YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Hudack

lines on the record: 80
first: 2024-09-13
most recent: 2024-09-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I like the investment product. I like the family product which is coming out. So kid accounts, I think, is going to help Monzo move up demographically. I think all of these products have been very carefully thought out to kind of extend the demographic reach of the platform in meaningful ways, which I think is very important. And I think there's a bunch of stuff coming soon, which is also going to be very important and very good. I really appreciate all of the things that are happening right now. I don't really know how to put this, but all the experimentation that's happening with AI at the moment and LLMs, I think that Claude and ChatGPT and all these things, there's just something very interesting going on there. And you can see the minds working behind the scenes. I don't know how it's going to end up. I think that these things go in cycles where, you know, obviously there's a hype cycle. People are really excited about these things. I think there's going to be a trough. But then we'll get to that, the plateau of...”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many times, you know, it's a failure mode you can fall into when you are in love with the thing that you are building or have built. You really truly believe in it deep down and you look at the data and you say to yourself, oh, well, just one more iteration, I just got this wrong. Oh, I'm going to do this. Or this thing is wrong. I think it's a very easy thing to do. And I've done it many times and you have to kind of like catch yourself and stop yourself.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think great PMs combine deep intuition about people in markets with great product taste, great design taste. They don't need to be great designers, but they need to understand it and be able to tell you, though, that's good, that's bad. Together with a deep understanding of engineering or at least the ability to operate with engineers and have respect together with an understanding of the company's context and what it needs to accomplish, does it need to grow? Does it need to be profitable? Does it need profitable? All of these things. And if you don't have all of those things, I think it's very hard to be a good PM. And I think the thing that is not always obvious is just deep intellectual honesty. You need somebody who is willing to say from the first instance, I don't know the answer to that. I'm going to go figure it out.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Move fast, like ship fast. Get an early win. And I think this is good advice for everyone in every role. Put some points on the board.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not always true. I think that's an oversimplification. I have worked with people that I have had doubt about who then have turned out to be phenomenal. And it turns out maybe there was something going on in their personal life which was difficult and transient. Maybe they didn't understand expectations properly. Everybody has a different style.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This comes back to founder mode a little bit. I think that people often, when their company starts growing, start thinking that they are out of their depths as a founder and that they don't understand what is needed from the product organization. They don't understand what's needed from the finance organization. And they kind of go against their gut because somebody's telling them, oh, well, this person is great. They did a great job at this company or whatever. I think you really have to believe your gut, partially because you're probably correct, at least about your company. Like, you know, a director or a VP from Google is not necessarily going to do well at your 100-person company, but also because you need to trust the people in that role so much that if you have that kind of like doubt at the time that you're hiring them about whether or not they're the right person, you just shouldn't do it. That relationship is just so deeply important. You have to listen to yourself on these things.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really depends on the founder, but probably very, very late. I wouldn't do it too soon. I think that the best CEOs are very product-minded and should stay involved in product for as long as possible.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't worry about getting promoted. Figure out what the company most needs and go do it. Ideally, if it's something that nobody else wants to do. And the promotion will find you.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Worked on building a multi tiered filtering encrypted proxy, basically like Tor, the onion router, when I was a kid at a startup.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Invest in people who you believe in. Don't mistake good managers or ICs at a large company for people who are going to do well going from zero to one in a startup, you know, think about what that means.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, there have been so many. One of them was just around sharing in the mechanics of sharing on Facebook. And Mark built the thing. And I remember him saying, this is like the last part of this thing that I built myself. I have a deep emotional attachment to it. And I thought I was just like, okay, I can't.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understanding what you need to build and what you need to do differently in order to grow faster. And I think that people often mistake those two types of work for each other, if that makes sense. And that first kind of like obsessive refreshing of the thing or that obsession with like hours or the theater of it is actually super stressful, you know, and I think that's the stuff that kind of like leads to burnout. Whereas I think that you can work 20 hours a day, but like integrate that well with family and kids and all of that kind of stuff and be thoughtful and make good decisions and move fast and all that kind of stuff. And it's healthier and it's better.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably my first startup. I don't know. I think you get into these phases where you become very lopsided. And I've certainly worked on things. I have kind of an obsessive personality, you know, slings growing now. We have a channel. We have a Slack channel called Pulse, where we see every sign up and we see every transaction. And then, you know, we have a dashboard that updates regularly with transaction volumes and all this stuff. Man, I look at that Slack channel every four minutes, you know, every three minutes. And I have to stop myself from doing that. And that's the kind of stuff that I think is dangerous. That's what people mistake for grinding or working hard or sleeping on the factory floor. You know, when you're just doing the same thing over and over again, you're looking at it and you're obsessing about the numbers or something. That's very different from having a detached view or a semi-attached view to how quickly you're growing interrogating it.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do too. I believe in that too. I think that maybe I don't feel like I work less hard for having the family. I think that kids are a great joy and Caroline is a great joy. And I think we have a really amazing life. And I garden, we grow tomatoes and chilies and corn and potatoes and all this stuff. A lot of what we eat we grow at home. I'll work. I'll get up. I'll hang out with the kids from 630 or 7 until 8. I'll go to my desk. I'll work for four hours. I'll eat lunch at my desk. I'll go out and garden for 20 minutes to clear my head. I'll come back. The kids will be back at 3.30. I'll hang out with them for like half an hour and then I'll go back to work and then I'll have dinner. You know, I don't know. It just all feels very integrated.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think children are one of those things that just almost always makes you better coming home after a long day of work and giving them a hug and having dinner with them kind of washes a day away, resets you a little bit, and then you move on and I think makes you better the next day. I think the first thing is just a mindset shift, which is that it's not necessarily strictly about making time for one at the expense of the other. I think that the best way of understanding this is that one makes you better at the other. I talked to my eight-year-old all the time about slaying and what we're building and why we're building it and decisions that we make. And I'm like, oh, you know, I'm going to call with a bank in Thailand today. And, you know, they all showed up in suits. And thank God I put on a collared shirt. You know, it's important to be mindful of people's culture. You know, I don't know. You just have those kind of conversations. One reinforces the other and makes me better at the other, I think.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For sure, for sure. And it's great for the brand and it's great for you. So you need to find a way of connecting the thing that people are doing.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was it good truffle oil? It was great. It enriched your life, and the entire job there is to put that truffle oil ad in front of you at the right time, knowing that you're interested in truffle. You know, that's good for you and it's good for the company that may truffle oil.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing when you have a billion people looking at these ads is you are helping small businesses all over the world grow. You're helping entrepreneurs. And, you know, hey, what's the last thing that you bought off of a Facebook ad or an Instagram ad, which was actually kind of cool? And you can just totally reframe that thing.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are two things that are very important. You need to give people a win. So page insights that we talked about earlier is an example of a win like that. We can be proud about a thing that we shipped. And then I think you also have to give people a reason to work hard or a thing to believe. I worked on sharing at Facebook, which is like all the photos, text videos, links, everything that ends up in NewsFeed from regular people. So for a while I did ads, which was like everything from companies and celebrities. And then I moved over to people. And in both cases, there's like a weird thing. You can imagine people saying, I don't want to work on ads because I don't want to work on the thing that makes money and detracts from the experience, right? Ads are annoying and all this kind of stuff. You can reframe that and you can say actually the thing that we're doing is we're helping individuals discover the products that are going to improve their lives and we're helping businesses find customers. And the more efficient we can make that process, the better we can make that process, the more economic growth is going to happen in this world. And actually the thing that you're”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's this idea, I think, that you can be deeply proud and optimistic about the thing that you have built, but also know that it's not perfect. It's the same as a position of maturity that you might have about yourself, which is like, oh, well, you know, you're smart, you're accomplished, you did this, and you did that, but you're a flawed human being and you have to be humble about these things and you're not perfect and maybe you were wrong about that thing or whatever. You can have high self-esteem while being sober about yourself or sober about the thing that you've built and realistic about it at the same time.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that, first of all, I don't think that a leader's job is always to cheerlead. I think sometimes a leader's job is to say, hey guys, we're in a really tough situation here. But it is to inspect.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, when you don't hit your goals with a launch, what happens is the team and everybody around the team who makes decisions around this stuff becomes deflated. Mood goes down, and you kill the project too early.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that you have to have these kind of competing ideas in your head at the same time, which are like on one hand, we've built a thing that we really believe in. We're putting our best foot forward and we believe that it is going to work. And at the same time, we intellectually understand that when you first ship something, it's probably going to have something wrong with it or some misunderstanding of the customer need or your solution that needs to be addressed. Sometimes that's so drastic as, well, guys, we just wasted our last six months and we never should have built this in the first place. And sometimes it's something as simple as the copy on the second street screen of the new user experience is wrong and people don't get it. You need to change it. You know, you need to be open to both of those things. And it could be anywhere on that spectrum. I think you just have to be emotionally prepared for having to do that work. And if you're not emotionally prepared for doing that work,”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do wrong. And you don't want to be doing that from a place of deep sadness. You want to do that from a place of expectation where you're almost like you expect that you got something wrong and you're ready to interrogate it.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that I have always tried to temper expectations with everyone, so I do this thing a lot that I think a lot of people find weird, which is that when we get close to a launch, I give a talk to the team saying you should not expect this to work. My theory there is that you should have put your best into it. You should be putting your best foot forward modulo like shipping fast, right? So you have to find this place on the line where you're shipping something that you're still embarrassed by, but like, you know, you put good work into it. And there's another concept behind this we should talk about in a moment. And you ship this thing. And if your expectations are low and it does really well, you're going to be super happy. You're going to forget that your expectations were ever low. If you ship it and it doesn't immediately work or it doesn't totally hit all of your goals and you should set ambitious goals for it. Don't get me wrong. You should still have ambitious goals. If you don't hit your ambitious goals, then you're emotionally prepared for the work that you have to do next, which is asking yourself, what did I do?”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I had at Facebook was getting into ads, having conversations with people where it felt very much like, and in fact somebody said this to me explicitly, they were like, the thing that we have to do is we just have to build as many features as possible and ship them as fast as possible to see what works because we don't know what's going to work. And, you know, I was like, okay, like if we truly don't know what's going to work, I agree that that is the right strategy. But maybe we should try to figure out what's going to work. Maybe we should develop a theory of the world. Maybe we should do fewer things well if it's knowable. And it took a lot of work to say, oh, okay, well, we have people's identity. We can do the targeting insights measurement loop. Okay, let's build goals around the number of advertisers that we have and the amount that they spend with us and so on and ship things which are meaningful move you in a direction instead of just shooting spaghetti at the wall and i really believe that that's important”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for sure. But then how do you know that it's somebody's salary? Lots of people earn a different ways. We eventually settled on one, you know, and then we built a goal around that. And, you know, we built a goal around increasing the percentage of people who treated Monzo as their main bank. Then we built a bunch of products and a bunch of features fewer than Revolute, but like very targeted, very specific, I believe, very innovative products around the idea being somebody's bank. What can you do when you are somebody's bank? So like MonzoFlex, for example, is a lending product. It's a credit card product. Kind of integrates almost like buy now pay later directly into your bank account. That takes a lot of work to get right. It takes a lot of regulatory work, a lot of product design work, a lot of engineering work. And hopefully those bets that you make, you make fewer of them and they are more meaningful over time. One of the most influential experiences”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. Why? Monzo is a bank. It has a very specific position in people's lives of trust. You know, when I first started working there, we didn't actually say the word bank anywhere on the website. And one of the things that we realized pretty quickly was that we had all of the, I don't want to call them downsides, but all of the consequences of being a bank in terms of the regulatory framework and the constraints that it places on you and so on, with very little of the upside because people still thought of us very much.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I argued very strongly against shipping crypto products. I didn't think it was the right thing to do for our audience, for our user base at the time. Do you think that was a good idea?”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that as companies, we had very, very different philosophies. I wouldn't chip some of the stuff that they've shipped, some of the experiments that they've shipped. I would have said, well, I don't think that's going to work or I don't think it's core to our thing.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it was a wrong decision at all. I think that the US is the very big prize. I think that you have to, when you're developing a bank, and it's very interesting, we've kind of taken the opposite perspective with Sling in a way, which is weird in a way. But banking is very regionally specific. The way that mortgages work in the UK and the way that mortgages work in the US are completely different. Credit cards in the US versus credit cards in the UK completely different. The way that people think about debt, the way that people think about saving, the way that people think about investing. The pace at which people get paid, all these things are different. And I think it's very easy to think that you can take a highly localized product and just lift it and shift it somewhere else with a different license and it's going to work. I suspect that the only way to truly do that successfully is to have people in the local market who take the bones of the thing, who deeply understand what has and has not worked about it, and then shape it around local insights.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would have grown Monzo globally. I think that that's a very difficult thing to do. It's doable over some period of time, and I think that Monzo will expand geographically really well. You know, in the UK, it's growing faster than anyone else. It's doing incredibly well. I think it will expand into more GOs. But like, do you think the...”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, you're like, why can't I test pricing? I've tested pricing my entire career. Like, what are you talking about? I can't test pricing. And you change your perspective to so much of society is based on the stability of the banking system.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mean massively, and I had to learn how to do that. I think at various times I really chafed at that or found that very difficult. And I remember having this amazing conversation with this guy, Ian, who's the chief risk officer at Monzo, who also became a really good friend, and he's brilliant. And he just said at some point, he was like, you know, you have to understand that most of, or many of the crises that nations have faced in history are the result of financial crises or banking failures. And society has, you know, has a right, has an obligation to protect itself and people from those kind of situations, from those kind of outcomes. I think this is like a really important thing. It's a really important lesson. You have to understand where people are coming from. And once you understand and you think about that critically and you change your perspective from somebody who is trying to make a graph go up and to the right and trying to produce value for people as quickly as possible and experiment and”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, you know, a little bit like going from Facebook to Deliveroo, all of this time, the entire time that you're building things on the internet, I think that you are developing your intuition. I think that Deliveroo really prepared me for going into Monzo and being deeply curious about the way that British people approach money, which is hugely different from the way that Americans approach money. You know, Americans are paid every two weeks. British people get paid monthly.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you have to do power analysis so that you know how big the experiment needs to be, how long it has to run. And then at the end of that, as long as there were no execution problems with the feature, and as long as you designed the experiment correctly, you're going to get an answer. The answer might be that there's no statistically significant impact, in which case you should unship the thing, or maybe there's something wrong with it, may increase RET, which would be a paradoxical outcome and you then need to figure out why, or it may decrease RET, in which case you roll out the feature to 100%.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you see The ability to know timing, the ability to For sure, for sure. Well, the key is that you ship all of those things in carefully designed and controlled experiments where you have a set of metrics that you're looking to improve. So you can imagine, for example, that driver chat is designed to reduce what's called rider experience time, the time that it takes a rider to get from the restaurant to handing you the order. And there's often a couple minutes at the end of RET where they're looking for your apartment, fumbling around or whatever, and you're sitting there being like, God, if the guy just hits 2B, you know, I'll have my food now. Do I really have to go outside, whatever? You know, and so you can design an experiment which very clearly shows whether or not RET, like writer experience time, decreases by the amount that you expect it to in the population that has messaging. What you do is you give messaging to, you know, I don't know, somewhere between 20 and 50% of the users. And then you just look at the delta in RET between those two.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, Deliveru has one product, really, which is food, and then everything else is kind of a feature or way of delivering that. So it's a weird way of thinking about it.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One mistake I'll never make again that I made when I was young at my first startup is underestimating the competition or assuming that something that they are doing will not work or that there is this looming impending thing which is going to prevent them from accomplishing there. No, like you have to have deep deep respect for the people that you compete against. And they are smart and good and they are trying to do the same thing that you are. And I think that that's like the first law of competing with anyone.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wildly different. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And I think that the places where I've seen data abuse the most is in customer service, where people will say, there's this famous maybe apocryphal story of, I think it was like Amazon's customer service number where they said, oh, well, you know, we answer all calls within some threshold of time. It was like in a WBR or something. And I assume it was Bezos who's in the room. And he was like, I don't believe you. And he dialed the number and, you know, he was on hold for 10 minutes before he was hung up on. And I think it turned out that like the analysis only included calls that were answered. Like all calls were answered within one minute.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like from the data, it's a great question. I think that it's very hard to accurately interpret data, and it's very difficult to not lie to yourself with data. You know, you can cut data any way that you want. I once shipped something into the, it's called the dive bar at the time at Facebook. It was like a social product, a social sharing surface. And the dive bar was this thing. If you swiped the Facebook app to the left, it opened up on the right. It was originally used, I think, for messenger contacts. I think something like 75% of Facebook users opened the dive bar. And so there was an argument to be made that it was a great surface to ship into. The thing is that 99% of those people opened it by accident and didn't want anything to do with and then immediately closed it. You know, so you can run all sorts of different analyses. You need to consider the entire set of things around you in order to understand.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there are two limits, right? There's a limit where you expose the entire set of options and the entire set of buttons that you could possibly expose to a user. And on the other hand, you have only one button. The art is picking the plays. The science then is like evaluating when a controlled experiment looking at the data to understand whether or not you've selected your point in this curve, this gradient, too far to the left or too far to the right, and then you just keep adjusting. And it might be different for different people. It might be different for different use cases.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I'm like, I really want to listen to whatever right now. I want to listen to Pantera right now. Like, I want to play that. You have to give the user some level of choice.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Versus hot Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, I think one of the great insights, one of the things that I really learned here was that it's so important to allow people to make their own choices. It's just so important to let people make their own choices. Like if somebody wants a soggy burger and you've given them enough information, like they know how far away it is. It's not like they have any illusions about what's going to happen to this burger over that period of time. Let them order the soggy burger. This extends to so many things that you build. There's this line you asked earlier about having more features or fewer features, you know, more buttons, fewer buttons, whatever. You know, there's a line you can imagine a version of Spotify that only has a play button and maybe you can thumbs up, thumbs down. And Spotify plays to you the best music that it can think to play to you at the moment based on the time of day, the weather, you know, what it knows of your likes and dislikes, whatever. You know, that product actually existed. Pandora kind of worked that way. Maybe you would seed it with a song and it wasn't great, to be honest. Like it never played.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be a little bit soggy and a little bit cold when it arrives because they just want their like bacon onion cheeseburger, right? And we had this deep-seated assumption that we should only deliver food as far and as long as it is still what we would consider to be high quality. And after a couple of days there with the local team, we realized how wrong we were. And I remember spending the entire trip back getting to the airport and sitting in a chair by the gate, putting on headphones and writing. I wrote the entire flight back. I wrote the entire cab ride home. I rode for a couple hours after I got home. And then, you know, the next day I was like, we need to change everything.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite was I went on a trip to Spain at some point with a bunch of people from the team and we went there and we really learned the importance of selection. We went to Madrid and Madrid is a very long city and there's one five guys on one end. And it turns out that people who live on the other end, the way that we designed our system originally, it would dispatch on kind of a neighborhood basis. And so you probably experienced this living in London ordering delivery. You're like, well, why can't I order from this restaurant, which is like three blocks away? Because it's in another zone. And, you know, that was kind of optimal for London, which is a city, or we thought it was optimal for London, which is a city of residential neighborhoods arranged around high streets and the restaurant is on the high street. You know, Madrid is very different than that. It kind of has like a central business district, and there's like a restaurant and then residential that goes out much further. It turns out that the people in the outskirts of the residential area still want five guys. And they actually will tolerate a longer trip and understand that it'll...”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Well, over time, I think we learned a lot about the importance of selection and all sorts of things. And I think Deliveroo Plus really influenced people's behavior in a really dramatic way where people feel a loyalty and affinity. It's sunk cost with the platform, which brings them back. It was a very unbelievably important product. But yeah, you know, it was also the first time that there was an alternative in the market. And so the combination of those things was brutal.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we were too busy, we would close for orders in SKC, South Kensington, Chelsea, right? And there was actually a team of about a dozen people in a literally windowless room clicking buttons to open and close zones manually. And they were going to jump out of window. They didn't have a window to jump out of because there were no windows in the room they worked in. But if there were a window, they would have gone through it. And customers were pissed off. It was a rough time.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Driver insights products It turned out to be really easy because when I got there, again, this is a difficult, you know, in this kind of form, I need to be careful about the way that I tell these stories, but it was Uber with Uber Eats was in London and Paris and a bunch of other places. And it was a knife fight in the streets. You know, I mean, it was crazy. It was deeply competitive. There was a fight over, well, everything, restaurants, riders, customers. And we were not meeting our brand promise. So Deliver's brand promise is great food delivered to you quickly. It's delicious, right? It's like high-quality restaurant food. And man, we were late 40% of the time. We were opening our demand modulation tool. So, you know, if you think about the way that you might in a system like that have orders beyond time and fulfill your brand promise, there are all sorts of different ways that you can do it, but the way that we were doing it at the time was opening and closing zones in order to control demand. So, you know,”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, there's always an event. There's always a thing. You know, you're constantly modulating the rate that you pay riders in order to ensure that enough show up to meet the demand, you know, the demand spike that you're anticipating.”
2024-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source