Unorthodox PM tips: Automating user insights, unselling candidates, decision logs, more | Kevin Yien

the PM job can become a little too internal influencing my stakeholders and getting alignment and all these things but if you can't sell or support your own product I don't trust you to build the product you think every PM should keep a decision log we all talk about product sense to me it's just a fancy way of saying you can make good decisions with insufficient data PMS need as many reps as possible in making decisions documenting the rationale behind those decisions and then crucially seeing the outcome of them we have a lot of interesting approaches

to hiring including this idea of a unsell email when you get to offer stage I send an email and I say all the terrible things that are probably going to reinforce their fears if you can tell them that upfront and they can read that whole email and still be equally excited to join you find yourself any CL higher I'm curious if you found any interesting uses of AI in your work we are not even beneath the dust on the surface when it comes to what's going to change [Music] today my guest is Kevin Yen Kevin

leads product for merchant experiences at stripe before that he built the restaurant business and the ecosystem teams at square and most recently was head of product and design at Mutiny he also makes ice cream and as you'll hear in their conversation was a pretty competitive eater for some part of his life in our conversation Kevin shares a ton of unique and insightful perspectives on how to be a successful product manager including how to get into product management how to improve your relationship with your engineers and designers bunch of advice on and hiring why you should

keep a decision log how to automate your customer research plus a ton of really powerful stories around failure and Ai and career this episode is for anyone looking to become a better leader thinker and builder of products if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and followed in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube it's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously with that I bring you Kevin yen [Music] Kevin thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast thanks lening I am humbled to be

here I've been a big fan of yours from afar I've been following on Twitter for a long time you have a very distinct profile photo that I feel like you may be not haven't changed for a long time how long have you had this this profile oh gosh probably 2011 or 2012 the story behind that is I was inspired actually by Chris Dixon's Avatar at the time and I wanted something really similar to it but I couldn't figure out how to luckily I was dating a designer at the time uh and so she made me

that sort of custom pick that has been my profile since then and she's not my wife oh my God I uh funny enough I had a startup idea once where it's like a profile picture as a service business where there's like these three tiers where it's like one has automated one has someone illustrates and one is like a professional photo as like it feels like everyone profile photos are so important totally but I I never follow through probably not a good business anyway yeah but a good idea good tool good idea thank you thank you

for making me feel better I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time as I said I've been a big fan of yours for a long time something that I've noticed about you is you have a lot of really unique perspectives on a lot of different things and in particular product management how to be successful as a PM how to get into product management things like that so I thought it'd be fun to start there talking through some of these things that I've heard you talk about and then get into some very tactical

stuff that you found to be useful in your product management career the first thing I've heard you talk about is that you discourage people from going straight into product management if they want to become product managers you encourage them to start somewhere else first why is that where do you want where do you think people should start talk about this Insight that you've had yeah so follow me on the detour to Science World temporarily if we if we all remember sort of like high school science classes there was like this concept of potential and kinetic

energy and there's so many different definition for like product management but the one that I have come to myself that I really like is when you are building a product you have this team right Engineers designers so much potential and the purpose of product management not the person but the practice is to convert that potential into as much realized value for someone as possible Right minimum loss and when you're just getting started with a new product the people that should be doing that are the people who are building it right that's an engineer that's a

designer that's a salesperson or a support person they're the front line of the smallest Loop possible to get something going and it's through those practices that I think you're able to get the most exposure to what it takes to build a good product and then from there that's your foundation right that's the unique perspective that you bring and allows you then to actually take on a quote unquote role of product manager in a good unique and cyle way so that's sort of like the foundation there's a lot more to unpack behind that comparison but that's

where it comes from I love that uh I'd love to unpack it further this episode is brought to you by build better. a back in 2020 when AI was just a toy build better bet that it could cut down on a product teams's operational BS fast forward to today 23,000 product teams use purpose-built AI in build better every day first build better uses C system models to turn unstructured data like product and sales calls support tickets internal Communications and surveys into structured insights it's like having a dedicated data science team second build better runs those

structured insights into workflows like weekly reports about customer issues context aware prds and user research documents with citations it even turns standups into action items that automatically get assigned and shared into your tools plus with Unlimited seat pricing on all plans buil better ensures everyone at your company has access to this knowledge truly no data silos in a world of AI demos over promising and underd delivering see why build better has a 93% subscription retention get a personalized demo and use code Lenny for $100 credit if you sign up now at build better. a/ Lenny

I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert the founder of one schema one of our longtime podcast sponsors hi Christina yes thank you for having me on Lenny what is the latest with one schema I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like ramp vanta scale and Watershed I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import csvs from especially tricky systems like erps yes so we just launched one scheme of file feeds which allows you to build an integration with any system in 15 minutes as long as you

can export a CSV to an SFTP folder we see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds and the product teams that we work with don't have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to integrate with we allow our customers to offer thousands of Integrations without involving their engineering team at all I can tell you that if my team had to build Integrations like this how nice would it be to be able to take this off my road map and instead use something like one schema and not just to

build it but also to maintain it forever absolutely Lenny we've heard so many horror stories of multi-day outages from even just a handful of bad records we are laser focused on integration reliability to help teams end all of those distractions that come up with Integrations we have a built-in validation layer that stops any bad data from entering your system and one schema will notify your team immediately of any data that looks incorrect I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust Christina thank you for

joining us and if you want to learn more head on over to on schema. that's ones schema. every pm has their definition of what is product management yeah and I have one that I'm trying to find exactly what I what I wrote but essentially it's to Marshall the resources of your team to solve customer problems and drive business impact most efficiently something like that and I feel like it's very aligned with your perspective but I really love this view of it's like unlocking the potential energy of the team not just marshalling the resources of a

team but it's there and your job is to maximize their effort and this is why when people say like I hate product managers I don't want any product managers at my team with we don't need product managers here I feel like that's often because you've had a bad pm good PMS make you better and make your life better allow you to do the work you want to do and they take all the stuff you don't want to do make sure the stuff you're doing is is worthwhile is there anything more you want to add along

those lines to elaborate on that I think the broader point is that truly not every team needs a product manager but the activities the outcome that one would drive needs to get done no matter what and in some cases this is why the prototypical companies that everyone references when they say they never had product managers look at how successful they are they're all building for themselves stripe twilio uh figma like designers for designers Engineers for engineers when you are the customer why the heck do you need someone else to help do the things that let

you make decisions on what to build but if you are not the customer if you're working in a particularly complex space if there's something that you as the person that could build the product feel you don't have that's when you can essentially delegate that responsibility to someone else to say hey let me do the things I'm really good at and you do something that I need to get my job done so it's that sort of relationship that I think is often missing in the discourse and I think it would alleviate a lot of the we

don't want PMS PMS are useless or PMS are the best things since SI spread which they are not uh it's just a manifestation of that problem yeah just to build on that we're going in a tangent but I think it's really interesting I think there's another element of that like Snap actually is another example where they waited I think till they had 200 people before they hired their first pm and to me that's an example of other people were doing the PM job as you said there's like PM activities someone's doing them lining people prioritizing

making sure things are clear making sure people aren't surprised all these things PMS do like someone's doing that and my feeling is like okay your designers may love doing that great let them do it if you're Engineers that have a lot of product sense may want to do that great but there's some point there either is like forget I just want to code I want to build that I want to be sitting around in meetings all day or they just aren't as good as it's things are scaling and so it's kind of like if your

engineers designers want to do it and are good at it great you don't need PMS for a long time oftentimes they're not good at it or they don't want to be sitting and doing all these PM things yep precisely okay so going back to uh the question of your so your advice is don't go straight into product management if you want to become a grade PM where do you think people should start if they can what are some options you recommend the best way to think about this in my opinion is who are the people

that you would be sort of taking the PM responsibilities from and then do those jobs and so for me the sort of foundational three are going to be like engineer designer or salesperson and it doesn't have to be I think sales also gets not a bad rep but a misrepresented reputation in Tech where all they care about is quota it's just about numbers Etc in reality the best sales people are the best listeners the best people at understanding the problem that the customer is having and then Translating that into what you can do for them

and so if you get really good at having those calls getting told no a lot and being able to translate that I mean why would you not want to start there and then eventually move into something like product so that's like the foundational three for me so your advice is essentially if you want to be a PM start as an AS a designer or an engineer or a salesperson uh I was an engineer so this is exactly the path I went on and I think there's a like an element of you start there and then

you realize you're never going to be as amazing as the other people at that role and you're like okay maybe I should explore this other thing because I was like I'm never gonna be an amazing engineer I'm like good enough I'm like totally I'm pretty good at this other stuff let's explore that the the one thing that I might tack on there because this could lead to a a negative perception is well I'm never going to be a world class engineer world class designer or Etc and so let me settle for being a PM that

could be the conclusion you arrive at but I think a better way of framing it is I'm okay at those things I'm potentially world class at this other thing let me see what it feels like to double down in this area absolutely and I think that's just a good braking okay so let's talk about another insight and piece of advice that you have is that you think that grade PMS need to be great writers and I think a lot of people don't necessarily think this I think people may probably think ah if I'm okay writer

I can probably be really successful PM talk about why you think it's so important to be a really great writer to be a really great PM it's actually shocking for me to hear that this isn't commonplace sort of acceptance but the the place that this comes from for me is writing is Clarity at scale and a key component to a PM's job is creating Clarity both internally and externally but it's it's both sides of that that I think often get lost a lot of times the PM job can become a little too internal and it's

about influencing my stakeholders and getting alignment and all these things don't get me wrong all that's very important you should write your PS they should be super crisp they should articulate things really well but I'm not saying that every PM needs to be a marketer or a world-class copywriter but you should be able to write really compelling messaging in the voice of the person that you're trying to serve and I'm working backwards from the belief that if you can't sell or support your own product I don't trust you to build the product and so that's

where I think writing is the foundational component there there's like a few quotes I say often on this podcast just because they always come to mind one is by Joan didan who said that I don't know what I think until I've written it down and that's what I find with writing where I need to like actually write it down for me to like really understand what the heck I'm thinking to really crystallize it yeah and I think writing is it's both a mechanism for translating what you're trying to think into that thought into like what

you're actually trying to do but then it needs additional revs to be properly consumed by everyone else and that's I think the really hard part that a lot of folks don't do the extra mile effort to take on and this connects to your earlier point of a job of PM is to unlock this potential energy of your team of the various resources you have and obviously having everyone aligned behind a very like this is what we were doing and everyone understanding it and it being very clear is really powerful there uh okay so this begs

the question how does one become a great writer what helped you become a better writer do you consider like how do you feel about your ability to write at this point any oh man becoming better I I'll start with like a sightly cheeky comment which is I think some of this is changing with the Advent of large language models and the ability to actually just like mimic someone else's tone but I I take inspiration from the camp of Anthony Bourdain and he has I'm going to butcher the exact quote but it's something like if you

want to know how to make good food you have to eat a lot of food and you have to be willing to have a bad meal every now and again and so for me like good writing comes from consuming as much good writing as possible and sometimes you'll read something and say that was actually absolute trash but that's okay you have to be willing to take on some of that stuff but the more you index towards developing your own taste for what you think is good by consuming others then you can shift into producing your

own and then comparing them and ripping it off other people so I think that's sort of the cycle that I've gone through I have a friend who's a very good writer and a poet and helped me develop my writing early on Vanessa and she said exactly the same thing just to become a better writer read beautiful writing and it just kind of infuses you or your brain uh in your experience is there anything you read anything you found really effective anything that you think influenced the way you write or think that people can check out

I explicitly do not mean read a bunch of other PM artifacts like you're not going to become a better writer by reading prds or you know whatever it is uh or support articles it needs to be writing that compels like that's the the theme I would go back to because that's what you're trying to do at the end of the day and when I say compels I mean it pushes you to action because if you read something and you're like oh that's interesting that's not enough right you need to be able to give someone something

that then allows them to do something differently and so the things for me that have been best obviously there's like all the Paul Graham essays I think his writing is very succinct very clear that's not novel I I learned a lot by finding specific voices back in the day on Twitter and it wasn't always what they were posting on Twitter but if they wrote an essay or a post that would be their crispest thinking and so you can use these like broadcast channels to find where their gold nuggets are but then spend time with those

instead and don't worry about all the additional noise that comes with it Paul Graham actually mentioned him he has a great piece on how to become a good writer that will link to where this basically his advice is write the way you talk just like keep it really simple and really regular and so link to that is there anything else along these lines of writing that you'd recommend for folks that are like okay I need to become a great writer how do I do this actually along the lines of write how you talk uh there's

this concept of cadence that I think is really important when it comes to internal writing and it's there's probably like some very good article about this but it's the idea that if you only write in a monotonous Cadence either all really short sentences or all really long sentences then your brain just Tunes out eventually and so you have to interrupt the pattern intentionally and so you go short long long short whatever it is but there's a few very specific things that you can do that allow someone to just roll through uh you know a post

or something when you write that way along those lines there's a book that I just found to make sure I had the right title called several short sentences about writing that is uh really helpful along these lines and the whole book is like very short sentences and it teaches you to write very short sentences because once you're good at that you can get better writing longer sentences and so we'll link to that too it's like a really good book uh that I have like two copies around my house that I kind of poke at sometimes

nice I'll have to PR too okay uh another area that you have a really clever insight into is how the PM rooll fits with engineering design we've talked about this a little bit but you have a really clever way of just thinking about how these roles interact and who's responsible for what talk about that so this this description came from writing prds at square and I think there was a lot of confusion from my team specifically when I joined them for what it's worth it was uh new product line three Engineers three designers there was

nothing but a slide deck three engineers and three designers the best ratio ever this is a whole other thing uh ever most people I would say underinvested design Point Blank and when you get to a certain scale maybe things change but like truly I don't think most teams have experienced what it feels like to have a really high design ratio and what that actually does to the quality of the work and like the quality of the thinking so shout out to designers uh we we need more is the the short version and I would rather

hire an incremental designer than PM almost any day of the week so I've never experienced this ratio incredible yes I was very lucky uh shout out to Bruce Bell who was my manager at the time who was an exd designer at the time GM and like declared sort of that starting ratio so anyways with that setup they all had sort of like an opinion they had seen prds in the past they weren't quite sure what the purpose of it actually was because they had designs already they had something to start from and when I came

in and talked to everyone and figured out where we needed to be in a year's time I was like okay here's how I think it let me know if you agree and this is a whole other concept which is the best way to get feedback from people is not by asking what they think but to put something Concrete in front of them and then have them react to it right it's a twoing fork and so my description is PM should be doing everything in their power to draw the perimeter of the space of the problem

space and it's within that enge design everyone else that you're working with they can go as crazy as they want Push Up Against The bounds in it fill the box to its maximum capacity but you've now applied the constraints that allow you to actually have productive conversations on the other end of the spectrum though I think there's a lot of folks who think oh PMS are just strategy high in the clouds all they do is you know kick things off you need to be obsessed about the final deliverable and whether or not value is actually

getting to the customer and I have like a really tra example of this if you want to go down it but please the the key point I want to make is I think it is tempting when we think about engineering product and design to draw these really clear swim lanes and say you do X I do y don't tread on you know my area but you need these murky overlaps in order to build something really good and so even if the engineers are going to build a better product than you and the designers are going

to design something better than you you need to come with a strong opinion and you need to do the leg work to get their trust so they actually care about your opinion in the first place okay so time for mini story uh so Square we're building a point of sale for restaurants and if you've ever seen one one of these in a restaurant there's this sort of grid of tiles that they tap to enter your order when you're sitting down for dinner and we were developing one and there's this concept of a like a menu

group so it's a little box you tap on it and then it pops the screen in so you go to the next level of like the hierarchy so example would be you have a wine button you tap it and you see your Reds whites Etc if you think about the people that we were trying to serve there's the restaurants that were coming from a really old Legacy system and if you've seen a bartender tap on one of these I mean it is muscle memory to the max they're not even looking at the thing and just

punching in the order blindfolded and it's rapid fast on the other hand you have people who are entering the workforce for the first time they've never used the point of sale and so we have to serve both of these equally well how do you deal with that level of speed but also the ease of use that anyone can learn it for the first time and so there was this interaction that we really cared about which was when you tap on a menu group what's the animation to pop you into that next level this seems like

such a small thing but it made the difference in how easy it was to adopt for a lot of the restaurants and so a designer and myself spent like literally an entire week just fine-tuning how many milliseconds it would take to pop in and out so that it felt right and we actually brought in servers and bartenders to play with the prototypes we had on iPads and be like here's an order pop it in and we would see where they would sort of like Flinch or hesitate because the animation was too slow and they thought

I can't tap it yet or something related to that and so it's easy I think for a PM to say that's not my responsibility I Define the requirements you know have a menu group that goes to the next level designer engineer figure it out no way like that's fully on you and you better be involved with those details I love this and there's there's two directions I want to go so there's the drawing the perimeter and then there's this paying attention to the final deliverable and keeping the barly high which I love and I totally

agree with both uh in terms of this animation people hearing this that are PMS are going to be like how do you how do you have time to spend a week on an animation for one little product I have so much to do I get hit some goals Drive some numbers I have people waiting for me uh maybe because square is like this once you deploy it's harder to change and it's like a big deal to ship but I'm curious if you have any advice or things you've learned about how to create space for that

sort of thing to create a time to spend a week on this animation or is it just was it just like obvious to everyone we need to spend as much time as we can top down everyone knew I definitely don't think it was obvious to everyone and I can I can definitely say that because you know we were given a pretty strict deadline that we needed to launch by and I pushed it out three times and that's not because of this one animation but it's because of the series of decisions where we said this is

what we believe we need to ship and this matters much more than hitting some artificial external GA date and there's this other aspect that I think PMS like to feel good about how busy they are and they like I'm involved in so many processes and I have to talk to this person and talk to that person all that might be true but I think there needs to be a calibration or at least like a spring cleaning of what's everything I'm doing and how much do these things actually matter to getting value to a customer cuz

as a company gets bigger as teams get more complex it's very easy and natural to spend more time on things that are internally focused and not externally focused and I think we just all have to have like hyp sensitive antenna to that so that we don't fall prey to well the way that my job is described is to do these things but really it's the outcome again of put something in a customer's hands that solves a problem in it's amaz reminds me of your now colleague Jeff Weinstein's uh advice he got from one of the

cson where they came to him and they're like you're world class at doing the second and third most important things and you're not focusing on the most important thing because it's so hard and that's something you need to work on totally I will say so one on that uh the CEO at Mutiny charie she always repeated it to me non-stop keep the main thing the main thing and would just say it as nauseum and I'm really glad that she did the one excuse I don't want to give folks is as you progress in your career

you have to walk and chew gum at the same time you can't say oh I'm only focused on this thing over here so other folks handle that like you do have to figure out how to do a little bit more at the same time but priorization does play a factor there's a framework shos uh suggested that I really like the L framework I forget exactly what the LNO stands for but leverage something something and we'll link to it in the show notes that gives you some advice on how to prioritize your time based on this

stuff totally okay so so I guess in the case of pushing back to create space this was just you as a product leader recognizing this is really important to get right I will convince people we need to make more time for that I don't want to make it seem like it was me against everyone because that was definitely not the case I think the the starting engineer and designers on that team really cared about the quality of what they built too that's a pretty structural sort of DNA for a team as well if you don't

start with that and as a comparison you have a team that is that really Prides themselves on shipping fast and meeting deadlines really prescriptively you might end up in a different world or your role as a PM might be a little bit more challenging if you want to push on this stuff so I do think you have to take into account like what is the DNA of the team and then can you exploit that which I was able to do or do you actually have some change management to put into effect if you believe that

it's worthwhile let's go back to the perimeter drawing the perimeter concept to make that a little more real for people so your advice here is the role of a PM kind of your main part of your main job especially when it comes to engineers and design is to draw the perimeter for the team can you make that a little more real what's an example that maybe from something you worked on what does that look like totally the the best word to describe the perimeter is just constraints at the end of the day you should be

adding as many constraints as reasonable in order to let engineers and designers come up with the most creative solutions for whatever you're trying to do and so again if we just like stay focused on this point of sale example one constraint would be who the hell are we serving are we trying to go after sit down restaurants that are serving five different courses and have a 200 item wine list or we try to serve the taco truck those will lead to very different spaces and if you leave both on the table the lack of that

constraint makes designing a good solution that much harder uh there are instances where you actually can't apply that many constraints but I bet that if you push on enough different axes you eventually scope it down to a point where it feels really good for the team and it's just about how do you remove decisions right cuz this I think is like a maybe a TR phrase but the best decision is no decision like if you don't even have to think about the decision the team is that much more affected so to give people a few

maybe even pointers of I need to create more constraints maybe for my team to help them go crazy but within this box that we all agree on so you mentioned there's make sure the user is clear of who you're designing for is there anything else just like thinking about maybe the PRD someone's trying to write to help create this constraint what other maybe bullet points sections would you imagine or do you find useful to add so beyond customer segment slash like what their specific role is I think another one would be uh we can Loosely

call IT jobs to be done even though I know that's becoming an increasingly loaded term but great what's the thing they're trying to do and how many different pathways are you willing to entertain around it that's another one that I would think about uh depending on what you're building there's availability so do you care about desktop web mobile web native mobile Etc and maybe another one to Think Through just as an ex example would be this is probably getting closer to what a lot of people think about in terms of principles but what are the

things that you want to be known for when you ship a product and one example there might be speed and so if you say speed is more important than consistency of data that's a huge tradeoff and constraint that you can give the team oh my God if an engineer hears I don't need real time consistency of data I can do so much cool stuff and easily accomplish that speed thing and so that's just like a very technical example maybe awesome okay I'm glad I followed up on that there's a couple more things you mentioned that

I want to come back to real quick uh the first is this tuning fork idea I completely agree this point you made that the best way to get feedback from your team is to take a first pass at it and here's like a rough quick draft uh I find with design especially if you design something ugly uh designers are often like let me make that better I can't stand this thing is there any other anything else you want to add there just like this idea of the tuning fork as feedback strategy okay there's two areas

we can go deeper on here one is in how you get the feedback so this is definitely a square ISM I think it was probably adopted from Amazon which is around the silent read of documents when you are all busy and someone's like I wrote a doc you send it into the slack you know ecosystem and everyone goes please feedback you have so much going on like you'll be lucky to maybe get a response maybe there's one or two people that Chim in and so even though we hate meetings and we love asynchronous there is

a lot of value to saying I need 20 minutes of focused time to interrogate something that I've done and we're not going to talk I'm literally going to force us into a room or Zoom you're going to read the doc I'm going to watch you comment on it and real time I'm going to respond to your comments in real time and at the end of this thing I'm going to have enough really good input that I can do a huge rub on this thing and get to the next base I love that so it's basically

instead of hey I'm sending you this doc to go review give me feedback it's uh I'm going to schedule a meeting and the meeting is for you to spend time reviewing this Doc and giving me feedback and then maybe we could talk about it yep and I think a lot of people are going to hate hearing that because like oh my God I have so many meetings already why do I want another meeting that isn't even a meeting but that's the best kind then because it's actual work getting done right and maybe you carve out

two minutes at the end for one really IM meded discussion topic or something but I don't think we give enough space in any type of meeting for people to actually think and when you are just staring at a dock you know with your camera off and the only expectation is to engage with that thing thoughts are a little bit better and crisper and I think with this idea like if someone says I a meeting where you just sit and review this doc you could always say let me just review it asynchronously I'll give you feedback

I promise give me give me 24 hours right it's not like they have to come to this meeting although I would urge you to make them come to the meeting okay say more there because you find that that's a lot more effective I think there there's two sneaky things hiding behind that one is the yeah I'll get to this in the next 24 hours maybe they don't like maybe you'd really trust that person and they're the exception but beyond that there is something else to the real time interaction that can happen when you're commenting and

responding on a dock at the same time I think this is the part that often gets lost which is the the latency between a comment or question and a quick followup from the author just pushes that cycle speed really long in a way that doesn't need to be and so when people are trying to find out like how do you move faster like this actually is one of those very good examples of moving slower to move faster uh reminds me CLA vau I think it was her phrase of uh moving one clock speed faster and

just like that's the way you speed up a companies try to move one clock speed faster which in this case is just like reduce the time between feedback and iteration I love it okay I want to shift to talking about some a few very tactical things that you've found really helpful in your PM career and something you recommend to other product teams the first is uh something you call the decision log uh you think every PM should keep a decision log talk about what that is and why that's powerful I will say there's sort of

two different decision logs we could talk about we'll focus on the former though the latter is just as you're making decisions within your job you should document those you know within a purity make sure everyone knows it's just a silly very small thing but I think every PM should do it the other decision log though that I think is quite critical is if we zoom out for a second every person has something that they can do to slightly increment in their craft and you know sprinters have certain exercises that they do I There's Something Beautiful

about pianists and piano scales where it doesn't matter if you were just learning the piano or you are a 30-year veteran like you're still doing your scales and it's because it lays the foundation for everything else you need to do and so we all talk about product sense it's this like super mystical thing that no one knows how to get better at to me it's just a fancy way of saying you can make good decisions with insufficient data and the core of that is decisions and so PMS need as many reps as possible in making

decisions documenting the rationale behind those decisions and then crucially seeing the outcome of them and so the natural followup would be well I only have to make X decisions in my job how the hell do I make more of them look around you there's other teams that are making decisions what would you do if you were in that position with the information you have great write it down say why there's other companies that are doing crazy things what are they doing what would you do if you were responsible for the road map write it down

a year later see what they've shipped like you can just do this for anyone it's free and no one takes the time to do it but that's how I think you get better at actually making decisions it's just doing more of them hearing you describe this it feels like obviously yes we why are we doing this like how else can we get better if we're not reflecting back on the decisions we've made and realizing hey I was I made a bunch of bad decisions but I'm always so confident my decisions still maybe shouldn't be so

I guess first of all do you actually do this how often do you do this and is there an example of you learning something from your own decision look many uh and many of them because it was a wrong decision but yes I do keep a decision log uh I have a separate sort of practice where it's just a daily log which is everyone wants like the perfect note taking system to me the best note taking system is inspired by uh what is it called like big ass text file batf there's a funny blog post

from like 2001 on it but it's just you write everything that happens to you in a day in a bolded list and it's all in one big note and that way you can you know command fit do whatever you want the way that I keep track of it is I do a little like hashtag this and then write things down just as I think about them and then I'll have a reminder to S of Comb back through on some Cadence and so uh I'll first use a positive example which is a funny one so if

we rewind to I don't know what year but Shopify had uh just launched Shop app their consumer application for what started as uh tracking your order when you bought something from a Shopify customer and then it's evolved into a full-blown like Amazon competitor right you can actually like find merchants and buy things through it when they first launched it though uh I was like oh my God this is so brilliant like they have completely hijacked this specific Loop for consumer buying Behavior via this very unassuming thing which is package tracking and so like that morning

I was like you know whatever I'm GNA quickly draw a diagram of this flywheel that I think Amazon owns today I'm going to show how Shopify is like slowly planting their little seed to take over this and how shop fits into it I tweeted out and then I don't know that day there must have been like 60 Shopify employees that followed me I was like what the hell is this guy talking about and so funny enough fast forward I've talked to some of the folks that worked on it and they're like yeah nailed it here's

what we were thinking here's why you know it's no longer Secret Sauce but that was a really interesting example of both doing a decision log putting my rationale down on paper and this case broadcasting it out but then having that be a mechanism for it making its way back to me to actually better understand why did they make the decision versus what I thought because the reasons were a little bit different uh but the outcome was the same so that's like one interesting example it's an amazing story you doing this explains why you've been so

successful I could see how this all connects now I think for a lot of people they want they would want to build this habit like clearly there's a lot of value here but they just don't because you know they got a lot of other things going on or it's just like you know it's like this new thing they have to start doing is there anything that helped you adopt this practice of this daily log SL decision log that you think might be helpful to folks to motivate them to give this a shot this is probably

just general advice on building any habit which is start small and just force yourself to do it and uh there's like that old saying around how do you start running as a hobby you don't do it by saying I'm going to run a mile every day you do it by putting your sneakers at the foot of your bed unless you know you're take your shoes off inside then you put it at the front door like you have your shorts ready to go and you're like I commit to putting on my shorts and if I decide

after getting dressed to go run that I still don't want to go run okay fine but like you build up to that thing and I think decision logs are the lightest weight thing possible and so you can start super easy by saying you know what every Sunday morning I'm going to scroll through Twitter I'm going to check out news whatever it is I'm going to see something interesting and I'm going to make a bet I'm going to place my decision on this thing write it down and then set a calendar invite in you know X

weeks X months to see what plays out and that's all it is right 10 minutes once a week super easy and then over time you can crank it up and then eventually you're just like constantly writing these decisions down and then it's like feeding its way back into you it become second nature and you're touching on something that uh there's been a little bit of talk on this podcast and newsletter post about this idea to get better product sense and product taste and also just like decision- making this case one of the best strategies is

to simulate other people's decisions and simulate what they're thinking through and predict what they're going to do which is what you're describing here totally I I do want to apply a pretty severe caveat here though which is a decision log is not a replacement for building products like it's a additional complimentary thing that you can be doing on your own but if you think that you can just you know sit back in your chair look out at the market make a bunch of calls and be like look at how smart I'm getting without actually being

Hands-On with like building a product you're not actually going to get any better so I just want to interject that amazing caveat very important don't just sit and read Hacker News and think you're going to become an amazing founder product leader this episode is brought to you by EPO EPO is a Next Generation AB testing and feature management platform built by alums of airbeam B snowflake for modern growth teams companies like twitch Muro clickup and DraftKings rely on EPO to power their experiments experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of

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it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team sparking new ideas for the AB testing flywheel EPO Powers experimentation across every use case including product growth machine learning monetization and email marketing check out EPO at geo.com Lenny and 10x your experiment velocity that's geo.com leny if someone wants to try this idea of a daily log what what is it exactly say decision log or daily log is there like is it just things that happen today and then hashtag here's a decision I made or here's a decision I think Shopify will make in the

future is that the format yeah it depends on how far you want to go down productivity and not taking uh sort of rabbit holes but let's start basic this is not what I do but I think it's the easiest place to start spin up a Google doc or an ocean page just call it daily log and then bullet point out like the date of today and then as you're going through your day you have a meeting just type in the meeting name if there's a takeaway put it under there if there's a decision you can

make do hashtag decision and in this case say Shopify launch Shop app I think this is their way to take over you know like the Fulfillment to buying Behavior Loop the the reason for that is XYZ follow up on this in six months and then set your caliber invite awesome so as motivation for listeners to try this sort of thing just look at the success Kevin has had as in his career and how insightful he has been so far and will continue to be and this is how these happen this is how your mind learns

to see things in a really unique interesting way so I know I know you're modest and aren't going to take any credit but I'm just saying this is how you this how you get better just trying stuff like this footnote correlation versus causation that's all put out there could be all genes could be completely unrelated to anything you've done your entire life I be me being very lucky I I'll put that out there could also be luck uh okay so something I wanted to touch on with this decision log idea and it's a seg way

to talking about hiring is I think interviewing is also a really good opportunity to try something like this feel like people interview lots of people they think they know what they're looking for they think they've made all these decisions they think they have these amazing interview questions that are going to Signal help them see really good signal but you never actually go back back and see was I right should we have hired that person did this person work out was that question asked them at all inform form was all at all a leading indicator of

anything and I feel like this is a really good method for improving your interviewing abilities is like here's the questions asked here's why I decided here's what I think and then a year later look back was that actually go I think some of the best companies actually do have a practice around this where you know they have a 6 12 18 month check-in on new hires and they then compare you know their sort of performance against level hired at and then review against the scorecards uh it's like a pretty laborious process so you know stups

aren't probably going to do it in the same amount of rigor but it shows you so much about the holes in your interviewing process uh so I I definitely plus one to that one I love that oh my God it puts all this pressure on your score which is great so let's actually Segway talking about hiring there's a couple more tactics that I've seen you be really good at so one is just hiring in general you have a lot of interesting approaches to hiring including this idea of a unsell email where you try to convince

someone not to join your company talk about that and why you think that's effective and then anything else along the lines of hiring you learned I'll say the idea of the unell email came from a place of failure which is uh at Square I had sort of shifted into a position where I had to hire a lot of people really quickly and through that as a you know fairly new hiring manager you're like all right great the goal I've been told the goal is to hire fast okay you give me a metric you're going to

go after it so you do your best to get as many people in the door as possible and when you're talking to your recruiting partner they're incentivized to increase pass through rates offer to close rates all these other things and so they're like yeah I think this person's really good and you listen you're like yeah they are pretty good aren't they even though there's a sneaking suspicion that maybe they're not the right fit but you move forward anyways so fast forward there's a few folks I bring on and within 6 months they come to me

and they're like this is not at all what I thought I was going to do this is not the environment I thought I was going to walk into you didn't warn me about this that and the other I feel terrible how do I prevent this and the reason it's bad is not just because they feel surprised but because then either one they decide to leave two they're not performing because it's not the right role or environment for them or three you know maybe the company is still good but that role isn't and so they immediately

try to do like internal Mobility or something to another team which then leaves you with the same hole so all of those bad outcomes so I'm right how do I prevent this well how do I just got to frontload all the gnarly stuff they're going to find out in their first six months and so the practice I started developing is you go through the whole interview process and during that period you're collecting all these little concerns fears anxieties that they're not explicitly saying but they're definitely hinting at and you got to be pretty honest with

yourself about which ones are real but then when you get to offer stage I send an email with no more than eight bullet points and I say all the terrible things that are probably going to reinforce their fears and I'm pretty candid about this is what it's like here uh maybe one example would be hey I'm a parent and I'm worried about work life balance maybe they don't say that explicitly in the interview process but you get a feeling for it and I I get that as a parent too right so if I'm at a

startup I'll be really clear and I'll say you know what we are a serious a startup we are pushing really hard at product Market fit the expectation here is going to be that you're online at 10: that you can occasionally hop on a meeting on a Saturday or Sunday and if you can tell them that upfront and they can read that whole email and still be equally excited to join you find s any plus higher but if they read that and they're like I don't know anymore it's way better to say great this is not

a good fit let's go our separate ways then have them leave after 6 months and when I first instituted this I lost 30% of candidates at offer stage oh wow which drove my recruiting Partners insane because they look terrible their man is like what the hell are you doing you're losing everyone at the very end and so they ask can you either not send this thing or can you send it at the very beginning and my answer is no cuz I don't know what they're afraid of yet I have to go through the whole process

to actually understand the thing that's going to potentially make them say no and that's really crucial I think but once you hear it again this is like such an Obviously good idea uh clearly not an easy thing to do in this case where recruiters were upset is that just get buying from folks above like okay we all this sucks for them but at a macro level this is good for the business and they're like all right let's keep doing it at Square at least when I first started doing it luckily I had a very good

relationship with them so that's a that's a good starting point uh this is maybe going to come across a little bit flippant but they can't stop you from sending an email technically so I'm just going to send the email and if someone really wants to come and say this is bad for business whatever it is like I have very strong reasons for why that's not the case and now I've done it so many times at least that I can point to very clear proof points uh on why this is the right path and in theory

the incentives would be a line where the recruiter success matters is based on like did they actually have a good time did they stay did they have good impact butt since they're not obviously their incentives aren't right I I think some companies have shifted on that where uh recruiters and and sort of salespeople are compensated sometimes in similar ways on terms of like quota and whatnot and so they'll hold the recruiter accountable to you know 612 post offer tenure before they say oh yeah you successfully landed this role um so you can tweak the incentive

structure a little bit but not everyone does that okay so the advice here is uh to end up with better people that end up being successful and happy put together like keep track of the things that will probably be painful for them at the company and then craft an email that shares up front here's what may be a problem if you join in I just want to be very up front about it is there I think you actually sent share a template in one of these emails on one of your blog posts yep that's right

I have like a fairly real one in there is there anything else hiring wise I know there's probably infinite things that you've done but is there anything else you think might be worth sharing of things you've learned to be more successful at hiring awesome people one final note I'll make on unsell email is it's not as if you just send the email and then they either say yes or no like most of the time they will say thank you I am cool with six of these this one freaks me out can we talk more definitely

and I think this is where hiring managers have an incredible responsibility that sometimes isn't taken as seriously as it should which is when you are working with someone to get them to join or to offer like you need to bend to do whatever it takes for them and so if they're like hey the only time I can talk is tonight at 11 o'clock after my kids go to bed no problem here's my phone number let's hop on I will walk you through whatever you want to talk about and that sort of has to be the

place you get to for like really strong hires so that's just like one other thing I'll say The Meta Point around that is you need to be really invested in the candidates this probably does change at a certain scale like you know if your quote unquote organization is hiring 100 Engineers or whatever like you have process around it you have pipelines as a machine at that point but I do think the direct hiring managers have a responsibility to be really involved in every individual because there's no one who's like directly hir Hing 100 people it's

always within a number that I think you can take on okay so this is the final tactic that I heard you're amazing at which is automating user research on the surface that sounds amazing I'm gonna automate my user research it's going to be amazing so great talk about why you find this really powerful and important then how do you actually do this how do you automate user research how have you done this on your teams let's start from why this even matters I think a lot of folks going back to what is the point of

product management I think there's a a similar overlap with uxr like us experience research and people will say well if they're doing research what do I need to do I should just be consuming what they're producing the hell with that like I know PM should settle for looking through bent glass in my opinion because whether it's a research report whether it's something a salesperson is telling you whether it's market research don't care it's been processed by someone and PM need direct exposure to raw material end of story and so that's where I think like you

just need to constantly be talking to or interacting with whoever is is your customer that's like the foundation so okay if we all agree on that then the question is well I don't have time it's so hard how do I find them my customer success manager says I can't talk to the client if you are in a situation where the product manager is literally not allowed to talk to a customer there was something structurally wrong and that needs to be fixed first so I'm going to ignore that one for now just because that's a whole

other s of rabbit hole but you need to fix that in order to even get close to the next thing so okay now the excuse is going to be well I don't have time I don't want to run a program I don't want to have to you know query and look up and send out emails every week there's so many good resources out there right now and I think that there are I I'll speak mainly from like a B2B sense I think B Toc different story I don't have as much experience there but B2B the

the two things I will say one is there's this thing called userinterviews.com shout out to them they're pretty much user testing but like explicitly focused on B2B and you can put in super clear criteria on the type of people you want to talk to they do the heavy lifting sourcing it and then you just review and say yes yes no no and you can have a steady stream of the exact ICP you want to go after um ICP is ideal customer profile that you want to go after just coming to you automatically amazing the next

one though uh it depends on whether or not you have this Tooling in place but the broader theme behind this next category is your sales team is a research team and if you don't view them that way you are missing out on half the value and so there's tools like gong which do call recordings and you can set up filters and alerts for specific terms phrases competitors whatever you want I don't care what PM you are in a team like you can find the terms that are associated with what you care about the most those

then get pushed automatically to a slack Channel or otherwise and then you can set up workflows either via zappy or something else to say who was the customer pulled their email put that into a sequence drop in my cumly and you just have interviews showing up automatically on your calendar I will say I cannot take credit for this shout out to Beth Hills uh who was a PM that I hired in Mutiny she is the queen of automating customer research and like built an amazing system around this so the way it works is you set

a term for like I don't know POS point of sale something in gong and if somebody says that or has an issue there talk about again how that schedules a meeting with you potentially yes so uh gong has an integration with slack you set up this alert it posts to slack the excerpt of the transcript where it was mentioned along with the user or customer names so in this case it'll be you know Lenny's Burgers shop uh Lenny's BG Lenny Lenn Burgers shop.com and then you can set up a zapier to take every new slack

post from that and then send uh using I don't know customer IO an email to that person using that field and then in that template of the email drop in your cly specifically for user research wow that is genius uh I love that it there's a another similar tactic that Teresa Torres shared on the podcast one of the earlier episodes where you have a little popup on your homepage asking people hey do you want to do you want to talk we'd love to he feedback on our product click here if you want to uh give

us some feedback and then that schedules cently on the PM's totally caler so you mentioned gong custom iio there's like some tools here is there anything else you think zap here obviously uh is there anything else you find useful to help automate the sort of stuff if I take a step back from the automation side uh or maybe like straddle it depending on the type of business you're in there's ideally people talking about you somewhere right it's either happening on Reddit or Twitter or on some Forum or your support Forum there there is a community

there's a destination somewhere and if there isn't then I don't know that's too bad maybe you don't have product Market B but if you can take advantage of that you can usually set up something and if it's not gong or a zappier maybe it needs to be just like a custom script that you write or you sit down with an engineer to say like how do we set up alerting around this thing so that I know when things are happening and I think you can't use the effort required to do that as an excuse to

not be talking to your customers more frequently because again if we go back to a product manager should be trying to like convert this potential into kinetic energy like part of that understanding and part of knowing the constraints you can apply is just living in that world as much as possible uh like the best comparison I can give is there is a world of difference between reading a report about a lime cook and then standing with a lime cook you will just pick up on so many ancillary aspects of what their life is like that

cannot possibly be communicated in like a report and you owe it to yourself as a PM to be exposed to those things all the time in my experience every time I talk to a customer I'm always reminded why have I not been doing this more like how can I not be doing this it's absurd that I haven't done this like every time you actually do it but until you do that you're like no no I I I know what they want I'm reading all the customer service chall issues I'm reading their emails like I get

it until you actually talk to them you're like oh wow I no idea and I love that your advice is like the tactics you're sharing aren't here's how you get a bunch of feedback from your users it's like here's how you actually get to talk to the right users it's like in the end of the funnel it's you're talking to a potential customer it's not just reading a cool some feedback that they shared that's right and I think just like the the last point on this one is when you join a new team or start

a new role every PM is like budding with energy to do this like of course I'm going to talk to my users but then you reach a point where you go no I know them inside and out I don't need to talk to them anymore I can write a PRD in my sleep and I'm so busy doing both you know product improvements maintenance annual planning something else I I can use my intuition from the 100 interviews I've already done I don't need to do one more interview and that is a very tempting lie to tell

yourself because the world is changing their lives are changing and you need to constantly be exposed to those little micro changes in their lives in order to build the product that they'll eventually need the best explanation I've heard of this is actually from your new boss Patrick hson bosses bosses boss I don't know how far away you are from um where he talks about user research and where it fits in and the way he described it is instead of doing user research talking to customers informing what to build it's talking to user talking to customers

informs your mental model of what the customer needs and then that informs what to build 100% beautiful way to think about it okay so I'm going to take us to a couple recurring themes of this podcast a couple corners of this room that we have uh first of all I want to go to AI corner so let's walk over there hello AI corner I'm curious if you found any interesting uses of AI in your work or in your life there's plenty in work I don't know if any of them are interesting or novel I feel

like everyone's just like figuring it out in real time together so I'll actually take us in a slightly different direction in this maybe isn't directly useful to product managers but I think it's a really good story so when mid Journey V1 was released if we can remember that far back uh it was at least I got beta access on a Saturday and for what's worth like I have three daughters one of them's uh seven years old and so her and I were awake we were waiting for those two to wake up and I was like

oh like I have this cool new thing you want to play with me and she goes of course so we log in we create an account and I type in the first prompt image gets generated it's like a rainbow or something and then I asked her do you want to try it she goes of course so she types in you know unicorn prancing in a field and it generates this hideous looking like demented unicorn with two rear ends and like a demon flying over it and I'm appalled at first thinking that she's going to feel

really bad about about what she got shown but instead I look over and she's in awe she is amazed and then she turns to me and she goes did I draw that like yeah I I guess you did and the thing that I got hung up on was that she used the word draw she didn't say oh didn't like I enter a prompt and the llm produced this thing or like whatever weird terminology that all of us use it's like did I draw that and I don't know when it clicked for me but at some

point in time after that I was like the concept of these image generation models is the same as a crayon to her like there is no difference in her mind and that is an insane change that I can't even comprehend and so for me that's just been I think a an experience that I go back to when I think about people asking like what do you think AI is going to do and what's the next thing and is it chat or is it something something else like I cannot comprehend what a child who grew up

with a crayon of an llm is going to think is a good product in 20 years I need to start trying but God damn it like I have no freaking clue and so I think I have a cheat code actually as a parent because I get to see how they evolve and use these tools in real time but all I can say is uh we are not even like beneath the dust on the Sur Sur when it comes to what's going to change wow that is an amazing story gave me tingles it makes me think

a little bit about how like we used to code in binary and then like assembly and now it's you know Java and then I don't know all the languages Python and now it's like it's like Co like AI llms generating code and it's the same thing for drawing potentially it used to be sticks on a cave and now and then became crayons and pens and iPads and and all that stuff and now it's again llms so that's pretty Bonkers Amazing Story thanks for sharing that uh useful to PMs and non PMS alike okay I'm going

to take you to another recurring Corner slash uh segment of the podcast fail corner I'm curious if there's a story of failure that you can share of something that didn't go the way you wanted and still had a positive impact on your life or career well there's countless stories of failure but I'll I'll choose the one that I think I've had to reference the most with people and what has been to date the most difficult one to to really talk about I'm I'm on the other end of it and so now it's very easy but

it took several years to get there so context uh you know I man on my way to PM I land my first official by title PM job at a startup I made it I've arrived I'm a ially a product manager and we go up we go down all the things happen fast forward the company is really struggling and so we go through a series of rolling layoffs and I'm round four or something and at that point in time my wife was N9 months pregnant with our first child and so I am freaking out there is

the personal side that I'm worried about but then there's also my identity that has been completely crushed because in the moment all I could think was I thought I was a product manager this is evidence I am not and I couldn't I couldn't get past that and so for what's worth uh this is the one post I have on my website that I I actually feel like really really proud of it's called finding Swagger I can talk about why it's titled that way but it's the thing that I really wrote more for myself because it's

a good reminder to me every time I fall into this mentality again because that may have been the first time that I really had the feelings of I'm not worth it or I'm not meant to be this person but it's recurred you know several times since then over the past decade and when I read back through my mentality of how I got to the other end of it it helps even myself sort of get back on the horse so okay I get laid off I'm distraught I have no purpose I'm nothing and it was through

a lot of reflection a lot of conversation with friends and my wife where you eventually need to convince yourself that there is a difference between you not being good at something and a business or company not needing that thing at a particular moment time or you being very good at something but not in the way that a company needs and so I think once I was able to get to that square for me was the immediate subsequent role that I took on and I went into that thing just full steam ahead I'm going to prove

myself like I know I'm good Le I think I'm good and I'm going to prove the hell out of that mainly to myself but ideally to other people too and I think you know you shouldn't do things for other people for validation but the initial success I got to see in like launching a product gaining the trust of my peers uh having something that restaurants were texting me about saying I can start my restaurant because of this I didn't go down during rush hour because of this like that gave me the validation to say okay

I am competent at this thing called product management and then from there you can continue to build you continue to grow but I think right now like the Market's weird right the market wonky there's a lot of really good talent that is just getting hit over sideways and I have a lot of friends that are having the same mental conversations around well I guess I'm just not worth it I guess I wasn't cut out actually to do this job do this role be of this purpose in some cases maybe that's true and you can sort

of have a career transition or a pivot in your life but I think it's worthwhile to reflect on what are the things that were in your control that you can now change moving forward and then what are the things that were truly out of your control that you can now apply to find a better fit and that's one of the big things that I've been able to I think come around to and it it's really hard because early on I think it's very tempting to associate a lot of different things with your identity you're like

I'm a startup guy I'm a PM I'm a you know fast whatever I'm fast thinker and when an event happens that pokes at that part of your identity the rest of it crumbles and so long story short uh I think it's really important for folks to use these moments where it feels bad and feels like a failure to re-evaluate what parts are actually part of your identity and which parts are in your control to change and whatever you do next wow what an important and great story there's a as you mentioned a lot of people

are dealing with finding it hard to find a new gig and a bunch of layoffs and I think this is going to help a lot of people the two categories you shared I think are especially powerful so the advice here is just separate this company just doesn't need someone with my skills right now from I not good at these skills can you just share those two kind of things that might be true that you may not be recognizing about why they maybe laid you off again totally so one is the business just doesn't have a

need for you you know they got ahead of their skis and that's their fault and they probably admit that but that's not up to you the second one though is my skills and the way that company operates are not compatible and this one I think is really really important because I've seen so many times where there's been a PM engineer designer like whatever role they cannot make it work at company a and then you see them 5 years later just killing it in Company B and you're like did they change as a person did they

get super good at what they were bad at before it's like maybe a little bit but honestly it was just a changeing environment and when you find the right environment in the right role like you just flourish and I think this is actually sorry we'll go back to hiring for just a moment uh or at least management please this is why performance conversations can always feel so difficult because it seems like you're telling someone you are bad and as the recipient you're like I am bad and no one wants to hear that but the reality

is you are not bad it is that maybe the way that your environment is working like the machine that you exist as a part of is not the kind that you thrive in and so it's within your control to decide I'm going to change how I work to fit that environment or I'm going to find a different environment that actually fits the way I work much better and that's empowering I think that also applies a lot to interviewing a lot of times you interview don't get the job and you exactly feel like oh I'm just

not good enough but really that company's way of working just may not gel with the way you operate like uber operates very differently from Airbnb operates very differently from Google and so it's not that necessarily something you're doing wrong it's they just don't think you're fit and this connects to something I just had another guest on the podcast he was um brain science dude and he talks about how every company has this kind habitat like what habitat are you creating for your for your employees to enable them to think differently to or to be shut

down and not feel like they can be creative try big things or not and um basically the way just kind of to lovers that metaphor like you may be a palm tree and you're trying to uh join Antarctica and it's not you're not gonna it's not gonna go well totally you gotta find Palm Springs or or some hard place Kevin this has been amazing okay so before we get to a very exciting lightning round is there anything else that you think is important or valuable to share leave listeners with and if not absolutely I think

we'll probably find ourselves on interesting detailers to the lightning round so let's roll in Kevin with that we reached our very exciting lightning round are you ready hell yeah let's do it let's do it question one what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people I'll start by saying the type of book by volume that I read and get the most Joy from are autobiographies and memoirs uh it is just like the ultimate cheat code to spend time with people that you respect are interested by or want to learn from uh

like could you imagine what it would take in real life to sit down with Albert Einstein for 50 hours and just have him talk to you about his life like impossible but you can read and pretty much get the same thing so anyways strong requirement or a strong suggestion go read like Auto iies and Memoirs of people that you respect uh mostly for like their their mental model and way to approach thinking less about you know specific things but the one book that I read without fail every year has a very misleading title it's called

the courage to be disliked I think it's been mentioned previously on the podcast yeah but it uh it covers it's like a very Socratic method style so it's about a philosopher and a young person and it tries to teach you the ways of Ayan psychology which is sort of like to yungan Theory the the reason I really like it is because it makes me uncomfortable so the whole premise in my opinion behind the book and Elan psychology is focus on what you control like that's the one line don't worry about everything else don't worry about

what other people think don't worry about what other people do you cannot control those you focus on yourself and you focus on the actions you can take and like be the person that you think will attract other people that you want to be around and there's some like really pointed notes in there that I'm like ah I don't fully agree with that one but it always pushes me to question something about what I believe and so uh in every like physical copy of a book I have I like write the date that I started reading

it again and you know the front inside cover of this book I think it's been seven or eight years at this point um that I've read it every single year wow it's like a decision log in another context almost yeah a little bit I say the other book I was going to mention uh is the paper manager this actually shout out to Shawn Rose for I've never met him but I really appreciate Sean he was one of the early if not first PMS of slack and he used to be really sort of um loud on

Twitter in a very good way and I think I learned a ton from stuff that he would post but one of the things he posted was this book and it is just the most beautiful collection of essays that span like sci-fi and fantasy and so like if you're into that kind of stuff if you like exhalation then like paper manajer is even better oh guess I got to add this book to my list I do love exhalation there you go oh man this job is tough I get to learn all these amazing books and then

I got to read them but I don't have time hard speaking of more time uh next question you have any favorite recent movies or TV shows that you really enjoyed there's less time for either of these days uh I will say not novel The Bear holds a very special place in my heart right now both because I worked in restaurants and I got to build for them and so like seeing the details that they do actually gives me a lot of anxiety but I I really appreciate the craft they put into it the other show

actually this is I think this is the first time physical 100 so this is a Netflix show it's a Korean show about you know a hundred different bodybuilders athletes what have you on who has like the optimum physique or whatever I don't really care about that part the two things I love about the show are one it's ridiculous what people are capable of like you see what they can physically do and you're like oh my God that's amazing what they can put their minds to the other part though and this is maybe a trend of

Korean shows that I've noticed is the amount of respect they have in this competition is Barun like you have this guy who is uh historically famous was the top champion in Judo or something and you have all these other athletes that are 15 20 years younger and they're like bowing and like just humbl to compete against the guy I kind of wish that more American Joe's had like that level of respect as opposed to just like trying to find the most conflict there's something that I really like about that that that's beautiful I've started that

show but I haven't continued it so I'm going to revisit it cool do you have a favorite product that youve recently discover they really like we got a really old 2002 Jeep to work on with my daughters uh just like a true junker and as a result of that uh you know we're repairing it we're taking off the rust replacing parts and so there's these little magnetic trays that you can hold screws and nails and whatnot so they don't go flying and rolling around everywhere it's stupidly useful when you're working on a car and the

girls love it because they can use it for other things like collecting hair clips or whatever else so magnetic trays shout out uh and then selfishly I will say uh my buddy arjin mahanti has an app called circuit if you search the app store for circuit like cir cui T hit timer it's such a delightful little app that lets you track like Tata sets or whatever else to just get like a little workout in super cool that mag magnetic tray is not boring at all that is extremely cool and that is a really cool story

too do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to and find useful share with friends and family work your own life I think we've actually maybe touched on both of these um I'll cheat and I'll pull one from maybe each parent so that in case they see this they don't feel like I'm favoring one of them uh so my mom's side I think something that she would always repeat to me growing up is everything happens for a reason and I hated that growing up because because she only said it when something

bad would happen you know something bad happens because everything happens for a reason and I'm like no it doesn't life just sucks and to no surprise at this point in the conversation I've now grown to really really appreciate that piece of advice because what it's actually trying to communicate is when something happens good or bad frankly don't doell on it that's the past focus on what you want to do and then just move towards that and then in most cases you'll be able to look back in 1 5 10 years and connect the dots in

a way where the story makes sense in your mind and so just having that shift in perspective I think has helped me a lot to not overreact to anything that happens in my life um so that's one side and then on my dad's side so the funny origins of this unsurprising to anyone with Asian parents I'm a spunky little seven-year-old I come home with my math test one day the guy 97% I think that's pretty good I go show it to my dad with beaming eyes and pride he sort of stares down his nose at

it looks at me where's my other the 3% oh my God just like distraught and I sulk away I'm very sad I study hard I do the next math test I get 100% yes all right dad's approval here we come I come flying back I put the test in his hand hands he stares down his nose at it looks at me where's my other 3% I'm so confused I'm like I got 100 out of a 100 I have no clue what you're talking about he just looks me down in the eye and goes who said

a 100 is the most you can get at that age I literally had no clue what he was talking about and he had to reframe it for me in the moment around like well was there extra credit who said like can you just write your own problems to challenge yourself more could you have given yourself another test and maybe the teacher won't give you credit but you give yourself credit for doing additional work and I think I carry that theme forward where there's this weird transition we all go through from childhood to adulthood where we

no longer receive homework we're responsible for defining the work that we do and when you do that if all you do is the minimum of what's defined the 100% of what your job requires you'll never grow and so it's up to you to actually find what is the additional 3% there's always three more perc so that's my dad's lesson Kevin you're blowing my mind there's so many great stories you're just full of them uh and I feel like this lesson also applies really well to product and Building Product and founding companies just totally pushing pushing

further than people expect and making it a lot more delightful than the minimum bar final question speaking of things that that maybe people don't expect and may not understand is possible uh looking at you nobody would have guessed that you're a competitive eater at some point in your life as a final question what the tell us about this part of your life what did you eat how does this work uh how far did you get in this path it's probably misleading to say that I was like a true competitive beater like I wasn't on the

circuit with uh I always forget his name but Johnny Chestnut oh yeah Chestnut back in the day look like the OG could better on the hot dog I guess uh for me it was more eating challenges and so whenever I would travel I would find like the local eating challenge whether it was time based volume based something else and just like try to see what I could push my body to do uh I was blessed with a great metabolism so I never really had to worry too much about anything else and the the origin like

the first moment of this was when I was 14 my sister was going to college in Minnesota and there's this steakhous up there called Manny uh which is where like the Vikings front line goes to after every game and they have this ridiculous 97 o order housee I don't know how many pounds that is but it's too much meat for a human to consume uh 97 ounces yeah and so I sit down I order it thinking this is going to be great they put it in front of me it's a monster and 40 you have

to eat in under an hour and so 45 minutes into it uh I'm about halfway through and about to die and the the catch is if you finish it in under an hour you get it for free and so my dad again leans in and goes you can't afford not to finish this and so message receives her hunker down I plowed the other half in 15 minutes uh I then slept for I think three days afterwards but after that I was like oh my God if I could do that what else could I do and

so Anna carried for nearly a decade of trying to do these interesting challenges wow I don't know how that's physically possible but clearly you did it Kevin this has been wonderful I think there's so many lessons here for people in so many ways life and work and parenting two final questions where can folks find you online if they want to follow you and learn more from you over time and how can listeners be useful to you I'm on Twitter just Kevin Yen uh technically I I'm on LinkedIn I don't post it very often I probably

should I hear it very good um but that's where you can find me I also my website I don't write that often and I don't have an RSS speed which has always been on my backlog and I'm always too lazy to do but one day I will add it uh one quick note I'll actually make on websites so on one hand I love all the different website builders that exist it's amazing what we've sort of enabled anyone to be able to do there was something really special about having your corner of the internet that you

built sort of Hand by hand line by line and so like my website is like it's a GitHub page it's host on GitHub pages but it's just raw HTML CSS nothing fancy and I get so much joy every year just doing like a slight tweak or cleaning of it and so I really do recommend that for anyone with the Curiosity and the desire to buy your domain even if you're never going to write anything on it you're never going to share it out just own a little piece of the internet it feels good I love

that I didn't know that about your website and I could see I could see it now as I go there like it's HTML which you don't see as much anymore exactly um and yeah I can listeners be useful to you this is gonna sound TR and it has nothing to do with product necessarily just be kind like make for a nicer world right say thank you a little bit more often hold the door open a little more often wave if you cut someone off in a car uh I think there is a Temptation and incentive

structure to create conflict and tension and in most cases the world would just benefit from a little bit more kindness what an incredibly beautiful way to end it Kevin this was so much fun I'm so glad we did this thank you so much for coming on thank you for having me bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the

podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny podcast.com see you in the next episode