Jag Duggal: How We Scaled Nubank to 80M Users; Google's Brutal Hiring Practices | E995

1. 0:00 – 1:06

   Intro

   1. JDJag Duggal0:00

      I joined Google, and Google's famous for the fact that Larry literally looked at every hiring packet, including resume. They- I, 12 years after graduating college, had to provide my SAT scores to Google. I had to go find them. I had to provide my college transcript, which everyone did. It was a very credential-driven place, which it- which was accounted for a lot of the talent density there, but also led to blind spots. You know, Google, just take another example. Google, I was one of the last product managers hired into Google who did not have a computer science degree, and because of that computer science requirement to be a, a product manager, people like Kevin Systrom weren't allowed to be product managers at Google, right? So, he went off and founded (laughs) a, a little company called Instagram.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings0:45

      Jag, I am so excited for this show today. I've heard so many great things from many different people with different stories, uh, but especially the main man, David Velez. So, thank you so much for, for joining me today, my friend.

   3. JDJag Duggal0:57

      I'm so excited to be here, Harry. I'm a huge fan of the show, as you know.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings1:00

      That is so kind of you. But, uh, I, (laughs) when I spoke to David, he asked, um, the first most important question.

2. 1:06 – 4:24

   Why Jag Left Meta for Nubank

   1. HSHarry Stebbings1:06

      You went from a cushy job at Meta working in the Valley to working for a Brazilian fintech that no one really knew about at the time. "Why did you do it?" He asked. (laughs)

   2. JDJag Duggal1:16

      (laughs) Well, as, as he well knows, Daveed is an extraordinarily persuasive guy. So, that's the first thing. The first conversation I had with Daveed, I li- when he asked me towards the end, "Would you ever consider moving to Sao Paolo?" I thought, (laughs) I sa- I said, "Daveed, the obvious, uh, answer is no," and this is a crazy request, but he's a very persuasive guy, 'cause when I gave him that answer, he said, "Well, there are people working here who are far more definitive than you are, so we should keep chatting."

   3. HSHarry Stebbings1:46

      (laughs)

   4. JDJag Duggal1:47

      Um, Doug Leoni played a part in, in, in persuading me. But the, the larger, the larger reason is I had spent the previous almost 15 years, uh, at that t- point, working in, at Google, at Quantcast, at Facebook, basically in media tech and ad tech, as it was the center of what was happening in Silicon Valley, and had come to realize that I had a ringside seat to the great disruption story of the previous 15 years, and that was amazing, intellectually incredibly interesting. But I was- I had developed a toolkit that I was applying to serve what is effectively the richest billion people on the planet, the US, Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and what Daveed and Nubank offered was the chance to take that same toolkit and apply it to, roughly speaking, the bottom half of the global income pyramid. I had grown up in the Caribbean, so roughly speaking, depending on how you count the, the English-speaking Caribbean, I am, I am roughly Latin American. And the opportunity to apply to the bottom half of the income pyramid the toolkit I had gotten in my, roughly speaking, home region was really, was really, really exciting. It also came, the second reason that, a- and the thing that became clear to me as I started talking with Daveed and the Nubank team, was that media tech and ad tech had kind of played itself out. And I had, I had been on both sides. I had worked for Google and Facebook. I had worked for a, a challenge- a challenger startup, but the game had kind of consolidated.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings3:34

      Mm-hmm.

   6. JDJag Duggal3:35

      Fintech is, even today, three years later, still very much in its early innings, and we still have this 20-year game to play itself out, and being in at the ground floor in the beginning of an industry that's just starting to fundamentally change. And I, I firmly believe the next set of bits to be disrupted after the media industry, the obvious next set of bits is, is reais, dollars, pesos, pounds, uh, euros. And, uh, and the technology's ready, and it's, it's time to go. So, it was just too big an opportunity to pass up.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings4:06

      Uh, there's so many things for me to unpack there. You mentioned the word toolkit multiple times and kind of utilizing that toolkit. I think there's this kind of common, uh, question in, in product, which is, like, to what extent is it art or science? Incredibly difficult question, which, you know, is a utterly shit question, really, but I thought I would ask it anyway. Um-

   8. JDJag Duggal4:23

      (laughs)

3. 4:24 – 8:27

   Is Product more art or science?

   1. JDJag Duggal4:24

      Okay.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings4:24

      ... is product more art or science? And what would you say it would be if you had to, like, rank it 70/30, 80/20?

   3. JDJag Duggal4:31

      Yeah, I, you know, I- I've heard you ask this question of a number of product leaders over, over the last year or so, uh, from Gustav, to Kevin Wyle, and others, um, and I've liked their answers. I'll give you my take on, on the answer. I have tried, and we have tried at Nubank, especially over the last three years, to make it as scientific as we possibly can, and we pushed the envelope, and I think there's still further to go. I think you can make it 90% science. The thing about product management is it's a pretty new discipline. When an engineer shows up at a tech company or a salesperson shows up at a tech company, they kinda know what the job is. When I showed up at Google in 2006, no one really had a definition for what a product manager was. They showed you where the bathroom was, and then they sort of dropped you in a team and said, "Go." And over the last 15 years, and you've had Marty Cagan and others on, it's become gradually more scientific. And so, I think we can make it, and we're on the cusp of making it. I don't think we're quite there, but I think we're on the cusp of making it 90% science. What is the science of understanding product-market fit? How do you make it metrics-driven more than, like, gut feel? Having said that, I think the last 10%, and the most important 10%, and the 10% that makes all of the difference, is still art.And once you get the science, you get, like, to the start line of having a shot at winning the race. But it's the 10% of art that is how you win that race.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings6:11

      What is in the art? If we're in the science and we're, like, determining product market fit, um, eh, y- you know, all of the kind of metricized elements that we now have with the data tools that we have, what is in-

   5. JDJag Duggal6:21

      Yeah.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings6:21

      ... the 10% of art still?

   7. JDJag Duggal6:25

      Yeah. And I'm still figuring out the answer to that question every day. Um-

   8. HSHarry Stebbings6:29

      (laughs)

   9. JDJag Duggal6:30

      ... learning from my team every day. But I think the heart of it, and it's the hardest part to make scientific, is the empathy with the customer. What is that specific thing that we're gonna focus on that creates the magic for them that really taps into a deeply unmet need? The thing is, and the pitfall is, you can do customer research. You can go ask customers, but I, I tell, uh, the product team at, uh, Nubank all the time, we are not in the business of taking dictation from our customers. 'Cause if we were, we would just send the engineer instead of us, and we'd... no need for the middle man. We have to listen to the customer, better yet, observe the customer to interpret what their unmet need is and what the hierarchy of those unmet needs are and where the magic is. And then you apply business filters and everything else to see if there is, you know, profit to be had. Um, but that empathy and that intuition for where the real unmet need is, is something that is very hard to make scientific and is something that, you know, you can be called with the official title of product manager or you can be a guy named Daveed Velez, who isn't technically a product manager, but came up with a magical idea 10 years ago, uh, and just had that intuition for where the pain was that was sharp and that would create this visceral reaction from the Brazilian consumer, and that, that is hard to, hard to replicate.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings8:13

       This is me sitting down now 'cause it's, it's got serious. Uh, my question to you is, um, what makes a good question? I think the majority of customer development actually sucks because people don't ask good questions. What's a good question?

   11. JDJag Duggal8:26

       For my,

4. 8:27 – 12:33

   Best Question to Ask Customers

   1. JDJag Duggal8:27

      for my money, and look, I've ma- I- I've learned this mostly by making, by doing the opposite and making the mistake, it's, it's about exploring the customer's problem rather than the solution, and even when you're exploring the problem, you don't ask about the problem directly. You ask about the customer's life around whatever area you're, you're interested in. And customers don't even realize when they are employing workarounds, when they are, when they are making do, when they think everything is fine, but if you somehow showed up with something completely different, uh, you can, you can change their lives. And so, I think where we tend to fall short in the industry today even still is, we spend a lot of time trying to pitch the solution, ask about the solution. We spend not nearly enough time talking about the problem. And when we are talking about the problem, we're mostly asking about it rather than asking around it and observing around it, because it's our job to synthesize that.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings9:37

      Do you find by asking around that you can lead them, uh, to a conclusion? "J- Jag, don't you find it difficult when, uh, you have to wait three days for your, you know, salary to come through?" "Mm, yes, I guess so. Yes." But like, do you know what I mean? You're leading the witness.

   3. JDJag Duggal9:54

      Yeah. You know, for my, for my money and one of the hardest things for, for especially, uh, product managers who are earlier in their careers to, to wrap their round, their head around is, we should never fall in love with our belief or our hypothesis. Uh, and most, most of us can't help but become the lawyer, the advocate for the idea. And what is really important is to have a hypothesis, to be really clear on your hypothesis, not to go in with a vague set of, "I wanna ask you about this general area of your life," but to have a couple of sharp hypotheses you're out to test, but to be entirely agnostic, not in love with any of those ideas, uh, to approach it more as a judge than a lawyer. So you've got to have a sharp hypothesis, but also not fall in love with the hypothesis. It's a deeply... it's, it runs completely co- uh, contrary to human nature to come up with an idea and keep your distance from it at the same time. And that's, I think, what makes it hard.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings11:06

      How do you do it? You spend time on it. With time, you have commitment, and with commitment, you have love. (laughs)

   5. JDJag Duggal11:13

      (laughs)

   6. HSHarry Stebbings11:14

      Fuck me, this is a dating show, Jag. But like, you know, when it, when you've sacrificed other things to dedicate time and commitment and energy and passion to it, you... uh, it's human nature. How do you detach yourself from it?

   7. JDJag Duggal11:27

      Yeah. You know, one, the one step, which is, which is very hard, but is i- but is not even enough, is to at least fall in love with the problem, not the s- specific solution. Daveed, Daveed, you know, uh, just to take that Nubank example, was in love with the potential of unleashing the Latin American consumer who was being really badly served. He wasn't in love with, "I need to build a credit card for... because of X, Y, Z reason or, or business case." Um, and so first, you start with at least being in love with the problem. And then when you're in love with the problem-... the solution can come out in any one of a dozen or two dozen or 100 different ways, and you're just keeping your ear to the ground to see, "How can I unleash this bigger ide- bigger idea, this bigger opportunity?" That- that's- that's the key, whereas falling in love with a specific idea before you've proven- proven it just means you're gonna end up leading the witness, and you're gonna hear what you wanna hear. And, uh, and that's- that's always, always, always a trap.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings12:31

      And Jag, before we dive into the meat of the show, I

5. 12:33 – 17:05

   Lessons from Facebook

   1. HSHarry Stebbings12:33

      do just have to ask you. Y- y- you spent several years at Facebook as the director of product management, a pretty heavy role at a pretty important time for the company. What are one or two takeaways for you that really impacted how you think about product today?

   2. JDJag Duggal12:47

      You know, Facebook has its share of pitfalls in how it operates, but it has a few things it does extremely well, which in at least a couple of cases, dovetailed with things that I really needed to learn, especially at the time. One of them, a- and this sort of bill is actually ironically off what we were just talking about, is I- I had a tendency to, A, enjoy the arguments, and, B, get entrenched in my position, not with the customer, but internal. And one of the things that Facebook does incredibly well, especially at the senior levels, is, "I have a strong point of view as director A, and you have a strong point of view as director B, and we need to collaborate." And Facebook is built for it- you have to collaborate across business areas to- to make something, uh, big happen. And Facebook was incredibly good at saying, and I had- I had to learn this from a number of people, but they were incredibly good at simply saying, "You think X, I think Y. By the end of this week the latest, we are going to either agree, disagree and know why, and escalate." And the speed of escalation, it wasn't like, "I- I think X, you think Y. Let's come back in a week, discuss it some more and then in a week after that, we're gonna escalate it." It was like, "I think X, you think Y. By the end of day, we're gonna agree if we can come to a con- a consensus, or escalate." And that speed of escalation I think ties to Facebook's historical always impressive speed of execution, and that was probably the single biggest thing I learned there, which has been so valuable for me since.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings14:32

      I was speaking to a $50 billion CEO today who's a friend of mine, and he said, "You know, at the end of the day when you get to a size like ours, and bluntly like New Banks..." I- I'm- I'm adding that. (laughs) You know, he didn't (laughs) use that.

   4. JDJag Duggal14:45

      Yeah.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings14:45

      But, uh, you know, you're- you're fighting off, uh, eventual mediocrity, um, and you're fighting (laughs) off eventual slowness. Um-

   6. JDJag Duggal14:54

      Yes.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings14:54

      ... my question to you is, when you think about Facebook operating at that execution speed, how do you retain that speed and agility when you are New Bank today with such large teams and very real processes and bluntly heavy (laughs) corporate structures?

   8. JDJag Duggal15:12

      Yeah. Yeah, well, a few things. Um, we have a CEO who's still- who's a founder, and he fights the- the- the- the- the natural, uh, creep of corporate process even- (laughs) including ones that I try to introduce at times, and I think that's- that's a helpful counter- counterforce, counter-gravity. Um, but I think there are two things, and again, these a- these things are over the last 10 years getting more and more codified amongst the really great companies. Um, my wife- my wife used to work at Amazon, so we- we lived, and I heard in the early days about, you know, two pizza box teams. With- at Google, we used to talk about a team should be like a- like a- like a family. You should be able to, you know, feed it around the table. Um, so we at New Bank, we do a couple of things fairly religiously. We try to keep teams very small actually. We might have many of them focusing on many things as the company grows, but we try very hard to keep the size of teams small. That's a really important thing. And the second thing, which we just talked about, is when you get stuck, don't stay stuck. Escalate. Someone will make a call. A bad decision which can be iterated on is better than no decision at all 'cause you start learning from the market and from customers, and, uh, and very few decisions are, as- as Bezos would say, "One-way doors." So escalate and decide, and keep your teams small, and at New Bank, there is a religion which is sometimes hard as a senior exec. There's a religion around autonomy, and we try to give our- our- our general managers and even- even folks, uh, who are more junior than that a lot of autonomy to make decisions about where they're taking their product or their business.

6. 17:05 – 18:40

   Do you inherently trust people?

   1. JDJag Duggal17:05

   2. HSHarry Stebbings17:05

      Do you inherently trust people? I know that sounds weird, but you said about autonomy there. Uh, there's two ways, which is full trust from day one, and it's yours to be lost, or you gain trust over time. I inherently don't trust people, which is why I will die alone with my cat, um... I need to actually get the cat. I'm just alone now. (laughs) Um, but like (laughs) , you know, do- do you trust people from the start, or is it to be gained over time?

   3. JDJag Duggal17:29

      I- I- I tend to default to trusting people from the start. We had a mantra at Facebook, speaking of lessons from there, about assuming good intent. It was built into the cultural training there. Um, I think assuming good intent, trusting people... I- I don't trust people at the recruiting stage. When I'm recruiting someone, my default answer is they're not good enough to- to- to join the company. But once they've proven that, uh, and we've decided to extend an offer, I'm going to assume that you are New Bank quality, we try to keep a very high bar, and then I'm gonna try to give you as much room to run...... and show me what you can do. And look, if you make mistakes along the way, we'll, we'll correct them. Ev- we all do. And if you make too many mistakes, then we have to have d- more difficult conversations. But I think the, the right starting point is to give people that trust and give them room t- the room to run.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings18:24

      You mentioned that the pre-hiring process. You know, we have, uh, about 700,000 th- founders that listen, so no worries that you're about to, you know, impact, you know, many thousands of teams. Um, but I do have to ask about the hiring process. I know we're mixing the schedule up, but fuck it, let's do it. Um,

7. 18:40 – 26:04

   Hiring Tips

   1. HSHarry Stebbings18:40

      how do you structure-

   2. JDJag Duggal18:41

      W-

   3. HSHarry Stebbings18:41

      ... your hiring process today? What's the right way to structure a hiring process for a product team?

   4. JDJag Duggal18:46

      I really struggle with this. I don't know that I have a good answer, and if anything, I've lost, I've lost confidence over time and over the years and over the last decade, rather than gained it. Um-

   5. HSHarry Stebbings18:58

      Wh- why? What has led you to lose confidence? Mis-hires?

   6. JDJag Duggal19:01

      Well-

   7. HSHarry Stebbings19:02

      Not hiring?

   8. JDJag Duggal19:03

      Yeah. Some, some mis- some, some mistakes in hiring. Some great understanding that, again, and some of this is commonplace understanding, but first of us understanding that credentials matter less than I thought. Um, that someone who had gone to the right school, the right program, the right grades, the right company, and any combination of all of those things isn't necessarily right for your situation at your time, one. Two, a gradual understanding, and I know you're a, you're a football fan, and I'm a, a huge football fan, uh, and I'm really happy this morning 'cause Man U is back after a decade.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings19:46

      (laughs)

   10. JDJag Duggal19:47

       Um, but, uh, team matters. I think we've seen that in the world of football since Pep came along 15 years ago.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings19:55

       Mm-hmm.

   12. JDJag Duggal19:55

       The team matters. And so h- no matter how, how many Galacticos, how many All Stars you've got on the team, it doesn't mean that the, the whole is gonna be greater than the sum of the parts. And so recruiting someone who is going to fit the need, fit the team, fit the problem, and you don't have the, like, normal signposts of credentials necessarily as, like, a definitive guarantee. I g- I, you know, I... After consulting, I joined Google, and Google's famous for the fact that Larry, uh, literally looked at every hiring packet, including resume. They, I... What? 12 years after graduating college, had to provide my SAT scores to Google. I had to go find them. I had to provide my college transcript, which everyone did. It was a very credential-driven place, which it, which was accounted for a lot of the talent density there, but also led to blind spots. Um, and so, you know, Google... I'll just take another example. Google, I was one of the last product managers hired into Google who did not have a computer science degree. And because of that computer science requirement to be a, a product manager, people like Kevin Systrom weren't allowed to be product managers at Google, right? So he went off and founded a, a little company called Instagram. Um, and there were a number of those types of people who went off to fo- went on to found great, great companies. So the thing that I used to think was, was very scientific has become more re- in recruit- in terms of recruiting, and I used to feel a lot of confidence and clarity about it, feels more and more like art to me. And I think that means I just don't understand it well enough.

   13. HSHarry Stebbings21:38

       So with the, with the signals of clarity being less definitive in terms of quality, school, grades, prior companies, you name it, then there's something else. What questions do you ask to try and unveil my character? And imagine I'm a, an angel investment of yours and you're advising me. I'm a CEO. I don't know what to ask. W- what, what questions should I ask to determine quality of products?

   14. JDJag Duggal22:07

       There are sort of two flavors of questions I tend to ask these days. One is a r- one is a set of questions around drive. At, at Facebook, it was a c- an interview stream called Leadership and Drive. But the thing I really look for is drive 'cause there are a lot of really smart people who don't actually have that inherent drive for greatness, who will n- who will walk through f- fire, break through walls to achieve greatness. They're really, really sharp. But without that drive, it, it, it... Especially in a startup-type environment where the odds are stacked against you, you're supposed to fail, the odds are that you will fail, drive is more important than IQ points. So there's a set of questions around what's the hardest thing you've done? What's the... Tell me about a time when you were in a situation where you didn't know what the answer was. I, I took a class in, in cr- uh, leadership. It was supposed to be a leadership class in, in graduate school, and it basically was inherently designed, the professor was a psychologist, and it was inherently designed to be a Lord of the Flies exercise over the course of the semester.

   15. HSHarry Stebbings23:21

       (laughs)

   16. JDJag Duggal23:22

       Uh, when you had Israeli fighter pilots and BBC journalists and this amazing variety of people, and for example, one class, the professor walks in, puts his briefcase down, sits down, and doesn't say a word for 45 minutes. And you just sort of see what 100 type A, you know, Harvard people will do, and it's just this amazing psychological experiment. Um, but this, this drive to take command of a situation, but also to collaborate and bring people in. It's not drive for power's sake, it's drive for getting something done, is, is a really important thing. And the core thing I took away from that class after spending three quarters of it not understanding why in the hell I was in it, uh, I was like, "What are we doing here?" Uh, he had a phrase near the end, which-... which, uh, really resonated with me, I use it almost every week, is, are you able to stomach your own incompetence? Are you able to enter into a situation where you do not know what the answer is and dive in anyway? Uh, which I think is the essence of- of building something new. So, there's a set of questions I ask around that. And then, the other one is clarity, you know. It- it's pure coincidence that you had Kevin, uh, Systrom on recently. But I'm not generally in the habit, at least for the last 10, 15 years, of looking for advice from 20-somethings. But Kevin Systrom, back before Instagram was famous, certainly before it was bought by Facebook, I heard Kevin at some conference say, "We may not be right, but at least we are clear."

   17. HSHarry Stebbings25:05

       Huh.

   18. JDJag Duggal25:06

       And I love that because I think that's the other thing I'm looking for someone. And so, I would ask questions simply like, "You used to work at this company or you founded this company 10, 12, 15 years ago." It may not have been a successful company. It doesn't really matter. "Tell me about the company. And I just wanna know how clearly you can explain to me, as someone who knows nothing about your business, so that I can understand if it seems to ma- if it seems to make any sense. It may not make sense. I don't have the technical capability to understand if your startup made sense. But did it make sense, or your product or whatever you were working on? But I wanna know if you can tell me clearly. If you spend five minutes telling me and I've zoned out and I don't understand what you said anyway, which by the way is three-quarters of- of most answers-"

   19. HSHarry Stebbings25:49

       Wow.

   20. JDJag Duggal25:49

       "... then, uh, then you're not gonna have the clarity to lead a team to something that's truly breakthrough. And so, I'm looking for clarity and I'm looking for drive. And I still don't know if I have the right questions to get to those things. But (laughs) that's what I'm reaching for."

8. 26:04 – 34:59

   Execution vs Strategic Clarity

   1. JDJag Duggal26:04

   2. HSHarry Stebbings26:04

      You said clarity there, and it takes me to something you said before to me before the show, which was on the importance of execution. Or sorry, the lack of importance of execution and the importance of strategic clarity. Like, w- what did you mean by, like, the lack of importance or execution being overrated and-

   3. JDJag Duggal26:22

      Yeah.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings26:22

      ... strategic clarity being underrated?

   5. JDJag Duggal26:24

      Yeah. You know, uh, uh, I'm being a little contrarian, but, you know, I spent a number of years as a strategy consultant and, uh, which has its own, own pitfalls for sure.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings26:35

      (laughs)

   7. JDJag Duggal26:35

      But, uh, it's almost mantra at this point. I actually think it's fairly lazy mantra in Silicon Valley and in tech in general, to say strategy is easy and execution is- is everything. And look, to be very clear, execution is massively important. But execution without strategic clarity is basically frenzy. It is not progress. It is not forward motion, it c-

   8. HSHarry Stebbings27:04

      Is it... Sorry. Is it... I'm interrupting, I'm so sorry. Is it not about-

   9. JDJag Duggal27:07

      Voice.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings27:07

       ... the amount of at-bats though? With every bit you learn, and so like I always say, the speed of execution is the single biggest driver in the companies that I see succeed that I've invested in, 'cause they have a structure and a mechanism where they execute, learn, change, execute, again and again and again.

   11. JDJag Duggal27:23

       Completely. I think there's one piece missing in the framework you just outlined though. If you are executing and you don't know what you are executing towards, you cannot take the signal that's coming back at you and iterate. If you have a clear hypothesis of the case, a theory of the case as to what you're supposed to get back, what your strategy is trying to achieve, then all the data you're getting back becomes signal, and you can react very clearly and definitively so your next iteration is in the next, i- is in the right direction. Your strategy does not have to be perfect. It has to be clear so that you can take the signal back from the customer or the market and iterate in some clear direction. Otherwise, you're off and running in circles.

   12. HSHarry Stebbings28:09

       Can I ask, what would, what would be an example of this? Just so I understand it more clearly. So, we, you said there about kind of actually strategically being clear about knowing where you're going or what you're wanting. What would be-

   13. JDJag Duggal28:20

       Yeah.

   14. HSHarry Stebbings28:20

       ... an example of that in product?

   15. JDJag Duggal28:23

       I'll give you, uh, let me give you an example. So, which is one we have wrestled with, she fairly recently at Eubank. Um, if you've... And I'll speak a little bit generically. If you've got a- a hypothesis for a product and you launch it out in the market and you're not careful about who you've launched it to or how you've positioned it, and you get a bunch of signal that says, "Hey," as we did at Eubank, "Hey, the NPS on this product is actually quite mediocre." And you just look at your average NPS and it says, "Eh, this product just doesn't seem to be resonating." You might iterate in any number of directions, kill the product, iterate the product in some, uh, incorrect direction. What we ended up finding was, hey, peel underneath the data. There is a set of customers which was actually the set of customers we meant the product to be for, who love the product. They're actually a small minority of the- of the people who you've given the product to right now. And there's a bunch of customers who don't like the product, but you know what? It turns out this product wasn't designed for them. It wasn't built for them. Of course they don't like it. There's no reason why they should like it. So that's, in part, a story about de-averaging, but it's also a part and story about saying, and this is what strategy is, "I am building this product for this specific set of customers, this specific group segment of customers, for it to meet this deep unmet need." Do they like it or not? If those customers don't like it, then you start to ask a series of why questions. Why don't you like it? How, w- what is it about the product that isn't working? Is it we executed it poorly? Is it fundamentally misconceived? How do we iterate it?If it turns out, however, which is what we found quite recently, those customers love it, but we've been giving it to a bunch of customers for whom it wasn't intended and they don't like it, you've actually got confirmation that you're onto something. And the problem isn't to iterate the product, it's to get the customer... Get the product into the hands of the right customer. Completely different answers. And that's what I mean, if you do not have a clear hypothesis, a clearly articulated strategy of how you plan to win, you can execute with speed, with velocity, with quality, and never get there. And that happens all the time.

   16. HSHarry Stebbings30:59

       Do you know what I find so hard about, like, how you plan to win? I- I had this realization. I was with Alex Schultz, the CMO of Facebook, the other day.

   17. JDJag Duggal31:06

       Well, I've-

   18. HSHarry Stebbings31:06

       Uh, Meta, sorry. He- he did the rebrand, so he'll kill me if he heard me say Facebook. (laughs) Um, but like... And he taught me actually the most brilliant thing, which was actually, you know, when you think about, um, uh, you know, how to win or setting goals, the truth is most of it's gameable. If you say, "I want 1,000 users," your growth and marketing team could spend on ads and get shit users that churn. But your goal was 1,000 users.

   19. JDJag Duggal31:30

       Yeah.

   20. HSHarry Stebbings31:30

       I have with my investment partner, uh, he needs to meet 30 companies a week. He hasn't done a deal in three months. (laughs) Maybe that's the wrong fucking, um, uh, uh, goal. My point is, how do you align goals to strategic outcomes that move the needle for the business?

   21. JDJag Duggal31:49

       Yeah, well, uh, you know, that's one of the things... Th- that's, by the way, what Facebook, and- and Alex is one of the framers of that- uh, uh, of that approach. That's what Facebook calls execution, is aligning your success metrics and agreeing the success metrics that actually align with- with winning. Um, you've actually referred to something that- that I've seen many, many times and I think is one of the things that we all theoretically know and one of the things that we almost never actually live, which is the following. Um, and it's exactly what Alex was describing to you. There are all sorts of very elegant product management frameworks about the stages of- of building and launching and- and having a product succeed. I tend to break it down into basically two stages. There is pre-product market fit and there's post-product market fit, and your job in each stage is completely different. And the problem that companies often have, product people often have, frankly, you know, CEOs often have, is they think of- of building a product as, "I build it, I get it launched, and then I start scaling it and it's success smooth." And there's actually a- a- a- a... the most important piece in the middle, which is, "I gotta get this product that's just launched, that probably isn't quite right yet, to product market fit, to customer love," to use a more evocative phrase. And if I don't get customer love, scaling is like pushing the- the rock uphill, and I can, and I can game it. I can... Any gr- great growth person can run ads, can- can do any number of- of tricks of the trade. And, you know, you can get to the next round. You can, you can... That can go in a, in a good bull market for- for a long time. But if you have customer love, and this was the magic of early Nubank, your customers are your marketing. And the- you're, you're... The snowball is rolling downhill instead of you trying to push the rock uphill. And so, there are a couple of ways to answer your question. The- the first way or the most mechanical way to answer your question is, if you don't have a customer love metric, we... I learned to actually, when I moved to Sao Paolo back in the beginning of 2020 from the Brazilian, uh, the Nubank product team, about this technique that was starting to take off in Silicon Valley where I was living called the Sean Ellisor, which is an attempt to bring science to product market fit, uh, that I've come to really love. You can use NPS scores. There's a, there's a, there's a number of technical mechanisms you can use. But we try to be pretty maniacal about customer love first before we even talk about significant scaling. Um, 'cause yeah, I can scale the product. We've got 70 million, 75 million customers at Nubank. I can make any dead cat bounce. I can make any product I launch look great for the first year. But that doesn't matter. What matters is do the customers love it? 'Cause then it'll explode out on its own accord, and that's what we really try to focus.

   22. HSHarry Stebbings34:51

       Uh, so you mentioned dead cat bouncing there. You mentioned it to me earlier and I had no idea what you were talking about. Um, uh, and in the notes, I was like,

9. 34:59 – 37:02

   The Illusion of the “Dead Cat Bounce”

   1. HSHarry Stebbings34:59

      "Bizarre, I haven't heard this." What is the illusion of dead cats bouncing? Before I forget to ask this.

   2. JDJag Duggal35:05

      S- sure. So, you know, from- from your world, from the world of- of investing, there are lots of dead companies that, you know-

   3. HSHarry Stebbings35:12

      (laughs)

   4. JDJag Duggal35:13

      ... have a nice rally at some point on their way to zero, and that can often trick investors. The way that tends to happen in- in massive and largely successful technology companies is- is sort of the following arc. Company launches a product, great entrepreneurial energy, great customer focus. That product takes off. Maybe there's a second one of those that are really, really successful. Then the f- you know, the company gets big. The founder becomes the CEO, cannot be as close to driving that s- th- that stuff quite as- as tightly. And a product, a professional product team takes over and sort of forgets the inherent, you gotta get customer love before you can explode out. On top of it, you've got, you know, the CFO and the CEO saying, "Our next wave of products has to be really big to really, to matter." And so you start focusing on making early launches really big before they are genuinely loved. And then all of the incentives can go haywire, and I've seen this at- at pretty much every company I worked with. It's one of the things I obsess about and I'm paranoid about at Nubank, is we start to get really big, is making sure...... that we aren't bouncing dead cats, that we aren't launching products that customers don't actually like, where we're milking the New Bank brand, where we're milking the, the, the hyper-successful initial products we've got, rather than adding to the brand and adding to the product portfolio in terms of value to customers. Because, you know, just take Facebook as an example. You've got a billion-plus daily active users. I guarantee you, I can launch any product and make it look great for the first six months, the first year, and guess what? I can get promoted that way. Now, what are my incentives? My incentives are to make every product look good, even when it isn't actually working.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings37:01

      So,

10. 37:02 – 43:49

    How to Measure Churn

    1. HSHarry Stebbings37:02

       so, what are, what are the metrics that reveal true customer love in that time period? If you have a smart practitioner who can make anything look good, how do you determine between the true good versus the fake good?

    2. JDJag Duggal37:12

       The, the ultimate metric that, that, that I try to focus on is churn. 'Cause if I have a leaky bucket in the early days, I can, I can fill it up, 'cause I got a billion daily users I can pour into it. But you will never fill that bucket if it's got a bunch of holes in the middle, i- in the bottom. And so churn is the ultimate metric, and then you'd start looking for what are the leading metrics for churn, and that's where things like the Sean Ellis Survey and even NPS, which we tend to use pretty maniacally and pretty religiously. And if we cannot get a Sean Ellis Survey score that's actually above what, what, what Sean himself recommends, well above, we're not focused on scaling it. We're focused on iterating it. Again, for love, not for scale. Um, and that's, that's a, that's our attempt. That's, you know, back to one of your first questions, that's our attempt to turn art into science. I also, we've started going back to, you know, having leaders of our, o- of business product managers, just go call 10 customers. 10... Call 10 customers who are using the product and just get a, a visceral sense. And don't ask someone else in the customer experience team to call them. You call them, 'cause there's no other way. And by the way, bring your engineering lead with you in, in that call, and just listen to what they have to say, and that part, that part is some of the art. Let's just listen if there's real enthusiasm or if they're trying to be polite to you. Um, and customers are polite, are, are unfortunately, you know, human beings are polite by nature, and that's great in life and not great for product managers, and we've been full on-

    3. HSHarry Stebbings38:52

       How, how do you feel about the segmentation or the category that you're in altering churn by pure category? And what I mean by that is, if you are in productivity tools or CRM or whatever, well, CRM's actually a bad example, but productivity tools or consumer, churn is very high, it's very easy. Banks is like phone contracts. People don't change banks with as much tra- like, uh, ease and flexibility as they do pretty much every other product, I think. Maybe homes are probably being the same. So, is churn really a good predictor of love for you?

    4. JDJag Duggal39:27

       Yeah, I mean, I think it's a great point that you make, that there are a lot of people who get trapped with companies, and being trapped is different than being in a, in a committed (laughs) relationship.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings39:37

       No, that's called marriage, Jag. Um...

    6. JDJag Duggal39:40

       (laughs)

    7. HSHarry Stebbings39:41

       (laughs)

    8. JDJag Duggal39:42

       Well, um, you're gonna get me-

    9. HSHarry Stebbings39:44

       No, no comment. (laughs)

    10. JDJag Duggal39:47

        Um, no. Uh, what we have started to use for, for New Bank, and this is part of the journey for us over the last three years, is we have a definition, the technical details of which don't really matter, but we have a definition of, is our cu- do we have a customer, do we have an active customer, and do we have a primary, what we call a primary banking relationship? And we have been obsessed... Our board, actually, in my... the first board meeting I participated in, back in, I think it was March 2020, it was actually three days before pandemic locked us all down, um, and they, they pushed very hard on the question of, "You're growing like crazy, but are these people treating us as a primary banking relationship?" And we got obsessed about that since that, since that push. And we've been growing that metric pretty dramatically month over month for three years now. And so, there is churn, and we pay attention to that, and then there is, are you growing the share of your customers who are primary banking relationship, and, and are we driving... and this is something that Facebook and other social networks use. Are we driving our intensity of engagement? Daily active users over monthly active users, monthly active users over all customers. That intensity of engagement, combined with some of these customer love metrics, you start to cobble together a picture.

    11. HSHarry Stebbings41:11

        Can I ask, how do you define primary banking relationship? Is that it? Like, the big thing in the UK and Europe is, do they shift salary input from traditional bank to their new bank? Is that the same for you? How do you define that?

    12. JDJag Duggal41:24

        Yeah, altered for the realities of, of how that, that payroll, uh, deposit works in Brazil and, and, and in Latin America. That's basically what we're getting towards, is, are they moving the bulk of their incoming money into New Bank before they start, you know, spending and saving and doing the rest of their financial lives?

    13. HSHarry Stebbings41:45

        Can I ask what percent of your users is, uh, like primary first bank is New Bank?

    14. JDJag Duggal41:51

        Yeah, we, by our metrics, and we, you know, just, just announced this, uh, as part of our quarterly update, uh, we are, uh, well north of 40% of all customers, not of actives, but of all customers. And again, that's part of us holding ourselves to a high bar. So when a- when, when, three years ago, that metric was about 10%, and so we've grown it 4X even as we've grown the customer base 3.5X in the last three years.

    15. HSHarry Stebbings42:18

        Do you want usage? Sorry, I'm j- I'm just so interested now.Do you want usage? 'Cause like on a bank, maybe, you know, they have the card, you don't want them to log in to the app. They probably log in when there's a problem or when they, you know, aren't sure about something. How do you feel about usage when maybe it doesn't correlate to cons- customer love?

    16. JDJag Duggal42:36

        Yeah. Look, we, we are keyed first on customer love, you know, the first value of Nubank when Daveed, Chris, and ed founded the company. It's one of the reasons, frankly, I joined, back to your earlier question, was I, I visited Sao Paolo and in the lobby was this very odd statement, uh, uh, "We want if value number one. We want our customers to love us," interesting word, "fanatically." That's the word we use. Um, we want our customers to love us fanatically, and that is exactly how I think about it. So we are keyed off on that from day one at Nubank, value one at Nubank. We believe in the context of what we are trying to do in our strategy, that intensity of engagement with our app is actually a leading indicator of that customer love, and we, and we've proven that to ourselves. Um, you're right that in concept someone could never use the app or almost never use the app and still love the product 'cause, you know, they're using the credit card or what have you. But for us, what we found is intensity of usage is a lead indicator for customer love. Ultimately, what we care about is customer love, but we track both because really one's a leading

11. 43:49 – 48:49

    How to Decide Which Features to Prioritize

    1. JDJag Duggal43:49

       indicator of the other.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings43:50

       Can I ask, speaking of the product, you have so many different ways you can take product with new products, with features. How do you decide what to do next? How do you prioritize product decisions, Jag?

    3. JDJag Duggal44:02

       Again, it's aligned with what we think allows us to become a leading player aligned with the mission of the company. We want to transform services including financial services across Latin America. So a couple of things become obvious about that. We didn't say Brazil. We said Latin America. So launching in Mexico and Colombia three years ago was, I wouldn't say a no-brainer, but it was an obvious thing, o- obvious mountain we needed to climb. We started three, four years ago, call it about four years ago, as essentially, and I'm overstating for simplicity, a Brazilian credit card company. We knew, and Daveed was very clear, that we were on a journey from a Brazilian credit card company to being a full solution Latin American financial services company. That's a mouthful, but it's clear. That means you have to have investments. You have to offer insurance. You have to do lending. Um, in Latin America, consumers tend to consolidate their financial lives with one primary institution, and we had made a lot of headway in deconstructing financial services in Brazil, and the reconsolidation with the traction we had was the next play. And so we've been climbing two mountains simultaneously over the last three to four years. One, proving that the model extended beyond Brazil, which was a question three years ago. And second, proving that we were more than a credit card company, which was also a big question three years ago.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings45:48

       Why was, why was it a question that you were more than Brazil? The cultures are relatively similar. I mean, it's not, you know, uh, Southeast Asia compared to Latin America, which is obviously a bigger... Like, they are relatively aligned in terms of cultures. Why was it a question?

    5. JDJag Duggal46:00

       Yeah. Well, me, me it was obvious, and it was back before I joined Nubank. To me, it was an obvious next move, and the timing felt roughly right. But the, this was a question investors were asking, "Is Brazil... Are there unique aspects of Brazil that make this a one-off? Can you actually do it beyond the country?" And there are, there are some, you know, technical specifics. The, the working capital cycle for credit cards in Brazil is very favorable for a credit card company, for what we're trying to do, which is almost, almost compared to anywhere else in the world. Mexico and Colombia are much more typical. So there were some, some technical reasons why, but we firmly believe that Mexicans and Colombians were roughly as poorly served as Brazilians were. And that the formula we had come up with, uh, both starting with the culture and leading into the products was, was something that we could extend, but we had to prove it. We had to prove it, which gets back to execution, you know, to, to go full circle.

    6. HSHarry Stebbings46:56

       You're a leader of product. You have resource allocation at the front of your mind. You mentioned all those different new products that you have now, but that you had to build and build out over time.

    7. JDJag Duggal47:06

       Yeah.

    8. HSHarry Stebbings47:06

       How do you think about the right ratio of allocating between core product, innovation, and scaling and growth?

    9. JDJag Duggal47:13

       Yeah. And I- I- y- th- a bit of art with a, with a rule of thumb, you know, I, I grew up at Google. Um, we used to talk about 70/20/10 there. It's, it's a, it's a poor heuristic, but it's, it's, it's something we sort of roughly tend to use. We wanna make sure we don't lose sight of continuing to invest to improve in our core products and our core handful of products now. And so we put a disproportionate effort on making sure every pixel is, is, is perfect or as perfect as we can make it and improving. We wanna make sure we have small teams, going back to something we talked about earlier, who can do big things. So our insurance or investments or lending team when they started was a dozen people, and we're like, "Go change the world. Go, go come up with something fundamentally different, not incrementally better, 'cause incrementally better isn't gonna get anybody to notice. So we're gonna obsess about you dozen people come up with fundamentally better. Only when you get to fundamentally better will you get the next round of investment, meaning people. And when you launch, make sure there's customer love, 'cause only when you get customer love are you gonna get more investment at that stage." And, and, um...... and on and on. And so, we try to intentionally limit resourcing with a small group of creative, hyper-creative, hyper-driven people who think they can change the world. And that's, and that gets back to the autonomy and the drive and the clarity that we talked about earlier.

12. 48:49 – 51:38

    How Often You Should Do Product Reviews

    1. JDJag Duggal48:49

    2. HSHarry Stebbings48:49

       How often do you do product reviews, and who's invited to them? And any best learnings from what makes a great one great?

    3. JDJag Duggal48:59

       Uh, I, we do at least, at least a half dozen weekly. Um, or but at the-

    4. HSHarry Stebbings49:06

       A half dozen weekly?

    5. JDJag Duggal49:07

       Weekly, yeah. Um, 'cause I'll, we'll do product reviews on, like, one small element of, of a product. We'll obsess about the details of this s- aspect of the flow. So, there are some areas at any one time where I'm personally obsessed by, that either they are the next new thing, or something might be struggling, or whatever it is, and I'm, I'm in a biweekly cycle with the team. Uh, and then there is just a gen- general slot where we have two or three, um, open slots, and we're like, "Sign up." And people will come with, "Hey, we're thinking about X, Y, Z problem." Making one great is hard because you're balancing two things. You're trying to be inclusive, and particularly in a Zoom world, you could include a hundred people in your product review. Um, and a, a very inclusive meeting works against the second thing you're optimizing for, which is, this is a safe space for us to brainstorm together. And frankly, I don't think we're succeeding at balancing those two things anywhere near optimally, um, if I'm honest.

    6. HSHarry Stebbings50:16

       Which one-

    7. JDJag Duggal50:17

       But-

    8. HSHarry Stebbings50:17

       ... would you lean towards?

    9. JDJag Duggal50:19

       I would lean, I would like to lean towards having the safe space, um-

    10. HSHarry Stebbings50:23

        Okay.

    11. JDJag Duggal50:23

        ... because a product team should feel safe to come in and not do a dog and pony show for senior management and tell us how everything is great, but tell us where the warts are, what things aren't working, what things they're struggling with, and have ideas about what they're thinking about, some of which will be bad ideas. That's, it should be a learning environment. I read once an article about Pixar and how they do it, and there are elements of that that we tried to incorporate, although I don't think, I don't think fully successfully. And what they tried to do is, they'll have every director of a Pixar movie be in a room, and they will give the current director of the current big movie bet brutal feedback, ruthless feedback. But then it's on the current director to decide which feedback to take and which to... So they get everyone's opinion, and then they're very clear about who the decision maker is and who's got the autonomy. And how do you balance that safe space with that inclus- uh, inclusivity? How do you balance senior participation with the autonomy for the person who's actually on the ground making the decision? That's hard. That's really hard.

    12. HSHarry Stebbings51:30

        Yeah, that is hard. (laughs) Can, can I ask, you said a decision. Before we move into a quick fire, David asked me to ask this

13. 51:38 – 56:50

    Nubank’s Best/Worst Product Decisions

    1. HSHarry Stebbings51:38

       one. When you review the decisions you've made, um, what's the product decision that you think is best that you've made at Nubank? And what product decision do you think is the worst product decision you've made at Nubank?

    2. JDJag Duggal51:50

       (laughs) David's got you doing his work, work for him. Um, let me-

    3. HSHarry Stebbings51:54

       Yeah, yeah, yeah, literally. (laughs)

    4. JDJag Duggal51:57

       Uh, one of the decisions I think that we did really well, um, and we did it essentially in the first handful of months of, of the pandemic, was we had, and for, first for context, we were a credit card company. It was doing very well. We had about a, over the course of the previous year, really, we had launched our bank account product, and it had s- it had unleashed this wave of growth. We, we almost, I think, tripled the number of customers. We had an engagement challenge. Those customers who were getting the account but weren't yet getting the credit card were struggling. We were struggling to get them fully engaged. We did two things that I think were very, very powerful in driving the engagement and the primary relationship in going after. We were pretty decisive about making a shift from being a savings account only, and we had a very specific and a appealing value prop there, to being a transactional daily, daily bank account. And that was basically by incorporating every transactional mode there was, from debit card, which is the most old school thing you can imagine, which was actually massively successful, uh, to this central bank sponsored mobile real-time payment system in Brazil called PIX, which has taken off, uh, perhaps other than India, arguably other than India is, is easily the most successful real-time mobile payment system in the world, um, is in Brazil. And we bet big on that, and we sweat every pixel of that flow for sign up, because customers were going to decide who was gonna get those keys for their, for their, for their PIX. And we, we made it as simple to sign up and as simple to use as we possibly could, and we drove the team crazy. That was one bet. The second big bet is we launched a secured card product in Brazil which said, "Hey, you can, you, we can't yet sponsor you for credit because you haven't yet proven the creditworthiness that, that would allow us to do so in an economically sound way. But we can help you get on that first ladder of opportunity by proving that you will pay off your credit card against a security deposit," which is a common product in the US but hadn't been done in Brazil.... and that allowed us to start offering credit and get people on their first rung of the ladder of opportunity and credit in the, in the country. And that's been massively successful. And those two things together have been key drivers of our growth, so we're really, really, really proud of, proud of that. Um, and in terms of the product that we're strugglin-, struggling to... We've struggled for, for a while to get exactly right, and it gets down to what we talked about earlier about clarity, is our suite of products for the, for the upmarket, for the high-income segment in Brazil, has, has not had, and I have not cracked myself, the degree of clarity of what makes that offering fundamentally different for that target customer set.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings55:25

       Why do you think it hasn't cracked yet?

    6. JDJag Duggal55:29

       You know, part of what I tell myself is, you know, uh... You're, you're a Brit, so I'll, I'll come up, I'll come, come to you with a Churchill quote. "Victory is going from defeat to defeat without loss of enthusiasm."

    7. HSHarry Stebbings55:42

       (laughs)

    8. JDJag Duggal55:42

       Um, the biggest single reason is we need clarity, and we need a degree of focus on, on what... Every product that I've ever been involved with that succeeded has had one core characteristic. It has been fundamentally different, not incrementally better, because the only way you break through the noise is you've got something fundamentally different for a very specific person in mind, and that person loves it so much that they tell their friends. And that's how we have our, you know, acquis- cos- cost of acquisition so low at Nubank. That's the only way you break through. You cannot take on an entrenched player head-on. That's a, that's a recipe for failure. It doesn't matter how much, how much money you throw at the problem. And so we've gotta, we've gotta come up with something that's just fundamentally different with a clear customer in mind, and, uh, and that's what we're working on.

14. 56:50 – 1:03:07

    Quick-Fire Round

    1. JDJag Duggal56:50

    2. HSHarry Stebbings56:50

       Uh, my friend, I wanna move into a quick fire, so I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thought. Does that sound okay?

    3. JDJag Duggal56:56

       Sounds great.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings56:57

       I'm thrilled that, uh, we didn't set the schedule too far ahead of time, 'cause otherwise this would be a total deviation from it. Um (laughs) , tell me, uh, when do you listen to users versus when to ignore them?

    5. JDJag Duggal57:10

       You always listen to users, which doesn't mean you follow exactly what they say.

    6. HSHarry Stebbings57:16

       I've been fascinated by this one for a while. Why, h- have Bri- Brazilian banks responded? Have the incumbent Brazilian banks responded to Nubank, or have they just kind of ceded that they've lost that market and that segment?

    7. JDJag Duggal57:31

       I think the very best incumbent banks have started to respond. And, and one of the things I'm, I'm proudest of, I'm sure David even more so, is we have forced the bar to be raised for customers across the board. And so that is something we face, is the bar against which we compete is rising all the time, quite rapidly over the last two or three years through the pandemic. So yes, they are responding.

    8. HSHarry Stebbings57:57

       Why do so few fintechs never master credit?

    9. JDJag Duggal58:03

       I think credit is a very hard thing to crack. It's not inherently technology... It is only partially technology-based. And one of the, I think, most masterful decisions that the early Nubank team did was they decided to start on the hard thing first, rather than get going and figure out, "We'll crack it later." And, uh, and therefore, it is built into the DNA of the company at a very deep level, and it is a great counterbalance or complement to the tech orientation that, that we've got as well. And so that combination's a very rare thing to, to have and a very hard thing to balance.

    10. HSHarry Stebbings58:44

        What's the biggest mistake founders make when hiring product teams?

    11. JDJag Duggal58:49

        Hmm. That's a hard one. Um, I would say that the hardest thing that, that, that founders, the h- biggest problem, uh, and mistake founders, founders, uh, make is they go for the credential of the person who succeeded at big company XYZ, which is a very different mindset than succeeding in a highly ambiguous pre-success mode of a, of a startup.

    12. HSHarry Stebbings59:17

        Tell me, what one piece of advice would you give to a product leader starting a new role today?

    13. JDJag Duggal59:22

        Be incredibly clear about what hill you're going to take. Uh, someone just told me yesterday, actually, someone on our board, on the Nubank board, told me, "Priorities is not a plural." Uh, and I like that. Be very, very clear on what is your priority and what you absolutely need to get right, and be very focused only on that.

    14. HSHarry Stebbings59:48

        What makes David so special?

    15. JDJag Duggal59:50

        There are an- any number of things, from the, from the, from the courage as a Colombian to enter the Brazilian market not speaking Portuguese and, and, and, and have the audacity to think he will take on some of the most profitable banks in the world. But the thing, uh, that I have observed that I would most call out, uh, from, from working closely with him is his complete openness to changing his mind. He holds strong opinions weekly, uh, in a way that is beyond the soundbite or the cliché of that phrase. He will make a strong argument in one direction.And two weeks later, he will tell you why he was completely wrong with no ego and a complete willingness to pivot. And it is very hard at times, uh, and the more junior you are, the harder it is to, to, like, keep oriented, because there's such an instinct to please the CEO and the founder. But he's very, he's genuine about it, and he wants to hear the argument, and he's genuinely processing the argument, not listening to you to rebut. And that is, um, I learned, I learned from that every day, and I try to remind myself every day. It's not important to win the argument. It's important for us collectively to get, to be right.

    16. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:09

        What re- the final one, what recent company product strategy have you been most impressed by, where you thought, "Ah, that's smart. I like that."

    17. JDJag Duggal1:01:18

        Yeah. You know, you had, uh, you had Gustav on, I don't know exactly when, but fairly recently.

    18. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:25

        Yeah. Yeah, three or four months ago.

    19. JDJag Duggal1:01:27

        And, um, one, the first product I did in Silicon Valley when I joined Google was Google Audio, and, um, which is a failed product in the end.

    20. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:40

        (laughs)

    21. JDJag Duggal1:01:41

        But, uh, one, one of the privileges of, of that role back in, I think it was 2000, late 2006, early 2007 was, I got to play with the desktop demo version of Spotify, uh, back in the day. And I played a few Bob Marley tunes and thought, "This is pretty cool." Um, to see the evolution of that company through mobile, uh, through subscriptions, more recently through podcasts, I now probably spend three-quarters of my Spotify listening time, which has at least doubled through the pandemic, listening to podcasts, um, more than listening to music. It's been masterful. He's done the whole series, I know you know, uh, podcast series on how they did it and how they thought about it. And the way they have balanced this keen focus on the customer need with this deep, profoundly deep, uh, and Gustav embodies this technical, deep technical understanding of, uh, of the technologies involved is, it's just been masterful. So, I'm, I'm in awe of what they've achieved.

    22. HSHarry Stebbings1:02:48

        I call him the Daniel Craig of product. I mean, body of an Adonis and the voice is just so soft and silky. Uh, listen, Jag, I've absolutely loved this. You know I've wanted to do this for a while. Thank you so much for being so brilliant. And you've been an incredible guest.

    23. JDJag Duggal1:03:03

        Ari, I've enjoyed it tremendously. Thank you so much for the chance to, uh, chance to chat.

Episode duration: 1:03:07