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Mike Hudack

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2024-09-13
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2024-09-13
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  1. “Facebook, I mean, Facebook ships unbelievably quickly, or at least I assume it still does. I mean, when I was there, I mean, the pace of shipping was just unreal. I'm not sure that Deliveroo or I assume, you know, Uber is like this or DoorDash. I think it's more that there's more a feeling of urgency. At Facebook, you may ship really quickly because you believe that shipping really quickly is the best way to make the graph go up. At a real-time logistics company, which is moving food for people who get cranky if it doesn't arrive in 32 minutes, you're shipping in real time in order to ensure that you're fulfilling your brand promise and just a fundamentally different way than if you're doing social media or anything like that.”

    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

  2. “In logistics, but also just physical movement, which leads to a dramatically different culture and way of working and way of building software than you get when you're building a”

    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

  3. “Man, it was such an unbelievably different environment. You know, I've now done social media, advertising, online video, food delivery, a regulated bank, and now stablecoins. And they're all dramatically different. And I think that the most striking difference with Deliveroo compared to Facebook, both are fast-paced. But Deliveroo plays a game every day from breakfast to dinner, which doesn't stop. Every order is being delivered in real time. It's either on time or not. You either have enough riders to deliver on time or not. It's either raining or it's not. It's Sunday night. And everybody's starving. The restaurant is overrun by riders standing outside waiting for the food to be cooked. And then at the end of the day, you look at how many orders you did and whether or not you grew from the day before. It is a real time, unbelievable exercise.”

    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

  4. “Yeah, please Coming back to your original point about ICPs, I think you do have to find small communities that you cozy up to and you develop deep relationships with and you find sparks of success and then you double down and triple down on them and then you spread virally out from there.”

    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

  5. “Magical happens. Like the network completes. And the value of a social network is the square of the participants, right? This comes from telephones. Like the value of the telephone network was the square of the number of people who had telephones.”

    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

  6. “For example What do you mean by Sure, sure. I half agree with you. So I admire WhatsApp so much. When Facebook bought WhatsApp, I think 99% of people in Spain had WhatsApp. It was some of the most incredible market penetration. It was a global product. It was just texting. Everybody needs the text. And it had kind of two growth mechanisms. One was international texting was shitty and expensive. And so if you texted a lot internationally, your phone bill was really high and WhatsApp fixed that for you. And then there were certain countries where the telcos were really greedy, where they would charge a lot for domestic text message. And so of course what happened was people who were experiencing that particular pain point then got WhatsApp and spread it virally with other people who experienced that pain point. And then something really magical happens because it's an innately social product. At some point, people who aren't even experiencing that pain point both realize that they have WhatsApp and that they can consolidate on a single network for texting. And something”

    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

  7. “Yeah, I see that a lot where people are like, well, we're building a thing. And it's going to be useful to a lot of people. And they're not really tight about describing their initial target market. There's a laziness in that. It's okay to have a really broad initial target market if your value proposition and the motion that you want users to conduct is universal and super clear. Like if you're saying,”

    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

  8. “Spending on Facebook every day, every day 100%. I'd rather spend the money on users than spend the money on some other company”

    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

  9. “Yeah, I think they do, so I think that maybe what you're getting at is there are different strategies for distribution. So we had this conversation at the office this morning. We had a marketing meeting this morning. We're about to remove waitlists. We're about to really launch slang. And we had a conversation about whether we should do paid marketing or not. We have some people who are already using the product and returning and using it a lot and giving us great feedback. And we had a long conversation about whether or not our strategy in the short term should be a bunch of paid marketing or whether or not it should be viral growth and just encouraging people to tell their friends. And I think we're going to do viral growth to start with because to your point, if it is really great, people will tell their friends. And they will tell each other. We may have to encourage them to do that. We may have to help them to do that in various ways. But, you know, part of our...”

    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

  10. “Well, it just means the beauty of something else. I don't think it really changes it. To bring it back to the art science question really quickly, I think that what it means is, you know, when you're building something, the only real measure of value, Mickey, rivet capital invested in our seed rounded sling. And Mickey, the founder of Ribbit, is amazing. And I cherish every moment that I have with him. And he said to me at some point, distribution really matters because you can't have a great, you know, there are lots of great products that die without great distribution. And I think that's true. I think he's 100% correct. But to me, in order to have a great product, you need people have to use it and get value from it. It is value less without that. You may as well not have built it. And that is the objective measure that brings science to the art of product. Like if you build something and you give it to a bunch of people and they don't use it and they don't show that they enjoy it in ways that cannot be lied about, meaning they're spending time, they're moving money with it. They're, you know, talking to their friends with it, whatever.”

    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

  11. “I think some things are naturally pleasing and some things are not. Atonality sounds ratios and certain colors and certain designs look beautiful to the eye and some don't. I think that that's somehow natural or innate.”

    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

  12. “Yeah, I really believe that product is more art than science, but has to be managed through data. What I mean by that is you need to make a lot of room. And I think organizations, especially the larger they get, truly struggle with this, you need to make a lot of room for people saying filters and snap are going to have this kind of psychological effect on our user base and therefore lead to this thing. And I can't prove that because the only way to know it is if after we ship it and actually it's going to take three or four months for the attitudinal change to filter through whatever you need to make a ton of room for that but you also need to measure whether or not you're right which is the only way that you can inform and correct your intuition and hone your intuition over time because like all art really it's maybe not objective or you would argue that it's not objective but I think it is I think that people look at a painting and say oh this is either beautiful or not and 99% of people agree”

    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

  13. “Time spent listening goal for the quarter with this project. Let's go, build it. Let's see if it works. And sometimes people will back down and say, oh, it's actually, you know, 1% or half a point. And sometimes they'll say, great, thank you. And sometimes they're right. And sometimes you're wrong. And you need to make a lot of room for that. I think intellectual humility in this kind of situation is so important. But you bring it back to the numbers. And I think that that is the way that you almost avoid the talk. You know, you might then say, okay, well, you believe it's going to be 5%. Convince me that it's true. But now you're grounded in a thing. You're like, okay, well, I still don't believe that or I believe that or that's plausible or whatever. And then you just think about how you stack crank 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

  14. “I don't really feel like those are the choices as I would frame them. First of all, I think it's very important to have quantitative objective measures of success. So when you're having a debate about something, about what you should do, you need to ground that somehow and you need to have goals. I think goals are just unbelievably important. So if somebody is saying, and this is where nice to haves become difficult, right? So if Spotify's goal is to increase listening hours by 10% this quarter or whatever, I'm totally making up what that is. And you say we're going to build this thing which is nice to have, the correct question is, well, how much is it going to increase listening hours this quarter? And if the answer is 5% and the team that is arguing for it is like really believes that, is really making the case and they have credibility, then I think that as a product leader, depending on how large the organization is, if you're at a really big company, you might say, okay, great, set that goal. You're going to hit half of our”

    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

  15. “No, I think that my prioritization was, well, a little bit of both, but I think that at the time I probably had a less brutal attitude towards nice to have things. I think that I've learned over the years that everything which is nice to have has a higher cost than you anticipate and a lower value returned.”

    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

  16. “I wouldn't do it again. It was a fun project. I think that it was very cool, like in many, many ways. But yeah, I don't think I would build it again.”

    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

  17. “I think you have to think about the cost to build it, the cost to maintain it, the cost to explain it to people, the opportunity cost of all of those things. So not just the direct set of people who are working on that and the mindshare that it takes from them and everything else, but what else would you have done that would have created more value? And when you say that, you know, a nice to have, my immediate instinct is don't build it. Build something which is not just a nice to have, but is actually going to create meaningful value for your users and therefore for the company and for shareholders.”

    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

  18. “Oh man, there are a few, and I don't know. It's always difficult to talk about things when people are still there and all of that kind of stuff. I think that we spent a lot of time building this thing called audience insights, which was like the logical, it was an extension of a lot of the theories that we had where we thought, oh, well, we have all this amazing data, like population level data where we can help marketers kind of drill down and find their audience. It's probably targeted sort of at brand marketers. And we said, oh, you can go in and you can explore the entire population of people in the world and what they're interested in. You can see that like Yankees fans also tend to like 20BC or whatever, right? And the idea was...”

    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

  19. “I really believe that people in their soul know that long before you tell them that. And I think that that's true of people who are doing a bad job in a job or it's true of people who are building a product. I think that the problem often arises when people feel like they have some sort of commitment to others to put the best possible face on what's going on, or they feel like they need to just keep chugging away because they don't want to let down their investors or they don't want to let down their manager, when actually the best thing to do is when you realize that you're at that point, the greatest thing that you can do in order to drive respect from others is to just admit that like, hey, this thing isn't working. My time is super valuable. Your money is super valuable. Let's figure out how we can get some of both back. People know that. I can speak for myself as an angel investor. The level of respect I have for somebody who comes to me with half of the money is still in the bank and just says, hey, we were wrong about this and has a conversation either about selling the company or shutting it down.”

    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

  20. “You know whether or not it's good because they'll come back or they won't come back. You know, if they churn, you are wrong. One of the big mistakes I think people make is they then give up too early. So your theory of the world might be 20% wrong, but that means that it's 80% right. One of the hardest things to do in product, I think, is to try to figure out how to bridge that 20% and not lose faith. You know, at some point, you might just be 100% wrong. It might be good to walk away. You need to know when that is. But I think often people get dejected when they push 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

  21. “Well, implicit, I guess, in some of what I was talking about earlier is this idea that I really believe that before you build something, you should have a theory of the world. You should understand who your user is, what they want to accomplish. You should understand your strengths and weaknesses in doing that and have a theory of like the thing that you're going to build and how it is going to accomplish your goals and the user's goals. And that might take you anywhere from 10 minutes to develop to a year to develop. That's very, very variable. It really depends on what you're doing. I don't really think you should start writing code until you have that. Now, the problem is that most people's theory of the world prior to shipping a thing and having contact with real live human customers is wrong. And it might be 5% wrong or it might be 50% wrong. And you don't really know until you ship. You can do user research along the way, but the reality is that users lie when you talk to them and they will always tell you what they think you want to hear.”

    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

  22. “Yeah, well, I think every product team should be probably between six to eight people. Most of those people should be engineers. If possible, one of those people should be a data scientist. One should be a designer. And then I think a PM is optional. That team should work together against clear, coherent outcome-based goals, which are not ship goals, but are like, we are going to increase the revenue that we generate for this thing by 10% is like a decent goal, but a better goal is we're going to increase people's satisfaction with the product by 10% or we're going to increase people's sales by 10%, which we believe is going to lead to a 10% increase in revenue. You'll find that that often leads to a 20% increase in revenue. And so that attitude is unbelievably important, that they are building a thing to serve a person or a group of people on the other side. And I think that they have to feel truly empowered to reach that goal and feel supported by somebody who checks in and says, oh,”

    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

  23. “Yeah, almost always. I think there are people who believe that the best product has a lot of buttons and can do everything. I think that the real art of product, the true thing, is understanding what people want to achieve and helping them achieve that with the minimal amount of work if you think about it. The thing that an advertiser wants to do is they want to sell more of their product. And there are different ways that they might think about that different timescale. So, you know, at some point they may want attitudinal change. At another point, they may want behavioral change, but they want that outcome. They don't really want to target their ad. They don't want to think about optimization. They don't want to think about, they want to sell more product. And so the simpler machine you can give them to do that.”

    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

  24. “I'm going to give you two examples. I joined the Ads Org. I don't know, like a couple months after the IPO. And a lot of people don't remember this, but the Facebook IPO wasn't great. And ads revenue wasn't really performing the way that we wanted it to. And to support the kind of valuation that we had or that we wanted, we needed to accelerate revenue growth really significantly. And I think part of the challenge for the company was that historically market.”

    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

  25. “Was more valuable than the hundred dollars that the headphones cost. I've never seen anyone else do that before or since, but it's correct.”

    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

  26. “You know, there are a lot of very simple examples I can give you, but generally in the time that I was there, there was no bullshit. It was incredibly flat organization. Mark was always in Founder mode. I remember once he commented on a different was making a change to the composer on the web, and he commented on the diff and was like, I don't like this change. It was like an entry-level engineer, like, you know, it was like making a small tweak. And he was like, I care about this. Please come and see me and talk about it. You know, that's very unusual. When I was there, there were vending machines all over the office with good headphones and mice and whatever you would need in order to do your job. If you forgot your laptop, you could go and get a loner laptop. If you didn't have headphones with you, you could wave your badge at the machine and get a pair of good headphones out because they understood that the value of the time that you were spending that day, like your focus in writing code at that moment.”

    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

  27. “I think that founders who behave badly don't need any additional excuse to do it. Like I think you see it all the time. I think it's kind of normal. I think that people will now, instead of saying, hey, some version of like, this is my company or I feel really passionate about this thing, they'll say, oh, well, I'm operating in founder mode. But I don't think it's going to lead to a dramatic increase in bad behavior.”

    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

  28. “First of all, I think that every founder that I've worked with or for has operated in one way or another in founder mode. I think it's just like the natural thing that people do. You do skip levels, you get involved in the details, everybody does it. Like I remember hearing stories about Bill Gates doing product reviews, you know, he'd do a product review on Excel and he'd be like, click on that menu, go down five levels. Okay, why is that there? And if you could answer the question, he'd be like, oh, okay, all right. The rest of this kind of looks good. He wasn't like, oh, the person in charge of Excel just go, you know, he would do a product review. I think it's very normal. There are founders who are better or worse at doing this at different stages of company. You could be really great at being in this thing that we now call founder mode in a 20-person company and terrible at it in a 2,000 person company or the other way around. You might be bad at it at a 20 people and great at it a 2,000. I think it's just like good branding around something that people have already been 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

  29. “Man, I've basically wanted to build things on the internet for the entire time that I can remember, even before the internet. My brother had an Amiga back in the day. He used CompuServe on it. And I just thought it was the coolest thing ever. I think from that point on, I just wanted to make digital things. And I dropped out of high school when I was 15 and went to work at a startup and just always wanted to build things on the internet. Like it's just what I always wanted to 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

  30. “Think that the real art of product, the true thing is understanding what people want to achieve and helping them achieve that with the minimal amount of work, I think every product team should be probably between six to eight people. Most of those people should be engineers if possible. One of those people should be a data scientist. One should be a designer. And then I think a PM is optional.”

    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