The Evolution of Product Teams: Insights from Industry Leaders

the best product teams will stay as small as possible as long as possible it just becomes too

difficult for the product to look and feel like the outcome of a singular simple vision for what the future could

be as you layer more and more and more people into the thing it was easy to see it was the

future I mean even even in the early days computers were like you know memory on them was I mean from really these

were like 64k 16k 64k memory computer but even even then you know before you end had understand any understanding of

moris law or anything like that memory on them was doubling and tripling you know regularly ease of use was even the

the hardware attachments like silly things like disc drives were evolving rapidly and becoming smaller quickly and

the whole systems were becoming more powerful and lighter and on and on and on so it was pretty easy to see early on

that this was um how the Future Part of how the future was going to be built was the discussion

at that time like more around here's how powerful computers could be or here's like what manual things today it could

unlock it was much more about the pragmatic uses of computing I mean there was no discussion certainly no

discussion of things like the touring test or anything like that it was just more about how much more easily you'll

be able to process data if you will I mean originally was people refer to those jobs as data processing that's

what it was for it was processing for processing reams of data um and Manufacturing and you know accounting

and so forth um so it was it was mostly around the ease and speed with which you would be able to do things like that if

you fast forward to like over the last 5 to 10 years can you describe like this cohort of product Builders to me the

this cohort of product Builders and I think feels like a little bit this W started with figma but I'm sure there

are lots of other people who aren't Dylan Fields who would disagree with that there's a much more um cohesive

understanding of product and design instead of the product manager and the design lead I feel like this this cohort

of builders have a very clear sense of you know design themselves maybe obviously people

would looking at this would say well Steve Jobs was the first one uh was the first pro in that regard but when I

think about specific folks to think about again Dylan Dylan at figma KI at linear um Kareem at clay Nick Sharp at

adio these are people who don't have their product thought and then a design lead and an engineering lead they are

the they've got the cohesive understanding of the design of the product and its functionality in their

mind and a very clear vision for how that should look and feel in the world that Maps much more closely to how their

users will use the product than the previous iteration what is it about those people that sort of have cracked

that the different set of personalities obviously we're generalizing but I think maybe in if you think about you know

happen to be at Google in the mid 2000 since 20072 2008 the lead product leads were engineers First In fact when you

interviewed to be in product at Google they were engineering questions you know um and algorithm questions and describe

a product that you know and it was it was less about um pick an elegant product and then help me think about

some design component that's of it that's elegant why is it elegant those were maybe one in 40 of the questions

that you would get in a product interview and I think this new wave of you know product Founders that are

building this new cohort of products that just feel like the way you want to build things are come from a design

First Sensibility and they and that includes you know everything about that it's it's you know not just the function

what are all the capabilities that we need to build in this product but you know what are the things we shouldn't do

you know Steve Jobs was famously you know know is the most most important part of strategy you know what are the

things we shouldn't build into this he famously again referred to himself as an editor like first we have to remove all

the things that people are going to ask for that we shouldn't put in there and I think this cohort again of great product

Founders thinks a lot about what are the you know where are we not going to go and why shouldn't we go there even if

there's demand to go there the quality of bar as you're mentioning like in our circles just feels so high how do you

personally Define like what what makes an excellent product versus just an okay one let's see um I don't know that I

have a strict definitional way of thinking about it what I generally look for is Products that come along that

instead of you have to change the way you work to fit to the product the product understands this is the way

people want to do these things and let's let's let's just let them work in the do the work that way they want to in the

product again figma is the great sort of canonical first wave example of let's just design it here and then it does it

the way we designed it here because it's what you see is what you get instead of let's do a wire frame and then run it

and then move it over here and see how it actually works um products that work that way instead of you having to pound

a square peg into a round hole are the new wave again it's I think of things like notion and and figma and and linear

instead of like I've I got to do all this process work to fit to the product and then move it over to the way I work

you just the product works the way you work one of the great challenges in a larger product

organization is it becomes difficult for it to continue to be the singular vision of

the product founder again Steve was jobs was great at this um um but it just becomes it becomes challenging secondly

I wasn't the product founder in Twitter Jack dorsy was the inventor of the product so Jack was still chairman of

the company but you know he's not there every day and I feel like there's becomes a certain point in these

companies where it's impossible for it to feel like it's the result of a singular Vision anymore um and and you

know there are lots of reasons why that is and you can debate and debate all of them but the longer that product

Founders can hold on to that the better you I had a discussion with the product founder the other day who's still the

head of product and also the head of engineering was kind of having a discussion around you know at some point

it's getting to you know everybody reports to me it's not sustainable and I my you know comment was give up head of

engineering before you you know don't give up head of product right yet like you're the product looks and feels the

way it does because of you bringing in a vice president or product is just going to make them man you miserable and will

create dilution between your vision for what this thing currently is and people love and you know so don't do that right

off you're going to offload something offload VP of engineering the things that get in the way and cause it to

become you know a shell of its former self if you will are the company begins to subjugate the

beauty and quality of the product to the need to monetize it I mean look at Google search today it's ads and you

know it didn't they didn't when they started monetizing you know AdWords they didn't say I can imagine a future where

there are three pages of ads before the organic search results it just gets to the point where you're like you know we

could make a little more money next quarter and again nobody says that out loud it just sorts starts to happen and

you know the longer you can hold on to what's the way we can monetize this in the most organic way without subjugating

the original vision for the product of that the better but there it's not just monetization that gets in the way Dogma

gets in the way you know remember at Twitter when I first got there people would walk around and say you know you

have to tweet in order to really get and understand Twitter so really have to if you know if you don't actively publish

it's hard to get it it's hard to comprehend what it's for so there was a long time where people just walked

around saying that and then you know it turns out when you actually went and looked at the data like you know I

remember thinking like why do we believe that well because you know so and so says you have and then you hire the next

person and that person tells them and they think well so and so has been here forever and they say you have to you

know it turned out to not be true at all and of course is you know there we all know people who are like yeah I never

tweet at all but I use it every day and so that starts to that changes the way you think about the product so I think

things like Dogma um the dilution of the original singular

Vision through the necessity of having to create a bigger organization to manage the you know the usage and the

growth and the number of customers and on and on and on and monetization are all things that start to come between

that singular Vision that simple vision and where we are today something we talk about at linear a lot is like this kind

of concept of like the fall of the middle manager I don't know if that's just startups being idealistic like

we'll never have people managers or all managers are ic's or if this is actually kind of a real Trend that's in service

of this quality idea but I'm curious your take on management layers as it relates to Quality and also the trend in

managers you're seeing at startups Bill Campbell famously at Google lar Larry page this is very early Bill Campbell

had been was on the board of Apple and Steve Jobs close friend and had been brought in by um I think by by John dor

cler Perkins had been brought in to get Larry and sahay and Eric Schmidt to all be able to work together you know Eric

Schmidt was brought in as CEO and so Bill Campbell had been brought in like help these guys work together um Bill

had spun clar's software out of apple and built that as a separate company and so he understood scale and management

and so forth and Larry uh early on at Google was you know Engineers don't want to be managed they just want to be able

to like do their job you know Bill is like huh okay you know bill went out and talked to a bunch of of Engineers was

like hey you know what's it like you know not having any manager and almost all you know the engineers were like it

would be great to like have someone who could help me understand like how what I'm doing fits

into the purpose of the organization and like what the priorities are and cuz he thinks the priorities are this and that

guy thinks the priorities are that and I don't really know which one of them is right and I would also like to know what

like productivity means for me in my career here and where it all leads to and you know bill went back and told

Larry like yeah they totally want managers not people to tell them what to do um you know and great managers don't

tell people what to do they make sure everybody understands the priorities and how their work in

productivity what what it means for both them them and the organization um you know so when you think About Management

there are very different ways of thinking about it and Bill was famous Lee like stop telling people what to do

you know that's bad that's horrible um but help them understand what the priorities are and make sure they

understand what the work means both for themselves and the company you know um I had a friend of mine that was taking a

tour of a Tesla Factory he just asked some guy on the shop floor of Tesla who's you know

screwing things in like you know talk about like your job and the guy knew he didn't just talk about well I'm the guy

that screws the bolt in on this thing he talked about like the reason we do this this way what I'm doing that right now

is because and understood how it fit into the purpose and mission of Tesla that's a great understanding of

management someone has helped that person understand what we're trying to do here is make sure we achieve this

outcome not screw those screw eight of those in you know a day I'd be curious your perspective on how user research or

the understanding of users is changing and and the role of it nowadays for Founders or for people who are building

products I maybe have a little bit of a contrarian point of view on that which is I don't know that it matters to the

great product Founders I don't know that they think of it that way I think the great product Founders have a very

specific point of view and opinion that's theirs and that's what the product looks like not I went and talked

to 18 people and they told me this about their lives and that helped me understand what I want to build I think

the great product Founders don't come at it that way they come at it

from I'm tired of blah pounding the square peg into a round hole and I see in my mind how this thing could be

elegant and simple and meet me where I am in my work and I'm going to go create that I want to talk a little bit about

what you're seeing like Trends you're seeing and how we're changing the way we're building or how we're changing the

way we're working what do you think in the future the most successful product teams will be doing

differently if anything the best product teams will stay as small as possible as long as

possible it just becomes too difficult for the product to look and feel like the outcome of a singular

simple vision for what the future could be as you unless your a Steve Jobs as you layer more and more and more people

into the thing um it just it's just hard um so so I think the best product teams are the product founder is the product

manager and the product leader as long as possible maybe there are more engineers

and maybe there are more you know I don't know backend backend you know Architects making it make reducing

latency or what have you in the product but the best products are the result result of a single product Leader's

vision for what this can and should be and they are the always the best people to understand what we shouldn't do

because lots of times there get to be a A Chorus of users who want you know XYZ and doing that one thing doesn't change

the product dramatically but again look at an Instagram or a Facebook Instagram specifically once Kevin cam is pulled

out of Instagram it's oh it wouldn't hurt to just add a you know direct message button here lots more people use

it when you can direct message people it's just one thing and then next thing you know there are buttons all you know

hamburger menu at the top left buttons along the bottom how tactically do you advise

Founders actually achieve that offloading everything but that is you know when you get yeah

like you you know you shouldn't run you shouldn't run product and Engineering anymore get like get a get a director of

engineering to manage and organize engineering but trying to keep product as lean as possible for as long as

possible um you know and hey you don't have to you know I mean as you might imagine and again

probably because of people like Steve Jobs Steve loved to have his hands in marketing you know and was sort of

famously involved in it um you know those are things that I would encourage you know the product founder to like hey

it's going to there's going to come a point where you can't do all the marketing anymore either and they're

like but you know when so and so does it it's hideous and ugly and feels like a crappy ad campaign like well better

better that than you not being in charge you know being responsible for thinking about the product all the time the great

product Founders want to always be involved in the marketing because that's like the way we talk about the product

is the product I get it like and I totally agree with that I'm just saying like there comes a point in the life of

the company almost certainly where you have to have some people who are doing most

of that and you're reviewing it or something but you know not like that's obviously stupid and I'm going to go

home tonight and spend all my time redrawing the print ad for the back of the Wall Street Journal just you should

be spending your time on the actual thing the customer is going to use and feel I'm just saying as you sacrifice

things sacrifice anything but I'm responsible for what the product looks and feels like as you grow a company in

the absence of you doing you as the founder CEO or whoever's running the company you know at Twitter I wasn't the

founder I was a CEO at Twitter as we grew had to constantly work against the organic nature of the organization to

slow down as it grew why does that happened communication architecture is like telephone play again a game of

telephone at a dinner table you're like okay now there's a thousand people in the company how do I make sure that

everyone understands what I understand as quickly as possible you know I articulate some decision to a director

of engineering the director of engineering turns around and articulates that beautifully to the manager the

manager turns around and says dick says do this and then you've got someone in the New York office running around

thinking like Dick's Luna Dick's crazy and he makes these arbitrary and capricious decisions and God only knows

why so so one in order the organization to move as quickly as possible you really have to work hard against the

natural tendency of the organization to slow down so one of the ways we used to do that is launching an experiment at

Twitter I don't remember the exact time frame right now but launching an experiment at TW in in the Twitter

product to 1% of users to test some hypothesis took at one point like 14 weeks so you know we would like inste of

just letting of course didn't originally take that long it just grew and grew and grew organically so we would start to do

things like why does X at Twitter take this long and not like and instead of the question well what would have to be

true for it to be you know 12 weeks and then people like if you do that people start to come up with well the reason it

has to be we have to do this is we can't really stop doing that the right way to the right way to think about that is

what would have to be true for it to be two weeks you know and then you're like you forces people to like I'm not saying

that we're going to do it but what would have to be true for it to be two weeks and what you end up finding is that it

can totally be two weeks things that are true now in the organization have to not be true for example the designers don't

have to build wireframes for an engineer to be able to launch something to 1% It can be the engineer shitty design we

just want to see if this thing works so great you just took out X you know steps and we're not going to go through the EU

privacy review that we have to go through when we launch the full product because we're going to launch it I'm

making this up we're going to launch it in New Zealand to 1% so we're not going to do that you

know and on and on and on and pretty soon you can launch experiments in two weeks forcing yourselves to go through

those things in a growing organization to work against the natural tendency to slow down is super important a great way

for a company to slow down and for everything to take longer is for people to get in trouble when they make a huge

mistake what happens then everyone go everyone starts going around asking for permission before they did it do

anything because they'll go hey I asked dick and he said you know blah blah and and then I asked the head of trust and

safety who because they got mad at me last you know and and the organization slows down so you have to help people

understand nobody's going to get in trouble for making mistake it's the job of leaders to correct mistakes quickly

when they happen not to prevent mistake mistakes from happening you talked to a lot of Founders and product teams even

with the great ones who are building an excellent product is there something you feel they miss or like that you're often

giving advice on either in how they run their teams or what what they're prioritizing and building their product

yeah they all they try to do everything beyond the product for too long and then it it prevents the company from

achieving what it could achieve more quickly or more efficiently even they hold on to you know well that's an I

mean all you can say everything's an extension of the product HR is an extension of you know how we work and

who we are is an extension of the product I'm not going to have some you know people manager come in here and

start managing benefits you know or obviously an extreme example but the great thing about great product Founders

is they challenge assumptions and they ask questions like why is that that way it doesn't have to be that way and

that's why how you end up with these beautiful new products they tend to do that to things

like compensation reviews you're like okay like let's maybe play around with that you know we don't need to reinvent

HR again like that you see that all the time I mean I remember speaking with John and Patrick Collison at stripe

years ago and they're like you know why is HR like that I was like oh boy it's another it's we're going to go through

the whole revisit HR again from the great product Founders it's a pattern and it happens but I get it it's because

like well when I challenged assumption over here everyone told me I was a genius and look at what we've done and

blah blah blah so of course we should do that everywhere and you know you just don't have to do it necessarily

absolutely everywhere yeah You' only have so much time and you're just you know part some

of what you end up doing is just driving everybody crazy you know you're dealing with a great product founder when they

want to reinv HR you're like okay well it's probably should be actually a question I ask when I meet with founder

CEOs how do you feel about HR it needs to be reinvented great good this is probably going to work

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