YouSaid · the spoken record

Kevin Yien

lines on the record: 96
first: 2024-08-18
most recent: 2024-08-18
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

“Or invite in X week's X months to see what plays out. And that's all it is, right? 10 minutes once a week. Super easy. And then over time, you can crank it up. And then eventually you're just like constantly writing these decisions down. And then it's like feeding its way back into you. It becomes second nature.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is probably just general advice on building any habit, which is start small and just force yourself to do it. And there's like that old saying around how do you start running as a hobby? You don't do it by saying, I'm going to run a mile every day. You do it by putting your sneakers at the foot of your bed unless you take your shoes off inside. Then you put it at the front door. Like you have your shorts ready to go. And you're like, I commit to putting on my shorts. And if I decide after getting dressed to go run that I still don't want to go run. Okay, fine. But like you build up to that thing. And I think decision logs are the lightest weight thing possible. And so you can start super easy by saying, you know what? Every Sunday morning, I'm going to scroll through Twitter. I'm going to check out hacker news, whatever it is. I'm going to see something interesting and I'm going to make a bet. I'm going to place my decision on this thing, write it down, and then set a count.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to quickly draw a diagram of this flywheel that I think Amazon owns today. I'm going to show how Shopify is like slowly planting their little seed to take over this and how Shop fits into it. I tweeted out and then I don't know that day there must have been like 60 Shopify employees that followed me. I was like, what the hell is this guy talking about? And so funny enough, fast forward, I've talked to some of the folks that worked on it and they're like, yeah, nailed it. Here's what we were thinking. Here's why. You know, it's no longer secret sauce. But that was a really interesting example of both doing a decision log, putting my rationale down on paper, in this case broadcasting it out, but then having that be a mechanism for it making its way back to me to actually better understand why did they make the decision versus what I thought because the reasons were a little bit different, but the outcome was the same. So that's like one interesting example.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way that I keep track of it is I do a little like hashtag decision and then write things down just as I think about them. And then I'll have a reminder to sort of comb back through on some cadence. And so I'll first use a positive example, which is a funny one. So if we rewind to, I don't even know what year, but Shopify had just launched Shop app. Their consumer application for what started as tracking your order when you bought something from a Shopify customer and then it's evolved into a full-blown Amazon competitor, right? You can actually find merchants and buy things through it. When they first launched it though, I was like, oh my God, this is so brilliant. Like they have completely hijacked this specific loop for consumer buying behavior via this very unassuming thing, which is package tracking. And so that morning I was like, you know, whatever.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many, and many of them, because it was a wrong decision. But yes, I do keep a decision log. I have a separate sort of practice where it's just a daily log, which is everyone wants the perfect note-taking system to me the best note-taking system is inspired by, what is it called? Like big ass text file, B-A-T-F. There's a funny blog post from like 2001 on it, but it's just you write everything that happens to you in a day in a bolded list and it's all in one big note. And that way you can command F bit, do whatever you want.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“X decisions in my job how the hell do I make more of them? Look around you, there's other teams that are making decisions. What would you do if you were in that position with the information you have? Great. Write it down. Say why. There's other companies that are doing crazy things. What are they doing? What would you do if you were responsible for the roadmap? Write it down a year later, see what they've shipped. Like you can just do this for anyone. It's free. And no one takes the time to do it. But that's how I think you get better at actually making decisions. It's just doing more of them.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Person has something that they can do to slightly increment in their craft. And, you know, sprinters have certain exercises that they do. There's something beautiful about pianists and piano scales where it doesn't matter if you are just learning the piano or you are a 30-year veteran. Like you're still doing your scales. And it's because it lays the foundation for everything else that you need to do. And so we all talk about product sense. It's this like super mystical thing that no one knows how to get better at. To me, it's just a fancy way of saying you can make good decisions with insufficient data. And the core of that is decisions. And so PMs need as many reps as possible in making decisions, documenting the rationale behind those decisions, and then, crucially, seeing the outcome of them. And so the natural follow-up would be, well, I only have to make.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will say there's sort of two different decision logs we could talk about. We'll focus on the former though. The latter is just as you're making decisions within your job. You should document those within a PRD, make sure everyone knows. It's just a silly, very small thing, but I think every PM should do it. The other decision log, though, that I think is quite critical is if we zoom out for a second every...”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's two sneaky things hiding behind that. One is the, yeah, I'll get to this in the next 24 hours. Maybe they don't. Maybe you'd really trust that person and they're the exception, but beyond that, there is something else to the real time interaction that can happen when you're commenting and responding on a doc at the same time. I think this is the part that often gets lost, which is The latency between a comment or question and a quick follow up from the author just pushes that cycle speed really long in a way that doesn't need to be. And so when people are trying to find like, how do you move faster? Like this actually is one of those very good examples of moving slower to move faster.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think a lot of people are going to hate hearing that because, like, oh my God, I have so many meetings already. Why do I want another meeting that isn't even a meeting? But that's the best kind then because it's actual work getting done, right? And maybe you carve out two minutes at the end for one really immediate discussion topic or something, but I don't think we give enough space in any type of meeting for people to actually think. And when you are just staring at a dock, you know, with your camera off, and the only expectation is to engage with that thing. Are a little bit better in CRISPR.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have so much going on, like you'll be lucky to maybe get a response. Maybe there's one or two people that chime in. And so even though we hate meetings and we love asynchronous, there is a lot of value to saying I need 20 minutes of focus time to interrogate something that I've done. And we're not going to talk. I'm literally going to force us into a room or Zoom. You're going to read this doc. I'm going to watch you comment on it in real time. I'm going to respond to your comments in real time. And at the end of this thing, I'm going to have enough really good input that I can do a huge rub on this thing and get to the next phase.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two areas we can go deeper on here. One is in how you get the feedback. So this is definitely a squarism. I think it was probably adopted from Amazon, which is around the silent read of documents. When you are all so busy and someone's like, I wrote a doc, you send it into the Slack ecosystem and everyone goes, please give feedback.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is probably getting closer to what a lot of people think about in terms of principles, but what are the things that you want to be known for when you ship a product? And one example there might be speed. And so if you say speed is more important than consistency of data, that's a huge trade-off and constraint that you can give the team. Oh my God, if an engineer here is, I don't need real-time consistency of data, I can do so much cool stuff. and easily accomplish that speed thing. And so that's just like a very technical example, maybe.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So beyond customer segment what their specific role is, I think another one would be we can loosely call it jobs to be done, even though I know that's becoming an increasingly loaded term. What's the thing they're trying to do and how many different pathways are you willing to entertain around it? That's another one that I would think about, depending on what you're building, there's availability. So do you care about desktop web, mobile web, native mobile, et cetera? Maybe another one to think through just as an example would be.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you remove decisions right? Because this, I think, is like maybe a trite phrase, but the best decision is no decision. Like if you don't even have to think about the decision, the team is that much more effective.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. The best word to describe the perimeter is just constraints. At the end of the day, you should be adding as many constraints as reasonable in order to let engineers and designers come up with the most creative solutions for whatever you're trying to do. And so, again, if we just stay focused on this point of sale example, one constraint would be, who the hell are we serving? Are we trying to go after sit-down restaurants that are serving five different courses and have a 200-item wine list? Or are we trying to serve the taco truck? Those will lead to very different spaces. And if you leave both on the table, the lack of that constraint makes designing a good solution that much harder. There are instances where you actually can't apply that many constraints. But I bet that if you push on enough different axes, you eventually scope it down to a point where it feels really good for the team. And it's just about”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to make it seem like it was me against everyone because I was definitely not the case. I think the starting engineers and designers on that team really cared about the quality of what they built too. That's a pretty structural sort of DNA for a team as well. If you don't start with that and as a comparison, you have a team that really prides themselves on shipping fast and meeting deadlines really prescriptively, you might end up in a different world or your role as a PM might be a little bit more challenging if you want to push on this stuff. So I do think you have to. Take into account what is the DNA of the team, and then can you exploit that, which I was able to do? Or do you actually have some change management to put into effect if you believe that it's worthwhile?”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. I will say, so one on that, the CDO at Mutiny, Charlie, she always repeated to me nonstop, keep the main thing, the main thing, and would just say it ad nauseum. And I'm really glad that she did. The one excuse I don't want to give folks is as you progress in your career, you have to walk and chew gum at the same time. You can't say, oh, I'm only focused on this thing over here so other folks handle that. Like you do have to figure out how to do a little bit more at the same time, but prioritization does play a factor.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Calibration, or at least like a spring cleaning of what's everything I'm doing and how much do these things actually matter to getting value to a customer. Because as a company gets bigger, as teams get more complex, it's very easy and natural to spend more time on things that are internally focused and not externally focused. And I think we just all have to have like hypersensitive antenna to that so that we don't fall prey to, well, the way that my job is described is to do these things, but really it's the outcome again of put something in a customer's hand that solves a problem and it's amazing.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely don't think it was obvious to everyone. And I can definitely say that because, you know, we were given a pretty strict deadline that we needed to launch by. And I pushed it out three times. And that's not because of this one animation, but it's because of a series of decisions where we said, this is what we believe we need to ship, and this matters much more than hitting some artificial external GA date. This other aspect that I think And they're like, I'm involved in so many processes and I have to talk to this person and talk to that person. All that might be true, but I think there needs to be a”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had on iPads and be like, here's an order, pop it in, and we would see where they would sort of like flinch or hesitate because the animation was too slow and they thought, I can't tap it yet or something related to that. And so it's easy, I think, for a PM to say that's not my responsibility. I define the requirements, have a menu group that goes to the next level, design or engineer, figure it out. No way. Like that's fully on you and you better be involved with those details.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you've seen a bartender tap on one of these, I mean, it is muscle memory to the max. They're not even looking at the thing and just punching in the order blindfolded. And it's rapid fast. On the other hand, you have people who are entering the workforce for the first time. They've never used the point of sale. And so we have to serve both of these equally well. How do you deal with that level of speed, but also the ease of use that anyone can learn it for the first time? And so there was this interaction that we really cared about, which was when you tap on a menu group, what's the animation to pop you into that next level? This seems like such a small thing, but it made the difference in how easy it was to adopt for a lot of the restaurants. And so a designer and myself spent like literally an entire week just fine-tuning how many milliseconds it would take to pop in and out so that it felt right. And we actually brought in servers and bartenders to play with the project.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On it, and then it pops the screen in so you go to the next level of like the hierarchy. So, example would be you have a wine button, you tap it, and you see your reds, whites, etc. You think about the people that we were trying to serve, there's the restaurants that were coming from a really old legacy.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The key point I want to make is I think it is tempting when we think about engineering product in design to draw these really clear swim lanes and say, you do X, I do Y, don't tread on my area. But you need these murky overlaps in order to build something really good. And so even if the engineers are going to build a better product than you and the designers are going to design something better than you, you need to come with a strong opinion and you need to do the legwork to get their trust so they actually care about your opinion in the first place. Okay, so time for mini story. So Square, we're building a point of sale for restaurants. And if you've ever seen one of these in a restaurant, there's this sort of grid of tiles that they tap to enter your order when you're sitting down for dinner. And we were developing one and there's this concept of a menu group. So it's a little box.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“PMs are just strategy high in the clouds. All they do is kick things off. You need to be obsessed about the final deliverable and whether or not value is actually getting to the customer. And I have like a really trite example of this if you want to go down it.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I was very lucky. Shout out to Bruce Bell, who was my manager at the time, who was an ex designer at the time, GM, and declared sort of that starting ratio. So anyways, with that setup. They all had sort of like an opinion. They had seen PRDs in the past. They weren't quite sure what the purpose of it actually was because they had designs already. They had something to start from. And when I came in and talked to everyone and figured out where we needed to be in a year's time, I was like, okay, here's how I think it. Let me know if you agree. And this is a whole other concept, which is the best way to get feedback from people is not by asking what they think, but to put something concrete in front of them and then have them react to it, right? It's a to-ing fork. And so my description is PM should be doing everything in their power to draw the perimeter of the space, of the problem space. And it's within that engine design, everyone else that you're working with, they can go as crazy as they want push up against the bounds and it fill the box to its maximum capacity. But you've now applied the constraints that allow you to actually have productive conversations. On the other end of the spectrum, though, I think there's a lot of folks who think, oh,”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engine The best ratio ever. This is a whole other thing. Most people, I would say, underinvest in design point blank. And when you get to a certain scale, maybe things change, but like truly, I don't think most teams have experienced what it feels like to have a really high design ratio and what that actually does to the quality of the work and like the quality of the thinking. So shout out to designers, we need more is the short version. And I would rather hire an incremental designer than PM almost any day that week.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At that. So this description came from writing PRDs at Square. And I think there was a lot of confusion from my team specifically when I joined them. For what it's worth, it was a new product line, three engineers, three designers. There was nothing but a slide deck.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, along the lines of write how you talk, there's this concept of cadence that I think is really important when it comes to internal writing. And there's probably like some very good article about this, but it's the idea that if you only write in a monotonous cadence, either all really short sentences or all really long sentences, then your brain just tunes out eventually. And so you have to interrupt the pattern intentionally. And so you go short, long, long, short, whatever it is, but there's a few very specific things that you can do that allow someone to just roll through a post or something when you write that way.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I learned a lot by finding specific voices back in the day on Twitter, and it wasn't always what they were posting on Twitter. But if they wrote an essay or a post, that would be their crispest thinking. And so you can use these like broadcast channels to find where their gold nuggets are, but then spend time with those instead. And don't worry about all the additional noise that comes with it.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I explicitly do not mean read a bunch of other PM artifacts. Like you're not going to become a better writer by reading PRDs or whatever it is or support articles. It needs to be. Writing that compels, like that's the theme I would go back to because that's what you're trying to do at the end of the day. And when I say compels, I mean it pushes you to action. Because if you read something and you're like, oh, that's interesting. That's not enough, right? You need to be able to give someone something that then allows them to do something differently. And so The things from me that have been best, obviously, there's like all the polegram essays. I think his writing is very succinct, very clear. That's not novel.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he has, I'm going to butcher the exact quote, but it's something like if you want to know how to make good food, you have to eat a lot of food. And you have to be willing to have a bad meal every now and again. And so for me, like good writing comes from consuming as much good writing as possible. And sometimes you'll read something and say that was actually absolute trash. But that's okay. You have to be willing to take on some of that stuff. But the more you index towards developing your own taste for what you think is good by consuming others, then you can shift into producing your own and then comparing them and riffing it off other people. So I think that's sort of the cycle that I've gone through.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll start with, like I said, cheeky comment, which is I think some of this is changing with the advent of large language models and the ability to actually just like mimic someone else's tone. But I take inspiration from.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think writing is both a mechanism for translating what you're trying to think into that thought, into like what you're actually trying to do, but then it needs additional revs to be properly consumed by everyone else. And that's, I think, the really hard part that a lot of folks don't do the extra mile effort to take”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not saying that every PM needs to be a marketer or world class copywriter, but you should be able to write really compelling messaging in the voice of the person that you're trying to serve. And I'm working backwards from the belief that if you can't sell or support your own product, I don't trust you to build the product. And so that's where I think writing is the foundational component there.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, shocking for me to hear that this isn't. Commonplace sort of acceptance, but the place that this comes from for me is writing is clarity at scale. And a key component to a PM's job is creating clarity, both internally and externally. But it's both sides of that that I think often get lost. A lot of times the PM job can become a little too internal and it's about influencing my stakeholders and getting alignment and all these things don't get me wrong. All that's very important. You should write your PRDs. They should be super crisp. They should articulate things really well.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one thing that I might tack on there because this could lead to a negative perception is, well, I'm never going to be a world-class engineer, world-class designer, or et cetera. And so let me settle for being a PM. That could be the conclusion you arrive at, but I think a better way of framing it is I'm okay at those things. I'm potentially world-class at this other thing. Let me see what it feels like to double down on this area. And I think that's just a good branding.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best way to think about this, in my opinion, is who were the people that you would be sort of taking the PM responsibilities from and then do those jobs. And so for me, the sort of foundational three are going to be like engineer, designer, or salesperson. And it doesn't have to be, I think sales also gets not a bad rep, but a misrepresented reputation in tech where all they care about is quota. It's just about numbers, et cetera. In reality, the best salespeople are the best listeners, the best people at understanding the problem that the customer is having, and then translating that into what you can do for them. And so if you get really good at having those calls, getting told no a lot, and being able to translate that, I mean, why would you not want to start there? And then eventually move into something like product.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you do something that I need to get my job done. So it's that sort of relationship that I think is often missing in the discourse. And I think it would alleviate a lot of the, we don't want DMs, PMs are useless, or PMs are the best things in high spread, which they are not. It's just a manifestation of that problem.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Elaborate on that. I think the broader point is that truly not every team needs a product manager, but the activities, the outcome that one would drive needs to get done no matter what. And in some cases, this is why the prototypical companies that everyone references when they say they never had product managers, look at how successful they are. They're all building for themselves, Stripe, Twilio, Figma, like designers for designers, engineers for engineers. When you are the customer, why the heck do you need someone else to help do the things that let you make decisions on what to build? But if you are not the customer, if you're working in a particularly complex space, if there's something that you as the person that could build the product feel you don't have, that's when you can essentially delegate that responsibility to someone else to say, hey, let me do the things I'm really good at.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perspective that you bring and allows you then to actually take on a quote unquote role of product manager in a good, unique and cypher way. So that's sort of like the foundation. There's a lot more to unpack behind that comparison, but that's where it comes from.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Follow me on the detour to Science World temporarily. If we all remember sort of like high school science classes, there was this concept of potential in kinetic energy. And there's so many different definitions for like product management, but the one that I have come to myself that I really like is when you are building a product, you have this team, right? Engineers, designers, so much potential. And the purpose of product management, not the person, but the practice, is to convert that potential into as much realized value for someone as possible, right? Minimum loss. When you're just getting started with a new product, the people that should be doing that are the people who are building it, right? That's an engineer, that's a designer, that's a salesperson or support person. They're the front line of the smallest loop possible to get something going. And it's through those practices that I think you're able to get the most exposure to what it takes to build a good product. And then from there, that's your foundation, right? That's the unique.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh God, probably 2011 or 2012, the story behind that is I was inspired actually by Chris Dixon's avatar at the time. And I wanted something really similar to it, but I couldn't figure out how to. Luckily, I was dating a designer at the time. And so he made me that sort of custom pick that has been my profile since then. And she's not my wife.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You get to offer stage, I send an email and I say all the terrible things that are probably going to reinforce their fears. If you can tell them that up front and they can read that whole email and still be equally excited to join, you find yourself any plus higher.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All talk about product sense. To me, it's just a fancy way of saying you can make good decisions with insufficient data. PMs need as many reps as possible in making decisions, documenting the rationale behind those decisions, and then crucially seeing the outcome of them.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“PM job can become a little too internal influencing my stakeholders and getting alignment and all these things. But if you can't sell or support your own product, I don't trust you to build the product.”
2024-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source