"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 prod..."

"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 ..."

"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"

"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 ..."

"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..."

"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 da..."

"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 y..."

"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 ..."

"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 t..."

"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..."

"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 se..."

"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 thos..."

"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..."

"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 wha..."

"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 ..."

"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 an..."

"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..."

"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 ..."

"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 lit..."

"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 p..."

"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..."

"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 ..."

"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 l..."

"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..."

"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 c..."

"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 ..."

"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 prescript..."

"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 constra..."

"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 mention..."

"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 ..."

"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 ge..."

"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 i..."

"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 y..."

"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 w..."

"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 thi..."

"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 th..."

"performance of new features and EPO helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does when I was at Airbnb one of the thing..."

"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 d..."

"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 th..."

"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 ..."

"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 recruitin..."

"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 ..."

"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 ta..."

"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 ..."

"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 t..."

"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 ..."

"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 i..."

"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 wa..."

"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 thin..."

"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 som..."

"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 ..."

"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 Tat..."

"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 ..."

"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 f..."

"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 ..."