YouSaid · the spoken record

Josh Miller

lines on the record: 107
first: 2023-03-19
most recent: 2023-03-19
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

“Big takeaway from this conversation we got to get much better describing what the heck we'd built and why it's good for you. So I'm not proud of my first or last answer, but it is what it is”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try your best to not think of it as a browser and have a beginner's mind about how it works and how you might use the internet.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This past January, a couple months ago, we have started removing me from a lot of the product development process, which seems to be really healthy. So that has been the big shift this year.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is ostensibly a pair programming tool, but don't go in with that mindset. Go in with the, I need to talk to a colleague right now or a couple colleagues right now to do some work together. And it is absolutely fantastic.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to plug two pole. I think I'm going to put everything on Tuple relative to, you know, we run on notion we love notion. We love linear. But I'd say the one, the closet hit that I just cannot believe is not a hundred times larger company is tuple.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What would you like to ask me? It seems like a non answer, but my interview as a company are all ask me anything. And I find what people ask.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first TV show episode I've cried at, cried from in recent memories, episode three of the Last of Us. I was just, I thought I was watching like a zombie violence thing and I just was sitting there bawling so that one. And then I've been rewatching all of the Adam Curtis documentaries on YouTube. I'm a huge Adam Curtis fan.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Herald on the purple crayon. Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees, which is a book about Robert Orban. That's my number one PM book. So if you're asking from the perspective of the disciplines of people listening, that book is absolutely fantastic. And then God Save Texas by Lawrence Wright, who's one of my favorite authors. So if you're interested in road trips, politics, food, culture. So three very different types of books.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our interfaces to the internet today are the web browser companies, they have perverse business model incentives as big public companies that have lost the soul of the founders that they don't want to do that. They don't want to do that. So that doesn't mean we're going to do it. And in fact, one of them may win. And I actually think that this is something we're on talking about in our computer. I'm not trying to sell, we're not trying to sell anyone in our vision. We feel fully confident there are going to be many types of internet computers. And our Kmir may not be one of them, but we feel very confident that that is the future and the development platform on top of the web and the internet in these new interfaces will be the most exciting opportunity.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which means we need interfaces to the internet that are truly more robust than a browser that are more of a computer. And if we do that, then the most interesting opportunity on top of that is actually the things other people were built on top of this development platform. And if you look at this development platform, which exists today, the World Wide Web, the open”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Apple, they don't want you making web apps or applications for the web. They want you making them for the Mac and the iPhone so they can tax you when you do it through the App Store. And also surprisingly, Google doesn't want you making stuff more native and immersive for the air quote web because they want it to be indexed by their search engine. So there's a reason that the Chrome extension platform is one of the most underutilized opportunities. They view it as a loss leader. They built Chrome extensions just so they could, you know, have parity with Firefox. They don't want you making extensions because you have some immersive extension experience. That's not something that you can index in Google. And that's taking away from doing searches. And so I think we look at this and say everything is heading to the internet.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The web has that, and that's why you're seeing today. Why do you think Figma is in the web browser? Why do you think Figma's blog post was meet us in the web browser? Because as the development platform, developers cross-platform in one click, there's no tax. Everyone should want to and wants to make for the web. The challenge though is there's an experience gap. Native software feels better to people for whatever reason. The problem is the people that control our interfaces to this development platform that is the web, that is the internet have incentives to keep it from being as good as local software, from truly native immersive software.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“World changing then the first party computer itself, and so we have no doubt that in the next decade, if we're successful, if we still exist, Arc is a development platform, is going to be much more central to what we're doing. Building on top of these internet computers, ours and others than anything else. So to bring that down from reality, if you think about it, the internet, the web, is really the best development platform out there in many ways. It is accessible on every single device. It doesn't matter who makes it or the shape and size. It is free to access for individuals. You don't need money to access it. It's free for developers. You don't have to pay a license to use it. You don't have to, there's no 30% tax on what you make. And it's democratic. The best frameworks can win. And so in many ways, if you were to say, hey, in this future, we want to see what is the platform that we want to do, we should be developing on top of what has the best attributes.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is an internet computer, is an airquilt computer for this world where the move to the internet and move to the cloud accelerates and continues the tsunami as much as we think it will. And the way we represent that is we say we want to be to the web browser what the iPhone was to the cell phone. Yes, the iPhone replaced your cell phone, but it really was something much lower. And so we want Ark to be the iPhone for the internet and that yes or replaces your default compute your default browser, but whether or not we call it an internet computer or something else, it really is that interface, this new type of computer. If you play that one step forward, then what we're building today is we're building our equivalent of multi-touch gestures and the first party notes app, but on any new computer, any computer or computing device, the developer platform itself is much more interesting and lucrative.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I wonder my son is too. When he's ten what will his computer be? And I mean computer not in the technical again going back to words in the words that we use. I don't mean computer in the literal sense of my MacBook air, but computer in the human sense of what you need from your computer, your stuff, your applications and tools that people, where is that going to be? Where is his computer going to be? I think it's obvious at this point that we're going to have air cool computers everywhere. We already do. My car has cardplay. My TV is a computer. My laptop is a computer. I think that's going to be even more true in five years where hardware is commoditizing and it will commoditize even more. They're becoming empty shells that don't have anything on it. They are just vessels. They're just interfaces to viewing our real computer, which is out there on the internet somewhere. And so our view is that what we are building at the browser company.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The manifestation of that actually is if you smash your device that you're listening to this on right now, whether it's a phone or computer, other than being sad that you lost the resale value and there's a chore of replacing it and a cost of replacing it, you would not lose any of your stuff. So there is, imagine five years our entire computing life's lives are not on our devices on our computers, on our phones. They're out there somewhere. They're out in the internet. They're out in the cloud. Which begs the question, I remember when I was ten and I got my first computer, it was a see through iMac”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To cloud computing is everything in our technology in our computing lives is moving to the internet. It has been moving, but it's going to move even more. And what I mean by that is your applications are almost all today web-based internet-based applications, and they will all be soon. There was very, very few pieces of truly local only software or even local first software left. All of our files are moving to the internet if they're not all already there. So if you really think about your files today, and again, you ignore the word files, the stuff you need for work and your personal life, they're not sitting on your desktop. They're all URLs. It may be an airport PDF, but that PDF is probably out on Dropbox somewhere and you're accessing it as a URL. Your photos, your photos may seem like they're on your iPhone. They're not on your iPhone. They're on some iCloud server somewhere. When you get a new iPhone, they'll be right there.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we call it the browser company of New York almost as a misdirection because as you know from the intro, Vue Arc as a replacement for your default web browser, but we're hoping it will be much more. And so to kind of start at the highest level and bring it down to reality, one of the things that I've done many times in my career already is underestimate pretty foundational changes in how we use technology. I've appreciated them, but I underestimated them. Great examples, mobile. I think me and Herschel's first company would have been much more successful if we really appreciated the title way that was mobile. And I think one of those macro trends we're underestimating right now is the ship to cloud computing, the shift to the internet, which may sound weird because every big public company mentions Microsoft Azure, you know, Amazon Web Service. You hear about cloud, cloud, cloud. But again, that's kind of this business term. What I mean by the shift.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Detail sand latency, not going to do it. But also, Tupole wouldn't have beat a lot of the other competitors for me if it wasn't unbelievably beautiful and easy and simple to use as well. So again, I think it's like, what are the attributes you need to win in picking a market that the ones that you want to excel at and work on are key to that”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've seen this with a lot of, you know, in COVID, as I'm sure everyone listening has, a lot of the kind of remote work collaboration tools. A lot of them obsess to their credit over really interesting design details and product feature concepts that were imaginative and brought people together in new ways. And then the latency of the video, the audio was horrible because they relied on some third-party API that was significantly worse than Zoom. And so that's a great example where in that market, that category of software, you better nail latency. I think a great example is one of my favorite products these days of past years is Tuple. It's ostensibly a pair programming tool that just lives in your menu bar. But we, I use it. I'm not a paired program with anyone. It is the fastest way to talk to someone at your company. And they have an unbelievably simply user experience. The designer based on the own trance is incredible. It's a beautifully designed product. And it is the best audio quality I have ever experienced in a communication tool better than Zoom. So that exact same product with all their craft.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like that approach is good for those industries as a human being at the other end. I'm really grateful that they picked some reason to do it, whether or not it is part of their business strategy or not. It's a really wonderful trend as a human at the other end that cares about feelings. But I would say we actually think about it not as a we're focusing on the user experience over revenue or growth. We in fact picked a category of software. We're focusing on brand and user experience is how you get growth and revenue. And because we knew that this is who we are and if we were building cyber security software that you sell to government agencies, they are not going to give a shit about rounded edges or what color the button is or how surprised you feel with every member update though we didn't build cybersecurity software to sell to the government. So I hope that more people build things at the craft bar or something like linear, but that's how we.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love your product and feel an emotional connection to it and choose your brand, your product over the other? Almost not rationally, but emotionally. And so if you tie that back to everything I've said before, bingo, that is what we want to work on. That's what we wanted. We want to create emotional connections with people. We're creating that emotional connection with as many people as possible and delighting them with surprises and animations is the way you win. It's not romantic, it is practical. It is in many ways capitalistic. This is how we win this market, if you want to think about it that way. So the reason I hesitate to answer your question directly is, I don't think that applies to every category of software. And to be totally honest, I don't know enough about the ticketing space or the calendaring space or the whatever other space to know, honestly off the cuff.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A commodity where we want to be, but objectively, web browsers are interchangeable, they all do the same thing. Increasingly, they're literally just carbon copies of the exact same code, Chromium, with little tweaks, little tweaks around the edges. So they're all the same. It's a commodity market. And they're unbelievably lucrative. Browsers print cash. There is a reason why their own primarily by Google, Apple, and Microsoft. They're incredibly high margin. They're incredibly lucrative. Low marginal costs, the cost of revenue is incredibly low, et cetera, et cetera. So we have a product that everyone in the world uses where they're all identical, essentially, interchangeable commodities. And if you can get people to use it, you're going to print money. Attributes of those business and that product category mean you have to win on how much do people”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first is it's actually one of the most consumer pieces of software out there. People forget that. That's the opportunity to us. You ask someone in the street, what's your web browser? What do you think? They either won't know or they won't care. I don't know, it's fine. I don't know. But what pieces of software do your parents, your little nieces and nephews and you use? What's at the center of that Venn diagram? Your parents hopefully don't use TikTok and Instagram or probably don't. Your nieces and nephews, I hope, don't have a reason for email at the tender age of sixteen or a calendar. And a web browser is one of the few things in the middle. So it's an incredibly universal piece of software consumer unlike very few other things outside of a smartphone and messaging and maybe video calling in 2023 and a web browser. So it's very consumer, very universal. The second attribute is it's a commodity. I'm not saying that architecture.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Come with different attributes and things that will matter to their success. And so when thinking about starting the browser company and picking this category of software, Hersch and I were incredibly intentional about what that would mean for what would need to matter for our company. And so if you think about the web browser category traditionally, I'm not saying forward facing, I'm not saying it is what we are doing, but if you were to look backwards and take the browser company out of it and look at the web browser category, you noticed a few things.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'll say first I love those products or many of those products you mentioned, there's some I haven't really used. For example, our company runs on linear and has run on linear since day one. So I'm a big fan of that. So the way that we think about it is, so I actually spent two years at a venture capital firm as an investor called Thrive Capital. They've invested in Slack and GitHub and a lot of really transformative companies. But I was an investor there. I was a venture capitalist. It even feels weird to say that. And I learned a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot from that experience that has made me, I think, a better CEO and a better product leader. And one of the things I learned is Different ideas, product ideas, business ideas, company ideas.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's fine, but I assume when it was called a producer, a much more intentionality was given to communicating and talking and discussing what does a producer do? What's their relationship with design because no one knew what the heck a producer was? And so ultimately that may have been a failure in other ways. But that's one of the things we found tactically to be really helpful is whether it's a product feature or a team or whatever. Give it a made up name just to really get to the root of what you're trying to do there and not borrow too much from wherever you work before or whatever you've seen in popular media or whatever.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I know this podcast is about very tactical advice. So, one tactical piece of advice I'll give is whether or not you like. Idea of the storytelling team or something else. A byproduct of some of these experiments that we found works really well is when you give something a new name, it sheds a lot of preconceived notions of what the thing should be. We found that even with product. So if you say you're building a browser history feature, then people, the benefit is everyone knows what you're talking about. And the downside is everyone knows what you're talking about. And you show up with these preconceived notions of what it has to be. And so if you go back again to revalue ask what could be, in many ways the point of calling the team the storytelling team or the membership team or not having PMs is an org all this stuff isn't meant to be novelty for novelty's sake. It's meant to almost be a rhetorical tactic to make people think truly first principles about what are we trying to do here and again if at the end producers are called PMs?”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those individuals were reminiscing about their time there. And then what they all went on to create and the fact that even today on this podcast, I'm sitting here talking about general magic. So, I mean, to your point of hopefully browser company will have ripple effects. That to me is the ultimate goal. For me personally, at like a very emotional level, like if we could only be so lucky, like that, that to me seems like success in many ways”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's one of the best pieces of media I've seen related to technology industry. And it's really interesting. I think there are two types of people to just be very, there are people that watch that. And view it as wow, what a missed opportunity, or almost like a sad story. And I view it as if only I we could be so lucky to assemble that type of. A group of people like that. And the thing about that documentary for anyone that hasn't listened to it is essentially was the iPhone before the iPhone with the most legendary group of technologists working there. And it totally failed, completely failed by all traditional business definitions. But what stuck with me from the document is how proud and nostalgic and passionate.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For what it's worth, this is a great moment to share all of the beliefs that I've shared here on behalf of our team. These are things that we just originally came up with. They're moments like when I went to Airbnb's office early in my career and saw these snow white storyboard lining the walls like that had an impact on me. Even the idea that you would think in terms of that moment, you can actually see the lineage to, well, how do you want that person to feel when they open that door for the first time? I think it's just a great moment to shout out that this is a, we've accumulated a lot of doses of inspiration like that day at Airbnb that trickle down to us talking about optimizing for feelings, but that didn't come into vacuum. That is not our expression of what we've seen in the industry. This is building on the backs of so many people and companies that we've been fortunate to see.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I remember going to Airbnb's offices early in my career and seeing the storyboards lining the walls. And just being, I want to work here. So I actually am not familiar with Airbnb's videos and brain marketing. It's fucking fantastic, excuse my language. But yeah, I remember just walking around that office being like, oh my goodness, are they making a movie or something?”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ellis cannot be more different than Nash. Nash cannot be more different than Josh. There's some shared values. There's some shared beliefs, but they're very different. Did on the design team? Our design team is they are all over the place in terms of who they are, what they've done, their sensibilities, their aspirations, and whether it's the storytelling team or the design team, that can be hard sometimes, just to be honest. It's a lot easier to say, hey, we're the Acameo storytelling team. We're the Acamiko design team. We hire designers like this and storytellers like that. We hire, we hire people all over the place. We have an extremely diverse team, but in all senses of the word. But again, like the no PM thing, it's not without flaws. I can see why a lot of large companies over time tend to like, it's the Facebook way or no way, you know, or you're not good for here.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We like one of the things I also found at Facebook is there is a tendency towards homogeneity. As you know, there's sort of a stereotype of a Facebook PM, for example, or a Google PM, the contrast between them and the way they work. And one of the things we also have purposely done on the storytelling otherwise, let's hire radically different archetypes.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we have a person named Josh Lee, who actually met as an intern, he was an intern at Facebook, as a designer, then an intern for me at the White House when I worked at the White House, and then decided that he was over product design and overdesign and totally just jumped and be like, I'm going to be a filmmaker. And it's been making really fascinating kind of indie films for a few years now. And he's our video editor on the team. And so the three of them, and it's so interesting, you know, Nash's background she had appreciated.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we have a three person storytelling team. It's run by a woman named Nash. There is a gentleman named Ellis, who is a background starter as a reporter at the Verge. Maybe there's a publication before that, but I met him when he was a reporter at The Verge covering social media. And then he ran marketing strategy for Snapchat for seven years.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because again, the point of optimizing for feelings is not hire people who make feelings. It's higher than Rebecca's title is Data League. She runs our data team. But Rebecca is one of the most humanistic people I know. You meet her and you feel the warmth that you feel when you talk to you and you ask her what she does outside of board. And so it's not that data doesn't have a role. Actually, I'd say, for better or worse, data is part of our practice. It's more about like, what's that top level intentionality? What are we trying to do here? But yeah, we have a lot of people that data is either a noun they've had in their resume or it's been a part of their practice a lot in the past.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I had to predict, I would predict that the next, if we found that we were missing this discipline as a team, I think we would evolve Rebecca's team, which is technically the data team, and do something closer to a technical PM or data plus TBD. Again, it's all live, but the sun has even crossed our minds recently that we may be wrong. And what org might we create if we need folks that have more of a background of degree like this?”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever you want to call it, these verbs are taken up a lot of my time, and I do not have as much time to think and dream and design and to use your research. And so we're already feeling a breaking in our company. I think the intentionality, whatever comes next, whether it's the higher PA, you know, whatever it is, is leaders of the project should be picked for the project, not because they're in a certain org at our company. And if we ever hire people to do the PM role, we want them to think of themselves as people who make things and have lots of different disciplines and tools in their toolkit, not just the PM discipline. And of course, even that could be wrong. And maybe in a year, you know, we gave, you know, I got it totally wrong. We got it totally wrong. So we'll see. But I would also bet that of all the things I shared on this podcast so far, this is probably the one I'll come crawling back to your podcast in a couple years being, Lenny, you're right. It all blew up.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can look. There are a lot of PMs in Snapchat. So I know from my own experience with people that I respect from a product perspective that were indignant. They were never hired PMs. Their organizations now have PMs. That's probably for a really good reason. I would say also on our team, if any of our designers are listening, they'll tell you.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And for Wordsworth, Lenny, I think you're almost definitely right. I think I will almost definitely happen with us. And again, this goes back to the assume you don't know. The assume you don't know is try a prototype and then assume it's not going to work. So, even in my own experience, I remember getting to know Evan from Snapchat just a little enough to know how he talked about PMs at Snapchat. And it was. Never going to hire PMs that's that. Everyone's a designer. And I have no relationship with them anymore, but.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm talking about Rebecca through her resume. She's a much more so much about Rebecca. She plays effectively a PM role right now. She is effectively PMing our effectively our multiplayer team. But what was so awesome about meeting Rebecca is her and other people at this company have the mindset of I make things and I will do what I need to do to make what I want to make, whatever that verb is and whatever that discipline is. And that requires people that are multidisciplinary in practice and multidisciplinary in approach to their work. It's not that we don't hire PMs, but we want to hire people who kind of have a multidisciplinary approach and view things as I like to make things tell me how I contribute to making it. And sometimes they may play the verbs of a PM and sometimes they may be something else.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a data scientist at Cora? She got her PhD at MIT in, I think, behavioral psychology or something. I'm probably going to misquote that. But it's got some crazy degree at MIT. And that was a software engineer at Stripe.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we're increasingly hiring people that at other companies may have a PM title. I'd say we have two to three right now that could have a PM title at another company. I don't think we will have a PM org or a PM role because again, we believe depending on the, if you look, if you unpack the verbs that a PM does, I think those are verbs that anyone that we hire could do. And it really depends on what is the project and what are we trying to do. I think the thing that will become that will be unwavering is we like to hire mutts. And I haven't yet figured out a term that comes off as more endearing because it's meant to be very endearing. But for example, there's a woman in our company named Rebecca. Rebecca”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, you know, I'm not promising one day it won't change. But again, continuous through the company is assume you don't know, start by asking what could be. And let's just try some things and see what happens.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not me saying this experiment is ultimately going to be a huge success or right for everyone or even us at different times. But that was the intentionality of the membership king, the storytelling team and others. And even product management, we don't have PMs at the company. My title at Facebook was product manager. I love product management, but we view it not as a team. We view it as a leader, a role on a project, on an effort. And depending on the project, different types of people should be a PM. So we have a performance related project going on where, of course, an infrastructure engineer should be that air quote PM. We have a product project where actually I think someone from membership should be the PM because ultimately, yes, we're building software product, but it is really about serving our members in a specific way. So we should have someone from membership be a PM. Again, as you can imagine, as is going through the heads of ever and listening, that must break down in 18 ways. Oh, it definitely does.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's how we think about teams we don't start with first principles asking what could be, what are we really trying to do here? And what is the most direct way to manifest that, even if it's not how other people do it? In practice, one of the benefits of that is I do think it leads to certain pieces of content, for example, that people go, oh, wow, how, you know, I've never seen that before, but God, it's not, I think anyone's capable of this. I think we have an extraordinarily talented storytelling team and membership team, but I really think it's as simple as the intentionality of what is the team? What are their incentives? What are the disciplines on the team? You know, even hiring a video editor, for example, is a small company, but the video editor not having just like make a TikTok account go viral, but think about it more holistically in terms of the people. Again, there's a lot that breaks down. There's a lot that's not going well about it. I have no idea how the scales, the 500 people. And, you know, so this is.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be an investor investor relations. That could be members of the press, error quote PR, that could be just people out in the world, air quote marketing, you know, one day sales. But at the end of the day, it's telling our story to people. It's telling our story to people and thinking about that holistically in full stack.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We need to have a deep, genuine, ongoing relationship with them. And on day one, that may be customer success. How do I use this thing? On day thirty seven thou might be I have a bug. Do you mind helping me fix it? And on day fifty eight that may be, hey, we're shipping the mobile app soon. What do you want from mobile? What do you want on your phone? Other companies view that as different orgs and disciplines. We view that as there are a bunch of people at the other end of this that we are serving from the moment they touch our product for the first time. Let's own that relationship full stack and think about it holistically. And so that's the membership team. On the storytelling side, very similar, different type of person. Again, we're a humanistic company. So the theme here is the people on the company, the people at the other end. So if the membership team takes people from the moment they touch your product for the first time to the last, the storytelling team is about people we don't have the privilege of serving yet. They don't use ARC. They don't know what ARC is.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it always felt odd to me, and this isn't Loe and Jane's fault. Actually, in fact, you know, they suffered from this, that user research almost felt like a service organization relative to product engineering design. There'd be a PM, the PM would get assigned a researcher, and the PM got to decide how to use research and ask them what to do and ask them questions. But seeing the potential for when you really get to know the people that you are building for, that you're serving in a really deep way, it is extraordinary. How do you build product any other way? And so we took that to the extreme at the browse company, which we said, let's not think of it as customer support, customer service, customer success, user research. Those are just business terms. Those are just industry terms. At the end of the day, what we're saying is if there is a human being from the moment they touch our software or our products for the first time to, if they have it last”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source