Internal Product Management

Treat your company culture like a product, where your employees are the customers. Rather than preserving the established culture, founders should iterate on cultural principles and values to meet the evolving needs of a growing team. Document, iterate, and clarify cultural elements to reflect past, present, and future aspirations.

My aha moment of the value of first principles thinking was when I was at Dropbox. We would hire a ton of really smart people that had never done sales and had them do sales. There are a lot of disadvantages to that, but I do think it led to a ton of innovation. That's how we got our very innovative go-to market motions because a lot of those... See more

Culture includes the often invisible systems that influence our day-to-day experiences and how people work together. 

While there are plenty of articles and resources that talk about culture at work and shaping the future of work, what is missing from the conversation about culture is how it works and what specifically to do to build it, shape it... See more

You should be spending the majority of your time with the people who are moving the needle — the folks who are your highest performers and have the potential to change the company,” says Molly Graham. “It's really easy to think, ‘That person is so strong, they just take care of themselves. I'll go focus on the rest of my team.’ But I firmly believe... See more

Takeaways:

1. Sales becomes the second most common hire , after engineering.


2. A quarter of companies hired a product manager at this point.


3. Recruiters become a surprisingly common hire. I did not expect that. This is particularly true across some of the most unique startups, like Linear, Figma, Ramp, and Coda. Here’s Jori Lallo, co-founder of Linear,

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“You may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.”