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David Meyer

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2023-11-01
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2023-11-01
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  1. “I'm overly confident in this topic. So sometimes you do, sometimes it's clear, right? But I generally have this unspoken or sometimes spoken contract with people that work for me. If you're going to leave the company, I'm going to help you find the best job imaginable. But first, I'm going to figure out if you're running away or running towards. Like if you're running away from the company because something's broken, I want to fix it. If you're running towards an unimaginable opportunity, I'm going to guarantee you get it if I can. But then some people don't trust me. A lot of people tell me six months, nine months before they're going to leave. And I help them get a kick-ass job. But some people don't trust me tell me, oh, I've already accepted this offer from blah, blah, blah. I'm like, what did I do wrong?”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, but that gets to, I mean, you have empathy, EQ, and human understanding to enable you to do that. And that's really key in a leader. I think a lot of leaders are formulaic. And I think people follow people that see them. When I'm in a room and I'm frustrated, if I feel like I'm not kind of in the core of the conversation, but I have a point of view that I think they need to hear. I just want to feel seen. If I'm not seen, I feel ignored. And I think when you give people feedback, you need to get their feedback on your feedback. You might not give them any space to talk about the why or, you know, what they're going through. That doesn't mean not to be resolute on the feedback. Like, I need you to do this. And if they, you know, if they look ashen and they, you know, they're like stressed out, figure out why. It's your job to figure out why. Because otherwise you've lost them.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Well, I think that's because of the human connection. I am maddening to work for. I'm maddening because, like I said, I need to understand the system. If there's something that's done that I don't understand, I'm picking it apart and asking a million questions because until I get the system, I might give wrong advice. But that seems like and oftentimes is a little micromanaging. I'm maddening. I think I connect with people on a human level so they respect the intent of my maddeningness.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Anybody listening to this? That's worked for me thinks I'm totally full of shit now. I ask, we ask people to do all tons of shit. And they're like, this is meaningless.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I was just going to go there. I have created so many detailed frameworks. And it's basically like I have mathematical proof that this is what we should do, but it's so fallible. There's something like the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. It's an economic theory. And the gist of it is the more detail you see, the more correct you think something is. You can have this incredible financial model. Like, you know, people do financial models in spreadsheets all the time. You can have like a very simple model, or you can have one billions of pages and you're like, they put so much work into that. They're really good. But it's bullshit. So the key is using your collective experience. And there's a lot of science and math in that to find holes in the strategy. Because humans are not mathematically definable and products are for humans. So overrigor is just waste in the system, I think.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “This is where it's unfair because I presume that the only way to interact with the world is to fully understand the functioning system you're in and then have intellectual rigor and observation of data behind it. So I just assume that that's how brains work, but not everybody's brain works that way. So if you assume that that's just free, then it's 90% art. But if that's not a natural inclination of people, then it's probably a lot more of that being done purposefully.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Hold on, so it's a good point. There's a difference between hustle doing the best you can. Like, okay, I'm having, you know, relationship stress. I didn't sleep well. I have a migraine. I just want to get through the day. That might be the best you can. You might be dialing it in at work because of some other meta. People don't want to suck, but everybody's world is infinite. So with that mindset, if you're talking to someone in marketing or sales or something, you want to see different behavior. It's the same as talking to an engineer. You need to enroll them in why you the missing opportunity. And just understand, be inquisitive, and be open as to why don't we attack it this way. Wouldn't this be opening up a whole new thing? And when I do that, I learn a lot. And a lot of times it's like resource constraints and CEO needs this, all these things, sales. So it's just like me, people thinking product manager is a god role when it's a service role.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Here's the thing, and this is the core of being a humanist, having empathy. I think everybody's a genius, maybe not at their job, but. And they're trying to do the best they can. So if you lead with that kind of empathy and understanding and try to enroll them in why it should be different.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Okay, I mean, we could like put yourself on your website is not marketing. You got to get in the mind chair of the person whose problem you're solving. They're going to look at your website. It's crazy. I've never run marketing, so I'm always telling them how they should do their job better. It's the same thing as the flippas before.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Okay, so it gets back to this data driven thing. I've known a lot of product managers that ship a product and don't observe how it's behaving in the wild through data. I think they're fucking insane. You spent all this energy and willpower creating this thing, and you're not obsessively watching exactly how it interacts with the world. That's crazy.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Because they told me when I was applying that I could get a dual degree in fine art. So I call up my dad. I'm like, Dad, I have this deep decision to make. Do I go into fine art or engineering? He's like, it's not a decision. You go into engineering. So there's a lot of things I put on pause that I love, but there's beauty in solving problems for humans. And if you're not inspired by what's possible in what you're doing, then you should take a hike.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, I mean, that's great if you're doing something incremental. If you're like, let's grow revenue 10% on a product that has product market fit. You can have no emotion then, but a lot of the job is not about specking the product and building the product. A lot of the job is about enrolling customers you talk to into what's possible. How can you do that without emotion?”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Because of this world we're in and these things we need to achieve, this creature you've created has an illness. And we have to have a funeral for this thing. But you mourn in a funeral. You give it the space to say, yeah, this really sucks. If you don't put words to that, if you think they'll figure that out for themselves, you're lost and then you have a churn like later on because they're like management's bananas, you know?”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “It's so ingrained in being a human. And it ties to the thing about willing something into existence. I think, and this will sound completely bananas to you, I think things you build, things you create that you love and are passionate about, there's a bit of you in it. There's a bit of your soul in the thing. And then someone's telling you to toss it out the window. You got to be kidding me. And so I think that when you're going to change target and people have been working their ass off to build something meaningful to the old target, you just have to give it the morning cycle. You have to be empathetic and human. You need them to come along with you on the ride.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “You're not, well, you might be stupid, but you probably have a point of view of why this is the right thing. You need them to discover that in their own framework.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, but again, I call it brain massaging. It's really manipulation. So you arrived at the conclusion you have to do this through logic, right? Through a set of assumptions and stuff. And it's because you've basically taken the other possibilities and you've disproved them. And so you take the engineer through the same thing. The engineer wants to do this thing. And you're like, okay, it's great that you want to write your own API instead of using a standard. That's awesome. It would be like super efficient. It'll be great. So how are we going to get 10,000 developers to understand that? How are we going to get the whole ecosystem to adopt it? All the things that you'd have to do if you don't invent some new proprietary shit. And then they're like, oh, that would suck. And then they realize they don't want to do all the work you'd ask them to do to build this whole community. And they're like, we should use a standard. We should use the standard because then we don't have to do all that work and I can work on fun stuff. But you need to take them down your mental travel because”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah. Yeah, and whether you're talking to engineers, engineers have to believe. Otherwise, they're just not going to have the same velocity.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, venture, you know, startups product, why do something? Why do anything, the founder? Why are they doing it? They're doing it probably because they're the kind of person that has a problem with authority and can't have a boss. So great products bend reality. And so you realize something could be made a ton easier, right? You're starting a company. You need to enroll someone in that vision and you need to bring them along because you want a co-founder. You want to hire the first engineer or something like that. You need to get them to believe or else they're not going to go through the shit show to try to get there. I think you will things into existence. I think we do impossible things all the time because we just don't think they're impossible. But I think human ingenuity can like create impossible things because you just really, really want it to exist and you find a way.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Absolutely. I mean, I think it's just a different challenge at every stage. And you've talked to Ali a bunch. That's what keeps him awake at night, is the innovation factor. Now, objectively, we seem to be accelerating, which is a little crazy to think about. Like, I use the product constantly. That's the only way I can understand it, you know. But I can't keep up with everything now. But again, we're, you know, a thousand engineers and more than 100 people in products. But I think it's a different game at every stage of company.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I think that on average, yes, because there's so many of them. And when companies scale super fast, they have to build big teams fast. And it's just hard to sustain that, you know?”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And then she's just like, well, you know, search at Google was kind of biased. Like, you think you're like, you ship a feature and it grows. Well, because the buttons on the page and everybody's there, you know?”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Know it's funny, I have a kid freshman in college now, and I just pay attention more to what's going on in college. And like, people hire consultancies because it's a top school of people in college to advise their companies. It's like a racket, a name which then employs a bunch of college kids to do the consulting. But there's the mechanics of product management. Most people don't have like the hunger and the curiosity to keep going because it's a thankless job in a lot of ways. You think you're going to be the rock star, you're the roadie. You need stick toitiveness, whatever that weird word is, to be in product. But the people that have shown demonstrated impact, you know then that if it was them, and that's a lot of the interrogation when you're, you know, hiring people, then they understand the mechanics of the job. If you were at Google during the aughts, you think it was because of you. So how they accomplish extraordinary things at companies that aren't ramping?”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “No, I can't. But things like active users, time is so precious. If people are spending time and your product, there's value there. Now, it might be never credable to revenue value, right? That's a business model question. But you're building something that has value to someone if someone's using it. So those things are hard to gain.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I think that's it because here's the thing I'm just as bad at this as everyone else. Like, I have these dashboards. I build a lot of dashboards. And if there's something I don't understand, I like to do data science until I figure it out. And then I look at these all the time. This morning I got up, I looked at some dashboards. Am I going to do anything with that? No, it's a fucking waste of time. It's like infinite scroll. I want to see if the next bar is green or not. I have like this dashboard where if it's a record day, it's green and I call it record book for all these different parts of our product. I look at every day. It's green. It's green. We're rocking it. But like, I'm not going to do anything with that. So it's a waste of time. Think about the time people spend. A lot of times you don't have a good telemetry in place. You don't have good BI systems. So there's humans spending time counting shit to put the number in to send out the email with all the numbers so people see it. And is that adding value? That's the problem. The human energy.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I mean, speed of what? Like speed of learning is everything. But that doesn't mean shipping. People talk about one-way doors, two-way doors, type one, type 2 decisions, and all this stuff. The key is maximizing your learning curve. And there's so many clever ways to do that. And a lot of it feels slow. You want to know why you are doing the next step before you do it. But then sometimes you can't figure it out that way and you just need to try. And that's when ship things that you might throw away and do it. Don't scale prematurely. Don't overarchitect it. Get the learning in.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Okay, so if you're a startup of one, then continuously you're continuously doing the loop of hypothesis validation, no, I'm wrong, I'm an idiot, got to change. When you are a company of 6,000 people, you got to be very careful. There's a lot of grumpiness to do it more frequently than annually just because a lot of people have built up flywheels that are organizationally complex to hit the goal. But then again, if it's existential, like why would you wait? Why would you do something stupid for six months because you have annual goals?”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Like you came up with a target when you had a point of view and hypotheses before you shipped and then you disproved those and adjust the target.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Right, so we modified that to be truth seeking because the point of being data driven was truth seeking, but truth seeking defangs the dark side of data-driven. Sure. So when, let's say you're going to build a product, you want to like ship early, ship often, but how can you figure out the early signal if it's not revenue-based? Because maybe you're not charging yet, of whether or not it's working, right? And you come up with a KPI and you set goals and stuff like that, and you track that. And we could talk about that for days, input metrics versus output metrics and things like that. But the key is as soon as you start reporting on it, it becomes the goal. So the data in your progress serves one purpose, one purpose only, which is to figure out your blind spots and where to ask questions. The goal is not hitting your target. The goal is seeing where you're varying or going way above your target why. And then you can dig in and figure out if you need to course correct or not. A lot of times the right thing to do is change the target. The target was wrong.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “So it's a complicated topic, right? Brix used to have this value called data driven, where we wanted everybody to be data driven. But it has a dark side because you can weaponize data, right? You can argue any point of view with any set of data if you're clever enough with numbers. Sure.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “You ask them where their biggest impact was, and if it has nothing to do with product, if it's like calming down an angry customer, but it has nothing to do with the value, so you just tease it out and then interrogate from there.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Yeah, and the fact that you have unadulterated agency. If I'm talking to someone that wants to move from another function into product, the main thing I try to figure out is, are they doing product now? If you're an engineer and you're not involved in the PRDs, and let's say you're in the field, right? You're a sales engineer, you're harping on engineering and product all the time to fix the shit your customers need until you see it working the way you want and that you're doing product management. But if you can live as a sales engineer or an engineer without doing that, if you can take the spec and build it without fighting, you can never be so if you cannot not product manage, then you should be a product manager.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “The argument is don't write unless you have to because it's miserable. People often think, I want to be a product manager. I'm the CEO of the product. I'm the GM. I call the shots. I can tell people what to do. I can create something. I can be, you know, Johnny Ives. I can create this beautiful thing and everybody will build it. And customers will love it. But that's not what the job is, right? It's finding these impossible compromises.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “And as you know, I tried to dissuade them. But basically, if you're rocking it as a product manager, everybody thinks you suck. Think about it. Okay, your stakeholders are, there's customers, there's field, there's engineering, there's business finance, right? If sales loves you, engineering hates you because you're chasing deals and you're not thinking about the long-term future. If engineering loves you, sales hates you because you're just doing long-term stuff and you're never helping them close the deal. Like me when I was talking to Phil Sofer, everybody thinks they can do your job better than you. People come to me and they're like, I could do your job better than you from all functions because they're so frustrated with the path you have to take in order to juggle all the different constraints.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “There are a lot of conflicting inputs. It's funny because a lot of people come to you wanting to go into product, you know”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “So, people like to talk about being customer obsessed. But I think there's the customer and then there's the collective customer. So you have to be collective customer obsessed. You never want to overfit to a customer because then that'll be a tiny tam, right? Customers, well, I never listen to them in terms of how the feature should work, but what they need to accomplish suss out if that's a common need from your collective customer. Because if you're serving one customer, if you're obsessing about one customer, but it's overfitting, you're screwing over the collective customer”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “I mean, I'm a human, so I'm terrible at cusper questioning. It's impossible not to lead the witness. It's really, really hard. Yeah, I've been doing this for a long time. I like to have other people that I know on calls. And then I ask them for notes of when did they see me? One of Ollie's cultural values, but I kind of internalized it truth seeking. You want to get at the truth. There's all the biases, confirmation bias. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the open-ended questions, but the problem is open-ended questions, oftentimes you can't get to where you want to go, right? So then it's just like open-nish questions that are kind of leading. How would it feel if it happened this way instead, rather than like, let me talk at you and show you a demo.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “And then you say, okay, well, they articulated a lot of pain in these steps. And you have a point of view that totally different from what they said. And then you kind of like try to tease the best imaginable out of them. So they say what you want them to say.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “I think it's walking yourself down their vision and then vectoring their vision into your vision, right? So people come in with a point of view about your product or their business. I use the same methodology for like everything I do. And it's just to go in knowing nothing and then interrogate the person until you feel like you could do their job. And so you really understand like they say I did this, this, and this, but you can't figure out how they got from here to here. Keep asking questions until you figure it out. And then you get a picture of what they're trying to achieve. But then you're like, well, the why behind it. They don't want to do all these steps. They just want to accomplish a job.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “You figure out a way to solve a problem, and everybody thinks you're crazy, but then you just don't really have time to absorb that. There's a saying, if something's impossible, don't stop the people doing it. It was said much better than that, though.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “I think it's a superpower. I'm not a CS guy, but I ended up being like an architect at Plumtree Software and like running engineering at a bunch of places. And it's because I don't know what I don't know. Code is not complicated. I can't write it well, but I can understand it. You can look at it as just a logical system. I'm a systems engineer initially. So it's not hubris. It's just curiosity.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “I got into this world through weird ways. So I didn't understand the job. I felt that the engineering part was more important, but I couldn't work on things that didn't have clear customer value, weren't thought through and Phil was amazing, amazing product manager. But it's easy to critique what you've never done. So everything coming over the wall, I was like, these things don't make sense. And I was like, you have to define these things upstream or else we're going to go down dead ends.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “I was pretty young. I wasn't that productive. The thing is, you need to build things that matter, right? The way I got into engineering is I was in QA and there was this engineer and his stuff had so many bugs. So I went into the source control system and I started to figure out the bugs, right? And he locked me out of the source control system. So I went to the CEO and I'm like, I don't know what to do here. I want this code to work. So he fired the guy and he told me to write it. He was a very like big-hearted guy, but he just didn't want that kind of attitude in the company.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “So, you know, I'm a civil engineer by training, environmental civil. And then I became a nuclear engineer. But I ended up at the startup, Plumtree Software. And the first running QA, then running engineering. And this guy that ran product, Phil Sofer. And every day, I told him how he was doing his job wrong. I was the receiving end, building stuff, right? So I just told him this every day. And then one day he decided to move on to leave Plumtree. And he told the CEO, I had to run product to like get back at me, right? I didn't want to do it. I was like, my job's too important doing engineering. I can't give that up. But once I got into it, it was incredible.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “The CEO is the CPO. The CEO is driving the vision of the company and knows the right thing to do. Every great leader in startups, you're bending reality. You're creating things that seem impossible. I think you will things into existence. I think we do impossible things all the time because we just don't think they're impossible. But I think human ingenuity can create impossible things because you just really, really want it to exist and you find a way.”

    2023-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source