so to walk this line between kind of going, yeah, some of this controversy is just part of the game versus like, no, this is really valid. to figure out where that is you got to do what is so cliche But like you have to stay close to your users. And so to give you an example of how I did that when a lot of the complaints were happening about driving on lift, I drove. I would just pick up the car and I would get up and I go drive. And I'm like, let me go feel this for myself. Let me go see what these guys are talking about. I could give you a story about Rick. I still remember this drive I did with Rick and Berkeley. So I'm at home. I just get in there.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When a driver's on their way to pick you up, or when they drive somebody far out of town and they have a deadhead to come back into a place where they can work, that's real. That's a real problem that I think we got called out for, that we weren't paying enough attention to and it got us off our ass to go fix it.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The really hard part about dealing with this is understanding what criticism is valid and how much of it is just because a source of power is being changed. So I'll give you an example. Let's see with Lyft. Rich medallion owners in New York. I had no sympathy for them when they were complaining about trying to ban lyft. Because when I was in New York City putting my hand out to get a cab, they were driving right by my black ass. And so I'm sorry. I'm like, I do not see that much empathy for it, but I think there were really legitimate complaints about the structure of driver P. that we're coming up and that were behind, I think, some of the complaints and some of the big stories in the press and some of the big kind of legal action that was taken, paying for pickup time.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think you're going to have any meaningful influence on the world without changing some pattern of behavior. And if you're changing a pattern of behavior through somebody who's invested in that pattern of behavior, and that's going to create some conflict. The most fun news stories to read involve conflict. So that's always going to make for a great story and put you in the press. For Facebook, it was traditional media and other social networks worth one side of the fight. And then Facebook was the other side of the fight. And then it became other tech companies now. That always makes for a great story. With Lyft, it was taxis and unions. And so you have to recognize that you're always going to have some bit of a challenge.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them down and Is there anything to share about what you've learned there? I think the biggest thing is that as a PM, you are a leader. You have to provide a buffering or damping effect on the team. And that goes two ways. Sometimes we're doing stuff that everybody thought was amazing. This is the best thing we've ever seen. You kind of got to bring people back down to earth and go, look, if that was cool, but we got a lot more stuff. We are really not there on providing the value that we want to provide to people in the weird world. So slow your roll and recognize that there's a lot more to do. And then when it's terrible, and the press is telling you that like, you're the worst thing that ever happened in the world, you kind of have to also go back and say, guys, slow down. We're not anywhere near as bad as what they think. You see and know what we're doing and they're going to misunderstand us sometimes. And so pull your team up at this point in time and keep charging forward with the mission. I think some controversy is necessary. So I may be in a different point on that one.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's something that feels like the approach to not doing it, that way feels colonial. It almost feels like we're a group of people sitting down in this like tower in this country, in this relatively sterile environment. And don't worry, we know exactly what you need. And these are the parts of the world. And it's just, it just doesn't work well. So it doesn't feel right to me also.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to reteam them. You have to retain diverse talent. And so you have to have an environment that values it, cares about it, and uses it and rewards it because it's part of the core system of the company. Then once you have that working, it becomes a lot easier to recruit because people see you valuing it and bringing it in and wanting it. And it's not just like lip service that you're paying. That's been what I've seen to be true in all the conversations I've had on the topic.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recognize concretely, no, I get value from this. And you are willing to take the other steps that have a culture in your company that utilizes it, then it becomes easy. Because when you bring folks in from diverse backgrounds, they retain. And that's always the number one step to growth, as you all know.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Makes you so much faster. It's not perfect. You still have to go out and talk to folks because we still have our own kind of monocultures that form that we need to get out of, but it helps a lot. To your second point about diversity and how to foster it. Man, from the beginning of my career, McKinsey to today at Reddit. I've been in rooms where everyone's asking the same questions about how to fix it. And here's what I've seen work. When you recognize that you get business value from it, then it all of a sudden becomes something that you look out for and you take care of. That's it. And there's definitely a lot more to it. But I think when it goes from, frankly, something people feel they need to do to be PC or for cultural reasons or because they're getting social pressure to do it to something that you really...”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How your customer, you have to go out and talk to them because you don't necessarily get them really well. Man, we didn't meet one that team. We would just argue with each other. We would think about how our friends would use it, how our cousins would use it, and we are covering a broad swath of the world when we were arguing about how to design a product. And I think the original leadership of the group team, I think starting with Shamat, but then followed up with Habi, value that and kept bringing in that diversity of again, ethnicities, religions, cultures from all over the world so that you could actually build a product that way. And it just makes you so efficient because an argument that might take two weeks to resolve because you have to go recruit a panel of users and talk to them and figure out what's going on. We kind of knock out in 15 minutes. We're just throwing it back and forth with each other. And I can't stress how much that's important for building products that you want people across the world to use. You got to have your teams look like the world.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I recognize after talking to a lot of the other PMs and the engineers, it's like, no, no, no, they want me for what I know from my perspective because they're really trying to grow this product globally. And being this guy from Trinidad working on growth, whether the perspectives I just mentioned was appreciated. I think I was lucky enough to be on the growth team and having leaders on that team who really valued diversity. I think about some of the teams I was on and they were awesome. I joke about them sometimes. I remember being on a team where I was a black Trinidadian product manager with a female Israeli engineering manager, a female Brazilian tech lead. Then the rest of the engineering and design team was from all over the world. We had Russians, Chinese, some folks from Slavic countries. And it made designing products fun. Because a lot of times when you're building a product and you want to think and get into it.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Man, that's a tricky one. So the two parts of that, what was that like for me? I think it went quickly from being a little bit of imposter syndrome. Like that date when I was sitting in that room, I was like, dude, I'm one of 30 people working on Facebook. Yo, what am I doing here? I don't belong.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, I remember we all sit into this conference room called Canada, and that was probably like my second week. It was probably about maybe 30 of us. Yeah”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was often shared and people couldn't just have one for themselves. So when I was working on user acquisition and designing registration for Facebook, that knowledge was incorporated into the design of the product in ways that I think other companies not caught on to yet. And I know for a fact that a lot of that thinking that went into designing how you think about a phone number and a device and use among one, it's how to say pairing with an individual has been helpful for Facebook's growth back then and even after I left, I know that's still been providing benefit. So that's a simple example of how just being in that environment and soaking up information could help product design in a way that I think wouldn't have happened if I and others like me weren't there.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to celebrate everyone's holidays from Diwali for Hindus, Idul Fatir to Christmas. I have friends who were fasting for Ramadan. I know a lot of the names of Hindu gods and I always love shutting my co-workers with my knowledge of this stuff. So that gives me this really different perspective that shows up at work. So I'll give you an example. Something I've noticed in almost everybody I've worked with in tech. As we work on mobile devices, people make an assumption that one phone number plus one device tied to one person. And growing up in Trinidad, I just knew that wasn't true. Someone who is using a prepaid phone could have their number change all the time. So that one person could have multiple phone numbers just because they were using prepaid. You have phones with two SIM cards. That was pretty common. And a phone is and definitely was a really expensive digital device. It's a computer.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really broad range of incomes. But then schools are a melting pot. So you don't have as much of the kind of class and income segregation with schools that you get in most of the West. And so when you have that kind of a melting pot of ethnicities, religions, media consumption, and kind of socioeconomic status in one place, you learn a lot of empty. Because in school, you're mixing up with everyone. One of the jokes we have is to not probably has the most public holidays of any country.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it's tough for me to not see that having some effect on what was built or how things were built or on me. So it's pretty meaningful. But I think one of the ways to see how it upvexings is actually just to understand a little bit about Trinidad. It's kind of its own little unique animal. So Trinidad is an island in the southern Caribbean all the way at the bottom next to Venezuela. It's a really diverse place. So ethnically it's 35% Indian like from East India, 35% African, 25% mixed. And that last 5% is everything under the sun. European, Chinese, Arabs, et cetera. And then for religions, it's about 60% Christian. But then that's a lot of different forms of Christianity and that's 60%. 20% Hindus, 7% Islam. Media diet is a mix of British and American TV. You have a”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's not something that I really think about consciously, but it affects me every day. And it's tough not to see it in retrospect. I was the first black product manager at Facebook.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, that is kind of related to that first goal I was talking about. I think the third is you have to set up the work that these teams are doing such that people don't believe all innovation is going to happen on that team. It can't be that like, okay, we're just stuck with the operational stuff and they're going to have all the fun. Other teams are still going to innovate, but maybe we're taking on something that other teams don't have capacity for, that the organization needs. And it's part of the core mission. So I think that's been a lot of what I think about when working on and setting up these teams is to make sure that we are part of the organization and everyone wants to hug us as being, yes, you are one of us, not you kind of need to go off in your little corner and behave.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like this thing looks so different to the rest of the body and the rest of the organization that you get some form of rejection of the ideas entirely. So I think what I've learned is a few things. So the first is the rest of the company needs to see what you're doing as being core and critical to the mission. It can't seem like these guys are just playing off in a corner on something that isn't related to what we are doing every day. Because I think that leads to some of the like resentment. Because you can imagine any team internally is fighting for resources and they look at this group as having resources that they can't get. They're like, oh, we got to get rid of them because they're not helping us do what we are here to do. So you have to be part of the core mission. Otherwise, you're going to have problems culturally with that. So I think that's one thing. The second is it has to be everyone's success. So if you end up doing something on one of these R&D teams, it should just be the R&D team that wins. Everyone should feel like.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's really good coming to this from being on the other side of it. If you think about where I've been, I've been on growth and on marketplace, which is as far as you get from seeing like we're on the new stuff kind of team. And what I've seen happen a lot is organ rejection.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are a few things that we've done recently that have been fun. We have an avatar marketplace that we've been working on recently where creators have been able to make art, put it up for sale on Reddit, and make that available for other folks to buy and use. And that's been performing amazingly well. The underlying technology behind it is NFTs. And we thought that technology was really important to use because it gives a creator. Think we're still in the infancy of using these technologies appropriately. There's a lot of like terrible use and a lot of uses that are wastes, but I think there's some gems in there and we're hoping to find some of those.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not really. I think we look about as a potential technology, but our primary focus is a lot more on, I see modes of interaction and platforms that are a lot more at scale today.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Awesome. Yes. So I'm the vice president of product management for Reddit X, which sounds like we're out launching balloons into space, but that's not exactly what we're doing. We're more of a team at Reddit that's thinking about the evolving modes of interaction with Reddit. So content, temporality, the audience that you're talking to. If you think about it, Reddit is primarily about a synchronous conversations between anonymous strangers about shared interests. Sometimes other people find answers to their questions on Reddit, but we're looking into the X team evolving that to look at problems like helping people communicate faster and easier about shared interests. Perhaps changing who they're having conversations with. Maybe it's about something other than a shared interest, or maybe they have something else in common that brings them together. Maybe bringing video, audio, and other media into being a part of the product and playing with permanence and things like that.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'll do real fast. So big highlight about me is I'm originally from Trinidad and Tobago, an island in the Caribbean, came to the US for college, AE, got seduced by consulting, mental that for a couple years, worked in oil and gas, electric power, heavy industries, loved that stuff. But also like writing code on the weekends for fun. So I thought I should move into tech and I did, worked intuit and helped develop their first iPhone app, which was a thing back in the day, worked at a startup growth team at Facebook for four years working on user acquisition, which was really fun and I could kind of like strong formative experience I had. Quickstint in biotech and then worked on marketplace at Lyft. So rider pricing, real-time driver incentives, matching riders with drivers, and then a lot of the operational tools that we use to manage our marketplace. And so that's a bit of my journey in maybe 45 seconds.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Man, that is hype praise coming from Jules. Jules is my boy. I love him. He's such a great guy, awesome product manager and dedicated to the craft that like, just like being in this presence.”
2022-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 did 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. 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