Pod Insights The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview About this episode Hugo Barra is the OG of consumer hardware of the last decade. In Hugo's current position, he is the CEO @ Detect, building tools that empower people to understand their health and make informed, timely decisions. Before Detect, Hugo spent an incredible 4 years as VP of VR @ Meta with Oculus. Prior to Oculus, Hugo was in China as VP of Global @ Xiaomi, the 3rd largest phone maker in the world. Finally before Xiaomi, Hugo was a product leader @ Google for over 5 years including as VP of Android Product Management. In Today's Episode with Hugo Barra We Discuss: 1.) Entry into Product: How did Hugo make his way from Brazil to Silicon Valley and Beijing Product OG? What is one takeaway from Google, Meta, and Xiaomi that influenced the way Hugo approaches product today? What is 996 Chinese work culture? How does the experience of working and leading teams in China impact his approach to team building today? 2.) The Secret to Success in Hardware: Why is hardware so much harder than software? What are the main differences? What are the biggest challenges faced when building V1 and V2 in hardware? How much do you rely on data vs gut and intuition? What are some of Hugo's biggest consumer product hardware failures? What did he learn from them? 3.) Feature King vs Budget King: Previously Hugo has said, "in the beginning, there is only two types of consumers." What does he mean by this? How does that impact his approach to product building? Can a budget king product leader also be an amazing feature king leader? What is the difference in the two? Why is it harder to be a budget king product leader? What happens if you have both budget king and feature king in one product? What happens then? 4.) Product Management 101: How does Hugo define product management today? What does it really mean to Hugo? Gustav @ Spotify has said before, "details are not details, they are the product." How does Hugo think about this statement in terms of great product management today? When do product orgs start to break down? What are the catalysts? What can be done to stop this? 5.) Brand Marketing vs Product Marketing: What is the difference between product and brand marketing? Why does Hugo believe you should always start every product build with the press release? What is the difference between good and great in a press release? What do the best have? What are the single biggest mistakes founders and product leaders make in storytelling today? 6.) Masterclass in Hiring: Why does Hugo do 3-and-a-half-hour interviews when hiring new candidates? What are the benefits of their being so long? What does he want to achieve? What core questions does he ask every time? What differentiates good from great? How does he get people to really open up and show true vulnerability?
Transcript 10,694 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 People who hustle, put themselves through struggle early in their career, become much more resilient and tend to do way better later in leadership roles or leading their own companies. You need to put yourself way outside of your comfort zone to really learn.
0:16 Harry Stebbings? You are listening to 20 Product, the monthly episode where we sit down with the world's best product leaders to reveal their tips, tactics and lessons from scaling some of the best products we all know and love. And today, we're joined by a consumer hardware OG, a wonderful friend in the form of Hugo Bauer. Among his incredible roles and accomplishments, he spent an incredible four years as VP of VR at Meta with Oculus. Prior to Oculus, Hugo was in China as VP of Global at Xiaomi, the third largest phone maker in the world. And finally, before Xiaomi, Hugo was a product leader at Google for over five years, including as VP of Android Product Management. And I want to say a huge thank you to Shaq for both the intro and the questions. This episode would not have happened today without you, my friend.
0:58 Harry Stebbings? Before we dive into the show today, we need to talk about the game-changing tool that is Miro. Are you and your product team still wasting precious time and energy going from tab to tab, tool to tool, looking for the most updated information? Well, you could be in any team and Miro would work for you. I'm a podcast host and I need to constantly be balancing between the deliverables from multiple different stakeholders, whether it's my team, locking down new interviews, voting on potential topics for future shows, or directing feedback from guests. I need to manage a show like a PM manages a product and information is all over the place and it causes real inefficiency. So I keep track of all of it using Miro, the collaborative visual whiteboard that brings your team's great work together in one place online.
1:41 Harry Stebbings? Miro acts as this infinite canvas where ideas and projects can be shared across the team and across the tools you're probably already using. So how do I use Miro as a podcaster? Well, with every show we do, we create a new Miro board. My team takes 10 reference calls before each episode for every single guest and they compile all of their comments on a Miro whiteboard. Then I can jump into it, see all the cool notes in one place and then write in the schedule for the show. And right now, you get to actually see the magic in action. Head on over to my personal Miro board at Miro.com/20VC to see my favorite templates in upcoming episodes. I'd also love to hear your suggestions on who you'd like to hear on the show, so leave them on the board. That would be a massive help.
2:24 Harry Stebbings? That's Miro, M-I-R-O dot com forward slash two zero V C. And next we have Stitch. Stitch is your all-in-one platform for authentication. From a modern reboot of traditional passwords to passwordless options like email magic links, one-time pass codes, biometrics and web three logins. You can quickly and easily integrate Stitch to power your authentication use case. Our SDKs allow you to get up and running quickly with the option to use Stitch's pre-built UI components or fully customize the experience to fit your brand's look and feel. Or for maximum flexibility, their direct API gives you the tools you need to build out authentication flows to fit your exact needs.
3:05 Harry Stebbings? Make user and customer onboarding seamless to boost your conversion and retention rates by making authentication as frictionless as possible. And Stitch have raised over a hundred million dollars from the likes of Co2, Thrive, Benchmark and Index. And their customers range from individual developers to the fastest-growing companies in tech like Bitcoin.com. And get started today with a thousand dollars in credits. Sign up at Stitch.com/20product. That's Stitch, S-T-Y-T-C-H dot com forward slash two zero product. And finally, there is the common adage, "Data is more valuable than oil and gold." This got me thinking about my personal data and what I'm doing to protect myself online. And I thought, well, I wouldn't leave my front door unlocked whilst I'm on holiday.
3:50 Harry Stebbings? So why don't I protect my personal data and privacy whilst I'm online? This is why I decided to team up with the good folks at NordVPN. I downloaded their app, which is super easy to use. And within seconds, I'm completely protected whilst online on six of my devices. It gives me complete peace of mind, knowing that all my personal data, bank details and privacy is completely safe from falling into the wrong hands. I can even access streaming services, this is my favorite, in other countries by switching my virtual location. Hello, US Nat.
4:20 Harry Stebbings? And it costs the price of a cup of coffee in London every month. A small price to pay for premium cybersecurity. And of course, I have a special discount for my listeners. To grab your exclusive NordVPN deal, head on over to nordvpn.com/20vc to get a huge discount off your NordVPN plan plus four additional months for free. It's completely risk free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee. But now I'm so excited to hand over to the one and only Hugo Barra, CEO at Detect.
4:54 Speaker 03 You have now arrived at your destination.
4:57 Harry Stebbings? Hugo, my friend, this is such a joy to do. I've wanted to do this ever since we sat by a pool in Greece and I heard the wisdom of you and Gustav. And so thank you so much for joining me today.
5:07 Speaker 00 Thanks for having me, Harry. And about that pool in Greece, I think you meant that time when Gustav was teaching us about stable diffusion, was it? And you had to step away to show the Greek barman how to make the perfect mojito. Did I recall that right?
5:22 Harry Stebbings? And you know what I recall? I recall having a dad bod and standing next to Daniel Craig, which is Gustav, just feeling incredibly less of a man. But running to the bar was, I think, my solution to get away from that. But I want to start with a little bit on you and not Gustav's Daniel Craig, right, body? That would be an interesting start to any show. So tell me, how did you make your way into the world of startups? You've led some of the best product talks in the world. How did you come to the world of startups and come to lead some of the best product talks?
5:49 Speaker 00 Well, I was, I was born and raised completely in Brazil. And when I was seven years old, my mom enrolled us together in a Pascal programming course. And after that, in an AutoCAD, you know, 3D design course. My mom is an architect and builder. So I also grew up with lots of tools and sort of fun materials around me and got into making stuff, you know, pretty early on. I came to the US as an immigrant when I was 19 years old to go to college in Boston. I don't know if you've ever watched the movie Cool Runnings, which is about four Jamaicans who formed a bobsled team to compete in the Winter Olympics despite never having seen snow in their lives before.
6:24 Harry Stebbings? It's when they come out of the airport and Sanka's there with like no jackets on, you're dead, man.
6:30 Speaker 00 Well, similar story for me coming to Massachusetts minus the bobsled team. I graduated from MIT in the year 2000, so that was three months after the dot com bubble burst, which was just about the, you know, worst time in the world to start a company because nobody wanted to fund you. We did start a company and we were building voice recognition software for mobile computers. Our vision was that speech would play a central role in this new mobile UI paradigm. And people would be able to talk instead of type into these pocket computers, which later of course became what we now know as smartphones. We weren't wrong, but we were definitely about 10 years too early with that vision. Our company ran out of money and we ended up getting actively hired by a big software company called Nuance.
7:12 Speaker 00 And in the end, our tech became the foundation for Apple's Siri voice assistant. And Nuance got paid a ton of money for basically processing everything that people spoke into their iPhones for the first few years of Siri, before Apple finally figured it out and built everything in-house. Years before Siri actually even launched, I joined Google as a product manager. And we're talking 2008 here, right after the first generation iPhone launched. Back then, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat on Apple's board of directors, which is a crazy thing to think these days. And it was like having a crystal ball. Eric knew that over multiple generations, the iPhone was going to be this massive transformational force for the world. So he did two really clever things.
7:57 Speaker 00 One was funding a team with hundreds of engineers to build mobile versions of all things Google. And the other was the mobile operating system team that was formed out of the Android acquisition. Well, I had the opportunity to lead product management for both of those teams in my six years at Google. And even got a chance to work with Steve Jobs for a little bit, since we're partners with them at the time.
8:19 Harry Stebbings? From working with Steve, is there any takeaways from the interaction, from the experience? I'm just fascinated.
8:25 Speaker 00 The best way to describe working with Steve is perfection. He would call us at crazy hours of the night, you know, or super early in the morning, to tell us that there was something off with some piece of the UI, which no one had possibly Caught or catch, but Steve saw it and for him it just had to be changed and had to be changed immediately. Yeah. So perfection really is the word that I would use to describe Stephen and what made him so wonderful, really.
8:50 Harry Stebbings? Incredible. Challenge to work with the three AM call, I'm sure. So how did that then lead to Xiaomi?
8:56 Speaker 00 Android was sort of this crazy hypergrowth story, the biggest I think we've ever seen in the tech world. Working for Andy Rubin was a really big school for me. And that's where my obsession for consumer hardware began. In two thousand thirteen, I accepted an offer from a former Googler to join his small startup in China. The company nobody had ever heard of, that was of course Xiaomi. This was the first of many times that our friend, our good friend Shaq was involved behind the scenes in my career jumps. And I'm sure we'll get to talk about that. Long story short, Xiaomi wanted to challenge Samsung and Apple in the smartphone market by making incredibly, incredibly good smartphones, selling them direct to consumers online without any middleman.
9:40 Speaker 00 We didn't spend money on marketing, we made relatively thin margins on the hardware, but then used software revenues to kind of make up for the difference. It was a really cool business model. It was completely new in the industry then, and it really, really worked. My job was to expand sort of that recipe, that direct to consumer recipe outside of China. And we expanded to like twenty markets in about four years and became either number one or number two in each of these markets. And our biggest win was becoming the number one phone brand in India. Today's Xiaomi is the second largest smartphone brand globally, behind Samsung, if you exclude the US market.
10:15 Harry Stebbings? Tell me, final one, Matter, and then I'm gonna dig in.
10:18 Speaker 00 After four years in Asia, I came back to the US and accepted an invite from Mark Zuckerberg to run the Oculus team inside of Facebook. It was a great four-year run during which we rebooted virtual reality, made it much more mainstream. Oculus became the Metaverse business unit and that was sort of when Zuck decided to rename the entire company to Meta. Of course, the rest is history. And during my days at Meta, to bring us back to present time, I was introduced by Shaq, of course, to an incredible scientist, this guy Jonathan Rothberg, who was a serial entrepreneur in the medical devices space. And at the beginning of the pandemic in two thousand twenty, Jonathan and I started to start a company together. And this is how Detect was born.
10:56 Harry Stebbings? Next question I have to ask, and it's unfair of me, but I want like a quick fire round hit on this. But you've worked now at Google, Xiaomi, Matter, now health tech startup Detect, all immensely different leadership styles.
11:09 Harry Stebbings? If you were to take one takeaway from each that's impacted kind of how you think and operate, what would it be?
11:15 Speaker 00 At Google, learning all of the fundamentals of product management and product marketing, that was my school. At Xiaomi, the main takeaway, price is a feature and pricing can really, really make or break you entirely as a brand. And then the other takeaway was this, the immense value of creating and cultivating a loyal base of true fans of your brand. That was part of our secret sauce there and it was a huge learning for me. At Meta, I learned to be a better manager and adopted a completely different management style from what I had been using up until then and especially in China. I really do think that Facebook does an outstanding job of building manager culture, better than anything I've seen or heard of in any company. And then at Detect, which is, as you mentioned, is the health technology
11:57 Speaker 00 company that I co-founded a couple of years ago, I learned the power of having kick-ass co-founders and not being alone when making big decisions.
12:06 Harry Stebbings? So you get dangled a toy and it's like, I really want to touch on like the meta-management kind of evolution, but I do want to like stick to some form of structure because I love the structure we have. So I'm going to like put a footnote in that for later. I do want to talk about different management styles and I spoke to Daniel actually about this and he said, you really have to dig in on Hugo's time, both in Asia and then obviously US because it's very rare to have someone with such unique exposure. And when you spoke to me before, you said especially around kind of culture and the journey, the struggle has to be real. What did you mean by this Hugo?
12:35 Speaker 00 I fundamentally believe that people who hustle, put themselves through struggle early in their career, become much more resilient and tend to do way better later in leadership roles or leading their own companies. And just working really hard isn't really enough. You need to put yourself way outside of your comfort zone to really learn and to really build resilience. Your version of this, Harry, of course, is starting this podcast, which I know was a really uncomfortable thing to do early on. You're a natural idiot today, but it wasn't always this way.
13:08 Harry Stebbings? When I was 18, I got rejected for jobs in venture in London and I moved to San Francisco for nine months and I'd never ever left home before. But that was like a big thing. I was very uncomfortable. I'd never been to the US.
13:19 Speaker 00 It made who you are today to go through that struggle. Tony has been on the show so many times, he's a huge mentor to me. Tony's version of this was working at General Magic at such a young age alongside these incredible people. And he had to teach himself or he would be out of a job the next day. My version of going outside the comfort zone was living in Beijing and working for a Chinese company for four years with a P and L and a level of responsibility that I had never had up until then. And on top of that, deal with Chinese language, culture, politics and an absolutely brutal work ethic. That really, really kicked my ass. And my point, you have to be resilient to be a strong leader and that requires the struggle to be real.
14:03 Speaker 00 I think this is something we really, really have to teach our kids.
14:05 Harry Stebbings? So Jay told me when I was doing the research for the show about nine nine six work culture in China. I actually haven't heard of this before. So can you explain what is nine nine six work culture?
14:15 Speaker 00 Nine nine six was the standard work week in most Chinese tech companies back when I lived in Beijing. And it was actually written in my Chinese contract. Nine nine six means nine AM to nine PM, six days a week. You're in the office all day on Saturday, but for some teams in practice, it was actually worse. I, for instance, had weekly strategy working sessions with our CEO at Xiaomi at least every other Saturday night. And these things went on for like six hours, you know, well into into the night. And I knew that the hardware team at Xiaomi also worked half days on most Sundays. So it's a brutal work ethic, like I said. And this work ethic is partly what makes Chinese companies so competitive.
14:56 Speaker 00 But it's also true that Chinese companies are generally not as well run and sometimes are really messy. So a lot of the time on the ground is wasted by poor communication, lack of clarity, lack of goals, bad habits. You know, so there's kind of two sides to this story.
15:09 Harry Stebbings? Do you think it's good? Do you think it works?
15:12 Speaker 00 I think it works for them. This nine nine six culture, this brutal work ethic is a direct derivative of Chinese culture, of how things are, of how parents build expectations for the kids in school. It's kind of innate. It works for them. It wouldn't work for us.
15:27 Harry Stebbings? This is where I'm totally unfair, but like I find it really challenging. I work my fucking ass off seven days a week and it's why the show's been successful. And then I see everyone else doing offsites and yoga retreats and I'm like, no wonder your growth is flat. You're on fucking offsite. Is it difficult making that transition from nine nine six to startup where a product manager now expects, you know, a foot massage as well as a kombucha when they come into the office?
15:53 Speaker 00 It was a really tough transition for me. I think I tried to transplant some of this to the West and it really didn't work. The story that I remember most vividly was after I, you know, I called a strategy meeting for my leadership at Oculus on a Sunday morning, which seemed like a reasonable thing to do because then you have a large block of time. And then I got a call from Facebook HR the next day and that was the first and last time I called a strategy meeting on a Sunday.
16:18 Harry Stebbings? That's my point. I rest my case before I get on a high horse. Daniel highlighted the uniqueness of your experiences. Final one before we move on to product itself. But how did that time being in China and seeing the culture, how did that impact your mindset? And now having both Chinese and US kind of environments in your mind, how's it impacted how you build the tech today?
16:39 Speaker 00 I'll mention one thing that that was a really big takeaway for me that I think has a lot to do with leadership. Chinese culture is incredibly rich in its wisdom and depth of meanings, you know, compared to the relative superficiality of Western cultures. A big thing I learned from Chinese culture is to really, really go out of your way to make sure people always feel respected. In China, you have this age old concept of face, which is essentially a person's social dignity, to be a little dramatic. It's really important in China to always be thinking about giving face, getting face, saving face and not letting a person lose face. For example, through acts of public humiliation, again, to be
17:22 Speaker 00 It's kind of like a social bank account. You spend it, you save it, you invest. If you make someone feel like they've given, for example, a wrong answer or offered a silly idea in a meeting, you could cause them to lose face. That's really, really bad. So in practice, what this means is that if you need to have a difficult conversation or give someone strong feedback, do that in private. And if it's serious enough that it would cause them to leave the project, leave the team, then try to give them an out. And never, ever call them out in public because that degrades their dignity. That's of course, an exaggerated basic human principle that Chinese culture really amplifies. But it has really, really influenced my leadership style. I don't avoid hard conversations, but I prefer to have them in private.
18:05 Harry Stebbings? I want to move to product. You mentioned Tony Fidel. We obviously both know Tony, incredible man. So much energy for so little caffeine. I can't believe he doesn't drink any coffee. Anyway, he has obviously said you're a consumer hardware OG. And so I want to start with a question from him, which is what are the main differences between building hardware versus software products? Let's start there.
18:26 Speaker 00 Well, the most important difference is that building hardware requires having a lot more conviction early on, before you even build your V1. If you're wrong in software, you take feedback and iterate quickly and move on. If you're wrong in hardware, you could end up with millions of dollars in inventory that you can't do anything with. And as a hardware startup, you basically cannot fail in your V1 because if you do, it might just cost you your life.
18:50 Harry Stebbings? Have you ever failed in your V1? Have you ever had one where you're like, oh shit, that didn't work?
18:54 Speaker 00 Yeah, I have a few stories of V1s that failed. And basically, if your V1 fails, you have no choice but to follow up with a sensational V2 that just has to more than make for the failure of V1. So a V1 failure is salvageable. You still have money in the bank to do a V2, but then you have to really eat it out of the park. So the story that comes to mind was my first new product after I took over the Oculus team. That product was called Oculus Go. It was a $200 VR headset that was built to be kind of your everyday VR device. And it sold really well, but had absolutely atrocious retention, which means it obviously failed. It was basically An MVP, but it wasn't particularly compelling for anything other than watching videos.
19:37 Speaker 00 To simplify the technology, we kind of ignored the two most important needs of VR immersion, which are the ability to physically walk around and to see your hands in VR. The reality is that we weren't ready to launch a product with those features. And instead of taking the time to build them, we rushed an MVP out the door and it was a disaster. If we were a startup, we would have been dead. One year later, after Oculus Go, we launched Oculus Quest, which was our second product, and that product delivered perfectly on those two user needs and had a terrific launch library. It was an instant success, absolutely phenomenal retention, retention like almost nothing I've ever seen. Did we learn from Oculus Go? Yes, we sure did, but honestly, we didn't need to launch the product to learn what we learned.
20:22 Speaker 00 It was my decision to launch it and I was completely wrong.
20:25 Harry Stebbings? Speaking of the consumer needs that you filled there with Quest, we've talked about it before and in the beginning you said there are only two categories of consumers to think about. And so when we think about kind of those categories, what are those two categories? And what examples stand out to you most prominently with these two categories in your experience?
20:42 Speaker 00 Okay, when you're building a consumer hardware product, you have to make one important decision for V1. You either go for customers who are willing to pay a high price for a full feature product that does the job they expect without cutting any corners, or you focus on value customers who won't even consider your product if the price isn't right. I call these two different approaches feature king and budget king. Feature king are products that have all the features and are for that reason more expensive. Budget king products are built under a cost constraint that requires the product people to make really, really hard choices. And you need to choose where you're going to play. If you fall somewhere in the middle, you fail to make either of these customer types happy.
21:27 Speaker 00 Your product is a stinky dead fish, your brand suffers and you probably are going to die. And Harry, it's unbelievable how many companies make this mistake to this day of falling in the middle. Now, there's a lot of factors that go into making this decision. Product category or an existing one, what products already exist in the market? What do they do? Do you have a technological advantage that could justify a big price premium? For example, I am a big fan of budget king products. I am Mr. Cheap. And that's where it's been my entire career. Budget king products are actually harder to build than feature king products because they can't just be cheap. They of course have to be good. Otherwise, people won't buy them or won't keep using them.
22:10 Speaker 00 However, once you get really good at being a budget king, you can occasionally spot a finite market window where you can be feature king and price king at the same time. And you'll be lucky if that happens even once in your career. And if it does, it's usually a massive jackpot and your company can go a hundred X in a couple of years. But your competitors are going to be on your tail. So enjoy that window while you can. This actually happened once in my career. It was astounding. It was a product at Xiaomi that we first launched in India in 2016, I believe. And it was called the Redmi Note 3, a product of many, many firsts in like a single smartphone,
22:53 Speaker 00 which is why it landed as a feature king in the market. It was the first smartphone with metallic body, the first with a large screen, the first with a large battery. And these were all considered premium features. And then we had also negotiated the market exclusivity with Qualcomm for a new chip that they were launching that was all the rage because it was like really, really powerful, but also very battery efficient. This smartphone was really carefully and cleverly engineered, even though it had all these firsts, was very, very, very good. We managed to build it with all budget components. It sold for just over a hundred dollars. And it absolutely took India and then all of Southeast Asia by storm. This product, single-handedly propelled Xiaomi into the top of the smartphone ranks.
23:35 Speaker 00 And it's what allowed us to beat Samsung for the first time that year. We caught our competitors completely by surprise. But then everybody rushed to respond. And six months later, that spec was the norm. So we were kind of back to just being budget king after that massive home run.
23:51 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask, do you find the product? Leaders, they're either budget king product leaders or feature king product leaders and many flexible enough to do both within their career. You've said before you're Mr. Cheap. Can you be Mr. Feature or is that tougher?
24:03 Speaker 00 I think being Mr. Feature is not tougher. It's a really, really hard thing to sustain. It typically requires a tremendous amount of investment because being feature king is very related to innovation and new technologies. So being feature king is possible, but it really, really requires team that can stay on top of their game year after year after year. I don't want to say that budget king PMs are not as capable. I think they are actually more capable than feature king PMs. Who tend to have amazing technology teams behind them. Budgeting product managers really, really have to find the careful trade off. When deciding what component to keep, what component to pass on, so that the whole package ends up still being very magical.
24:45 Harry Stebbings? Speaking of kind of component, component and that granularity, Gustav, our mutual friend, obviously at Spotify, has said before, details are not details. They are the product. Ever the man for a brilliant quote. How do you think about this quote?
24:58 Speaker 00 I completely agree with Gustav, of course. There is no such a thing as MVP in the hardware world. In the hardware world, your V1 must be a delightful product for the audiences that you choose to sell it to and the job that it needs to do. You cannot half ass it. You have to make sure that your product does the job that your product has to do and it has to do it very, very crisply. If your V1 fails, your audience may give you another shot. Like I said earlier, your V2 then has to be sensational. So the best way to avoid this problem is don't MVP your V1 and just don't think about MVPs, not in the hardware world.
25:35 Harry Stebbings? I get you don't think about MVPs, Hugo, but this is tough. It's really hard to just skip to full fledged V1. And when you think about like intuition versus data, you don't have data then. So you're just purely going off intuition. It would seem to me so especially when we think about the categories that you've innovated in. It's insane when you look at now with detect and health tech and where you're playing now, where you played with VR, where you played in the early days of Android. It seems like these were all completely. Completely new categories. Were you bluntly just going off intuition or data? And how do you think about that trade off?
26:08 Speaker 00 When entering a new category, you have to rely on intuition more than data. As a product manager, you have to do your homework, you have to be the voice of the customer, and you have to validate your intuition to some degree. And a big part of this, as Tony says in his book, which I love, is about understanding their emotional needs, which is very different from asking customers what they want, because they don't know what they want, so they won't tell you that. It's really sort of that voice of the customer at play. It's intuition to validation and do that time and time again, until you're confident and you can build your product.
26:41 Harry Stebbings? I want to dig in on that, just on the emotional need side. I think this is where most people go wrong with customer discovery. How do you truly detect emotional need of customers? What do you ask? How do you ask them? How do you uncover their emotional needs?
26:55 Speaker 00 You don't ask direct questions. You kind of dance around the topic, right? And you ask, how do you feel when this? How do you feel when that? When was the last time you thought about this? Never ask about what do you think of a product that does this? Just kind of dance around the question and try to get them to talk about it.
27:15 Harry Stebbings? It kind of makes me think of actually Simon Sinek, it's not what you do, it's why you do it. And I think that takes me to my question there, which is that you have the emotional need and then you product market or market your product around that. And I find product marketing a little bit of a fluffy term to say, honestly. How do you think about the definition of product marketing and what it really means to you?
27:35 Speaker 00 Product marketing for me is pretty neatly divided into two separate sub-disciplines, which are different but very intimately related. Inbound product marketing and outbound product marketing. Inbound product marketing is very interwoven with product management in what the beginning of the journey of creating a product. This is the part where you have to be the voice of the customer, understand their emotional needs, and the jobs that your product will do. The quote unquote deliverable here is what we classically use to call market requirements document, kind of a boring name, which today is more commonly replaced by that press release or the pre press release, as some people like to call it. Outbound. Product marketing is the foundation to all go to market activities.
28:16 Speaker 00 You know, the quote unquote deliverable here is the product messaging document that describes the what and the why, the product features, benefits, who should buy it, pricing and so on. Based on this core messaging document, you can then build your website, paid marketing, sales collateral, social media, press releases, press interviews, review briefs, et cetera, et cetera. Those two functions are what makes product marketing and the P M M function is incredibly critical and a product cannot come to life successfully without it.
28:47 Harry Stebbings? I heard from Jay beforehand that you are incredible when it comes to creating and crafting clear, but also very compelling stories. And you did so for him where he saw it at Xiaomi. What makes for the best stories, Hugo? And what makes clear and compelling? Because I think people are pretty bad at product marketing today, so help me out on that.
29:04 Speaker 00 Storytelling, as I think Tony would would also say, is the soul of product marketing. It's what gets customers to imagine what your product will do for them in their actual lives. You tell a story on your website, keynote launch event, in an ad and even in an Amazon product page. You need to be able to tell a story. I've some examples in my career when I had to tell a story about a product that I didn't get to build, which is challenging because you you always think about the story first. You always write the press release first, but I had to try to figure out a way to do it in the reverse order and tell the story without having built the product. And it's possible, it's harder, but it's possible. You have a lot more constraints. An example that comes to mind, the launch of the Redmi Note three smartphone product in India,
29:47 Speaker 00 which I mentioned earlier, we were launching with a new Qualcomm chip. And it was a really astounding Qualcomm chip, but they made a mistake in how they named it because they named it as a successor to a chip that had massively failed in the market. It was Snapdragon six fifteen and they were launching as Snapdragon six sixteen. And six fifteen just had a terrible reputation, right? So I said to Qualcomm, look, guys, we cannot tell a story for this product, right? This product will be received as the same stinky dead fish as Snapdragon six fifteen was. So we have to somehow change this game. If you allow To change its name, then I think we can tell a good story. So Cristiano, who's a good friend at the time, he wasn't yet CEO of Qualcomm, but he led their chip business unit.
30:31 Speaker 00 Said, okay, well, let's try. What do you want? So we came up with a new name for the product. We made it the Snapdragon six fifty, six five zero. And basically said it's pretty much a flagship grade chip. And we told this incredible story about a chip that allowed gamers to play all day long without using up all their battery, without pausing your phone to get hot, which was something that we learned through that sort of emotional need uncovering process that we did. People in India absolutely hated phones that got hot, except they didn't really know it until you told them. So we marketed this Qualcomm chip with a new name, sort of around this idea of huge performance without heat.
31:13 Speaker 00 And it was a killer story. It was one of the things that helped made the Redmi Note three product launch so successful. Qualcomm has yet to pay me a couple million dollars for that turnaround job that I did for them in India, but it's all right. They're good friends.
31:25 Harry Stebbings? They very much might do after this podcast and the public shaming. Tell me, what's the difference between product marketing and brand marketing? Because in my mind, that would seem like brand marketing, name change in that way. How do you think about the blurring between the two? And then what actually is brand marketing?
31:38 Speaker 00 Yeah, brand marketing is all about sort of aspiration, right? It's creating an aura, an ethos around your brand, which of course does interweave with product stories. But it's more of a long, long term journey, right? Your brand is built based on the products that you make over time. And a brand is not made or destroyed overnight. Well, sometimes it is destroyed overnight, but it's definitely never made overnight. So it's a long journey and it takes time. Product marketing really is about telling the story, about making someone imagine what that product could look like in their daily lives.
32:11 Harry Stebbings? You mentioned the press release a couple of times there and you said about starting with the press release. Why should we start with the press release? And just help me out here. I'm either product leader or founder. What should it have in it? What makes a good versus a great one? Advise me for my first one.
32:28 Speaker 00 Well, you start, like you said, your product creation journey with a press Release because a press release, writing the press release will force you to create that storyline, that narrative early on that can really cause somebody to imagine what that product would look like in their lives. Sometimes as the product marketing manager, you're gonna have to do a lot of homework to be able to write that press release in a way that can be convincing even to yourself. It's a terrific and very, very productive exercise to go through. It really pays off. A good press release has all the important details, the features, the benefits, the pricing, why should you buy this? But a great press release speaks to your customers' emotional needs, that thing we've been talking about.
33:10 Speaker 00 One way that I like to think about it is you could imagine handing this press release, the great press release, to a film director and they would be able to take that story that they're getting from your press release and in their creative minds easily visualize a short film that would convey the product and its emotional benefits in the way that like gives you goosebumps. That's a great press release.
33:34 Harry Stebbings? How do you product market or tell stories for horizontal products? And what I mean by that is products that can be used by so many different people. Like with Xiaomi, there were grandmothers who were gonna use it to phone relatives and there were children who were gonna use it to play games. How do you effectively market to such broad use cases and customer segments?
33:55 Speaker 00 Yeah, in the beginning, you need to choose who your product ambassadors are gonna be. Who are those customers most likely to love your product, to talk about it to their friends and to sort of carry it through that product lifecycle? So you really, really have to focus, you have to choose your audience. You know, oftentimes because if there are sort of power users in that audience, if there are people who really care, those people are gonna wanna think that you're really focused on them. I would say choose your best ambassadors, those people who are likely to become your biggest champions and tell a story that's tailored to them first and foremost. And then of course, when you do your press outreach, when you do your targeted paid marketing and so on and so forth, then you can tailor the story. Try to focus it to begin with.
34:37 Speaker 00 Over time, of course, once you're a thing, you can then afford to dilute your message. A little bit more, but because you know, I really like that kind of one to 10 space when the product is still hasn't massively taken off. I'm a huge fan of choosing your champions.
34:50 Harry Stebbings? I'm totally the same. I think it does so much in terms of your cats, your messaging. But it's all about kind of fundamentally getting to that product market fit within that initial customer segment. And I was really interested. I had such a good chat with Jay about this, by the way. But one question that I really wanted to ask was, when we think about hardware specifically, what are the single biggest challenges of finding product market fit with hardware products?
35:11 Speaker 00 Product market fit in the hardware world means earning that physical place in someone's life. Day after day, week after week, whether it's on their desk or kitchen counter or in their backpack or wherever it might be. I like to think about this as, look, you force someone to pay money for a product that they then have to carry with them every day. And then if they use it every time, every day, every week, you can almost calculate a cost per use. Did you manage to give somebody a product that costs them 10 cents every time they use it? If so, that's fantastic and that absolutely is product market fit because it means they're using it pretty often. If however, they don't use it very often, you're essentially selling a product to someone that maybe costs 10 bucks every time they use it. That's a terrible deal and that I don't think naturally leads you to product market fit.
35:53 Speaker 00 You know, physical products are challenging because they have to be chosen by the person every day because they're carrying it. It's occupying space as opposed to an app that may be on their 10th screen. It's not really bothering them. Physical products are way harder.
36:06 Harry Stebbings? Do you want to think of when you say that? I think of Nespresso machines. Nespresso machines are probably the best cost per coffee. If you think I have like five per day and I have mine for three years, that is the most insane price per coffee.
36:18 Speaker 00 Incredible ROI, right? And you can think about that for everything. You can think about that for clothes, right? You can think about that for shoes and all of these things. They have to earn their place. Cost per use.
36:29 Harry Stebbings? I love businesses like your Xiaomi where you have the net product or like the base product, which makes net neutral. And then you layer on top your subscription revenue or software revenue, or in Nespresso's case. The cartridges are insanely expensive. What a brilliant business. I love it when you have those sorts of businesses. It's been kind of getting to that product market fit. You need a great team to get there. I spoke to Pedro at Brex before the show and he said that you were instrumental in terms of helping Brex get the team they have in place now. And I had to talk to you about the hiring process. So Hugo, bluntly, how do you hire someone? What's that interview process? Can you help me and walk me through how you do it?
37:07 Speaker 00 When talking about interviews and hiring people, I'm a really big fan of diverse interview panels where everyone is assigned a specific hat. I think it's really important when you're putting a panel together to make sure that you have live problem solving interviews as well as interviews that test for culture flags really, really deeply. And this applies for every position in any job ladder. Problem solving interviews are not just for technical roles, it's for everything. I've always relied on panel interviews where each interview is a maximum of an hour and so on. But in the last eight years or so, as I've had to hire a lot more senior folks, I've started to take a pretty different approach. I do continue to rely on interview panels for sort of getting diverse feedback.
37:48 Speaker 00 But I also invest a considerable amount of time myself in getting to know the person. And I've been applying this method, which I'm about to describe for interviews in my own teams. But I also do this for a number of startups like Brex that I love helping out. It's a two-step interview. It starts with a brutal three and a half hour. Don't ask me why three and a half, it just kind of worked out to be the perfect number in my opinion. A three and a half hour interview without a food break, bathroom break, water, et cetera, of course, but you don't have a meal. It's a three and a half hour sort of grilling session, very nice, kind grilling session. Where you get the person to talk about a level of detail of what they've done in their careers before
38:29 Speaker 00 or problems that they've had to solve or failures that they had to recover from, that they have typically never, ever had to talk about. So you kind of remove that layer of polish that people tend to put together when they've kind of practiced doing interviews time and time again. Because you really force them to talk about shit at a great level of detail. And that's when you get to the real story, right? That's when you get to who they really are, how good they are, what they're not so good at, and so on and so forth.
38:56 Harry Stebbings? How do you do that? Is that like the five whys? Why did you do that? And then why did you? How do you literally dig deep? To an extent where they've never gone before.
39:04 Speaker 00 It is absolutely the five whys. The five whys are the secret of getting to the depth, to the reality, to who someone really is and how they think. You have to just go infinitely deep, pull out a layer, pull out the next layer, pull out the next layer. You have to go far beyond what they've sort of thought through in interviews and common situations. So the five whys is absolutely the framework that I love.
39:25 Harry Stebbings? Do you find people are willing to open up? I find sometimes when I try it, I kind of get this barrier resistance. And I'm not getting there and I'm not getting into the next layer.
39:34 Speaker 00 Yeah.
39:34 Harry Stebbings? Do you find that? And what do you do when that happens?
39:36 Speaker 00 If you spend enough time with the person and you take a little bit of time to talk about yourself and try to build that relationship, you will eventually find an entry point. And honestly, if they don't open up in that three and a half hour interview, then I don't know if they're like real humans or more like robots. It's never ever happened to me that I couldn't fully dress someone down in a three and a half hour interview. It's extremely time consuming. It's half of your day, but it is in my opinion, the absolute best way to get to the core of it. Then what I do after that three and a half year interview, I go think for two days. And then I do a follow up one and a half hour where I go back to my notes, I think through carefully. And I figure out kind of the missing dots that connect to a full story.
40:18 Speaker 00 And then we do usually about one hour and a half as a follow up. And then at the end of that, I usually have a pretty high confidence decision, either for someone that I'm trying to hire or for a startup CEO, a founder who's a friend who's trying to decide if they want to hire somebody. Of course, you only do this marathon interview towards the end of the process. Once sort of the panel interview has given you their thumbs up.
40:39 Harry Stebbings? What are the missing dots most often?
40:42 Speaker 00 A lot of it has to do with leadership values, right? And how you build teams and how you help people recover from failures. A lot of it has to do with culture and how someone like really, really is at work when shit gets tough. It's a simulator, right? It's getting somebody into a position where you can watch them at work without really doing it because you're talking it at such a deep level of detail.
41:05 Harry Stebbings? When you've made mistakes, are there commonalities in the mistakes you made? Like, I over indexed on their domain experience, I over indexed on the hustle that they showed as a child. So for me, like, mine is like, I over index on logos. I'm kind of insecure just generally as a person, which is why I pay my therapist so much. But then I look for like validity elsewhere. And so when they work at an amazing place, I'm like, tick, someone else says they're brilliant. Do you see what I mean?
41:32 Speaker 00 Yeah, you know, I think I've always over indexed on like product nerdiness. So I have to really, really check myself to not become sort of overly seduced by product nerds when I'm interviewing them. Because they may not be the great leader that I'm looking for, who's going to build a team and be, you know, an inspiring person that everybody else follows. Even though maybe they are an incredible product person, you know, there's sort of all these other dimensions that you have to care about. And it's tough to keep checking myself on this and sometimes you you do fall in that trap.
42:01 Harry Stebbings? I had Brad Garsner from Altimeter on the show the other day, and he said the commonality of great hires that he's made is they can answer the question. Tell me about the first time you made money. It shows hustle, it shows grit, I was selling sweets, I was redoing cars, I was doing whatever. Are there commonalities in your experience of hires that have worked in terms of their backgrounds, the interview process? Are there commonalities there?
42:25 Speaker 00 Yes, I think, first of all, to me, leaders, as I said earlier, have to have gone through big struggles in their career. They have to have, you know, survived times when shit got really tough, way out of their comfort zone. And and I think I always, always look for stories like that. People who never got out of their comfort zone can't handle bad times, crises, sort of battle moments, as well as as those who have those battle scars. So I really, really do look for that. I rarely will hire someone who hasn't who hasn't gone through something that was a big struggle in their careers and can tell their story. I think personal life struggles are often good too, like they they can build that resilience that you look for in a leader. And there's a lot of cases amongst people that I know and that I've hired where that played a pretty big role.
43:10 Speaker 00 Because I could tell the person became incredibly resilient as a result of. And I would only build teams with people that know how to behave, how to act, how to keep their calm when things get really tough.
43:22 Harry Stebbings? But I want a final question because Pedro mentioned the hiring process, but also your ability to build insanely good product orgs. And I wanted to really just ask, what unconventional actions or behaviors make the best of the best? And when do product orgs begin to break in your mind?
43:38 Speaker 00 I think product orgs begin to break when the product manager job starts to morph into more of a general manager, GM job. As companies grow and product teams are forced to scale with that growth, product managers need to fill in a lot of gaps that, you know, the CEO, the senior team can no longer fill because there's so much going on in the company, right? So the product managers then become the people who have to kind of stitch together, not just design and engineering and maybe some part of manufacturing, but they actually have to go deeper into the supply chain, or they have to be much more well-connected to sales or customer experience teams. And they have to have this kind of much bigger 360 view of the product, not just before it's built and while it's being built and launched,
44:19 Speaker 00 but also how it's doing in the market, how it's performing. So you can tweak it, you can improve it, not only on an ongoing basis if you're building a service, but as every new version comes out, when you're building physical products. So it's a sudden push for maturity that a lot of product managers fail to have. They want to stay in their box, working with design and engineering, not caring as much about the rest of the business if they need to, or otherwise they can't become these mini GMs. That's a huge challenge and it's something that you have to think about when you're hiring people, because maybe in two years, you might need someone pretty different from the person that you're hiring right now, if you're expecting that scale to come in that timeframe.
44:59 Harry Stebbings? I totally get you. It's difficult to align the timeframes. I could talk to you all day, Hugo, which is kind of what we did by the pool with Gustav, to be honest. But I want to move into a quick fire round. So I say a short statement and you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?
45:12 Speaker 00 It sounds great.
45:13 Harry Stebbings? Okay. So when do you listen to users and when do you ignore them?
45:17 Speaker 00 Listen to their behaviours, ignore most of their opinions.
45:20 Harry Stebbings? Very efficient, quickfire, my word. What element of being a first time founder are you most nervous about?
45:25 Speaker 00 Heavy enough money in the bank to get to product market fit and then build a V2.
45:31 Harry Stebbings? Is product more art or science and what's the ratio?
45:35 Speaker 00 I would say in a new category, it's sixty forty art to science. In steady state, it's more forty to sixty art to science.
45:45 Harry Stebbings? Gustav said it is a hundred percent science. And I was like, Gustav, you're an OG. If you say it's a hundred percent science, I could replace you and it would be great and like the product would be fine. I can't do that. That's why you're still here. It was brilliant.
45:59 Speaker 00 Gustav is a, an amazing artist. He just doesn't know it.
46:03 Harry Stebbings? So much love for him. Which product leader do you most respect and admire and why?
46:07 Speaker 00 Steve Jobs always, and I would say Tony Fadell is a big mentor over the last many years. And I always come back to understanding the need to uncover these sort of emotional requirements from people, which they'll never tell you about. So you have to find a way in.
46:23 Harry Stebbings? How has your view of building a consumer product changed over time?
46:27 Speaker 00 Using intuition more and more, you know, as I became older.
46:31 Harry Stebbings? What would you most like to change about the world of product, Hugo?
46:34 Speaker 00 I would love to create a new type of engineer, full stack hardware engineers. They don't exist like you have in the software world. You always have to have a team with three or four types of engineers. And I wish there were more full stack hardware engineers in the world. They exist, but they're, they're hard to find, mostly because universities don't train them.
46:51 Harry Stebbings? What product release of yours are you most proud of?
46:54 Speaker 00 Usually it's my last product release. So for me, that was the unveiling of the tech back in December twenty one. But I would say my all time favorite product release was the Xiaomi Redmi Note three in India in twenty sixteen.
47:07 Harry Stebbings? Was it just instantly apparent that that was an immense success?
47:10 Speaker 00 I knew it on the stage on the day of the launch.
47:13 Harry Stebbings? That's a pretty special feeling. You mentioned Shack a couple of times there. Obviously it's how we met. It's how anyone good meets, I think.
47:20 Harry Stebbings? If only you could productize Shack, actually, we could sell him as a SaaS product. Obviously very close and special to both of us. What do you think is so special about Shack to you? You've known him for many years.
47:30 Speaker 00 Shack has been a wonderful friend over 10 years. And as you know, he has the most insane mind for connecting people across industries and across the globe, just because he loves doing it. And I think that is what's so special about him is the fact that he just loves to do that. Every career job that I made in the last 12 years was the result of some introduction made by Shack. And I agree with you completely. We should productize Shack. Shack as a service would be the world's most delightful product.
48:01 Harry Stebbings? Finally, what recent company's product strategy outside of your own and detect? Have you been most impressed by?
48:07 Speaker 00 I've been super impressed with Nothing, which is a new consumer electronics brand. I'm actually wearing the Nothing earbuds for this interview. And I absolutely love the design language that they created their new smartphone, which just came out. I'm quite biased since I'm a friend of Carl's and also a proud investor, but I'm a huge fan of what they're doing.
48:24 Harry Stebbings? I'm not a friend of Carl's. I mean, I think the world of him, but I wouldn't say we're friends and I fucking love the product. So I'm an unbiased one, but they are fantastic. So I'm totally with you there. But thank you so much for joining me today, my friend, and I so enjoyed this.
48:36 Speaker 00 Thank you, Harry. It's been amazing and I can't wait to hang out with you at the pool again.
48:42 Harry Stebbings? I mean, that was so much fun to do, but I do really want to say not only is Hugo a product OG, he's also one of the kindest, most genuine, brilliant people in this business. So much love for Hugo. I cannot thank you enough for all you did to make this one happen. But before we leave you today, we need to talk about the game changing tool that is Miro. Are you and your product team still wasting precious time and energy going from tab to tab, tool to tool, looking for the most updated information? Well, you could be in any team and Miro would work for you. I'm a podcast host and I need to constantly be balancing between the deliverables from multiple different stakeholders, whether it's my team locking down new interviews, voting on potential topics for future shows or directing feedback from guests.
49:24 Harry Stebbings? I need to manage a show like a PM manages a product and information is all over the place and it causes real. Inefficiency, so I keep track of all of it using Miro, the collaborative visual whiteboard that brings your team's great work together in one place online. Miro acts as this infinite canvas where ideas and projects can be shared across the team and across the tools you're probably already using. So how do I use Miro as a podcaster? Well, with every show we do, we create a new Miro board. My team takes 10 reference calls before each episode for every single guest, and they compile all of their comments on a Miro whiteboard. Then I can jump into it, see all the cool notes in one place, and then write in the schedule for the show. And right now, you get to actually see the magic in action.
50:07 Harry Stebbings? Head on over to my personal Miro board at miro.com/20vc to see my favourite templates and upcoming episodes. I'd also love to hear your suggestions on who you'd like to hear on the show. So leave them on the board, that would be a massive help. That's miro, M-I-R-O dot com forward slash two zero V C. And next, we have Stitch. Stitch is your all-in-one platform for authentication. From a modern reboot of traditional passwords to passwordless options like email magic links, one-time passcodes, biometrics and web three logins, you can quickly and easily integrate Stitch to power your authentication use case. Our SDKs allow you to get up and running quickly with the option to use Stitch's pre-built UI components
50:50 Harry Stebbings? or fully customize the experience to fit your brand's look and feel. Or for maximum flexibility, their direct API gives you the tools you need to build out authentication flows to fit your exact needs. Make user and customer onboarding seamless to boost your conversion and retention rates by making authentication as frictionless as possible. And Stitch have raised over $100 million from the likes of Co2, Thrive, Benchmark and Index. And their customers range from individual developers to the fastest-growing companies in tech like Bitcoin.com. And get started today with $1,000 in credits. Sign up at stitch.com/20product. That's stitch, S-T-Y-T-C-H dot com forward slash two zero product.
51:35 Harry Stebbings? And finally, there is the common adage, "Data is more valuable than oil and gold." Got me thinking about my personal data and what I'm doing to protect myself online. And I thought, well, I wouldn't leave my front door unlocked whilst I'm on holiday. So why don't I protect my personal data and privacy whilst I'm online? This is why I decided to team up with the good folks at NordVPN. I downloaded their app, which is super easy to use. And within seconds, I'm completely protected whilst online on six of my devices. It gives me complete peace of mind, knowing that all my personal data, bank details and privacy is completely safe from falling into the wrong hands. I can even access streaming services, this is my favourite, in other countries, by switching my virtual location. Hello, US Netflix! And it costs the price of a cup of coffee in London every month.
52:20 Harry Stebbings? A small price to pay for premium cyber security. And of course, I have a special discount for my listeners. To grab your exclusive NordVPN deal, head on over to nordvpn.com/20vc to get a huge discount off your NordVPN plan, plus four additional months for free. It's completely risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I cannot wait to bring you a fantastic episode this coming Friday.
Previous 20VC: Coinbase's Brian Armstrong on Real vs Fake Emergencies, Coinbase's Failed NFT Launch, The Politicisation of Leadership, Why This Crypto Winter is Different From The Past & Brian's Development and Insecurities as a Leader Next 20VC: Why Market Size is Everything | Three Signs of a Bull Market and How To Remain Disciplined | Why Investing is a Young Person's Game | The Secret to Negotiation | Missing a $200M Opportunity in Nubank and more with Martín Escobari, Co-President @ Ge Page updated September 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
