"the issue for us at the time was that we took people away from the investment in our core product to go do those other things like we moved people right and so the Trap there is that you leave yoursel..."

"distracted welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products today my guest is Vijay ayen..."

"this episode is brought to you by Pando the always-on employee performance platform how much do you love the performance review process um yeah it's time consuming subjective biased and there's rarely..."

"this very podcast including my content calendar my sponsors and prepping guests for launch of each episode notion is an all-in-one team collaboration tool that combines note-taking document sharing wi..."

"you've been in engineering for a while is that developed this um tendency to to immediately respond with no to new ideas and I think the engineering perspective this is because you spend a lot of your..."

"like oh I love when Engineers say yes this is awesome I'm gonna help everyone learn to say yes but as an engineer obviously that's a challenge often what do you recommend to folks that are Engineers c..."

"of mixed panel products and then I know that there are some challenges with scaling that and maybe the products didn't stick as much as you're hoping and what I understand is recently moved back to ju..."

"adjacencies that would leverage those same Technologies the first one was messaging being able to send targeted messages to users which is you know something that's fairly natural you might want to do..."

"and made that our roadmap I just gave every engineer you know direct access to customers and give them a bucket to go work on which I think goes against about a million product best practices out ther..."

"we spun up the second stream that was very design-led and I think this is also coincided around the time we adopted figma it's a really broad design a seat at the table of the company and and we just ..."

"the an in continued that grind on on core gaps and so the end result of that phase which is from you know 2018 to maybe late 2021 2022 was our retention went from about 60 to 90 and our NPS went from ..."

"oh that was posts focusing on it okay yeah yeah and you're saying that you had a stream of just build all the features that were lacking that are causing customers to churn and in parallel there was a..."

"idea to approach it that way at least for a while it highly depends on your context in a very competitive context where there are just table Stakes features that customers need and that's been validat..."

"what's an example of a feature or product that you launched within that first track and then what's an example of something that came out of the designer LED approach if anything comes to mind I think..."

"enabled one was that every time you added a new visualization or a new enhancement to a visualization or like how something is sorted in one report it just instantly applied everywhere so just the rea..."

"like being at a company that goes through this phase of hey we're just going to build a bunch of stuff that we know we need and it feels like it's hearing it it's like oh yeah and then we're just gonn..."

"would often come in at the end and be asked like hey can you just make this look nice and put some pixels on it and it's just such a waste of your design team to uh to have them do that but at the sam..."

"that was kind of a key friction point that we ultimately had to decouple for a bit and then regroup and say okay now like what's our strategy and and just take on projects purely for the sake of impro..."

"here is you should continue to out invest everyone else in that core and then invest you know the profits that come out of that core into the next Metro like invest profits and not people or or Ventur..."

"growth rate and then takes Engineers away from the core product and so those are the circumstances that we were in and I think if you're seeing turn to your competitor on your core product and you're ..."

"that is really interesting I've been doing this kind of series on how different companies approach Building Product and I have a few questions I'd love to ask around the product development process an..."

"generally our product team is these cross-motional epd teams Each of which that's focused on solving these long lived paired problems protectors are like our core analysis team focuses on that power S..."

"that do planning is I think it usually is sort of this W process of there's the strategy memo and then teams generate bets and there's a review and then they go back and I iterate and then they finali..."

"where we present to the rest of the company I'm going to get their feedback as well how long is this process generally the teams did uh pre-work for a couple of weeks like two weeks in December and th..."

"this episode is brought to you by lemon.io you've achieved product Market fit you're able to activate engage and retain your customers but you don't have the engineers that you need to move as fast as..."

"visit lemon.io Lenny I know you have some insights on vertization and some strong opinions on how to prioritize can you talk a bit about that and have advise your product teams to prioritize one reall..."

"goal is to end up with a reasonable mix of innovative bets incremental bets and then ones that are you know technical that or product that you need to address I usually just cut out the C myself I fin..."

"seems arbitrary and so the base camp people suggest just pick six weeks for everything and they're really austere about like if you can't scope Hammer something down to six weeks you're doing it wrong..."

"thought exercise and it just forces everyone to truly score the requirements right like critical nice to have is nice but really if you know in two weeks you're gonna get pulled off to do something co..."

"uh a couple more questions around how you build product you mentioned that you have a unique approach to keeping product teams close to customers and I'm curious what you've learned there what you fou..."

"engineers and designers to think like think like a PM a little bit which I think takes a little bit of the load off on the PM to be the gatekeeper of all that information and then over time we've evol..."

"right call I'm so curious how that gets prioritized and how PMS are looped into all that but we don't have to get too deep in that that's uh that's a really cool process I haven't seen that before whe..."

"productivity unlocked for us awesome if you guys shared that anywhere online just to show kind of the stack you guys have built we have a couple blog posts that talks about our our stack for so we use..."

"line of questioning you're one of the smartest people in the world on product analytics heading product for bixpanel I'm curious what you think most people get wrong when they're setting up product an..."

"that events um like like a Time series of users did this action at this time are the universal data model for analytics and the reason for that is every action every interaction a customer has whether..."

"so one of the things that we're spending a lot of time thinking about is how do we get that really rich trusted comprehensive data set from the data warehouse into a tool that's optimized from the UI ..."

"tracking anywhere just saying I already have events sitting here I trust all of them they're from all parts of my business why can't I do analytics on my support tickets and my gong calls just as easi..."

"investing in awesome anything else you'd like to share before we get to our very exciting lightning round you know we open talking about the the transition from engineering to products and I think one..."

"let's do it okay uh what are a couple books that you recommend most to other people on the business book standpoint uh there's this book called the goal by Elijah goldron and it's kind of an old book ..."

"so much for joining me two final questions working folks finding online if they want to reach out learn more about what you're up to and then how can listeners be useful to you I'm on uh on Twitter an..."