Joseph Bou-Younes's Website

Tag: product management

  • Be YouTube, not Qwest

    Today, no amount of model training is too much. No price for that training is too high. The builders bet is that inference will be orders of magnitude cheaper in 5 years. Build for that. Be Netflix or YouTube, not Qwest.

    This year, American tech companies will spend $300 billion to $400 billion on artificial intelligence, which is in nominal dollars more than any group of companies have ever spent to do anything. Notably, these companies are not remotely close to earning $400 billion on artificial intelligence.

    That’s why you’re starting to hear some people wonder whether the AI build-out is turning into the mother of all economic bubbles.

    The prospect of an AI bubble should scare us. Roughly half of last quarter’s GDP growth came from infrastructure spending on AI, and more than half of stock market appreciation in the last few years has come from companies associated with AI. If the AI spending project blows up in the next few years, as our next guest says it might, the implications for technology, the economy, and politics would be immense.

    – This Is How the AI Bubble Could Burst – Plain English with Derek Thompson

  • But who will build the applications?

    If this is to be believed, $META is inhaling talent and focusing them narrowly on training The Best foundational model.

    Which begs the question: who’s building the apps? Is the bet that direct interaction with the model will do everything?

    Meta Superintelligence – Leadership Compute, Talent, and Data

  • Distribution in digital products

    Distribution in digital products

    This was a great story about how Google’s search distribution deal dramatically increased cost of entry for Neeva, a putative competitor.

    This also reminded me of the Monster/AB InBev deal mentioned in “The Little Book that Builds Wealth:”

    To be fair, it is occasionally possible to take the success of a blockbuster product or service and leverage it into an economic moat. Look at Hansen Natural, which markets the Monster brand of energy drinks that surged onto the market in the early part of this decade. Rather than resting on its laurels, Hansen used Monster’s success to secure a long-term distribution agreement with beverage giant Anheuser-Busch, giving it an advantage over competitors in the energy-drink market.

    Anyone who wants to compete with Monster now has to overcome Hansen’s distribution advantage. Is this impossible to do? Of course not, because Pepsi and Coke have their own distribution networks. But it does help protect Hansen’s profit stream by making it harder for the next upstart energy drink to get in front of consumers, and that’s the essence of an economic moat.

    Once you find product-market fit you need to quickly scale distribution to own as much of the market as possible and preempt new entrants.

  • What I Learned from Interviewing 85 Product Manager Candidates in 18 Months

    What I Learned from Interviewing 85 Product Manager Candidates in 18 Months

    This post was originally published on Inside Q4, stories and lessons learned from the Q4 Inc. R&D team.

    The requirement was extreme: hire 15 Product Managers (and one Director of Product) in the next year and a half.

    When I arrived at Q4 in October of 2021, we were entering a period of hyper-growth in Product Design, Engineering and Product Management. We had huge ambitions and needed to scale our team — fast. I had hired talent before and had conducted dozens of interviews in my career, but the task ahead of me was daunting. As a new hire myself, Q4 was a domain that was still fairly new to me. Plus, the company serves a specialized clientele and isn’t exactly a household name — and the job market is insanely competitive!

    With the help of our CTO, my peers, our amazing talent acquisition team and under the guidance of our inspirational and very applicable company values (Grind, Hustle, Iterate, Compete, Care), we reached our goal. Here are some of the things that I learned as the hiring manager on this assignment.

    Cross-optimize your Hiring Process for Speed and Fairness

    Hiring is a flow, not a project. The point is to run candidates through a process and hire quality, diverse candidates in a fair and equal way as fast as possible — but no faster. Go in expecting that it will take time and unsexy work to do it well, but it will all pay off in the end.

    Create a process: align on it, refine it, repeat

    • Write a good job description for each role; ensure that all the interviewers know what’s in it. A good job description can help turn a mediocre interviewer into an amazing one.
    • Write a good rubric (‘marking key’) for the interviews and take care to set it up properly in your applicant tracking system. Refine it between searches so that you’re constantly applying what you learn in a hiring round to make your process better.
    • Learn from your mistakes! When you have a mis-hire — and we had a few — take another look at your questions, process, and rubric and improve on it for next time.

    Optimize for speed:

    • Have a well-defined interview process for each role, with backup interviewers on call to be added to an interview loop within a day’s notice to keep the process flowing.
    • Use your application tracking system and hold up your end by entering feedback immediately after the interview. This allows your talent acquisition partner to move right into the next step with a candidate (setting up next interviews, generating offers, closing, etc.)
    • Have a fast, scheduled window of time for interviewers to align on a candidate (if needed) and resolve any conflicting hiring decisions. For example, in the case where three interviewers rate a candidate “hire” and one rates the same candidate as “no hire,” use this window to quickly come to consensus.
    • Make it easy for talent acquisition and candidates to book your calendar — Calendly, or Google Calendar Appointment Windows, are great tools to keep all necessary parties organized.
    • Follow up with candidates quickly — especially when an offer goes out!

    Optimize for fairness:

    • Build a question bank! Over the years, I have tried to document every interview I’ve been in as a candidate. That includes writing down any really good questions that I was asked. Good artists copy, great artists steal.
    • Have a consistent process, scoring rubric, skills criteria and question bank that all interviewers can draw on, so that each candidate has the same experience and opportunity.
    • Write. Things. Down. I try to fully transcribe every interview I conduct so that if I need to go to bat for a candidate — or reject a candidate — I can go back to the specifics and have a fruitful conversation with the other interviewers based on facts, not memory or impression.
    • Manage the flow of feedback between interviewers such that you don’t bias each other, but can still use subsequent rounds of interviews to fill gaps in understanding.
    • Create a great applicant experience. Get back to people quickly!

    Never stop recruiting

    Always be thinking about where a good person could fit with your team in the future. Circumstances change often, and quickly, so don’t ever assume the team you have today is the one you’ll have tomorrow.

    • Go back to the well: Past interviews, past applicants, and people who got an offer in the past but declined, are a good source of candidates for future hiring; mine your applicant tracking system for candidate “gold” you may have missed last time around.
    • Do your own outreach: Like us, you may have a strong talent acquisition team, but you’re the one with the in-role expertise. Buy and expense a LinkedIn premium account and send InMail to people you think could be a fit in the near future.
    • Do informational interviews: 15 minutes of your time is worth it if you can meet and nurture a potential future candidate. Team building is a marathon, not a sprint. The older I get, the more I enjoy, appreciate and learn from folks who are just starting out as PM. If a person is too junior today they may be a fit for a new role in six months, or a more senior role in 18. Build your rolodex: the value of this investment compounds over time.
    • Know (and love) your external recruiters: I was brought into Q4 by a top-shelf recruiter who had carefully built a relationship with our CTO over years and has turned into a trusted resource and advisor to me, too. He touches base every four or five months, we catch up briefly, he gives me a read on the market and periodically brings me amazing candidates. Relationships like this propel careers.
    • Focus on team composition, not “fit.” When hiring Product Managers, remember that you’re not just hiring individual contributors, you’re hiring a key peer leader for your product team. When I think of team composition, it’s not in terms of some arbitrary cultural fit but rather of the particular talents that needed to be added to bring the team to the next level.
      For example, I think about the emotional energy the team needs. Is the team a “hair on fire” sort that panics easily and could benefit from a calming presence? Or is the team more in need of a high-energy product manager to get them excited? Is it a creative product role? An analytical one? A highly technical one? How much executive exposure will this PM have? What skills will they need to spike on to do well for themselves and the team?

    You’re going to have interviews where the candidate is amazing but not for the specific role. When that happens, be up front with the candidate. Let them know they’re not going to get the offer for the position, and tell them why. Then, shop the person around internally and keep in touch for future opportunities.

    Of the 16 people we hired, three have already been promoted from individual contributors to managers. I’ve also heard some really nice things from colleagues about our evolved team. Hearing this makes me proud. Hiring processes are a lot of work for everyone involved. We put a lot of thought and energy into our part of it, and it’s rewarding to see it come together well.

  • Fixing our Unhealthy Obsession with Work Email

    “Creative thinking requires a relaxed state, the ability to think through options at a slow pace and the openness to explore different alternatives without fear.”

    – Fixing our Unhealthy Obsession with Work Email

  • Privacy, Trust and Identity

    Privacy, Trust and Identity are now at the forefront for all consumers, and have wide-ranging impact on technology and media businesses. From tech companies, expect lobbying actions, new tools, new policies and more personal control to rebuild users’ confidence, and from the policy world expect more guidelines around use of personal data and stricter repercussions for violations of user trust.

    The Best “Sleeper Ideas” For Trends, Stocks, And Private Companies To Watch In 2014 – Forbes

    Eric Jackson’s roundup of Sleeper picks includes this nugget from Michael Wolff (which of course I agree with), as well as a few thoughts from yours truly.

    (via gregcohn)

    Source: forbes.com

  • All of This Has Happened Before

    A software license touches on the software, not on the human relationships which the software mediates. It is those relationships that lock us into positions where Zuckerberg’s foot is on our necks.

    The Eternal Mainframe, Rudolf Winestock

  • How not to respond to negative product feedback in the press

    In yesterday’s journal there was an interview with the CEO of The Weather Channel, talking about the future of Weather content. Weather might seem trivial, but it’s one of the most important kinds of content to get right on any platform. Companies like Yahoo, Apple, Samsung, and others agonize over how to present weather content in a way that is visually fresh but still familiar. Weather Channel just relaunched on several platforms, and I was curious to hear what they had to say.

    I was disappointed. To wit:

    WSJ: A story on the Huffington Post recently listed your weather app as one of the ‘Worst Apps Ever.’ What are you doing to fix it?

    Mr. Kenny: It’s the fifth most downloaded app on the iPhone of all apps and second on the iPad. So it has been popular there. We are working to make it work better with Android. With any app it’s important that it works well within that operating system so it can take advantage of the best features. We are also moving more of the mobile team to the West coast so they can be closer to the developers on the operating systems.

    …because God knows, nobody in California churns out crappy Apps. Right?

  • The Law of Conservation of Complexity

    When I was a wee pup working on My Yahoo, this was a crime I committed more than once. We’d argue about how a particular feature should work, narrow things down to two contradictory options, and end up implementing both as a “configurable setting.” Users would then never find or use the setting, and we’d end up looking like idiots when we had to remove it in a future release.

    In our defense, we often did this because how users “used to use the product” was very different from “how they were going to use the product.” So we’d design things so that they would work one way for “old” users who migrated into the new product, but a different way for new users who just started using it. This worked well until we wanted to update one (or both) versions of the feature, and then had to find a way to manage the dependency. More often than not, we would end up migrating “old” users to the “new” setting, removing the setting, and then moving people forward. So rather than avoid pissing off the “old” users, we just deferred annoying them to a later date. It would have been better to just place a bet on the “new” approach, and be ready to modify it if the benefit to the business (gaining new users) didn’t outweigh the cost (pissing off old users).

    The Law of Conservation of Complexity

  • Don’t be a slave to the backlog.

    I’ve been spending a lot of time helping one client with their 2011 Product Roadmap. Although we’re not “doing Agile,” I’ve introduced them to the product backlog. So far it’s been a powerful planning tool. So Scott Sehlhorst’s post on how to prioritize resonated with me.

    When creating a backlog, or managing features, you need to remember that feature priority is a tool to be used to plan your work. Don’t get too specific about the exact rank of individual items, and remember that the eventual order of implementation should reflect what from a business, technical, and user perspective. It’s a compromise. The backlog is the beginning of knowledge, not the end. 

    Don’t be a slave to the backlog.