YouSaid · the spoken record

Vickie Peng

lines on the record: 51
first: 2024-04-17
most recent: 2024-04-17
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

“Linear is a really interesting one because they took this thing that is normally mostly used by issue tracking, mostly used by PMs and managers EMs, and they targeted the engineer instead because those people hate this thing. And I've worked with so many teams, and the more senior I've got in my product career, the more senior engineers around me have gotten and the more jaded, specifically around process and stand-up and issue tracking, tickets and things like this. They're like, they want none of it. And I was in this position where we adopted Linear here at Sequoia with my team and we actually had another issue tracking tool that we also had licenses for. Some teams use this, some teams use that. But EPD solely is linear. And we were being, there was a threat of us consolidating. You know what? There's more seats open here. Why don't we just take everybody from linear and move them over here? My team.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would go back to conviction and action. The first thing you should do is build conviction in your problem and your customer. So probably meet a bunch of customers, figure out how to get in front of the customer, absorb all the user resources done. What are we doing here? What does success look like? Who is this person? What do they care about? And then the action side. So that's outside the building. I think action is more inside the building. How do things get done here? How do we make decisions? Who has influence? How does the process work? How do I fit into this thing to actually make things happen? And I think that is probably the more challenging job for somebody just dropping into a role for the first time.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ooh, is there a spicy question? I think it really depends on the context, and it really depends on how willing the other functions are to step out of their own function. I believe in a cross-functional team, sure, you know, my job is to do product strategy. Like I kind of set the stage for why we're solving this problem and what the problem is. And then maybe an engineer's job is to figure out what we're actually going to do to solve the problem and how we're going to implement that. But we all have a say in all of those voices and rooms. And so I think that the tension usually comes from that's your lane, this is my lane, stay in your lane. Here's the wall, you know, and I think that's even a bigger macrocosm when you think about product development versus sales or marketing or some of the more business functions. You stay in your lane. I'll stay in my lane. I think many of the tensions arise there and are easily, maybe not easily, but they are definitely, you know, surmountable.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that I actually warn both founders and product operators against is joining as a product leader too early in a company. And what I mean by that is there's kind of three layers of product. There's product vision, there's product strategy, and there's product execution. And when you are very, very early on in a company, I would hope that at least the first two come from the founding team. Some is anchored on the founding team. And if you're joining to provide one or more of those things, there's often some tension, basically, between what swim lanes people live in. And I've seen that happen where the founder thinks that they're ready to give up product vision or product strategy, and it turns out that that's not actually the case. It's a difficult conversation to have once you find yourself there.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go back till I'll say it again. Say it in their words, not yours. Your words, the way that you see your product, you are too close to this thing. It is not actually how they experience it. And in some cases, like in these markets that you're talking about, like DevTools, you know, where you believe that you are your own customer because you are also an engineer, like I think we just have to break ourselves from that. Like you've got to hear it in their voice.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not solving a problem that matters with a solution that's compelling enough. You fail on part A or you fail on part B, or you fail on both. I think it's as simple as that, actually.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Working on these frameworks, it's just like a scaffolding to have these conversations, I think, and to think through all the different nuances because not everybody knows that product market, there's no one path and there's no one formula, but the way that we talk about it, I think, is a little bit one size fits all sometimes. So it's kind of nice to be able to identify patterns but allow for nuance, I think. And then you're bringing up some really great examples.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good question, and how much? And to the point of do they need to be 5x better to shake either, what are you breaking through? You're breaking through the competition, you're breaking through a habit, you're breaking through disbelief, how much does it take for the product to be better in order to break out of one of those kind of shake one ID program?”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know what the power tool is, and people still in this building still use PCs so that they can access Microsoft Excel. That's how hardcore they are about it. But it was good enough for most of us, right? We didn't need a 5x better spreadsheet. We just needed to do a little quick math, you know. And so how much better does it need to be? I believe you. I think we agree, actually.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would argue that's exactly the delta IV test of like, to your point, is it 5% better or is it 5x better? Because these unbundled ones are not 5x better and therefore there's no reason for me to take on the cost of unbundling that suite, managing all the different types of disparate technology when I could just have all in one here. Same thing with like Google Sheets and Google Docs versus Office. You know, originally, it is definitely not Google spreadsheets are not better than Microsoft Excel, like period. From a person that used to come from finance.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That three, no, strangely, it's a number four. Okay, it's the Delta Four, and it's really simple. I mean, one of our partners internally just started coined this term, but basically out of a 10-point scale, are you at least four points better? And I think to your point about unbundling and taking on the Collisons, if they're an eight or a nine, are you a 13? It's a very different question than if you are the port operating system of twenty years ago is a three out of ten, and you can be a seven, those are very different kind of beasts to tackle.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So to me, that reads very hard fact, but how do those customers actually view those problems? Like, where would you put them on the transfer? It's kind of a...”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But don't forget, though, that the demand is given. There's pros and cons to each. Like, it's kind of like, oh, another thing that I, you know, go really deep on the rabbit hole on is personality tests and frameworks. But there's not, you know, you say in those that there's not a good one or a bad one, right? Like there's just pros and cons to each. And the pros here, like you said, you've run into so many founders that say they're solving your problem. That's number 10 on people's lists. In Hair on Fire, in theory, the demand is clearer, which is why it is hair on fire. And then usually in that space that there is actual budget, there's actual spend, there's people ready to write checks, which the other tube has may not necessarily see such a clear, you know, line towards.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah, that's interesting. When we actually look through our portfolio, I would say it was actually pretty representative across the different paths, surprisingly enough. Hard fact is really comes through a lot, I would say, actually surprisingly so. A lot of founders find that's why I think a lot of founders found it so illuminating because they realized, wait a second, so all this struggle I have with skepticism and kind of waking people up to like, you doesn't have to be this way. It's because I am actually not on the hair on fire path. And so I think that was the biggest aha moment I saw from founders that actually were on the hard fact path, not realizing that that path existed. So the performance actually pretty representative, I would say, across the paths. One interesting thing I would add is that I would say both kind of from a founder perspective and also from an investor perspective, certain investors kind of like really gravitate towards certain paths.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it's crazy to think that ChatGPT and all their GPT models were a stepping stone to realizing the vision of AGI, they found a commercial application that solved problems that people were compelled by to adopt for one use case or another on their way to the actual ultimate future vision, which actually hasn't come to fruition yet. And this is something that Future Vision founders, there's one thing about going into a cave for 10 years and emerging, and then everybody wants the thing that you have, but there's another thing to actually prove the hypothesis in bite sizes and in milestones and in stepping stones and finding the right stepping stones.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, future vision is for all the dreamers out there. So future vision is a place where you have some deep expertise in some area that causes you to see a world that not everybody else sees yet. Think Elon Musk, think Jensen Huang, you know, think these are the types of folks that not only see a product that can change people's lives, but a paradigm that can change people's lives. The thing, you know, we said in the first path, the hurdle to overcome was competition. In the second, the hurdle to overcome is habit. In the third, it's actually disbelief. It's sure, I'd love flying cars. I'd love teleportation. I'd love all kinds of things. Great. Yeah, but I'll believe it when I see it. And I think your job as a founder in this path is mostly validation to prove the validity of your vision of the future, a like almost literal technical validity. And then secondly, applying that and finding the right stepping stones to your ultimate vision. I like to use open AI as an example here. Their ultimate vision of the future is that AGI exists.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use the shopping cart cover, and I have to bring all the toys and the snacks and prepare. It was like a whole journey just to get our groceries for the week. And then because of COVID, I tried Instacart. I think I have now, I don't know, 350 orders on Instacart lifetime and is truly a, why was I living my life that way? They broke this habit that wasn't even, it wasn't great. I didn't enjoy Schleppingham to the grocery store and Schlepping all the stuff back, but I thought it was just the way that I had to live life. And Instacart broke me out of that habit.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pain Yes, it's a hard fact. Remember, not just for the customer, but also for potential competitors. And so it's a hard fact for everybody. Everybody has just accepted it, both as not a problem they want to solve and also not as a habit that they want to change. And your job is to shake them loose of that belief. It has its challenges for sure. And I think the two ingredients to really overcoming this habit, one, once again, pick a problem that people care about. If I have a habit in a space that, you know, sure, it's not the best, but I'm not trying to bend over backwards to change my life over this behavior. If you pick a problem that is actually a soft fact, I guess using the hard fact analogy, right? If it's a soft fact and not really a problem, then you're, you know, dead on arrival. And I think the second one is to actually have a compelling or novel enough solution to shake them out of their habit. Another example I often use is Instacart prior to COVID. I have two young kids. At that time, my son was one year old, and I used to, before COVID, I would like schlep him to the grocery store. I was like a first nervous, first-time mom.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and it may sound almost like I think as a founder, oh wow, there's not a bunch of competition to elbow out of the space. That sounds great. But no, I mean, I think breaking people's habits could.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's how I lived my life. And I think that's one of these things about hard fat companies why was I living my life that way?”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Oh, for me, I have so many. So we work with a lot of great marketplace companies. I think marketplaces actually fall into this mindset very clearly in that I need a cab. And if there's no yellow cab on the street, I'm standing out here for five minutes. Can't find a cab. Guess I have to take the subway or walk. And it's just like, it is what it is. That's just how it works, right? And you have something like Uber come along and say, actually, there's a completely different source of supply that you have not thought of for getting you from point A to point B. And that kind of jars you out of, I actually started my career in investment banking and I used to work in downtown San Francisco. And so I would get out of the office at 2 or 3 a.m. I would call up a cab company. And I lived not in the city, but I lived like across the bridge in Berkeley. And these cabs would come and show up to the office. And then they would see that I'm going over the bridge and they're like, I don't want to go over the bridge. And they would just leave me. And I'd have to call off sometimes two, three, four cabs at two or three in the morning to get one to agree to take me across the bridge.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, a hard fact I think I would, I love that this comes right after Hair on Fire because these people are, you know, please help me now. Hard fact customer mindset is literally we use the phrase it is what it is. It's just resignation. It's not the best. Yes, it's a problem statement, but I hacked together something. I'm using something that existed for 20 years. There's no better way to do it. I've got what I've got. It is what it is. This is a hurdle of not noise and crowded in competition, but this is a hurdle of habit. It's a hurdle of inertia. It's a hurdle of people who have just lived their lives this way, and they're not. This is, I think, the most eye-opening path, I think, for many of the founders that we walk through this framework with, that there is any other path outside hair on fire. And so that means you go out and build a thing that people urgently are saying that they need, which is not what hard fact is. Hard fact is somebody has accepted that this is just a hard fact, a hard truth of their life.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would actually challenge that in that at least every truly engaged and evangelist customer has a way that they describe notion and why they think notion is head and shoulders above the rest. Basically what you have with a horizontal product is you have to collect that data point across a lot of different customer profiles and use cases and pull together a thread of similarity across those. But you still have to do the work of understanding how a customer uses that product. Same thing with, I always use Excel as the example because Excel is, you know, there's so many different ways that you can use Excel, but it didn't start as a, hey, here's a spreadsheet, use it for whatever you want, right? There was somebody that was like a more compelling and deeper use case for that, whether that was financial analysts or people that really needed to manipulate data to do their day-to-day job. You have to actually pull the true value prop and the evangelism out of people that actually see that value prop clearly.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I would go back to using their words not your words the number of times that I have seen a founder you know describe this is what my product does this is what it is this is you know the category we're in this is the feature set we have and then you go and ask the customer and say how would you describe this product and it is completely orthogonal to the way that the founder either describes it or thinks it exists in the world for me it fits here for me it is this useful for me this is the biggest benefit and the the words just don't align for me”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is this problem actually that bad if you got the real answer to exactly what you just said, that happens over and over and over again, like this problem statement of this is a huge problem, it is a big deal, is the most urgent number one problem, budgets are there, and you hear the customer literally tell you the exact opposite, maybe top 10, it's not that big of a deal. I think the terrifying question is, does this problem actually matter in many cases? I think when you face the terrifying question, you get answers very quickly. And I think on the Hair on Fire in the Hair and Fire path, it is specifically the differentiation point around does this problem matter and are you solving in a compelling way?”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and I think that's one of the things that we teach also in ARC is ask the terrifying question. You want to believe, right? We've talked about having a room of believers that is all kind of, you know, moving and rowing in the direction of bringing that belief to reality. Sometimes you got to have somebody that's sanity checking you, right? There's always at least one terrifying question.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes. Perfect. A lot of PMF content talks about your product as if it existed in a vacuum. It's like, how do you get your product in front of the right customer? How do you get your product used? How do you get your product to the retention number? How do you get your product to hit this benchmark?”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think product market fit, I mean, this is going to sound very meta. You know, it's a journey, not a destination. I mean, I truly believe that. Even growth stage companies, you're either finding product market fit in a new area, you're trying to, you're struggling, and you're fighting to keep it because of what's changing in the competitive environment, or you're trying to expand it to different places. And so nobody ever actually gets and keeps product market fit. It is an ongoing battle or an ongoing journey that nobody ever really just conquers and says, okay, I'm done, I've done that.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not the most effective path. And I think it took a few cycles to actually break out of the growth mindset and then break out of the hey, let's take what we have off the shelf and see what we can do with this.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think I actually fell into the trap early on when I was at Instagram adopting the mindset of I kind of like failed one of the first tests I would say, which is to build the product for the customer. Don't build the product and then find a customer for it. We really did just take this big, massive ad platform and try to water it down for SMBs. And you're imagining you have big deep pocketed advertisers that have millions of dollars, agencies, whole teams that are working on their ad platform. Your whole job title is to work on Facebook ads on behalf of this advertiser. And we're taking this platform and then we're shoving it into the hands of a baker who is running a local bakery and they're baking cakes and queenamans. And then they're trying to figure out this like ad platform during the day. In what world do we actually think that that would work? I think this was kind of before the awakening or the realization that, hey, like diluting this product for this person is not going to work, even if that's the most efficient path.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you find out the hypotheses? Good question. I think it's through the feedback loop into your business. So it's the data, it's their actual data. Where are they retaining? Where are they not? What types of users are retaining? What types of users aren't? It could be by Geo, it could be by platform, it could be by flow, step of the flow. So data is a really good tool here. And then secondly, actual qualitative feedback. When you talk to users, they will tell you.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coming back. They're voting with their feet and their behavior that this product is not sticky and they don't want to return. What are the top three reasons why that is true?”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, okay. So it follows from the mission and the metric. The product strategy piece is the most mystical black box thing. Like people either think you have product intuition or you don't, or you can't follow a formula because every product is different. So you just kind of wing it. From my perspective, you can break it down into its component parts. The first component is to have the mission. The second is to have the metric. And the third is to understand the metric. So basically, let's say we have repeat monthly active advertisers, or maybe it's retention, pick a number. You basically analyze your metric and determine why and what the gap is between what the lead level is today and what the optimal or ceiling of that number is. So if you know your monthly retention is 20% and you know that amazing world class monthly retention is 60 or 70 percent, there's a huge difference there. And so you have to either break down the gap and understand or have a hypothesis as to why there's a gap. And the key there is that there's a user facing hypothesis. So this is users are not”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It means nothing. Yes. If you're talking early stage pre product market fit, the farther you are from customer happiness. And like I literally imagine them pushing a button or raising their hand. Like every time this thing happens, they are happy or they're getting value or there's, like you said, so many output metrics and downstream metrics that you can measure. Great, measure them all you want, but goal on the thing that makes your customer happy. And one example from a recent ARC company that I worked with was a robotics company. The whole point is that the robots are set up in your lab and helping you kind of like automate what otherwise would be done by a human work. And so they have, you know, they have a long sales cycle. They have a long implementation cycle. And you can go on any number of those things, you know, time to implementation, robots live, contracts, you know, signed, things like that. But really what you should be going on is robot hours live. How many hours, how many actions? How many things are the robots actually doing in the lab environment that are driving value?”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Image that's created. There's something that they're doing in your product that is the core action of your product that suggests that they're finding value out of it. And that is the thing, that is the quantification of their happiness at this current stage.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What a great segue, Harry. The next part of this framework, the four-part framework, is actually the metric. So the whole point of the mission is inspiration, aspiration, also clarity around what it is that you want your team to achieve. The metric is the quantification of that aspiration. So at any given point, there is one number that is the best determinant. And if you're talking about the mountain analogy, the best compass to tell you what is up the mountain and what is down the mountain. And that thing can change over time. So pre-product market fit, for example, we give our arc founders the strong advice to pick a number that represents customer happiness. And you mentioned NPS. I recommend not using NPS. I recommend using for this purpose. I recommend using a metric that's specifically an action in your product. So imagine anytime this user takes this action, they're pressing a button that says this product is great. I love this product, or I'm using this product. So it could be an API call. It could be a dashboard that's created. It could be a query. It could be”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's a perfect. Yes. Okay. So there's two core things, I think, that make a great product mission. One is that it's customer-centric. It should describe what it changes for the customer and their world, how it changes the customer's world. Two is that it is a thing that you could imagine working against or working towards for the next decade, not the next quarter.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a great question. So, this is actually taking from a framework that I do teach during ARC. And so this framework aims to basically demystify and break down the act of product management into a framework. And so it's a four-part framework. It has, as you suggested, mission is that kind of like the top of the framework and all of the remaining factors kind of like cascade down from mission. So first you have a mission, which is a qualitative statement of what success looks like. So we usually use an image of a mountain and it's like the flag at the top of the mountain. What does it look like to achieve, you know, to scale this mountain?”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the right. And I think the thing that I most learned there is the power of asking the question, what problem are you trying to solve? At Instagram, the problem statement being framed as acquisition, when I spent some time digging into the numbers behind the numbers, we had an awful, awful, awful retention problem. For every 10 customers that tried the product, six of them the next month would go away. Even though, even despite that, the number of monthly active advertisers would keep going up because we're just pouring new advertisers in the funnel. I had to evangelize the idea that the problem is not acquisition, it is retention. And if we don't fix this retention problem, we are going to be at a serious cliff in some amount of time. I don't know if it's six months, 12 months, but eventually we are going to run out of advertisers to pour in the top of the funnel and we will have nothing. Just reframing the problem and really understanding what problem it is you're trying to solve is probably my biggest lesson.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once again, this continuing this parade of building belief, you know, most of the vast majority of the ads business was focused on obviously makes sense, more concentrated, larger, deeper pocket advertisers. And if you have any experience with Facebook or Instagram's ad platform, it is complicated. It's very sophisticated. There are lots of knobs and dials and levers that you can pull. And when you apply that to the SMB space, people are saying, hey, this is a long tail. There are secondary audience. Let's leave them by the wayside and maybe kind of just retrofit or dilute what we have and ship it to them and it'll work. And so I think it was always a little bit of a second order customer. And I inherited this team that basically was saying, you know, our goal is to grow because this is the long tail, we make up for price with volume. Like they're not going to have the budgets, but there's millions of them. So let's go get a million of them, right? So the problem statement is acquisition. It's growth. Our metric is monthly active advertisers, and you just want that number to go up.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. I think, or at least open your mind to the possibility. We actually do have this scoping MVP framework that we teach during ARC that I teach during Product Week. And it talks about there's three columns, of course. There's three pillars that we break it into. And the first is what does the product actually need to do? And the second is what can you fake? And that's when people say unscalable things. We're talking about things you could fake operationally, Wizard of Oz, behind the curtain. What are the things you can do that maybe someday your product can do, but it doesn't have to do it today for you to learn the thing that you need to learn?”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In general, I agree with the premise of that, that you are almost always going to overestimate the amount that you need to build to actually learn the thing that you want to learn. I think the goal of building, like I said, this kind of cycle of conviction and action, the goal of building is to either move an impact metric that you care about or to learn something about how to move the thing that you care about. And both of those things require way less product than people think. Like my job as a product leader is almost to scope down the product that I build, to build less product I consider a successful.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Build only what you have to, I think, is one of the lessons I learned. At that time, there was lots of performance marketing. I mean, Google existed. Product listing ads existed. So there is a way to build a really, really sophisticated ad engine that we could have just taken a page out of their book and really started there. We started with a spreadsheet. So we ran our entire performance marketing engine off of a Google spreadsheet for, we did, I think it was a full year that we ran it on a spreadsheet and all the bids from all the advertisers, like you have Saxfith Avenue, Neem and Marcus, you know, these people are coming to us saying, hey, like they had to email their account manager to change their bids. So they would say, hey, can I change butt my bids for dresses up from 250 to 275? And the count manager would let us forward it to us and then we'd jump into the spreadsheet and change it from 250 to 275. And I think the lesson I learned was just it's so surprising how far you can get like building so little.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. But I think differentiation in the customer's voice. It's one thing for you to be able to say why your data lake is better than the others, but if your customer can't parrot that back to you in one sentence, then you haven't done your job yet.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first thing I would say is the framing it from their perspective rather than the customer's perspective. Me versus the customer and then solution versus problem, I think are the two main kind of issues that I see where it says we do this, our company is the best, our company is the best in this space because of this reason. We have this, we have that feature, as opposed to this is how your life will change if you realize the possibilities of my product. This is how your life will be better. This is how your possibilities are opened. And then I think the second thing is solution over problem. We have these features, this is what our thing does. Here's a full demo. Here's all the long list of super power advanced user features that we have, as opposed to what problem are we trying to solve and do you resonate with that problem? Are you deeply affected by that problem? How to solve that problem change your life?”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. Yeah, it's an interesting to your point, yes, I think you hit the ground running easier and you say, hey, we all believe in this, like, let's go. But at the same time, I think the act of seeing the tide turn, the feeling of being kind of like a rebel or a pirate or a startup within a startup, and then slowly you see traction and slowly you see customers and slowly we start popping up in those farm games and people that were”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I was actually reflecting on my career prior to this conversation, Harry, and I realized that I somehow ended up in situations where I own the side hustle and like my whole challenge is actually at Polyvar that was the same, at Instagram it was the same, at Sequoia it's been the same, where there's this like initial thesis that is unproven and then therefore not only do I have to build the product, but I have to build the belief. And so for me, I would say building the belief has actually been a through line in my career more so than I think the average product leader.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest lesson I learned there was, of course, you build the product, you have to build a product that delights customers, that actually delivers value, but you also, your job is also to build belief as a product leader, this belief in the possibilities that are unlocked by that product. And sometimes you're building belief for folks outside the building, like your customers and your investors, but sometimes you're building belief inside the building because, like you said, there are folks that were working on the core business, like best case scenario, this is an experiment that works, worst case scenario, this is a distraction. And we took things away from the core business to try something new. And so why would we be doing that?”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just like jump into a space where I was able to build some sort of hypothesis and then build an actual product that tested that hypothesis. But as you said, the product that I owned was kind of like a side hustle for the company. The company was already a growth stage company. We had found product market fit in the, you know, space of e-commerce and software. And there was this little nugget of a belief like, hey, could we apply this business model to another space, which was social gaming, which was on the rise at the time. I don't know if you remember the times when everybody had their own farm or aquarium or whatever they were tending to in between their productive life. Could this be the product that we sell in this, you know, kind of ad marketplace instead? Would this work? And so they kind of pulled together this ragtag group of folks across the company that were previously working on the main business and kind of pulled us into the side business and dropped me in as a new person, a new to product, new to the company. Hey, here's like this side gig. Let's see if you can make it a thing.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, big question. So I've actually been in product now for reflecting on it for about 15 years, which sounds like a very long time when you say that out loud. I was originally drawn, I think, to the career mostly because I love pulling order out of chaos. You know, in the movie The Matrix, where you see like the lines of code floating in the air or in a beautiful mind, he sees math formulas. I hear a big kind of like meaty question, I see bullet points or like pillars or two by twos. And I just need to structure things. Sometimes people would be in meetings with me and I just have to open my laptop and start typing in a doc because I just want to make bullet points. And so product, I think, was an area that it's just like the engine of being able to kind of take these problems and break them down and make them tractable and take action on them. It's like the cycle of conviction and action. Build conviction, take action. Action helps you build conviction. It's just a cycle over and over again. And I find it so exciting. So trial pay was the first place that I was able to do that.”
2024-04-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source