YouSaid · the spoken record

Kevin Niparko

lines on the record: 50
first: 2023-09-29
most recent: 2023-09-29
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

“Yeah, I would say retool moving from internal tools to a low code app builder. I think this is going to be an incredible opportunity for product builders to be able to build with less technical tools, but be able to deliver on data-informed apps.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there are two use cases. One is searching for keywords, specifically around roadmap and specific topics that we're looking to dive into. And then the other is for more quantitative research, how frequently are certain terms or products or features coming up in sales cycles.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say go on a listening tour, right? So when you're early, you can ask the most fundamental questions about your customers, the product that they're using. I think that's the best place to start.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My sense is that we'll see a rise of a product architect role which combines the disciplines of product and design and engineering into one and uses AI as leverage and an accelerant to really deliver new products to market.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'd say always listen to their problems, but rarely listen to their solutions unless they've built something that is a working solution and are willing to show you it.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I think there are a few cases where we built instead of partnering. I think there is a lot of opportunity, more opportunity than product teams typically see to actually start with a partnership and really expand your product capabilities through what others are building. You know, I think on the surface, a lot of these products seemed really simple. But when you clicked a few levels deeper, there were a lot of dragons hiding beneath the surface and it was a lot harder of a challenge than we had initially given it credit for. And so I just advise founders and product people don't fall into the build trap, really put a premium on partnerships and go explore those, especially when you're thinking about areas that are necessarily your core competency.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, one of the first products that I worked on at Segment was around data warehousing and what we called segment warehouses. This was helping our customers get direct query access to their customer data in their data warehouse. I think back in 2015, this was very early warehouses have played this key role across segment has really been a huge growth lever for the business. And I think the reality or sort of how we got there was we went out and we listened to some of the most advanced customers that were building things around segment and had actually built some very hacky workarounds to load data into a data warehouse from an s3 bucket and they helped us realize what the potential could be for data warehouses. And so I think the key learning there is go listen to your smartest customers, sit next to them, really learn what they are doing with your product because that can really inform and give you early signal as to what's going to be big.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard because there's a lot of sunk cost fallacy, right? We spent a lot of time building this. We have a large investment here, but I think the reality is if customers aren't ripping the product out of your hands, that is your signal, ensuring that you have thought creatively about ways in which you can deliver this product to market, have really tried and exhausted all of those ideas. But when you hit product market fit, you will definitely know been fortunate enough to experience that multiple times at segment, have also been on the other side where customers are not pulling this product out of our hands. And I think you need to look at those hard situations and make the call that it's probably not the right thing to be investing in if you are not able to really break through.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think weighted a really long time at segment to introduce our second product, which I think was a function of our core product was growing really quickly and we felt like we had a lot of runway. Key piece to keep in mind is what does that growth rate look like one to two years out? I think that's probably the right time when you see that flattening or starting to stall out one to two years out in the future, you really need to be ahead of that. I really encourage folks to stay focused on core product as long as possible, but also knowing that you need to be thinking about the long term and new products and second products take a while to build, hone, and deliver to market. And so you really probably need 12 to 24 months to make that a reality.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the early challenges building segment was around scaling our integration catalog. So we have hundreds of different tools and APIs we connect to. Customers expect a really high quality integration with a new tool. These APIs are constantly changing and emerging today on the Martech landscape. I think there are like 10,000, 12,000 different marketing and analytics products that you can connect to. It becomes a really big challenge of building a cohesive and really high quality catalog for our customers. And so I think there were periods where we weren't investing the right focus in integration quality. I think that ended up showing up in some really hard conversations that we had with customers and realizing that we had probably been too”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think those are the three buckets having that framework around the three horizons, I think, is really helpful. What are you doing well today? What is emerging over the course of the next one to two years? And what do you need to do long term, three to five years out that's going to set your product and org up for success? You know, I do think that the allocation across those buckets are going to swing, especially in the early days at Segment would swing pretty wildly between 90, 10, 0 when we're going really hard at our core product really honing the quality of our core product in the early days to really periods of innovation where we're trying to expand, build new products and really solve new problems for our customers when it looked probably more like 30, 40, 30 across those different buckets.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And I think this gets back to the conversation on art versus science. When you start your career in product, there is a lot of learning and skills and craft that you can pick up by following the playbook. And then I think the reality is as you grow within product, science is a helpful start, but at the end of the day, it comes down to creative thinking and ways in which you can solve problems across the organization. And that doesn't always boil down into a template or a specific process. It can often be these really creative, funny ways of getting people to understand the work that you're doing.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think simplicity is one, accessibility for folks, and then memorability, the fact that it is actually something that you will remember, you will walk away from that conversation, remembering. We had a big campaign for segment, which was called, you know, What Good is Bad Data? It's just sort of a catchy phrase, which helps you understand data quality at the end of the day is going to be really important for your data strategy. I think they can also be really small. So we had this feature, which was essentially self-healing identity graphs, obviously complex, very deep in the weeds, but we called the project project Roomba after the beloved self-driving vacuum cleaner. You know, that sticks with people. It allows them to understand what you're doing, even if they don't understand the specific details of it.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the end of the week, it not only hurts your sales, but it also becomes self fulfilling and it spreads. This is sort of the dark side of the meme. And you can invert that and think about ways in which you can control the narrative and really build alignment around what you are building through exciting memes. You know, we had a few cracks at this at segment over the years. So these can be big ideas and campaigns.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With all the talk about how important it is to write as a product leader, I think at the end of the day, most people are never going to read your PRD. Most people are not actually going to review your 20-page roadmap. And so product memes are this concept of really simplifying your thinking down into the shortest, simplest, most memorable perception of your product and then distributing those ideas through the meme. If you think about memes, these are generally these distillations of really complex ideas and structures. It's about compression. It's about taking these different ideas and creating knowledge shortcuts for people. And so I think a good example of this is like memes gone wrong, right? The ways in which memes can work against you. If you think about a sales team that has lost faith in the quality of the product that they're selling, that in and of itself is a meme. It spreads at the water cooler over drinks.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To general mistakes teams will make. The first is going to be jumping too quickly to solutions. They have a great idea. They're sort of working backwards from the solution. That's one. And then the other is tying back to our conversation around demos, not giving a clear feeling and experience that you're looking to deliver at the end of the day for the customer. What does it look like to actually solve this problem for a customer? Why is that experience going to be unique to our position and what we are building? And so I think those are probably the two biggest pitfalls.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So prereads generally sent out 24 hours in advance if you're working up to the last minute of a product review, which happens from time to time, you'll create 10 to 15 minutes where everybody can sit down, read it, and think and comment in the doc. And so you really want to create the space not only for product teams to write PRDs, but also for folks who can really help sharpen the thinking to read it and weigh in on it. And so need to create the space and time to do that.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a key component of the PRD and the product review really comes down to a set of clear decisions that you're looking for the team to weigh in on. There'll be large questions that need to be answered and really being able to pull that out of the folks that are coming to product review through a set of very targeted questions here.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've gone through a bunch of different iterations on product review over the years. At times it's been sort of wildly centralized and seen as sort of a gate to projects before they get greenlit. I think my view has evolved quite a bit here, which is product review is really an opportunity for PMs to gather additional input and drive additional alignment across the organization. And so we run product reviews on demand as product teams are at a point where they want additional input, flexible list of attendees who can attend generally will include some folks from go to market, product leadership, anybody who design and engineering, anybody who can”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. That's where product reviews come in, which is really a forum to discuss product requirement documents and really go through them. And so being able to have a forum where product leads can discuss their learnings, share their learnings across the organization really creates that incentive and that forum to be able to get product teams to sit down and write and synthesize and work backwards from the product review conversation that they want to have.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I think a lot of the great product thinking gets encoded into this concept of a PRD or a product requirements document. These can take multiple forms, but I really think at the end of the day, the thing that you are trying to articulate is what is the customer need? What have you learned through the discovery process? What are the key problems you are looking to solve? And why is your team, your organization, your product uniquely positioned to solve those problems? It's not about solutions. It's not about how you can solve them, but it's more about what and why you are solving that problem. And so this concept of the PRD is really powerful. It creates structure for product teams to really be able to articulate and synthesize everything that they've learned from going out and talking to customers and encoding that into a document that everybody can engage with, read, give feedback on, and iterate on.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They do on the surface, or by comparison to all of the other ideas that are out there, this one is not the highest ROI thing that you can be working on. And so I see writing as really this forcing function for thinking, for testing these ideas and really understanding if that oasis on the horizon is actually filled with water or if it's just a mirage.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's this great interview with one of the writers of the Onion Dita. The onion, it's Satira Goldman. But there's this interview with the writers, and they go through the process in the writer's room for coming up with headlines and then the articles that they end up writing for the onion. It's interesting because they come up with like hundreds of headlines every week. They eventually whittled that list down to, I think it's like 10 to 15 articles that actually get written. And the difference between all of the ideas that get generated in the room and what actually gets written is that there's no real substance to the joke that they come up with in the writer's room. Right. So they give this example of a woman crying at the Penguin Museum. And it's like funny on the surface, but then you sort of ask yourself, like, why is that funny? There's no meat to that joke. And I think ideas have this illusory nature, which is on the surface they seem really good. But when you force yourself to sit down and write the idea down and really unpack it, either they don't seem as good as”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we've definitely had to adjust through the pandemic and now as a fully remote organization, think about how we structure this differently. We do have this concept of asynchronous demos as well to the extent that people are working in different time zones aren't able to make demos, can submit a recorded version of their demo, which is just as good. We'll watch it and everybody will give their feedback there.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of two pitfalls here. The first is that they become too high stakes. And so people feel like they need to put a lot of polish and prep into their demo. They spend a good chunk of their week on overhead and polish as opposed to the actual core components of the demo. And so that's why encouraging people to show docs that they've written, pull up the command line, really show off whatever that is that they've been working on in an end-to-end full value delivery, I think is really important. And then the other that I would say is not making it too performative. It doesn't need to be a ton of people, a huge group. It can be down to your product pod or a small team that's been working together.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Key unlock here, which is you need to commit to your demo a week ahead of time. So you need to say, what are you going to deliver next week? And then you work backwards from that. The times in which we've had demos that didn't go well, it's generally because we hadn't really set the bar for what we were going to deliver the next week. You know, it's amazing how much the demo or the product gets built in the five hours before demos, then deadline is a really helpful forcing function for being able to go from wherever you're at to a way of showcasing and explaining what you've built.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you know, one of the challenges with building product is you have to believe in this future state that better than today. That can be really hard for people because they don't necessarily feel it. They're familiar with the status quo. Changes really hard. Do you remember this example of Bill Gates going on Letterman and explaining why Letterman needed the internet? I think it was like in 95 and like Letterman's just like completely confused by why anybody would need to listen to baseball game on the”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Example of this was when we introduced personas, which was a new product offering an add on to our core product within segment. We really needed to spend the next year as the product team who was closest to the discovery and the customer needs going out, pairing with our sales team, and really delivering it to market, essentially spent a year in sales, figure out what needs to be solved and go do it.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. You know, I think it's tough to be a product leader in a product led organization because you're responsible for so many different things, right? If the product doesn't sell, you're the one who's on the hook. If your team is flooded with support requests, generally product needs to go figure out what is wrong with the product. If you're misaligned on margins or the product doesn't scale, yes, that's a systems and engineering problem, but also at the end of the day, you're trying to meet your customers' needs. And so I think the beauty and the challenge of being a product leader in a product-led organization is that you're uniquely positioned to solve these issues, even if they're not traditionally product problems. But I think what that really begs is, you know, somebody who can go out and learn really quickly, a bunch of different disciplines, and then go solve the hardest problem within an organization, regardless of whether it fits into a product bucket or an engineering bucket or a go-to-market bucket. I think a great”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. I think overweighting skills, specific domain expertise, a common one that I've fallen into specifically with hiring product people. The best product leaders within our organization are generalists can apply their craft to a bunch of different domains. And there are very few cases where we needed specific knowledge and skills to bring onto the team that was really the key input into a decision. More often than not, that is going to be something that somebody can learn on the job. And so you don't want to overweight skills instead really focusing on experience, the overall craft of product management, and making sure that they're at the bar there.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely value in getting a bunch of different diverse perspectives from your team on the quality of a candidate and working through these different dimensions of a candidate's experience. But at the same time, at the end of the day, a hiring manager is the ultimate decision maker. I view the hiring team as really an input into the decision, which ultimately needs to be owned with the hiring manager. At the end of the day, that's the person who's going to be working most closely with this person. And so therefore, they should be empowered to be the decision maker.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our strategy interview takes a few different forms. We cover both internal decisions that we are currently wrestling with. So sort of a live conversation and talk through how the candidate would approach it, as well as talk about the candidate's experience. But we don't give theoretical cases or external cases throughout the hiring process.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product strategy is probably the most difficult for candidates as they work through sort of their impact. I think it's really important to think about what is the overall direction of the business? Where is go-to-market at? How do you think about bringing together all of the needs of the business, balancing those into a cohesion strategy, and then being able to articulate that strategy and incept that into your organization? And so that's generally the hardest area to hire for. And I think it's one of the most amorphous to test for.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That first call that we're going to have, you know, it's going to be talking about career product experience, sort of a get to know you. And then we think about structuring the interviews in a few different buckets versus around product strategy, which is talking about big bets and decisions that this person has led within an organization. You have execution, which is how do you take that large strategy, translate it down into an executable roadmap, and then actually deliver on it. You have people management for CPOs and product leaders, and then technical fluency, which is, you know, we do run a relatively technical product and we're selling to engineers. And so we do expect our product team to have a certain level of technical fluency.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's really how we think about designing that role and spec that we are looking for, and then the challenges going out and finding and testing for those spikes.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hiring process really starts well before the first meeting, right? So there's a lot of internal discussion and debate and wrestling that goes into defining the role and the spec that we're looking to hire for. That is upfront work that will really pay dividends as you move through the process as hiring manager. A good example of this, we're hiring right now. We're backfilling a director on my team. A lot of our conversations internally are what are the sets of qualities both in terms of leadership product leadership, but also the things that this person had brought to the team that we are looking to persist or continue on. And so this person was a sales engineer, had great relationships with our go-to-market team, was a technical expert internally on the product. While we're looking for a great product director, we're also looking for those sets of qualities that are maybe less directly tied to the role and more complementary to the entire team.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know I made a lot of hiring mistakes over the years. I think there are really two hiring mistakes when it comes to hiring product people. The first is not really having a clear understanding of the role that you're hiring for. So there are a bunch of different archetypes that you can hire. Some product people really spike in strategy, some really excel in culture building and team building and people management and other specialize in go-to-market partnership or product execution, right? And so you really need to be crystal clear on what you are looking to hire for. And then the other, I think, is really being deliberate and committed to hiring for those set of spikes. You know, I think allowing a committee to dictate a hiring decision is never good. The hiring manager, the CEO in this case needs to be.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. At Segment, we had a bunch of really technical founders. We also brought in product focused engineering leaders early on. And so we never really had a CPO in the traditional sense. I think the biggest consideration is where is your founding team at? What are the biggest gaps that you need to fill really thinking about a CPO as somebody who can play the role of up leveling the product organization but needs to be complementary to the founding team?”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So finally, there's the good stuff, which is you're consistently shipping and you're consistently delivering high impact work. And teams in the state are generally going to be really high context. There are going to be high trust across engineering design product. They're very high talent density, right? So you have a lot of great people that are working there and they're empowered to take risks. This is the bar that you want to set for your entire EPD org. When you have a team in this state, you want to figure out ways in which you can keep it intact and keep it going and really get the heck out of their way. By looking at product teams through this lens, you can really think about what are the different strategies that you need to take to get them to continuously deliver and continuously deliver high impact.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the end of the day, you need to be looking at customer outcomes for segment, and as customer data infrastructure, we really think about unlocking use cases around customer data. So what are the ways in which we are actually influencing end user and customer journeys to improve the product experience for our customers through data? Really thinking about what is the end value that you are delivering for your customers? Are you continuously achieving that?”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then celebrate the heck out of it to really encourage that feedback loop to get into the mode of delivering for customers. The second seat, you can have a team that ships, but they are delivering impact. And so here are the pace of development is good. They're moving really quickly, but it's relatively low impact work.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, it's a pretty powerful model for thinking about the performance of your product teams and how you can get them to the next level. So if you just imagine this grid where you have shipping fast and slow, you have impact, high and low as the other, you can really think about mapping where your product teams are relative to those two dimensions. And so over time, there were really only four states that a product team could be in. You can have a team that's not shipping, and there are a lot of reasons that can go into that. Maybe they introduced a feature that led to an outage. And so there's a lot of fear on the team. Maybe they got a lot of feedback from a last product ship. And so they're reticent to move the needle. Maybe they don't have a clear strategy. And so they're in tweaking mode. Essentially, they're not delivering on the roadmap, but you really need to unlock this state. You really need to think about how can you get them into shipping mode, have them ship something really small.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think about product management is all about building great products that users love that are aligned with the long-term interests of the business. And so if you break that down, right, you have building great products, which I think boils down to great discovery and really understanding customer needs. And there, I do think that there is a highly scientific approach that you can take and repeated process that you can build around that. Then there is building things that users love, right? Taking those problems and actually translating that down into creative solutions given the technology landscape where the market is at. And that is going to largely boil down to an art which sits somewhere between design, engineering, and product management disciplines. And then there's, of course, making sure that where you are heading is in the long term direction of the business and that requires deep market understanding, understanding where competitors are at and where they're likely to move.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I think a really important part of the segment story was that the founders, you know, before anybody joined the company had really struggled to find product market fit for a few years before.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think there were probably two parts to that. The first is this trade off between speed and quality. People typically believe that this is a trade-off and you need to make a decision where you want to fall on the spectrum. I think one of the things that we've learned at segment is that the faster you ship, the faster you learn all of the ways in which you are wrong and all of the ways in which you can make it right. Reality and customers and procurement teams are very unforgiving. The faster that you get your ideas out into the market, the faster you're going to learn. Moving quickly is, I think, really a key to unlocking that next level of quality.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is leading to that perspective. It's through understanding that way of thinking and processing that you can actually refine and sharpen your own decisions by really understanding those around you and debating and openly understanding how people are approaching their decisions. You know, I think the second big takeaway is actually pretty similar, which is how they approach their trading systems, which is highly systematic. Bridgewater is essentially some of the smartest people in the world encoding their market understanding in this giant prediction machine and constantly refining that machine as new information is gathered, as feedback is collected from the markets. And so I think the reality of this is that, you know, most organizations, most teams are dealing with the things that are coming at them, not systemizing and building the machine that can help them solve future problems. And so that approach around being highly”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Verdrudder's definitely a pretty special place. I don't know how many of the listeners know what Bridgewater is, one of the largest asset managers in the world, also committed to building an organization that's all about radical transparency and honesty and ruthless pursuit of the truth. I think there were really two interesting learnings here. The first is around trying to better understand how people think around you to sharpen your decision making, especially in business conversations in the workplace. People are often talking about and debating opinions, right? So like Harry believes option A is the best option. I believe option B, and we're going to debate option A versus option B to figure out which one is superior. But I actually think there's something more valuable in the approach that is often taken at Bridgewater is really trying to understand how Harry got to option A, right? What is the data that Harry is seeing? What is the mental model that Harry has of the world?”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. I like to think analysts make incredible product managers largely because you're forced to think broadly about the business, really dive deep into data, both quantitative and qualitative and the signals that you can gather to really inform strategy. And so, you know, I felt like there was a great foundation there. I also think being in the early stages of a company, you end up playing a lot of different roles and seeing a lot of different parts of the business. So analytics took on the role of growth at times, of partnerships, of sales ops. And so you really get a unique lens across the business sitting in analytics.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I actually started as segments first data analyst. So I was really helping the early team figure out the business model, product direction, and go-to-market strategy through our own internal data. I joined right around the segment series A and being the lone data analyst at a very small data company means you were often the internal customer who's using the product every day, sort of the frontline tester for a lot of the new ideas, the dog eating the dog food. And so I developed this perspective on how the product should work specifically geared towards analysts, business intelligent use cases. And so I had really formulated a perspective on the opportunities that were sitting around the data that segment was helping our customers collect. And as Peter and the CEO and co-founders were formulating the product team made the hop over to product from analytics.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The faster you ship, the faster you learn all of the ways in which you are wrong. I think there are really two hiring mistakes when it comes to hiring product people. I see writing as really this forcing function for thinking, for testing these ideas.”
2023-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source