Pod Insights The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack About this episode Mike Hudack is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sling, a peer-to-peer payments app whose vision is to simplify the way the world connects financially. Previously, he held roles at Monzo Bank as Chief Product Officer, Deliveroo as Chief Product and Technology Officer, and Facebook where he led ads product and sharing product. In Today's Episode with Mike Hudack We Discuss: 1. Product: Art vs Science: What is the true art of product? What makes the great product leaders and PMs? Is simple always better in product? How do you retain product simplicity with time? When should data be used over intuition in product building? 2. Lessons from Leading Ads at Facebook: What are Mike's single biggest product lessons from building the ads product at Facebook? How did a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg discussing a product change, alter how Mike thinks about product today? What makes Zuck so special on product? What are the biggest mistakes that Facebook made when it came to the ads product? What did they not do that he wishes they had done? 3. Leading Product at Deliveroo: What I Learned: What are Mike's biggest takeaways from his time at Deliveroo on how to make consumer products? What did Deliveroo do from a product perspective that worked so well? What did he learn? What were the single biggest product mistakes that Deliveroo made? What did he learn? How fast do you know when a consumer app is working or not working? When do you go against data and follow your intuition? 4. Building the Biggest Bank in Britain with Monzo: What are Mike's biggest lessons on product building from his time at Monzo? What did Monzo not do that he wishes they had done? Why does Mike think the US is crucial for Monzo? How did Monzo change how Mike thinks about competition? What do you do when your competitor, Revolut, is outshipping you at such a speed?
Transcript 14,209 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Speaker 00 I think that the real art of product, the true thing, is understanding what people want to achieve and helping them achieve that with the minimal amount of work. I think every product team should be probably between six to eight people. Most of those people should be engineers, if possible. One of those people should be a data scientist, one should be a designer, and then I think a PM is optional.
0:28 Harry Stebbings? This is 20 Product with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, 20 Product is the monthly show where we sit down with the best product leaders in the world to unpack how they approach building category-defining products. Our guest today, Mike Hudack, is a total OG in the product world. In the past, he was at Facebook, where he led ads product and sharing product, and then he went on to become CPO and CTO at Deliveroo before joining Monzo as their CPO. Today, he's the co-founder of Sling, simplifying the way the world connects financially, and they have backing from some of the best, including USV and Ribbit. But before we dive in, ever wondered what your customers actually do? The team over at They Do have been living it for decades, and they have recently built a product that
1:11 Harry Stebbings? is frankly enabling the world's biggest businesses to literally know what they do. Harnessing journey mining with AI, you can turn unstructured data into structured customer journeys in minutes, saving weeks of work and months of analysis. They Do Journey Management Platform is already helping over 100 leading businesses, including Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Royal London, and Home Depot, to know what they do. Don't waste another step. Check out theydo.com. But before we continue, let me tell you about OneSchemer. OneSchemer is the embeddable CSV importer that will save your team months of development time. While building a basic CSV importer may seem simple, product teams typically spend over three to six months
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2:36 Harry Stebbings? and Pave to streamline their CSV import process. Importing clean customer data into your product is easier than ever. Learn more by visiting onescamer.com/20. And finally, we need to talk about Pendo. A really simple way to describe Pendo's value is to simply say, get your users to do what you want them to do. What is Pendo? The only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application. What are the features that make Pendo so awesome? Pendo's differentiation is in its platform. Every capability from analytics to in-app guidance, to session replay, mobile feedback management and roadmapping are all purpose-built to work together. What is the social validity? Ten thousand companies use Pendo and we also manage Mind the Product,
3:19 Harry Stebbings? the world's largest community of product management professionals. Where do we want to drive people? Give it a try and visit pendo.io/20product-podcast to learn how your team can use Pendo to start building better digital experiences. There you can also check out Pendo's lineup of free certification courses, twelve hours of in-depth training for your product management teams on topics from AI to product analytics to product-led growth.
3:44 Harry Stebbings? You have now arrived at your destination.
3:47 Harry Stebbings? Mike, I am so excited for this, my friend. I've wanted to do this for a long time. We met a couple of years ago and I've wanted to make it happen since then. So thank you so much for joining me today.
3:55 Speaker 00 Thank you for having me. I mean, this is awesome. I'm really glad to do it.
3:57 Harry Stebbings? This is so great. Now, I think there is a moment when someone falls in love with product and the design and the simplicity of it. When did you fall in love with product, Mike?
4:06 Speaker 00 Man, I've basically wanted to build things on the internet for the entire time that I can remember. Even before the internet, my brother had an Amiga back in the day. He used CompuServe on it and I just thought it was the coolest thing ever. I think from that. At point on, I just wanted to make digital things and I dropped out of high school when I was fifteen and went to work at a startup. And just always wanted to build things on the internet, like it's just what I always wanted to do.
4:32 Harry Stebbings? We were talking just beforehand on this. How do you feel about founder mode? I know we're diving straight in, but it's dominated the airwaves.
4:38 Speaker 00 Yeah.
4:38 Harry Stebbings? And I'm just intrigued because you have this unique perspective, having spent ten years plus at some of the best companies.
4:43 Speaker 00 Yeah.
4:43 Harry Stebbings? And then also having founded several companies.
4:45 Speaker 00 First of all, I think that every founder that I've worked with or for has operated in one way or another in founder mode. I think it's just like the natural thing that people do. You do skip levels, you get involved in the details. Everybody does it. Like, I remember hearing stories about Bill Gates doing product reviews. You know, he'd do a product review on Excel and he'd be like, click on that menu, go down five levels. Okay, why is that there? And if you could answer the question, he'd be like, oh, okay, all right, the rest of this kind of looks good. He wasn't like, oh, the person in charge of Excel, just go, you know, he would do a product review. I think it's very normal. There are founders who are better or worse at doing this at different stages of company. You could be really great at being in this thing that we now call founder mode in a twenty person company and terrible at it in a two thousand person company.
5:28 Speaker 00 Or the other way around, you might be bad at it at twenty people and great at it at two thousand. I think it's just like good branding around something that people have already been doing.
5:36 Harry Stebbings? Do you think it will have more harm than good as an impact?
5:39 Speaker 00 I think that founders who behave badly don't need any additional excuse to do it. Like, I think you see it all the time and I think it's kind of normal. I think that people will now, instead of saying, hey, you know, some version of like, this is my company or I feel really passionate about this thing. They'll say, oh, well, I'm operating in founder mode, but I don't think it's going to lead to like a dramatic increase in bad behavior.
6:00 Harry Stebbings? I diluted everyone ninety-nine percent because I'm operating in founder mode.
6:04 Speaker 00 Yeah, totally.
6:06 Harry Stebbings? I want to start on Facebook, Mike. You spent four and a half years there, two and a half years leading as product team. But when you look back on that time, it is an incredible experience to have.
6:14 Speaker 00 Yeah.
6:15 Harry Stebbings? What are some of your biggest takeaways?
6:17 Speaker 00 I mean, Facebook is still very much the best run company I have ever worked at.
6:22 Harry Stebbings? Why is that? Kaz from Shopify said the same.
6:25 Speaker 00 Yeah, you know, there are a lot of like very simple examples, like. can give you. But generally, in the time that I was there, there was no bullshit. It was incredibly flat organization. Mark was always in founder mode, you know. I remember once he like commented on a diff, somebody was making a change to the composer on the web. And he commented on the diff and was like, I don't like this change. He was like an entry level engineer, like, you know, it was like a making a small tweak and he was like, I care about this. Please, please come and see me and talk about it, you know, that's very unusual. When I was there, there were vending machines all over the office with good headphones and mice and whatever you would need in order to do your job. If you forgot your laptop, you could go and get a loaner laptop. If you didn't have headphones with you, you could
7:10 Speaker 00 wave your badge at the machine and get a pair of good headphones out because they understood that the value of the time that you were spending that day, like your focus and writing code at that moment was more valuable than the hundred dollars that the headphones cost. I've never seen anyone else do that, you know, before or since, but it's correct.
7:28 Harry Stebbings? When you review product decisions, I think we learn a lot from successes and failures. When you think about the single best product decision you made at Facebook, what do you think it was with hindsight? And what did you learn?
7:38 Speaker 00 I'm going to give you two examples. I joined the Ads Org, I don't know, like a couple of months after the IPO. And a lot of people don't remember this, but the Facebook IPO wasn't great. And ads revenue wasn't really performing the way that we wanted it to. And to support the kind of valuation that we we had or that we wanted, we needed to accelerate revenue growth really significantly. And I think part of the challenge for the company was that historically, Mark had said, you know, there was a perception that he didn't really care about ads. And I think the ask that I got was to just go over there and kind of, I don't know, make it okay for good consumer PMs to work on ads. There was this view that that was important. And I think the organization felt like it hadn't shipped anything of quality in a long time. I kind of looked around and tried to find something unloved without a team on it.
8:22 Speaker 00 Where we could just very rapidly ship something where the only thing that was necessary, it didn't need to even be successful. Was that everybody in the organization would say, oh, we're capable of building something great. You know, we're capable of producing quality at speed. That thing ended up being this page insight. So if you go to Facebook pages. And you're a page admin, you can go in and you can see how your posts are doing. And you know, there was a lot of feedback on that product that it was confusing. It was difficult to use. It was slow. It was all these things. And so we put together very rapidly, a team of maybe eight or nine people rebuilt that product in a few months. And it was, I think, really beautiful. We did a lot of things that had never been done before with UI.
9:00 Speaker 00 We simplified the whole thing and we shipped it. And, you know, all of a sudden, I think everybody kind of took a step back and was like, oh, the ads org can ship good software. And that then gives you permission, then, I think, to go to other teams and say, well, this, this is the new bar. Like, if you just go in and you say, oh, well, you know, we're going to ship like this. There's no example. There's no example of having been done before. The bar is not set. I, I think that's a much more difficult conversation.
9:25 Harry Stebbings? And there's so many things I want to unpack. You said about kind of simplifying insights page in particular, and the importance of that. Is simplifying product always better?
9:33 Speaker 00 Uh, yeah, almost always. I think there are people who believe that the best product has a lot of buttons and can do everything. I think that the real art of product, the true thing, is understanding what people want to achieve. And helping them achieve that with the minimal amount of work. If you think about it, the thing that an advertiser wants to do is they want to sell more of their product. And there are different ways that they might think about that, different timescales. So, you know, at some point, they may want attitudinal change. At another point, they may want behavioral change, but they want that outcome. They don't, they don't really want to target their ad. They don't want to think about optimization. They don't want to think about, they want to sell more products, you know?
10:14 Speaker 00 And so the simpler machine you can give them to do that, the better. And I think that that has been the path that Facebook ads has taken over the years.
10:22 Harry Stebbings? I do have to ask, you mentioned also the reorging of the different teams.
10:25 Speaker 00 Yeah.
10:26 Harry Stebbings? What are some big lessons to you in the right way to structure those teams? Could be size, could be roles, could be mentality. Any big lessons on the right way to structure those teams?
10:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, I think every product team should be probably between six to eight people. Most of those people should be engineers. If possible, one of those person, one of those people should be a data scientist. One should be a designer. And then I think a PM. Is optional. That team should work together against like clear coherent outcome based goals, which are not ship goals, but are like, we are going to increase the revenue that we generate for this thing by 10% is like a decent goal, but a better goal is we're going to increase people's satisfaction with the product by 10%, or we're going to increase people's sales by 10%, which we believe is going to lead to a 10% increase in revenue. You'll find that that often leads to a 20% increase in revenue, you know, and so that attitude is unbelievably important that
11:18 Speaker 00 they are building a thing to serve a person or a group of people on the other side. And I think that they have to feel truly empowered to reach that goal and feel supported by somebody who checks in and says, oh, do you have everything that you need? How are you doing? Are you on time? Are you on schedule? That kind of thing.
11:36 Harry Stebbings? I'm just thinking of actually Dez Traynor now, who talks about the length to kind of the start line, so to speak. And he, like you, is kind of a great product mind, but also an angel investor. And he likes a long road to the start line in terms of product whereby it's actually quite difficult to get V1 out the door because there is so much to do. I'm just intrigued for you. How do you think about that long road to the start line versus get a quick V1 out? Test, see.
12:02 Speaker 00 Well, implicit, I guess, in some of what I was talking about earlier is this idea that I really believe that before you build something, you should have a theory of the world. You should understand who your user is, what they want to accomplish. You should understand your strengths and weaknesses in doing that and have a theory of like the thing that you're going to build and how it is going to accomplish your goals and the users' goals. And that might take you anywhere from 10 minutes to develop to a year to develop. You know, it's very, that's very variable. It really depends on what you're doing. I don't really think you should start writing code until you have that. Now, the problem is that most people's theory of the world, prior to shipping a thing and having contact with real, live, human customers is wrong. And it might be 5%
12:44 Speaker 00 wrong or it might be 50% wrong. And you don't really know until you ship. You can do user research along the way, but you know, the reality is that that users lie when you talk to them and they will always tell you what they think you want to hear. You know whether or not it's good because they'll come back or they won't come back. You know, if they churn, you are wrong. One of the big mistakes I think people make is they then give up too early. So your theory of the world might be 20% wrong, but that means that it's 80% right.
13:15 Speaker 00 One of the hardest things to do in product, I think, is to try to figure out how to bridge that 20% and not lose faith. You know, at some point, you might just be 100% wrong. It might be good to walk away. You need to know when that is. But I think often people get dejected when they first ship.
13:29 Harry Stebbings? How do you know when that is? You have a lot of angel investments. You've got a great angel portfolio. You know when it's just not hitting? How do you tell them, guys or girls, this is just not working?
13:41 Speaker 00 I really believe that people in their soul know that long before you tell them that. And I think that that's true of people who are doing a bad job in a job, or it's true of people who are building a product. I think that the problem often arises when people feel like they have some sort of commitment to others to put the best possible face on what's going on, or they feel like they need to just keep chugging away because they don't want to let down their investors, or they don't want to let down their manager. When actually, the best thing to do is when you realize that you're at that point, the greatest thing that you can do in order to drive respect from others is to just admit that like, hey, this thing isn't working. My time is super valuable. Your money is super valuable. Let's figure out how we can get some of both back. People know that. I can speak for myself
14:26 Speaker 00 as an angel investor. The level of respect I have for somebody who comes to me with half of the money still in the bank and just says, hey, we were wrong about this, and has a conversation either about selling the company, or shutting it down, or pivoting. I have so much more respect for them at that point than if they just went to dry well.
14:40 Harry Stebbings? On the flip side of, you know, the brilliance of the insights page, and that working incredibly well, we learn a lot from mistakes. What was the worst product mistake you made at Facebook? And what did you learn from that?
14:50 Speaker 00 Oh, man, there are a few, and I don't, I don't know. It's always difficult to talk about things when, you know, people are still there and all of that kind of stuff. I, I think that we spent a lot of time building this thing called Audience Insights, which was like the logical, it was an extension of a lot of the theories that we had where we thought, oh, well, we have all this amazing data, like, population level data where we can help marketers kind of drill down and find their audience. It's probably targeted sort of at brand marketers. And we said, oh, you can go in and you can explore the entire population of people in the world and what they're interested in. You can see that like Yankees- Fans also tend to like 20 VC or whatever, right? And the idea was that it would like help you develop creative strategies. And it turned out to be incredibly difficult to build.
15:35 Speaker 00 It required a huge amount of novel technology. Like it was just a nice to have. So I think that discrete thing, I wouldn't prioritize it the same way now.
15:43 Harry Stebbings? When do you think you're allowed nice to haves in product?
15:47 Speaker 00 I'm not sure that you're really ever allowed to have nice to haves in product. It depends on what you mean by nice to have.
15:53 Harry Stebbings? It's it's a good addition and people like it, but it's not cool. If you took it away, wouldn't terribly distract from the user experience.
16:00 Speaker 00 I think you have to think about the cost to build it, the cost to maintain it, the cost to explain it to people. The opportunity cost of all of those things. So not just the direct, you know, set of people who are working on that and the mind share that it takes from them and everything else. But what else would you have done that would have created more value? And when you say that, you know, a nice to have, my immediate instinct is don't build it. Build something which is not just a nice to have, but is actually going to create meaningful value for your users and therefore for the company and for shareholders.
16:33 Harry Stebbings? So the takeaway for you from audience insights is it was a nice to have and you shouldn't have done it at all?
16:38 Speaker 00 I wouldn't do it again. It was a fun project. I think that it was very cool, like in many, many ways. But yeah, I don't think I would build it again.
16:47 Harry Stebbings? Was your theory of the world that wrong?
16:50 Speaker 00 No, I think that my prioritization was, well, a little bit of both. But I think that at the time I probably had a less brutal attitude towards nice to have things. I think that I've learned over the years that everything which is nice to have has a higher cost than you anticipate and a lower value returned.
17:09 Harry Stebbings? The challenge is there's always a lot of voices in a room. They say we should keep going, they say we should stop. You know, I had Gustav from Spotify on the show.
17:17 Speaker 00 Yeah.
17:17 Harry Stebbings? And he was like, you know, talk is cheap, Harry, so we should do more of it. I'm always perturbed by that almost because I don't see how that's right, but Gustav is brilliant.
17:26 Speaker 00 Sure.
17:27 Harry Stebbings? How do you think about discussion within teams? Is talk good or is dictatorial product vision better?
17:34 Speaker 00 I don't really feel like those are the choices as I would frame them. First of all, I think it's very important to have quantitative, objective measures of success. So when you're having a debate about something, about what you should do, you need to ground that somehow and you need to have goals. I think goals are just unbelievably important. So if somebody is saying, and this is where nice to haves become difficult, right? So if Spotify's goal is to increase listening hours by 10% this quarter or whatever, I'm totally making up what that is. And you say, we're going to build this thing, which is nice to have. The correct question is, well, how much is it going to increase listening hours this quarter?
18:13 Speaker 00 And if the answer is 5% and the team that is arguing for it is like, really believes that, is really making the case, and they have credibility, then I think that as a product leader, depending on how large the organization is, if you're at a really big company, you might say, okay, great, set that goal. You're going to hit half of our time spent listening goal for the quarter with this project. Let's go build it. Let's see if it works, you know? And, and sometimes people will then back down and say, oh, it's actually, you know, 1% or half a point. And sometimes they'll say, great, thank you. And sometimes they're right and sometimes you're wrong. And you need to make a lot of room for that. I think, you know, intellectual humility in this kind of situation is so important. But you bring it back to the numbers and I think that that is the way that you almost avoid the talk.
18:58 Speaker 00 You know, you might then say, okay, well, you believe it's going to be 5%. Convince me that it's true, but now you're grounded in a thing. You're like, okay, well, I still don't believe that, or I believe that, or that's plausible or whatever. And then you just think about how you stack rank it.
19:09 Harry Stebbings? But now you're itching at the core of like the true question in product, which is art or science? And by kind of leading with data, you're potentially missing out on that. I have no data to support this view, but I just feel like filters in Snap would be hugely popular.
19:25 Speaker 00 Yeah, I, I really believe that product is more art than science, but has to be managed through data. What I mean by that is you need to make a lot of room. And I think organizations, especially the larger they get, truly struggle with this. You need to make a lot of room for people saying, filters in Snap are going to. Have this kind of, you know, psychological effect on our user base and therefore lead to this thing. And I can't prove that because the only way to know it is if after we ship it. And actually, it's going to take three or four months for the attitudinal change to filter through, whatever. You need to make a ton of room for that. But you also need to measure whether or not you're right, which is the only way that you can inform and correct your intuition and hone your intuition over time.
20:08 Speaker 00 Cause like all art really, it's maybe not objective or you would argue that it's not objective, but I think it is. I think that people look at a painting and say, oh, this is either beautiful or not. And 99% of people agree. I think you look at a product.
20:22 Harry Stebbings? To what extent is that just human mimeticism?
20:25 Speaker 00 I think some things are naturally pleasing and some things are not. Atonality, sounds, ratios and certain colors and certain designs. Look beautiful to the eye and some don't. I think that that's somehow natural or innate.
20:40 Harry Stebbings? I'm bringing in like a grenade here. Does that change in a world of AI where maybe the screen is no longer the primary interface?
20:46 Speaker 00 Well, it just means that beauty is something else. I don't think it really changes it. To to bring it back to the art science question really quickly, I think that what it means is, you know, when you're building something, the only real measure of value. Mickey Ribbit Capital invested in our seed round at Sling and and Mickey, the founder of it is amazing, you know, and I cherish every moment that I have with him. And he said to me at some point, distribution really matters because you can't have a great, you know, there are lots of great products that die without great distribution. And I think that's true. I think he's 100% correct. But to me, in order to have a great product, you need people, people have to use it and get value from it. It is valueless without that. You may as well not have built it. And that is the objective measure that brings science to the art of product.
21:29 Speaker 00 Like if you build something and you give it to a bunch of people and they don't use it and they don't show that they enjoy it in ways that cannot be lied about, meaning they're spending time, they're moving money with it, they're, you know, talking to their friends with it, whatever your thing is, listening to music with it, then it wasn't good.
21:44 Harry Stebbings? If you build it, they will come, agree?
21:47 Speaker 00 No, you need to have distribution for sure, but it's not a good product if you don't.
21:52 Harry Stebbings? But if I push, but I agree with you totally. But if I say we create the most delightful banking experience.
21:57 Speaker 00 Yeah.
21:58 Harry Stebbings? Truly delightful. Do people not share that? Do people not tell their friends?
22:02 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think they do. So I, I, I think that maybe what you're getting at is there are different strategies for distribution. So we had this conversation at the office this morning. We had a marketing meeting this morning. We're, we're about to remove waitlists. We're about to really launch Sling. And we had a conversation about whether we should do paid marketing or not. We have some people who are already using the product and returning and using it a lot and, and giving us great feedback. And we had a long conversation about whether or not our strategy in the short term should be a bunch of paid marketing, or whether or not it should be, you know, viral growth and just encouraging people to tell their friends. And, you know, I think we're going to do viral growth to start with, because to your point, if it is really great, people will tell their friends and they will tell each other. We may have to encourage them to do that. We may have to help them to do that in various ways. But, you know,
22:47 Harry Stebbings? I'd way rather do referral codes or discounts on new accounts, whatever it is than spending
22:53 Speaker 00 on Facebook. Every day, every day, a hundred percent. I'd rather spend the money on users than spend the money on some other company.
22:59 Harry Stebbings? But I think that's the biggest problem that I actually see, like, a lot of our investments, maybe, which is their ICP is not tight enough. And so it's too broad. The product marketing then doesn't hit because it's not concise enough and it doesn't really resonate with a small enough target market. And then it kind of just goes in the, nah.
23:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, I, I see that a lot, where people are like, well, we're building a thing and, you know, it's going to be useful to a lot of people. And they're not really tight about describing their initial target market. There's a laziness in that. It's okay to have a really broad initial target market if your value proposition and the motion that you want users to conduct is universal and super clear. Like, if you're saying...
23:39 Harry Stebbings? Well, I don't know. If you think about like money transfer, say, for example, you're going to get a lot better conversion and a lot better reviews, recommendations, word of mouth, if you have it heavily verticalized.
23:50 Speaker 00 What do you mean by that?
23:51 Harry Stebbings? That focus on moving money from the Philippines to the US, ex-pats from thirty to forty who have high income jobs and want to shift large amounts of money back.
24:01 Speaker 00 Okay.
24:02 Harry Stebbings? That product marketing is going to convert way better. You're going to get viral virality in communities.
24:06 Speaker 00 Sure, sure, sure. I half agree with you. So I admire WhatsApp so much. When Facebook... Thought WhatsApp. I think ninety nine percent of people in Spain had WhatsApp. It was some of the most incredible market penetration. It was a global product. It was just texting. Everybody needs to text. And it had kind of two growth mechanisms. One was international texting was shitty and expensive. And so if you texted a lot internationally, your phone bill was really high and WhatsApp fixed that for you. And then there were certain countries where the telcos were really greedy, where they would charge a lot for domestic text message. And so of course, what happened was people who were experiencing that particular pain point, then got WhatsApp and spread it virally with other people who experienced that pain point.
24:49 Speaker 00 And then something really magical happens because it's an innately social product. At some point, people who aren't even experiencing that pain point, both realize that they have WhatsApp and that they can consolidate on a single network for texting. And something magical happens, like the network completes. And the value of a social network is the square of the participants, right? This comes from telephones, like the value of the telephone network was the square of the number of people who had telephones.
25:14 Harry Stebbings? The thing that I find hard, with total respect,
25:16 Speaker 00 Yeah, please.
25:17 Harry Stebbings? is actually just product marketing and differentiation, where there's a lot of products which are better, different. But the markets are so crowded that actually Revolut actually sell it pretty well. Transferwise sell it pretty well. And there's fifteen other players that sell it pretty well. And so even if you are better, you can't sell it better.
25:33 Speaker 00 Coming back to your original point about ICPs, I think you do have to find small communities that you cozy up to and you develop deep relationships with, and you find sparks of success and then you double down and triple down on them and then you spread virally out from there.
25:47 Harry Stebbings? Speaking of like serving communities incredibly well, Deliveroo serves incredible communities with immense products. I obviously consume Deliveroo every day, hence my complete inability to cook. But you were CPO there for two and a half years. It's a fascinating role change really from Facebook to Deliveroo's CPO in that respect. How did your time at Deliveroo impact your product thinking?
26:09 Speaker 00 Man, it was such an unbelievably different environment. You know, I've now done social media, advertising, online video, food delivery, a regulated bank and
26:22 Speaker 00 Stablecoins and they're all dramatically different. And I, I think that the most striking difference with Deliveroo compared to Facebook, both are fast paced, but Deliveroo plays a game every day from breakfast to dinner, which doesn't stop. Every order is being delivered in real time. It's either on time or not. You either have enough riders to deliver on time or not. It's either raining or it's not. It's Sunday night and everybody's starving. The restaurant is overrun by riders standing outside waiting for the food to be cooked. And then at the end of the day, you look at how many orders you did and whether or not you grew from the day before. It is a real time, unbelievable exercise in logistics, but also just physical movement,
27:08 Speaker 00 which leads to a dramatically different culture and way of working and way of building software than you get when you're building a. Does that impact your way of building product? It, it can't not. So how does it then? Well. You ship things quicker? You test more? Facebook, I mean, Facebook ships unbelievably quickly, or at least I assume it still does. I mean, when I was there, I mean, the pace of shipping was just unreal. I'm not sure that Deliveroo or I assume, you know, Uber is like this or, or DoorDash, you know? I think it's more that there's more a feeling of urgency. At Facebook, you may ship really quickly because you believe that shipping really quickly is the best way to make the graph go up. At a real time logistics company, which is moving food for people who get cranky
27:53 Speaker 00 if it doesn't arrive in 32 minutes, you're shipping in real time in order to ensure that you're fulfilling your brand promise in just a fundamentally different way than if you're doing social media or anything like that. Are you just permanently anxious? Like shit, it's raining and it's Sunday night. Yeah. It's the FA Cup final. Yeah, yeah, there's always an event. There's always a thing. You know, you're constantly modulating the rate that you pay riders in order to ensure that enough show up to meet the demand, you know, the demand spike that you're anticipating.
28:25 Harry Stebbings? How do you determine the products that you build? Because there's so many that you could do at Build. You could build like driver insights products, you could build driver messaging, driver platform product.
28:33 Speaker 00 It turned out to be really easy because when I got there, again, this is a difficult, you know, in this kind of form, I need to be careful about the way that I tell these stories. But it was Uber Eats was in London and Paris and a bunch of other places. And it was a knife fight in the streets, you know, I mean, it was crazy. It was deeply competitive. There was a fight over, well, everything, restaurants, riders, customers. And we were not meeting our brand promise. So Deliveroo's brand promise is great food delivered to you quickly. It's delicious, right? It's like high quality restaurant food. And man, we were late 40% of the time. We were opening our demand modulation tool. So, you know, if you think about the way that you might in a system like that have orders beyond
29:18 Speaker 00 time and fulfill your brand promise. There are all sorts of different ways that you can do it. But the way that we were doing it at the time was opening and closing zones in order to control demand. So, you know, if we were too busy, we would close for orders in SKC, South Kensington, Chelsea, right? And there was actually a team of about a dozen people in a literally windowless room clicking buttons to open and close zones manually. And they were going to jump out a window. They didn't have a window to jump out of because there were no windows in the room they worked in. But if there were a window, they would have gone through it. And customers were pissed off. It was a rough time.
29:52 Harry Stebbings? Did you see churn when they were pissed off?
29:54 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah, of course.
29:55 Harry Stebbings? You did?
29:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, well.
29:57 Harry Stebbings? You know, a lot of people have like a late delivery now. And it's like, I'm still going to get back to delivery.
30:01 Speaker 00 Sure. Well, over time, I think we learned a lot about the importance of selection and all sorts of things. And I think Deliveroo Plus really influenced people's behavior in a really dramatic way, where people feel a loyalty and affinity of some cost with the platform, which brings them back. It was a very unbelievably important product. But yeah, you know, it was also the first time that there was an alternative in the market. And so the Combination of those things is brutal. How important was exclusivity to winning on the supply side of restaurants? You know, I think we thought it was very important. But to get back to the question of like figuring out what to build there and how product is different. You know, you land in that kind of a situation and you're like, holy shit. Like, you know, we need to fix this problem. We need to be able to modulate demand properly. We need to be able to make a promise to the customer, which we can actually fulfill.
30:45 Speaker 00 And at the time, the logistics algorithm was very, very, very simple. We had an amazing data scientist, a neuroscientist, who knew how to build a great delivery algorithm, but we we didn't have it. And so the the first thing we did was just open up a war room. We had an apartment across the street from the office and we moved about 10 engineers into that apartment and had them sit down and spend two or three days trying to figure out the highest leverage way to start actually delivering on our brand promise properly. And the first thing that they did was they built a lateness model, a machine learning model, to correctly estimate how late we were going to be. The theory being that we could then accurately tell people how long their order was going to take and they could make a decision as to whether or not to place the order and they wouldn't be pissed at us.
31:30 Speaker 00 You know, we would say, instead of saying, oh, it's going to be 15 minutes. We'd, you know, say, oh, accurately, it's going to be 45. And then we would deliver within the 45 minutes and they would be happy customers instead of us having said it was 15 minutes. Still delivering 45, they're pissed off. And so that team just built a very simple kind of regression model to estimate lateness. And that dramatically improved late very quickly. And, you know, most of the work in delivery for a really long time was actually in what we called the delivery organization. We created an organization called delivery. And that was a core machine learning systems, dispatch systems, rider pay, rider app, all that kind of stuff. And that was, I think, far more important than the consumer app or the restaurant order manager or anything like that.
32:15 Speaker 00 What was the best product decision you made at delivery? My favorite was I went on a trip to Spain at some point with a bunch of people from the team. And we went there and we really learned the importance of selection. We went to Madrid and Madrid is a very long city and there's one, there's one Five Guys on And it turns out that people who live on the other end, the way that we designed our our system originally, it would dispatch on kind of a neighborhood basis. And so, you know, you probably experienced this living in London ordering delivery. You're like, well, why can't I order from this restaurant, which is like three blocks away because it's in another zone. And, you know, that was kind of optimal for London, which is a city, or we thought it was optimal for London, which is a city of residential neighborhoods arranged around high streets and the restaurant is on the high street.
32:58 Speaker 00 You know, Madrid is very different than that. It kind of has like a central business district and there's like a restaurants and then residential that goes out much further. It turns out that the people in the outskirts of the residential area still want Five Guys and they actually will tolerate a longer trip and understand that it'll be a little bit soggy and a little bit cold when it arrives because they just want their like bacon, onion, cheeseburger, right? And we had this like deep seated assumption that, you know, we should only deliver food as far and as long as it is still what we would consider to be high quality. And after a couple of days there with the local team, we realized how wrong we were. And I remember spending the entire trip back, getting to the airport and sitting in a chair by the gate,
33:39 Speaker 00 putting on headphones and writing. I wrote the entire flight back. I wrote the entire cab ride home. I rode for a couple of hours after I got home and then, you know, the next day I was like, we need to change everything.
33:51 Harry Stebbings? I think it's also heavily subjective now in terms of the food quality reducing to your point. It's like, I only actually ever get sashimi and broccoli. Okay, that doesn't degrade. Sashimi is cold already.
34:02 Speaker 00 Sure.
34:03 Harry Stebbings? Broccoli warm is is fine versus hot.
34:05 Speaker 00 Yeah.
34:05 Harry Stebbings? So it doesn't actually matter, but Nando's is the same, like the chicken. It's not like a burger where it's the same.
34:11 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, I think one of the great insights, one of the things that I really learned here was that it's so important to allow people to make their own choices. It's just so important to let people make their own choices. Like if somebody wants a soggy burger and you've given them enough information, like they know how far away it is. But it's not like they have any illusions about what's going to happen to this burger over that period of time. Let them order the soggy burger. This extends to so many things that you build. There's this line you asked earlier about having more features or fewer features, you know, more buttons, fewer buttons, whatever. You know, there's a line you can Imagine a version of Spotify that only has a play button. And maybe you can thumbs up, thumbs down. And Spotify plays to you the best music that it can think to play to you at the moment,
34:54 Speaker 00 based on the time of day, the weather, you know, what it knows of your likes and dislikes, whatever. You know, that product actually existed. Pandora kind of worked that way. Maybe you would seed it with a song. And it wasn't great, to be honest. Like it never played, you know, I'm like, I really want to listen to, you know, whatever right now. I want to listen to Pantera right now. Like, I want to play that. You have to give the user some level of choice.
35:15 Harry Stebbings? I think it assumes that users are rational. And actually, I go to a brilliant Matthew McConaughey commencement speech, where he says, too many options will make an enemy of us all.
35:24 Speaker 00 For sure.
35:25 Harry Stebbings? And consumers are not always rational. And you can give them that time and they'll go, that wasn't a great service because it took so long. And fuck them.
35:35 Speaker 00 Yeah.
35:35 Harry Stebbings? So it's, it's just an interesting question of like, how much options is enough?
35:39 Speaker 00 Well, there are two limits, right? There's a limit where you, you expose the entire set of options and the entire set of buttons that you could possibly expose to a user. And on the other hand, you have only one button. The art is picking the plays. The science then is like evaluating on a controlled experiment, looking at the data to understand whether or not you've selected your point in this curve, this gradient, too far to the left or too far to the right. And then you just keep adjusting. And it might be different for different people. It might be different for different use cases.
36:07 Harry Stebbings? When did you look at data, come to a conclusion, and that conclusion was really wrong?
36:12 Speaker 00 Like from the data? It's a great question. I, I think that it's very hard to accurately interpret data. And it's very difficult to not lie to yourself with data. You know, you can cut data any way that you want. I once shipped something into the, it's called the Dive Bar at the time. At Facebook, it was like a social product, a social sharing surface. And the Dive Bar was this thing, if you swiped the Facebook app to the left, it opened up on the right. It was originally used, I think, for Messenger contacts. I think something like 75% of Facebook users opened the Dive Bar. And so there was an argument to be made that it was a great surface to ship into. The thing is that like 99% of those people opened it by accident.
36:57 Speaker 00 And didn't want anything to do with it and then immediately closed it. You know, so you can run all sorts of different analyses. You need to consider the entire set of things around you in order, in order to understand it. And I've made those kind of mistakes thousands of times.
37:10 Harry Stebbings? And then it is so rooted in context, which is like you can have the same data and two incredibly different teams and the outcomes will be wildly different.
37:18 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I, I think that the places where I've seen data abused the most is in customer service, where people will say, there's this famous, maybe apocryphal story of, I think it was like Amazon's customer service number where they said, oh, well, you know, we answer all calls within, you know, some threshold of time. It was like in a WBR or something. And I assume it was Bezos who was in the room and he was like, I don't believe you. And he dialed the number and, you know, he was on hold for 10 minutes before he was hung up on. And I think it turned out that like the analysis only included calls that were answered. Like all calls were answered within one minute.
37:55 Harry Stebbings? Is there anything that you learned from, you, you very rightly did, I think, describe it as like a knife fight in terms of, you know, Uber Eats versus delivery. Is there anything that you learned from that time on competition and how to approach competition?
38:07 Speaker 00 One mistake I'll never make again that I made when I was young at my first startup is underestimating the competition or assuming that something that they are doing will not work or that there is this looming impending thing which is going to prevent them from accomplishing that. No, like you have to have deep, deep respect for the people that you compete against and they are smart and good and they are trying to do the same thing that you are. And I think that that's like the first law of competing with anyone.
38:39 Harry Stebbings? I'm so glad you said that. The amount of companies I meet that are like SAP are shit for these reasons and they're shit. And I'm like, they're not shit.
38:47 Speaker 00 Yeah.
38:47 Harry Stebbings? There's a reason they're worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
38:50 Speaker 00 For sure, for sure. They're incredible.
38:51 Harry Stebbings? With like delivery, you get a lot of feedback very quickly.
38:54 Speaker 00 Yeah.
38:54 Harry Stebbings? There's a lot of consumers that use it daily. Do you know when a product works or when it doesn't very quickly in consumer apps?
39:01 Speaker 00 Yeah, you know, Deliveroo has one product really, which is food. And then everything else is kind of a feature or way of delivering that. So it's a weird way of thinking about it.
39:11 Harry Stebbings? But like when you see like the ability to message drivers, um, the ability to know timings, the ability to add notes to orders. All those little things which actually people can love. What is that?
39:22 Speaker 00 For sure, for sure. Well, the key is that you ship all of those things in carefully designed and controlled experiments, where you have a set of metrics that you're looking to improve. So you can imagine, for example, that Driver Chat is designed to reduce what's called rider experience time, the time that it takes a rider to get from the restaurant to handing you the order. And there's often, you know, a couple of minutes at the end of RET where they're looking for, you know, looking for your apartment, you know, fumbling around or whatever. And you're sitting there being like, God, if the guy just hits 2B, you know, I'll have my food now. Do I really have to go outside, whatever? You know, and so you can design an experiment which very clearly shows whether or not RET, like rider experience time, decreases by the amount that you expect it to
40:06 Speaker 00 in the population that has messaging. What you do is you give messaging to, you know, I don't know, somewhere between 20 and 50% of the users. And then you just look at the delta in RET between those two. And you have to, you can do, you know, power analysis so that you know how big the experiment needs to be, how long it has to run. And then at the end of that, as long as there were no execution problems with the feature and as long as you designed the experiment correctly, you're going to get an answer. The answer might be that there's no statistically significant impact, in which case you should like unship the thing, you know, or maybe there's something wrong with it. It may increase RET, which would be a paradoxical outcome and you then need to figure out why. Or it may decrease RET, in which case you roll out the feature to 100%.
40:47 Harry Stebbings? When you think about the move to Monzo, before we touch on Sling, what product lessons from Deliveroo were transferable and what weren't?
40:56 Speaker 00 I think, you know, a little bit like going from Facebook to Deliveroo. All of this time, the entire time that you're building things on the internet, I think that you are developing your intuition. I think that Deliveroo really prepared me for going into Monzo and being deeply Curious about the way that British people approach money, which is hugely different from the way that Americans approach money. You know, Americans are paid every two weeks, British people get paid monthly.
41:22 Harry Stebbings? The question I have is like, you know, at Monzo, you are a bank. That really impacts your ability to ship.
41:28 Speaker 00 For sure.
41:28 Harry Stebbings? How you approach product. How did being a regulated bank impact your approach to product?
41:33 Speaker 00 I mean massively, and I had to learn how to do that. I, I think at various times I really chafed at that or found that very difficult. And I remember having this amazing conversation with this guy, Ian, who's the chief risk officer at, at Monzo, who also became a really good friend and he's, he's brilliant. And he just said at some point, he was like, you know, you have to understand that most of, or many of the crises that nations have faced in history are the result of financial crises or banking failures. And society has, you know, has a right, has an obligation to protect itself and people from those kind of situations, from those kind of outcomes. I think this is like a really important thing. It's a really important lesson. You have to understand where people are coming from.
42:17 Speaker 00 And once you understand and you think about that critically and you change your perspective from somebody who is trying to make a graph go up and to the right and trying to produce value for people as quickly as possible and experiment. And you know, you're like, why can't I test pricing? I've tested pricing my entire career. Like, what are you talking about? I can't test pricing. And you change your perspective to like, so much of society is based on the stability of the banking system.
42:42 Harry Stebbings? What would you most like to have done, but were prohibited because of regulation banking license?
42:48 Speaker 00 I would have grown Monzo globally. I think that that's a very difficult thing to do. It's doable over some period of time. And I think that Monzo will expand geographically really well. You know, in the UK, it's growing faster than anyone else. It's doing incredibly well. I think it will expand into more GOs, but like.
43:07 Harry Stebbings? Do you think the US was the right move? I mean, both Revolut and Monzo did it, both with limited success.
43:13 Speaker 00 I, I don't think it was a wrong decision at all. I think that the US is the very big prize. I think that you have to, when you're developing a bank. And it's very interesting. We've kind of taken the opposite perspective with Sling in a way, which is weird in a way, but banking is very regionally specific. The way that mortgages work in the UK and the way that mortgages work in the US are completely different. Credit cards in the US versus credit cards in the UK, completely different. The way that people think about debt, the way that people think about saving, the way that people think about investing, the pace at which people get paid. All these things are different. And I think it's very easy to think that you can take a highly localized product and just lift it and shift it somewhere else with a different license and it's going to work.
43:54 Speaker 00 I suspect that the only way to truly do that successfully is to have people in the local market who take the bones of the thing, who deeply understand what has and has not worked about it. And then shape it around local insights. And I think that this is probably more particular to banking than almost anything else.
44:12 Harry Stebbings? Okay, so you would have maybe gone more global earlier. You had Revolut, who were innovating on product incredibly fast with everything from, you know, access to airline lounges to crypto products, to investing products, savings products. How do you sit and think as a product team when you see your competitors shipping respectfully at a much faster pace?
44:32 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think that as companies, we had very, very different philosophies. I wouldn't ship some of the stuff that they've shipped, some of the experiments that they've shipped. I would have said, well, I don't think that's going to work, or I don't think it's core to our thing.
44:45 Harry Stebbings? What would you not have shipped?
44:46 Speaker 00 Well, I argued very strongly against against shipping crypto products. I didn't think it was the right thing to do for our audience, for our user base at the time.
44:55 Harry Stebbings? Do you think that was right as a benefit of hindsight?
44:57 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
44:58 Harry Stebbings? Why?
44:59 Speaker 00 Monzo is a bank. It has a very specific position in people's lives of trust. You know, when I first started working there, we didn't actually say the word bank anywhere on the website. And one of the things that we realized pretty quickly was that we had all of the, I don't want to call them downsides, but all of the consequences of being a bank in terms of the regulatory framework and the, you know, the constraints that it places on you and so on, with very little of the upside, because people didn't, people still thought of us very much as a prepaid card. And I think that one of the most important things that we had to do is shift people's perception from thinking that we were a prepaid card to thinking that we were a bank. And we built a whole program around becoming people's primary bank account.
45:43 Speaker 00 Before we even got there, we had to figure out how we even measured that. Like, what does that even mean to be somebody's primary bank account? How do you know?
45:49 Harry Stebbings? Salaries.
45:51 Speaker 00 Yeah, for sure. But then how do you know that it's somebody's salary? Lots of people earn in different ways. We eventually settled on one, you know, and then we built a goal around that. And, you know, we built a goal around increasing the percentage of people who treated Monzo as their main bank. Then we built a bunch of products and a bunch of features, fewer than Revolut, but like very targeted, very specific, I believe, very innovative products around the idea of being somebody's bank. What can you do when you are somebody's bank? So like Monzo Flex, for example, is a lending product. It's a credit card product, kind of integrates almost like buy now, pay later directly into your bank account. That takes a lot of work to get right. It takes a lot of regulatory work, a lot of product design work, a lot of engineering work.
46:36 Speaker 00 And hopefully those bets that you make, you make fewer of them and they are more meaningful over time. One of the most influential experiences that I had at Facebook was getting into ads, having conversations with people where it felt very much like, and in fact, somebody said this to me explicitly. They were like, the thing that we have to do is we just have to build as many features as possible and ship them as fast as possible to see what works because we don't know what's going to work. And, you know, I was like, okay, like if we truly don't know what's going to work, I agree that that is the right strategy. But maybe we should try to figure out what's going to work. Maybe we should develop a theory of the world. Maybe we should do fewer things well if it's knowable. And it took a lot of work to say, oh, okay, well, we have people's identity.
47:20 Speaker 00 We can do the targeting insights measurement loop. Okay, you know, let's build a goals around the number of advertisers that we have and the amount that they spend with us and so on. And ship things which are meaningful, move you in a direction instead of just shooting spaghetti at the wall. And I really believe that that's important. What was the best thing you shipped at Monzo? Oh, man. I mean, I really love Flex. What did you think would be really good, but turned out to be a flop? I think that I have always tried to temper expectations with everyone. So I do this thing a lot that I think a lot of people find weird, which is that when we get close to a launch, I give a talk to the team saying, you should not expect this to work. My theory there is that you should have put your best into it.
48:02 Speaker 00 You should be putting your best foot forward, modulo like shipping fast, right? So you have to find this place on the line where you're, you know, you're shipping something that you're still embarrassed by, but like, you know, you put good work into it. And there's another concept behind this we should talk about in a moment. And you ship this thing. And if your expectations are low and it does really well, you're going to be super happy. You're going to forget that your expectations were ever low. If you ship it and it doesn't immediately work, or it doesn't totally hit all of your goals, and you should set ambitious goals for it. Don't get me wrong, you should still have ambitious goals. If you don't hit your ambitious goals, then you're emotionally prepared for the work that you have to do next, which is asking yourself, what did I do wrong? And you don't want to be doing that from a place of deep sadness. You want to do that from a place of expectation,
48:46 Speaker 00 where you're almost like you expect that you got something wrong and you're ready to interrogate it.
48:51 Harry Stebbings? Does that not go against every concept of positive visualization? I see the success, I make it happen.
48:57 Speaker 00 I think that you have to have these kind of competing ideas in your head at the same time, which are like, on one hand, we've built a thing that we really believe in. We're putting our best foot forward and we believe that it is going to work. And at the same time, we intellectually understand that when you first ship something, it's probably going to have something wrong with it or some misunderstanding of the customer need or your solution that needs to be addressed. Sometimes that's so drastic as, well, guys, we just wasted our last six months and we never should have built this in the first place. And sometimes it's something as simple as the copy on the second street screen of the new user experience is wrong and people don't get it, you need to change it. You know, you need to be open to like both of those things
49:42 Speaker 00 and it could be anywhere on that spectrum. I think you just have to be emotionally prepared for having to do that work. And if you're not emotionally prepared for doing that work, you know, when you don't hit your goals with a launch, what happens is the team and everybody around the team who makes decisions around this stuff becomes deflated, mood goes down and you kill the project too early.
50:04 Harry Stebbings? Does that not go against the inspiring leader? When you think about being The Jordan Balfour Wolf of Wall Street.
50:10 Speaker 00 Oh.
50:11 Harry Stebbings? Standing at the front and it's like, I want my teams to be gee'd up going into a product launch. Being like, expect this to fail and then don't be disheartened.
50:19 Speaker 00 I, I think that you, uh, first of all, I don't think that a leader's job is always to cheerlead. I think sometimes a leader's job is to say, hey, guys, we're in a really tough situation here or.
50:30 Harry Stebbings? But it is to inspire.
50:31 Speaker 00 A hundred percent, a hundred percent.
50:33 Harry Stebbings? And when you're going to a product launch, I want you really inspired.
50:37 Speaker 00 There's this idea, I think that you can be deeply proud and optimistic about the thing that you have built. But also know that it's not perfect. It's the same as like, it's a position of maturity that you might have about yourself, which is like, oh, well, you know, you're smart. You're accomplished. You did this and you did that, but you're a flawed human being and you have to be humble about these things. And you're not perfect and maybe you were wrong about that thing or whatever. You can have high self-esteem while being sober about yourself or sober about the thing that you've built and realistic about it at the same time.
51:09 Harry Stebbings? Can you take me a tour of time when you've had really shit morale in a product team?
51:13 Speaker 00 Oh my God, so many times.
51:15 Harry Stebbings? And what did you do to turn it around?
51:16 Speaker 00 I think there are two things that are very important. You need to give people a win, you know, so page insights that we talked about earlier is an example of a win like that. You know, well, we, we can be proud about a thing that we shipped. And then I think you also have to give people a reason to work hard or a thing to believe. I worked on sharing at Facebook, which is like all the photos, text, videos, links, everything that ends up in newsfeed from regular people. So for a while I did ads, which was like everything from companies and celebrities. And then I moved over to people and in both cases, there's like a weird thing. You can imagine people saying, I don't want to work on ads because I don't want to work on the thing that like makes money. And detracts from the experience, right? Ads are annoying and all those kinds of, you can reframe that.
51:56 Speaker 00 And you can say, actually, the thing that we're doing is we're helping individuals discover the products that are going to improve their lives. And we're helping businesses find customers. And the more efficient we can make that process, the better we can make that process, the more economic growth is going to happen in this world. And actually the thing that you're doing when you have a billion people looking at these ads is you are, you are helping small businesses all over the world grow. You're helping entrepreneurs and you know, hey, what's the last thing that you bought off of a Facebook ad or an Instagram ad, which was actually kind of cool? And you can just totally reframe that thing.
52:27 Harry Stebbings? Truffle oil.
52:28 Speaker 00 Truffle oil. Was it good truffle oil? It was great. It enriched your life.
52:33 Speaker 00 And, and the entire job there is to put that truffle oil ad in front of you at the right time, knowing that you're interested in truffle. You know, that's good for you and it's good for the company that made truffle oil.
52:43 Harry Stebbings? I agree. I actually think that people demonize ads too much, where if done well, they're a discovery mechanism for things that are. I buy a lot of gym kit that is actually suggested to me and I'm like, great. I wouldn't have found this brand otherwise.
52:54 Speaker 00 For sure, for sure. And it's great for the brand and it's great for you. So you need to find a way of connecting the thing that people are doing every day to like a good thing in the world. You know, when we worked on sharing, we talked a lot about helping people maintain loose ties across the world. So in the past, you would lose touch with often great friends who you went to college with or whatever you worked with in that, you know, in that job or whatever. Facebook sharing, personally discursive sharing, helps you stay in touch with people that you, you may not have seen in like, you know, 10 or 15 years, but the next time you go to New York, you can, you can say hi and you kind of know what's going on in their life and you're, they're still part of you. And that's a really magical thing that you can give people and you know, the better that we make sharing, the more that we can help people
53:37 Speaker 00 maintain larger communities than would otherwise be possible without this product that you're working on. You know, with Monzo, you're not building an extractive bank. You're helping people make sure that they can pay their rent at the end of the month. You're helping people make sure that they don't rack up too much debt. You're helping people manage their finances so that they can save more and you know, buy a house. That's meaning that you can find. And then if you pair that with like, starting to get momentum in shipping stuff where you can actually see the impact in people's lives, you can relate it back to that idea. That, you know, morale, you can just, you know, flip it so quickly.
54:12 Harry Stebbings? Final one, but I spoke to your co-founder beforehand and he said that one of your greatest skills is your ability to balance family and incredible execution as a founder. Yeah, I'm pre-family.
54:22 Speaker 00 Yeah.
54:22 Harry Stebbings? But it's something that I would like over time and it makes me very nervous to think about being able to maintain the same level of quality. whilst also being a great father. What advice would you have for me specifically as possible on how to do both really well?
54:36 Speaker 00 I think children are one of those things that just almost always makes you better. Coming home after a long day of work and giving them a hug and having dinner with them kind of washes a day away, resets you a little bit and then you move on and I think makes you better the next day. So I think the first thing is just a mindset shift, which is that it's not necessarily strictly about making time for one at the expense of the other. I think that the best way of understanding this is that one makes you better at the other. I talk to my eight year old all the time about slaying and what we're building and why we're building it and decisions that we make. And I'm like, oh, you know, I'm on a
55:13 Speaker 00 call with a bank in Thailand today and you know, they all showed up in suits and thank God I put on a collared shirt, you know, it's important to be mindful of people's culture, you know, I don't know, you just have those kind of conversations. One reinforces the other and makes me better at the other, I think.
55:26 Harry Stebbings? But I do think in zero to one, brute force is really important. I am a believer in Elon Musk. When I started, I slept in the office. And I'm not saying you don't have a girlfriend, but.
55:37 Speaker 00 I do too. I believe in that too. I think that maybe, I don't feel like I work less hard for having the family. I think that the kids are a great joy and Caroline is a great joy. And I think we have a really amazing life and I garden. We grow tomatoes and chilies and corn and potatoes and all this stuff. A lot of what we eat, we grow at home. I'll work, I'll get up, I'll hang out with the kids from six thirty or seven until eight. I'll go to my desk, I'll work for four hours, I'll eat lunch at my desk, I'll go out and garden for twenty minutes to clear my head. I'll come back, the kids will be back at three thirty, I'll hang out with them for like half an hour and then I'll go back to work and then I'll have dinner.
56:22 Speaker 00 You know, I don't know, it just all feels very integrated.
56:25 Harry Stebbings? When was your life most out of whack?
56:28 Speaker 00 Probably my first startup. I don't know. I think you get into these phases where you know, you become very lopsided and I've certainly worked on things. I have kind of an obsessive personality, you know, sling's growing now. We have a channel, we have a Slack channel called Pulse where we see every sign up and we see every transaction. And then, you know, we have a dashboard that updates regularly with transaction volumes and all this stuff. Man, I like look at that Slack channel every four minutes, you know, every three minutes. And I have to stop myself from doing that. And that's the kind of stuff that I think is dangerous. That that's what people mistake for grinding or working hard or sleeping on the factory floor. You know, when you're just doing the same thing over and over again, you're looking at, you know,
57:11 Speaker 00 you're looking at it and you're obsessing about the numbers or something. That's very different from, you know, having a detached view or a semi attached view to how quickly you're growing, interrogating it, understanding what you need to build or what you need to do differently in order to grow faster. And I think that people often mistake those two types of work for each other, if that makes sense. And that first kind of like obsessive refreshing of the thing or that obsession with like hours or the theater of it is actually super stressful, you know? And I think that's the stuff that that kind of like leads to burnout. Whereas I think that you can work 20 hours a day, but like, you know, integrate that well with family and kids and all of that kind of stuff and be thoughtful and make good decisions and move fast and all that kind of stuff.
57:56 Speaker 00 And it's healthier and it's better.
57:58 Harry Stebbings? Mike, listen, I could talk to you all day. I want to do a quick fire. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?
58:04 Speaker 00 Sure.
58:04 Harry Stebbings? Okay, so tell me about a time when you most vociferously disagreed with a manager.
58:09 Speaker 00 Oh, man, there have been so many. One of them was just around sharing and the the mechanics of sharing on on Facebook. And, you know, Mark built the thing and I remember him saying, this is like the last part of this thing that I built myself. I have a deep emotional attachment to it. And I I thought I was just like, okay.
58:30 Harry Stebbings? Was he right?
58:31 Speaker 00 I can't argue with that. To this day, I don't know. We'll never know.
58:34 Harry Stebbings? Okay, angel investing, what's your biggest advice to an operator angel investing today?
58:39 Speaker 00 Invest in people who you believe in. Don't mistake good managers or ICs at a large company for people who are going to do well going from zero to one in a in a startup. You know, think about what that means.
58:54 Harry Stebbings? What is the single worst product you've been a part of making?
58:57 Speaker 00 I worked on building a multi-tiered filtering encrypted proxy, basically like Tor, the onion router, when I was a kid at a startup.
59:06 Harry Stebbings? What advice would you give to PMs today who want to get promoted?
59:10 Speaker 00 Don't worry about getting promoted. Figure out what the company most needs and go do it. Ideally, if it's something that nobody else wants to do and the promotion will find you.
59:19 Harry Stebbings? When is the right time to hire a CPO?
59:21 Speaker 00 It really depends on the founder, but probably very, very late. I wouldn't do it too soon. I think that the best CEOs are very product minded and should stay involved in product for as long as possible.
59:33 Harry Stebbings? What are the biggest mistakes that founders make when building out their product team?
59:37 Speaker 00 This comes back to founder mode a little bit. I think that people often, when their company starts growing, start thinking that they are out of their depths as a founder and that they don't understand what is needed from the product organization. They don't understand what's needed from the finance organization. And they kind of go against their gut because somebody's telling them, oh, well, this person is great. They did a great job at this company or whatever. I think you really have to believe your gut, partially because you're probably correct, at least about your company, like, you know, a director or a VP from Google is not necessarily going to do well at your like hundred person company. But also because you need to trust the people in that role so much that if you have that kind of like doubt at the time that you're hiring them about whether or not they're the right person,
1:00:21 Speaker 00 you just shouldn't do it. Like that relationship is just so deeply important. You have to listen to yourself on these things.
1:00:26 Harry Stebbings? When there's doubt, there's no doubt on people. Is that true or not true?
1:00:29 Speaker 00 Not always true. I think that's an oversimplification. I have worked with people that I have had doubt about who then have turned out to be phenomenal. And it turns out maybe there was something going on in their personal life, which was difficult and transient. Maybe they didn't understand expectations properly. Everybody has a different style.
1:00:46 Harry Stebbings? You can call in a CPO before they start their first day at their new gig. What advice do you give them?
1:00:52 Speaker 00 Move fast, like ship fast, get an early win, you know, and I think this is like good advice for everyone. Every role, put some points on the board.
1:01:02 Harry Stebbings? What two to three traits or one to two traits are less obvious but crucial in great PMs?
1:01:08 Speaker 00 I think great PMs combine deep intuition about people and markets with great product taste, great design taste. They don't need to be great designers, but they need to understand it, be able to tell you, oh, that's good, that's bad, together with a deep understanding of engineering, or at least the ability to operate with engineers and have respect, together with an understanding of the company's context and what it needs to accomplish. Does it need to grow? Does it need to be profitable? Does it need profitable growth? You know, all of these things. And if you don't have all of those things, I think it's very hard to be a good PM. And I think the thing that is not always obvious is just deep intellectual honesty. You need somebody who is willing to say from the first instance, I don't know the answer to that, I'm going to go figure it out.
1:01:53 Harry Stebbings? When were you not intellectually honest with yourself?
1:01:56 Speaker 00 Many times, you know, it's a failure mode you can fall into when you are in love with the thing that you are building or have built. You really truly believe in it deep down and you look at the data and you say to yourself, oh, well, just one more iteration. I just got this wrong. Oh, I'm going to do this or this thing is wrong. I think it's a very easy thing to do and I've done it many times and you have to kind of like catch yourself and stop yourself.
1:02:22 Harry Stebbings? Final one. What recent company product strategy have you been most impressed by? And why then?
1:02:29 Speaker 00 I continue to be very impressed by Monzo's execution, Monzo's strategy. I think it's I think it's going to go very well.
1:02:35 Harry Stebbings? What specifically about Monzo's new product over the last 12 months has made you so impressed?
1:02:40 Speaker 00 I like the I like the investment product. I like the family product which is coming out. So kid accounts, I think, is going to help Monzo move up demographically. I think all of these products have been very carefully thought out to kind of extend the demographic reach of the platform in meaningful ways, which I think is very important. And I think there's a bunch of stuff coming soon, which is also going to be very important and very good. I really appreciate all of the things that are happening right now. I don't really know how to put this, but all the The experimentation that's happening with AI at the moment and L L Ms. I think that like Claude and Chat G P T and all these things. There's just something very interesting going on there and you can see the minds working behind the scenes.
1:03:23 Speaker 00 I don't know how it's going to end up. I I think that these things go in cycles where, you know, obviously there's a there's a hype cycle. People are really excited about these things. I I I think there's going to be a trough. But then we'll get to that, the plateau of whatever, and you know, it's going to be great.
1:03:37 Harry Stebbings? Mike, I've absolutely loved this. I love the meandering. I'm glad that I told you beforehand that we didn't really stick to schedule. But you've been such a fantastic guest. So thank you so much for doing this.
1:03:45 Speaker 00 Thank you. Yeah, pleasure.
1:03:48 Harry Stebbings? Oh my God, I so much prefer doing shows in person. If you want to watch that full interview, you can on YouTube by searching for twenty V C. That's two zero V C. It really is a fun one to watch in person, I have to say. But before we leave you today, ever wondered what your customers actually do? The team over at They Do have been living it for decades and they have recently built a product that is frankly enabling the world's biggest businesses to literally know what they do. Harnessing journey mining with AI, you can turn unstructured data into structured customer journeys in minutes, saving weeks of work and months of analysis. They do journey management platform is already helping over one hundred leading businesses, including Ford, Johnson and Johnson, Royal London and Home Depot, to know what they do.
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1:05:57 Harry Stebbings? What are the features that make Pendo so awesome? Pendo's differentiation is in its platform. Every capability from analytics to in-app guidance to session replay, mobile feedback management and roadmapping are all purpose-built to work together. What is the social validity? 10,000 companies use Pendo and we also manage Mind the Product, the world's largest community of product management professionals. Where do we want to drive people? Give it a try and visit pendo.io/20product-podcast to learn how your team can use Pendo to start building better digital experiences. There you can also check out Pendo's lineup of free certification courses. 12 hours of in-depth training for your product management teams on topics from AI to product analytics to product-led growth.
1:06:41 Harry Stebbings? As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode coming this Monday with Shah Dul Shah, general partner at Index Ventures.
Previous 20VC: Scaling ServiceNow to $5BN in ARR | Leadership Lessons from Doug Leone, Frank Slootman and Bill McDermott | VC Value Add: Is it Real and Why the Worst VCs are "Seagull VCs" Next 20VC: Index's Shardul Shah on Why Market Size is a Trap | Biggest Lessons on Pricing from Leading Rounds in Wiz & Datadog | Why Benchmarks & Averages in VC are BS | How Index Makes Decisions and Why Growth & Early are the Same Investing Style Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
