Mike Hudack: How Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Build Great Products | E1201

1. 0:00 – 1:32

   Intro

   1. MHMike Hudack0:00

      I think 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, a designer, and then I think a PM is optional.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings0:22

      Ready to go? 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. MHMike Hudack0:42

      Thank you for having me. I mean, this is awesome. I'm really glad to do it.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings0:45

      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?

   5. MHMike Hudack0:54

      Man, I've basically wanted to build things on the internet for e- e- almost the entire time that I can remember. Like, I... Even before the internet, my brother had an Amiga back in the day, and he used CompuServe on it, and he was all in the forums. He was like a sysop on the film forum on CompuServe, and I just thought it was the coolest thing ever. (laughs) I think from that point on, I just wanted to build thing... Like, I, I wanted to make things, like digital things, and I, like, dropped outta high school when I was 15 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.

2. 1:32 – 3:10

   “Founder Mode” Insights: Experience at Top Firms & Founding Startups

   1. MHMike Hudack1:32

   2. HSHarry Stebbings1:32

      We were talking just beforehand on this, uh, how do you feel about founder mode?

   3. MHMike Hudack1:36

      (laughs)

   4. HSHarry Stebbings1:36

      I know we're diving straight in, but it, it's dominated the airwaves.

   5. MHMike Hudack1:39

      Yeah.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings1:39

      And I'm just intrigued 'cause you have this unique perspective, having spent 10 years plus at some of the best companies-

   7. MHMike Hudack1:44

      Yeah.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings1:45

      ... and then also having founded several companies.

   9. MHMike Hudack1:47

      Yeah, I, I feel like the best... First of all, I, 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, you do skip levels. You get involved in the details. You know, ev- 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 l- 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. Uh, 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. I think that, you know, there are founders who are better or worse at doing this at different stages of company. Like, you could be really great at being in this thing that we now call founder mode in a 20-person company and terrible at it in a 2,000-person company, um, or the other way around. You might be bad at it at 20 people and great at it at 2,000. I think it's just, like, good branding around something that people have already been doing.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings2:45

       Do you think it will have more harm than good as an impact?

   11. MHMike Hudack2:49

       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. (laughs)

   12. HSHarry Stebbings2:56

       (laughs)

   13. MHMike Hudack2:56

       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." For sure, but I don't think it's gonna lead to, like, a dramatic increase

3. 3:10 – 8:14

   Lessons from Leading Ads at Facebook

   1. MHMike Hudack3:10

      in bad behavior. (laughs)

   2. HSHarry Stebbings3:11

      "I diluted everyone 99% because I'm operating in founder mode." (laughs)

   3. MHMike Hudack3:14

      Yeah, totally. Totally.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings3:16

      Uh, I wanna start on Facebook, Mike. You spent four and a half years there, two and a half years leading ad product team. But when you look back on that time, it is an incredible experience to have.

   5. MHMike Hudack3:25

      Yeah.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings3:26

      What are some of your biggest takeaways?

   7. MHMike Hudack3:28

      I mean, Facebook is still very much the best run company I have ever worked at. Um-

   8. HSHarry Stebbings3:34

      Why is that? Cas from Shopify said the same.

   9. MHMike Hudack3:37

      Yeah. You know, there are a lot of, like, very simple examples I can give you, but there's... J- generally, in the time that I was there, there was no bullshit. Uh, it was an incredibly flat organization. Mark was always in founder mode, you know. Uh, 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." It was like a... You know, it 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. Ple- please come and see me and talk about it." You know, y- that's very unusual. Uh, w- there are... I don't know if this is still the case, but, uh, when I was there, there were, uh, 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 wave your badge at the machine and get a pair of good headphones out. Because, you know, they understood that the value of the time that you were spending that day, like, your focus in writing code at that moment was more valuable than the $100 that the headphones cost. I've never seen anyone else do that, you know, before or since, but i- it's correct.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings4:50

       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?

   11. MHMike Hudack5:01

       You know, there were two... I'm gonna give you two examples. Um, so I, I joined the ads org, I, I don't know, like a couple months after the IPO. And, uh, you know, I... A lotta 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, um, historically, Mark had said, you know, I... There was a perception that he didn't really care about ads. And I think the, the ask that I got was to just go over there and, and kind of, I don't know, make it okay for good consumer PMs to work on ads. There was this view that, that that was important. I think the organization felt like it hadn't shipped anything of quality in a long time. And I kind of looked around and tried to find something unloved without a team on it 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, uh, 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, 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, we're gonna 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.

   12. HSHarry Stebbings7:03

       So many things I wanna unpat (?) that. You said about kind of simplifying insights page in particular-

   13. MHMike Hudack7:06

       Yeah.

   14. HSHarry Stebbings7:06

       ... and the importance of that. Uh, you also said about kind of a money button for the web.

   15. MHMike Hudack7:10

       Yeah.

   16. HSHarry Stebbings7:11

       Is simplifying product always better?

   17. MHMike Hudack7:14

       Uh, yeah, almost always. I, I think there are multiple schools on this. 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 a minimal amount of work. And, and, you know, like, if you, 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 of, 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 wanna think about optimization, they don't wanna think abou- th- they wanna sell more products-

   18. HSHarry Stebbings8:02

       Sure.

   19. MHMike Hudack8:03

       ... you know? And so the simpler machine you can give them to do that effectively, the better. Um, and I think that that has been the path that Facebook Ads has taken

4. 8:14 – 13:06

   Lessons How To Structure Different Teams

   1. MHMike Hudack8:14

      over the years.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings8:15

      I, I do have to ask, you mentioned also the reorging of the different teams.

   3. MHMike Hudack8:18

      Yeah.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings8:18

      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?

   5. MHMike Hudack8:29

      Yeah, well, I think every product team should be probably between, y- you know, six to eight people. Um, 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, a designer, um, and then I think a PM is optional, you know. Um, that team should work together against, like, clear, coherent, outcome-based goals, which are not shipped goals, but are like, "We are going to increase the, you know, 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, you know, people's satisfaction with the product by 10%" or, "We're gonna increase people's sales by 10%, which we believe is gonna 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 they are building a thing to serve a person or a group of people on the other side, um, and I think that they have to feel truly empowered to reach that goal and feel supported by somebody who, you know, checks in and says, "Oh, w- do you have everything that you need? How are you doing? Are you on time? Are you on schedule?" That kind of thing.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings9:37

      I'm, I'm just thinking of actually Des Traynor now-

   7. MHMike Hudack9:39

      Yeah.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings9:39

      ... who talks about, like, uh, the length to kind of the start line, so to speak. And he, like you, is kind of great product mind, but also an angel investor, uh, 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-

   9. MHMike Hudack9:54

      Yeah.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings9:54

       ... 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?

   11. MHMike Hudack10:05

       Well, so, you know, implicit, I guess, in, 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, you know, understand who your user is, what they want to accomplish, you should understand your strengths and weaknesses in doing that, and have a, you know, a theory of, like, the thing that you're gonna build and how it is gonna accomplish your goals and the user's goals. Um, 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, uh, you know, prior to shipping a thing and having contact with real live human customers, is wrong. And it might be 5% wrong or it might be 50% wrong and th- 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, they will always tell you what y- 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 were wrong. Then the thing that people often do, uh, one of the big mistakes I think people make, is they then give up too early. So, you know, your theory of the world might be 20% wrong, but that means that it's 80% right. And 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, but I think often people get dejected when they first ship.

   12. HSHarry Stebbings11:42

       How do you know when that is? You have a lot of angel investments, you've got 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. MHMike Hudack11:55

       Well-I really believe that, you know, people in their soul know that long before you tell them that, and I think that that's true of people who are, you know, 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, um, you know, they feel like they need to just keep chugging away because, you know, they don't wanna let down their investors or they don't wanna let down their manager. When actually the best thing to do is when you realize that you're at that point, you know, the- the- 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." You know, y- "My time is super valuable. Your money is super valuable. Let's figure out how we can, you know, get some of both back." Uh, uh, people know that. I can speak for myself 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. Like-

   14. HSHarry Stebbings13:04

       To-

   15. MHMike Hudack13:04

       ... why- why would you do that?

   16. HSHarry Stebbings13:05

       Totally agree.

5. 13:06 – 15:47

   Biggest Product Mistake at Facebook

   1. HSHarry Stebbings13:06

      On the flip side of, you know, the brilliance of the Insights page, uh, and that working incredibly well, we learn a lot from mistakes.

   2. MHMike Hudack13:12

      For sure.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings13:12

      What was the worst product mistake you made at Facebook and what did you learn from that?

   4. MHMike Hudack13:16

      Oh, man. You know, there are a few and I- I d- (laughs) I don't know (laughs) how much... 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 tho- 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, you know. 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. And you can see that, like, Yankees fans also tend to like, uh, you know, 20 VC or whatever." Right? Um, and the idea was that it would, like, help you develop creative strategies and mark... You know, it turned out to be incredibly difficult to build. It required a huge amount of novel technology. And, you know, it- it, like, it was a nice-to-have. Like it- it was just a nice-to-have. So I think that discreet thing, um, you know, we- I wouldn't ha- I wouldn't prioritize it the same way now.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings14:16

      When do you think you're allowed nice-to-haves in product?

   6. MHMike Hudack14:18

      I'm not sure that you're really ever allowed to have nice-to-haves in product. Um, it depends on what you mean by nice-to-have.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings14:25

      Like, "Ah, it's- it's a good addition and people like it, but it's not cool. If you took it away, it wouldn't terribly distract from the user experience."

   8. MHMike Hudack14:33

      I think you have to think about the cost to build it, the cost to maintain it, the cost to explain it to people. Um, 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 mindshare that it takes for them and everything else, but what else would you have done that would have created more value? You know, 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 gonna create meaningful value for your users and therefore for the company and for shareholders."

   9. HSHarry Stebbings15:07

      So the takeaway for you from audience insights is it was a nice-to-have and you shouldn't have done it at all?

   10. MHMike Hudack15:12

       I wouldn't do it again. I, you know, I, it was a fun project. I think that it was very cool, like in many, many ways. But yeah, I- I don't think I would build it again. I think the people-

   11. HSHarry Stebbings15:22

       Was your theory of the world that wrong?

   12. MHMike Hudack15:26

       No, I think that my prioritization was... Well, a little bit of both, but I- I think that at the time, I probably had a less brutal attitude towards nice- nice-to-have things, you know. 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- and a lower value returned.

6. 15:47 – 25:20

   Talk vs. Dictatorial Vision: What's Best for Teams?

   1. MHMike Hudack15:47

   2. HSHarry Stebbings15:47

      The challenge is there's always a lot of voices in a room.

   3. MHMike Hudack15:49

      For sure.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings15:49

      There are some who say, "We should keep going." There are some who say, "We should stop." Um, you know, I had Gustav from Spotify on the show.

   5. MHMike Hudack15:55

      Yeah.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings15:55

      And he was like, "You know, talk is cheap, Harry, so we should do more of it." And I'm always, like, perturbed by that almost-

   7. MHMike Hudack16:02

      (laughs)

   8. HSHarry Stebbings16:02

      ... 'cause like I don't see how that's right, but Gustav is brilliant.

   9. MHMike Hudack16:05

      Sure. Yeah.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings16:07

       How do you think about discussion within teams? Is talk good or is dictatorial product vision better?

   11. MHMike Hudack16:14

       I don't really feel like those are the choices as I would frame them. First of all, I- I think it's very important to have quantitative, you know, objective measures of success. So when you're having a debate about something, about what you should do, you need to ground that somehow, you know, 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 be- 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 gonna build this thing which is nice to have," the correct question is, "Well, how much is it going to increase listening hours this quarter?" And if the answer is 5% and the team that is arguing for it is, you know, vociferous, 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 gonna 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 (laughs) then back down and say, "Oh, it's actually, you know, 1% or half a point." And sometimes they'll say, "Great. Thank you." You know, 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 in everything. But you bring it back to the numbers, and I think that that is the way that you almost avoid the talk. You know, you might then say, "Okay, well, you believe it's gonna 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.

   12. HSHarry Stebbings17:54

       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 for you, but I just feel..."... like filters in Snap would be hugely popular.

   13. MHMike Hudack18:11

       Yeah. I, I really believe that product is more art than science but has to be managed through data. So what I mean by that is you need to make a lot of room and I think organizations truly, 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 gonna 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, you know, inform and correct your intuition and hone your intuition over time. 'Cause like all art really, 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 and people-

   14. HSHarry Stebbings19:11

       To what extent is that just human mimeticism?

   15. MHMike Hudack19:14

       ... either use it or they don't. I think some things are naturally pleasing and some things are not. Atonality sounds off, and ratios and certain colors and certain designs look beautiful to the eye and some don't. And I, I don't think ... Yeah, I, I think that that's somehow natural or innate.

   16. HSHarry Stebbings19:31

       I'm bringing in, like, a grenade here.

   17. MHMike Hudack19:33

       Yeah.

   18. HSHarry Stebbings19:33

       Does that change in a world of AI where maybe the screen is no longer the primary interface?

   19. MHMike Hudack19:38

       Well, it just means that beauty is something else, you know. Uh, I, I, no, I, 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, uh, uh, Mickey Ribbit Capital invested in our seed round at Sling. And, and Mickey, uh, the founder of Ribbit is, is amazing, you know, and I, I cherish every moment that I have with him. And, uh, you know, he said to me at some point, some comment, he made some comment about how, you know, 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 (laughs) . People have to use it and get value from it. It is valueless without that. You may as well not have built it, you know? And that is the objective measure that brings science to the art of product. 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.

   20. HSHarry Stebbings20:47

       If you build it, they will come. Agree?

   21. MHMike Hudack20:50

       Um, no. You need to have distribution, for sure. Um, but it's not a good product if you don't (laughs) if, if people don't-

   22. HSHarry Stebbings20:57

       But if I push back. I agree with you totally.

   23. MHMike Hudack20:59

       Yeah.

   24. HSHarry Stebbings20:59

       But if I say we create the most delightful banking experience-

   25. MHMike Hudack21:02

       Yeah.

   26. HSHarry Stebbings21:02

       ... truly delightful, do people not share that? Do people not tell their friends?

   27. MHMike Hudack21:07

       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 where we're about to remove wait lists, we're about to really launch Sling, and, you know, we had a conversation about whether we should do paid marketing or not. And, you know, we have a, 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, you know, a bunch of paid marketing or whether or not it should be, uh, you know, viral growth and just encouraging people to tell their friends. And, you know, I think we're gonna 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.

   28. HSHarry Stebbings21:55

       Would you rather do referral codes or discounts on new accounts, whatever it is-

   29. MHMike Hudack21:59

       Yeah.

   30. HSHarry Stebbings21:59

       ... than spending on Facebook?
7. 25:20 – 32:53

   Leading Product at Deliveroo

   1. MHMike Hudack25:20

      from there.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings25:20

      Speaking about serving communities incredibly well-

   3. MHMike Hudack25:24

      Yeah.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings25:24

      ... uh, Deliveroo-

   5. MHMike Hudack25:24

      Yeah.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings25:24

      ... serves incredible communities with immense products. I obviously consume Deliveroo every day, hence my complete inability to cook.

   7. MHMike Hudack25:33

      (laughs)

   8. HSHarry Stebbings25:33

      But you were CPO there for two and a half years. It's a fascinating role change, really, from Facebook to Deliveroo CPO in that respect.

   9. MHMike Hudack25:39

      Mm-hmm.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings25:39

       How did your time at Deliveroo impact your product thinking?

   11. MHMike Hudack25:43

       Man, it was such a unbelievably different environment. And, you know, I've now done, well, social media, advertising, online video, food delivery, a, a regulated bank, and, and now stable coins, and they're all dramatically different. And I, I think that the most striking difference with Deliveroo, uh, c- compared to Facebook, both are fast-paced, but Deliveroo, uh, plays a game every day from breakfast to dinner, which doesn't stop. It's real-time. 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. Uh, the restaurant is overrun by riders standing outside waiting for the food to be cooked. Um, 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 move, just physical movement, which leads to a dramatically different culture and way of working and way of building software than you get when you're building a-

   12. HSHarry Stebbings26:59

       Does that impact your way of building product?

   13. MHMike Hudack27:01

       It, it can't not. It can't not.

   14. HSHarry Stebbings27:03

       So how does it, then?

   15. MHMike Hudack27:05

       Um, well-

   16. HSHarry Stebbings27:07

       You ship things quicker? You test more? Like...

   17. MHMike Hudack27:11

       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. Uh, I'm not sure that, you know, Deliveroo, or I assume, you know, Uber is like this, or, or DoorDash, you know, uh... I think it's more that there's more a feeling of urgency than there... So like at, at, at Facebook, you may ship really quickly because you believe that shipping really quickly is the best way to make the graph go up. Um, at a real-time logistics company, which is moving food for people who get cranky if it doesn't arrive in 32 minutes or 15 minutes or whatever we told them, 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, you know, doing social media or anything like that, you know?

   18. HSHarry Stebbings28:01

       Are you just permanently anxious? Like, "Shit, it's raining and it's Sunday night."

   19. MHMike Hudack28:06

       Oh... Yeah, it's like-

   20. HSHarry Stebbings28:07

       "It's the FA Cup final. Oh..."

   21. MHMike Hudack28:09

       Yeah, yeah. There's always an event. There's always a thing. Y- 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.

   22. HSHarry Stebbings28:21

       How do you determine the products that you build? 'Cause there's so many that you could d- build. You could build, like, driver-

   23. MHMike Hudack28:26

       Yeah.

   24. HSHarry Stebbings28:27

       ... insights products-

   25. MHMike Hudack28:27

       Yeah.

   26. HSHarry Stebbings28:27

       ... you could build driver messaging, driver platform products.

   27. MHMike Hudack28:30

       It turned out to be really easy 'cause when I got there, again, this is a difficult... You know, in this kind of forum, I need to be careful about the way that I tell these stories. But, you know, it was, um, Uber with... Ub- Uber Eats was in London, um, and, and Paris and a bunch of other places, and it, it was a knife fight in the streets, you know? I mean, it was crazy. It was deeply competitive. And, uh, there was a fight over, uh, well, everything, restaurants, riders, customers, you know? And, um, we were, we were not meeting our brand promise. So Deliveroo's brand promise is, you know, great food delivered to you quickly, you know, it's still hot, it's delicious, right? It's like high-quality restaurant food. And, um, man, we were late 40% m- more... you know, 40% of the time. And, uh, we were opening our demand modulation tool. So, you know, if you think about the way that you might, in a system like that, uh, have orders be on time and fulfill your brand prom- 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 s- 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. (laughs)

   28. HSHarry Stebbings29:54

       (laughs)

   29. MHMike Hudack29:55

       Um, and they were gonna jump out a window. They didn't have a window to jump out of 'cause there were no windows in the room they worked in-

   30. HSHarry Stebbings30:00

       (laughs)
8. 32:53 – 37:24

   The Best Product Decision Made at Deliveroo

   1. MHMike Hudack32:53

      or anything like that.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings32:53

      What was the best product decision you made at Delivery?

   3. MHMike Hudack32:56

      I think that that broad focus was, was the most important one. I, I think that my favorite was, uh, I went on a trip to Spain at some point with, with a bunch of people from the team, and we, um, 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, (laughs) there's one Five Guys on one end, um, 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?"

   4. HSHarry Stebbings33:37

      Mm-hmm.

   5. MHMike Hudack33:37

      It's 'cause 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, um, residential neighborhoods ar- arranged around high streets and the restaurant is on the high street. Um, you know, Madrid is very different than that. It kinda has, like, a central business district and there's, like, a, you know, restaurants and then, you know, residential that goes out much further. It turns out that the people in the outskirts of the residential area still want Five Guys, you know? 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 'cause they just want their, like, you know, bacon onion cheeseburger, right? Um, and we had this, like, deep-seated assumption that, um, 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, like, getting to the airport and sitting in a, you know, chair by the gate putting on headphones and writing. I wrote the entire flight back. Uh, I wrote the entire cab ride home. I wrote for a couple of hours after I got home (laughs) and then, you know, the next day I was like, "We need to change everything."

   6. HSHarry Stebbings34:50

      I think it's also-

   7. MHMike Hudack34:50

      You know?

   8. HSHarry Stebbings34:50

      ... heavily subjective now in terms of the, the food quality reducing, to your point. It's like, I only actually ever get sashimi and broccoli, okay?

   9. MHMike Hudack34:58

      Okay. (laughs)

   10. HSHarry Stebbings34:58

       Like, that doesn't degrade it. Sashimi's cold already.

   11. MHMike Hudack35:02

       Sure.

   12. HSHarry Stebbings35:02

       Broccoli, warm is, is fine-

   13. MHMike Hudack35:04

       Yeah.

   14. HSHarry Stebbings35:04

       ... versus hot.

   15. MHMike Hudack35:04

       Yeah.

   16. HSHarry Stebbings35:05

       It, uh, so it doesn't actually matter, but Nando's is the same. Like, the chicken, i- it's not like a burger where it's the same.

   17. MHMike Hudack35:11

       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, you know? It's not like they have any illusions about what's gonna happen to this burger over that period of time. Let them order the soggy burger, you know? They deserve it. Um, if, if it's sashimi, then they know that it's gonna be fine. Let them order the sashimi, you know? This extends to so many things that you build. There's this line, you asked earlier about, um, having more features or fewer features, you know, more buttons, fewer buttons, whatever. You know, there's a line, you can imagine a, uh, a version of Spotify that only has a play button, and maybe, uh, 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 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. Like, uh, Pandora kinda worked that way. Maybe you would seed it with a song, and it wasn't great, to be honest. Like, I'd never play... You know, I'm like, "I really wanna listen to, you know, whatever right now. I wanna listen to Pantera right now." Like, I wanna play that. You have to give the user some level of choice. I think a lot of the art, again, we're back to art-

   18. HSHarry Stebbings36:31

       I think it assumes though that ra- users are rational and actually-

   19. MHMike Hudack36:34

       Yeah.

   20. HSHarry Stebbings36:34

       ... I heard a brilliant Matthew McConaughey commencement speech-

   21. MHMike Hudack36:37

       Right.

   22. HSHarry Stebbings36:37

       ... where he says, "Too many options will make an enemy of us all."

   23. MHMike Hudack36:40

       For sure.

   24. HSHarry Stebbings36:41

       And consumers are not always rational, and you can give them that time and they'll go, "Mm..."... that wasn't a great service, because it-

   25. MHMike Hudack36:48

       Yeah.

   26. HSHarry Stebbings36:48

       ... took so long and fuck them. And so it's, it's just an interesting question of, like, how much options is enough?

   27. MHMike Hudack36:55

       The... Well, there are two limits, right? There's a limit where 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, you know, in 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.

9. 37:24 – 39:23

   When Data Led to the Wrong Conclusion

   1. MHMike Hudack37:24

   2. HSHarry Stebbings37:24

      When did you look at data, come to a conclusion, and that conclusion was really wrong?

   3. MHMike Hudack37:29

      Maybe a different way of answering this, slightly different from the question that you're asking I think, uh, it's very hard to accurately interpret data and it's very difficult to not lie to yourself with data. And, you know, you can cut data any way that you want, um, I once shipped something into the, it was 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 (laughs) , it opened up on the right, it was originally used I think for, uh, 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 (laughs) . They 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, you know, set of things around you in order, in order to understand it and, you know, I've made those kind of mistakes thousands of times.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings38:31

      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-

   5. MHMike Hudack38:38

      Yeah.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings38:38

      ... wildly different.

   7. MHMike Hudack38:39

      For sure. And I, I think that the places where I've seen data abused the most is in customer service, you know, where people will say, you know, there's this famous, maybe apocryphal story of, uh, 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 just didn't... This might be apocryphal, I don't know, uh, only included calls that were answered (laughs) . Like, all calls were answered within one minute, you know, it just, like, people passed there, didn't get

10. 39:23 – 40:52

    Lessons From Competition

    1. MHMike Hudack39:23

       an answer.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings39:23

       Is there anything that you learned from... You- you very rightly did, I think, describe it as like a- a knife fight, in terms of, you know, Uber Eats versus Deliveroo, is there anything that you learned from that time on competition and how to approach competition?

    3. MHMike Hudack39:35

       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 their... 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.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings40:09

       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."

    5. MHMike Hudack40:17

       Yeah. Yeah.

    6. HSHarry Stebbings40:18

       There's a reason they're worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

    7. MHMike Hudack40:20

       For sure. For sure. They're incredible. You know, Oracle makes, uh, Micros, the- the point of sale software in restaurants and, oh man, you know, Oracle will come into the meeting and, you know, drop a 500-page binder on the table and say, you know, "It's $100,000 to subscribe to our portal thing so that you can get the documentation which is in this binder, but you can look at it now," or whatever. You know, and it- it's a very difficult thing to use. I mean, they are an incredible company, it's an incredible product, they make a lot of money, they create a lot of value in the world. It's not how I would run a company, but you have to respect what they

11. 40:52 – 42:51

    How Quickly To Know If a Product Doesn’t Work in Consumer Apps

    1. MHMike Hudack40:52

       do.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings40:52

       With, like, Deliveroo, you get a lot of feedback very quickly.

    3. MHMike Hudack40:55

       Yeah.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings40:55

       There's a lot of consumers that use it daily.

    5. MHMike Hudack40:58

       Yeah.

    6. HSHarry Stebbings40:58

       Um, do you know when a product works or when it doesn't very quickly in consumer apps?

    7. MHMike Hudack41:03

       Yeah, you know, Deliveroo has one product really, which is, uh, food, um, and then everything else is kind of a feature or way of delivering that, so it's a, it's weird way of thinking about it. Um...

    8. HSHarry Stebbings41:15

       But, like, when you see, like, the ability to message drivers-

    9. MHMike Hudack41:17

       Sure. Sure.

    10. HSHarry Stebbings41:18

        ... um, the ability to know timings-

    11. MHMike Hudack41:19

        Yeah, you know-

    12. HSHarry Stebbings41:20

        ... the ability to add notes to orders. All those little things which actually people can love or they can go, "What? What is that?"

    13. MHMike Hudack41:25

        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, the 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- 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 hips 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 RE- RET, like, rider experience time, decreases by the amount that you expect it to 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 analyses 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 you, 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. You might... 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'd then need to figure out why or it may decrease RET, in which case you roll out the feature to 100%.

12. 42:51 – 45:28

    Lessons on Product Building at Monzo

    1. MHMike Hudack42:51

    2. HSHarry Stebbings42:51

       When you think about the move to Monzo, before we touch on Sling, what product lessons from Deliveroo were transferrable and what weren't?

    3. MHMike Hudack43:00

       You know, a little bit like going from Facebook to Deliveroo-Y- you know, the- 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, uh, hugely different from the way that, um, Americans approach money. You know, Americans get paid every two weeks, British people get paid monthly.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings43:31

       The question I have is like, you know, at Monzo, you are a bank.

    5. MHMike Hudack43:34

       Yeah. Yeah.

    6. HSHarry Stebbings43:35

       That really impacts your ability to ship-

    7. MHMike Hudack43:37

       For sure. Yeah, for sure.

    8. HSHarry Stebbings43:38

       ... and how you approach products. How did being a regulated bank impact your approach to product?

    9. MHMike Hudack43:43

       I mean, massively, and I had to learn how to do that. I think at various times I really chafed at that or found that very difficult. Um, and I remember having this amazing conversation with this guy, Ian, who's the chief risk officer at, at Monzo, who, who also became a, 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 a, uh, you know, has a right, has an obligation to protect itself and people from those kind of, uh, situations, from those kind of outcomes. You know, I, I think this is like a really important thing. It's a really important lesson. You, you have to understand where people are coming from, and once you understand that 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 tell- (laughs) 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.

    10. HSHarry Stebbings45:01

        What would you most like to have done but were prohibited because of regulation and banking license?

    11. MHMike Hudack45:06

        I would have grown Monzo globally. You know, um, I think that that's a very difficult thing to do. E- it's doable over some period of time, and I think that Monzo will expand geographically really well. You know, in the UK, uh, it's growing faster than anyone else. It's doing incredibly well. I think it will expand into more geos.

13. 45:28 – 46:41

    Is the US the Right Move for Monzo?

    1. MHMike Hudack45:28

       But like Sling-

    2. HSHarry Stebbings45:28

       Do you think the US was the right move? I mean, both Revolut and Monzo did it, both with limited success.

    3. MHMike Hudack45:35

       I don't think it was a wrong decision at all. Like, 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, you know, 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. You know, 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, when people pay their bills and how they pay their bills. 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 gonna work. 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, like, local insights, and I think that this is probably more particular to banking

14. 46:41 – 50:41

    How Mike Reacted When Competitors Ship Products Faster

    1. MHMike Hudack46:41

       than almost anything else, you know.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings46:42

       Okay, so you would have maybe gone more global earlier, um, or kind of more aggressively. You had Revolut, who-

    3. MHMike Hudack46:49

       Yeah.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings46:49

       ... were innovating on product incredibly fast with everything from, you know, access to airline lounges to crypto products-

    5. MHMike Hudack46:56

       Yeah.

    6. HSHarry Stebbings46:56

       ... to investing products-

    7. MHMike Hudack46:57

       Yeah.

    8. HSHarry Stebbings46:57

       ... savings products. How do you sit and think as a product team when you see your competitors shipping respectfully at a much faster pace?

    9. MHMike Hudack47:04

       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, you know, "Well, I don't think that's gonna work," or, "I don't think it's core to our thing."

    10. HSHarry Stebbings47:16

        What would you not have shipped?

    11. MHMike Hudack47:18

        I argued very strongly against, against shipping crypto products. Um, you know, I, I didn't think it was the right thing to do for our audience, for our user base at the time.

    12. HSHarry Stebbings47:27

        Do you think that was right with the benefit of hindsight?

    13. MHMike Hudack47:29

        Yeah, yeah.

    14. HSHarry Stebbings47:30

        Why?

    15. MHMike Hudack47:30

        Monzo is a bank. It has a very specific position in people's lives of trust. You know, when I first started working there, um, we didn't actually say the word bank anywhere on the website. (laughs) I don't think anybody actually knew we were a bank. 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, 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 r- 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, and we... be- 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?

    16. HSHarry Stebbings48:27

        Salaries.

    17. MHMike Hudack48:29

        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, uh, increasing the percentage of people who treated Monzo as their main bank, basically. 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. Um, it's a little bit different than most things that have existed in the world. It, uh, 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. There's a lot of care and a lot of thought that goes into that thing. And, you know, hopefully, those bets that you make, you make fewer of them and they are more meaningful over time. When I... One of the most influential experiences that I had at Facebook was, um, getting into ads and, um, 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." You know, I was like, "Okay, like, if we truly don't know what's going to work, (laughs) 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, you know, if it isn't- if it's knowable." And it took a lot of work to say, "Oh, okay, well, we have people's identity, we can do the targeting inside measurement loop. Okay, you know, let's build the goals around the number of advertisers that we have and the amount that we spend with th- that they spend with us and so on, and ship things which are meaningful and, uh, you know, move you in a direction instead of just shooting spaghetti at the wall." Um, and I really believe that that's important. I think that, um, you know, when I, when I think about the stuff that we shipped there or- or the stuff that we shipped at Monzo, I think we-

15. 50:41 – 53:30

    Best Monzo Product Success & Biggest Flop

    1. MHMike Hudack50:41

       we shipped-

    2. HSHarry Stebbings50:41

       What was the best thing you shipped at Monzo?

    3. MHMike Hudack50:43

       I mean, I really love Flex.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings50:45

       What did you think would be really good but turned out to be a flop?

    5. MHMike Hudack50:48

       I think that I have always tried to temper expectations with everyone, so I- 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." (laughs) And my- my theory there is that w- you should have put your best into it. 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- you're shipping something that you're still embarrassed by but, like, you know, you put good work into it. And th- there's a- 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 gonna be super happy, you're gonna 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, um, 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, where you're almost like you expect that you got something wrong and you're ready to interrogate it.

    6. HSHarry Stebbings52:03

       Does that not go against every concept of positive visualization? I see the success and make it happen.

    7. MHMike Hudack52:10

       Well, I mean, I don't know how much I... 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 and we've- 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 not 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, uh, "You know, 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, and it could be anywhere on that spectrum. I think you just have to be, you know, emotionally prepared for having to do that work, and if you're not emotionally prepared for doing that work, uh, then, 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, um, becomes deflated, mood goes down, and you kill the project

16. 53:30 – 58:10

    Leadership

    1. MHMike Hudack53:30

       too early.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings53:30

       Does that not go against being the inspiring leader, when you think about being the Jordan Belfort Wolf of Wall Street, oh-

    3. MHMike Hudack53:37

       Yeah.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings53:38

       ... standing at the front, and it's like, "I want my teams to be geed up going into a product launch-

    5. MHMike Hudack53:42

       Well-

    6. HSHarry Stebbings53:42

       ... being like, "Expect this to fail, and then don't be disheartened."

    7. MHMike Hudack53:45

       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-

    8. HSHarry Stebbings53:55

       But it is to inspire.

    9. MHMike Hudack53:56

       ... to be- uh, 100%. 100%.

    10. HSHarry Stebbings53:58

        And when you're going into a product launch, I want you-

    11. MHMike Hudack54:00

        Yeah.

    12. HSHarry Stebbings54:00

        ... really inspired.

    13. MHMike Hudack54:01

        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, you know, it's a- 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, um, 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 know, you can have high he- high self-esteem while being sober about yourself or sober about the thing that you built and realistic about it at the same time.

    14. HSHarry Stebbings54:36

        Can you take me to a time when you've had really shit morale in a product team?

    15. MHMike Hudack54:39

        Oh my god, so many times.

    16. HSHarry Stebbings54:41

        And what did you do to turn it around?

    17. MHMike Hudack54:43

        Well, I think there are two things that are very important. Uh, 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, where we- we can be proud about a thing that we shipped. Uh, and then I think you also have to give people a reason...... to work hard or a thing to believe. So like when I, uh, I worked on sharing, uh, at Facebook, which is like all the photos, text, videos, links, everything that ends up in news feed from regular people. So for a while I did ads, which was like everything from companies and celebrities, and then I moved over to, to, to people. You know, in both cases there's like a weird thing. You can imagine people saying, "I don't wanna work on ads because I don't wanna work on the thing that, like, makes money and, uh, you know, detracts from the experience." Right? Um, you know, ads are annoying and all this kind of stuff. You can reframe that and you can say, "Actually, the thing that we're doing is we're helping individuals discover the products that they ... that, 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?" You know? And you can just totally reframe that thing. Maybe nothing recently, I don't know, a while ago, whatever. Uh, great stuff. Um-

    18. HSHarry Stebbings56:14

        Truffle oil. (laughs)

    19. MHMike Hudack56:15

        Truffle oil. Was it good truffle oil?

    20. HSHarry Stebbings56:17

        It was great. (laughs)

    21. MHMike Hudack56:17

        It was great. It enriched your life.

    22. HSHarry Stebbings56:18

        Yeah, yeah. That's about it.

    23. MHMike Hudack56:18

        And, you know, 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.

    24. HSHarry Stebbings56:30

        I agree. I actually think that people demonize ads too much. Where if done-

    25. MHMike Hudack56:33

        Yeah.

    26. HSHarry Stebbings56:33

        ... well, they're a discovery mechanism for things that a lot ... I buy a lot of gym kit-

    27. MHMike Hudack56:36

        Yeah.

    28. HSHarry Stebbings56:36

        ... that is actually suggested to me and I'm like, "Great. I, I wouldn't have found this brand otherwise."

    29. MHMike Hudack56:40

        For sure, for sure. And it's great for the brand and it's great for you.

    30. HSHarry Stebbings56:43

        Yeah.
17. 58:10 – 1:02:21

    Exceptional Execution as a Founder & Being a Great Parent

    1. MHMike Hudack58:10

       quickly.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings58:10

       Final one, but I-

    3. MHMike Hudack58:11

       Yeah.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings58:11

       ... I spoke to your co-founder, um, beforehand and he said that one of your greatest skills is your ability to balance family and incredible execution as a founder. Uh, yeah, I'm pre-family. (laughs)

    5. MHMike Hudack58:22

       Yeah.

    6. HSHarry Stebbings58:23

       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 execution whilst also being a great father.

    7. MHMike Hudack58:30

       Yeah.

    8. HSHarry Stebbings58:30

       What advice would you have for me, specifically as possible, on how to do both really well?

    9. MHMike Hudack58:36

       I think children are, uh, 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 the day a- away, resets you a little bit, and then you move on, um, 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, you know, the best way of understanding this is that, um, 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 call with a bank in Thailand today and, you know, the, 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. One-

    10. HSHarry Stebbings59:31

        But I, I do think like in zero to one, brute force is really important.

    11. MHMike Hudack59:35

        Yeah.

    12. HSHarry Stebbings59:35

        I, I am a believer in the Elon Musk. When I started-

    13. MHMike Hudack59:37

        Yeah.

    14. HSHarry Stebbings59:37

        ... I slept in the office.

    15. MHMike Hudack59:38

        Yeah.

    16. HSHarry Stebbings59:39

        Um, e- I'm not saying you don't have a girlfriend, but...

    17. MHMike Hudack59:42

        Uh, I, I do too. I, I believe in that too. I, I, I think that maybe I don't feel like I, I work less hard for having the family. I think that, um, the kids are a great joy and Caroline is a great joy, and I think we have a w- uh, really amazing life. And I garden. Um, we grow, uh, tomatoes and chilies and corn and potatoes and all this stuff. Uh, a, a lot of what we eat we grow at home. I'll hang out with the kids from 6:30 or 7:00 until 8:00. I'll go to my desk, I'll work for four hours. I'll eat lunch at my desk. I'll go out and, you know, garden for 20 minutes to clear my head. I'll come back. The kids will be back at 3:30. 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. You know, I don't know. It just all feels very integrated. It just feels naturally like it flows.

    18. HSHarry Stebbings1:00:38

        When was your life most out of whack?

    19. MHMike Hudack1:00:41

        Probably my first startup. Um, I don't know. I think you get into these phases where, you know, you become very lopsided, you know? And I've certainly worked on things ... I have kind of an obsessive personality. You know, S- thing's growing now and, uh, 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-... you know, 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, 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, you know, 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-

    20. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:47

        Mm-hmm.

    21. MHMike Hudack1:01:47

        ... if that makes sense. And that first kind of, like, obsessive refreshing of the thing or that obsession with, like, hours or the, or the, the, the, the theater of it, uh, is actually super stressful, you know? And I think that's the stuff that, that kind of, like, leads to burnout. Whereas, uh, you know, I, I think that you can work 20 hours a day but, like, inter-... you know, integrate that well with, you know, family and kids and all of that kind of stuff, um, and be thoughtful and make good decisions and move fast and all that kind of stuff. And it, it's

18. 1:02:21 – 1:09:12

    Quick-Fire Round

    1. MHMike Hudack1:02:21

       healthier, and it's better.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings1:02:22

       Mike, listen, I could talk to you all day. I wanna do a quick fire. So I say a short statement-

    3. MHMike Hudack1:02:25

       Yeah.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings1:02:25

       ... you give me your immediate thoughts.

    5. MHMike Hudack1:02:27

       Okay.

    6. HSHarry Stebbings1:02:27

       Does that sound okay?

    7. MHMike Hudack1:02:28

       Sure.

    8. HSHarry Stebbings1:02:28

       Okay, so tell me about a time when you most vociferously disagreed with a manager.

    9. MHMike Hudack1:02:33

       There have been so many.

    10. HSHarry Stebbings1:02:37

        (laughs)

    11. MHMike Hudack1:02:37

        (laughs) I, I think one of them was, uh, 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, and I have a deep emotional attachment to it." And I, I thought... I was just like, "Okay, I q-"

    12. HSHarry Stebbings1:02:57

        Was he right?

    13. MHMike Hudack1:02:57

        To this day, I don't know. We'll never know.

    14. HSHarry Stebbings1:03:00

        (laughs) Okay, uh, angel investing. What's your biggest advice to an operator angel investing today?

    15. MHMike Hudack1:03:07

        Invest in people who you believe in, you know, and don't, um, don't mistake good, you know, 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.

    16. HSHarry Stebbings1:03:26

        What is the single worst product you've been a part of making?

    17. MHMike Hudack1:03:29

        I worked on building a multi-tiered filtering encrypted proxy, uh, basically like Tor, the Onion router, uh, when I was a kid at a, at a startup. Um, and, uh, yeah, it, uh, it wasn't very, uh, very-

    18. HSHarry Stebbings1:03:43

        What advice would you give-

    19. MHMike Hudack1:03:44

        (laughs)

    20. HSHarry Stebbings1:03:44

        ... to PMs today who wanna get promoted?

    21. MHMike Hudack1:03:46

        Don't worry about getting promoted. Uh, figure out what the company most needs and go do it, uh, i- ideally, if it's something that nobody else wants to do, and, uh, the promotion will find you.

    22. HSHarry Stebbings1:03:56

        When is the right time to hire a CPO?

    23. MHMike Hudack1:03:58

        Really depends on the founder, um, but probably very, very late. Um, I, 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.

    24. HSHarry Stebbings1:04:12

        What are the biggest mistakes that founders make when building out their product team?

    25. MHMike Hudack1:04:16

        This comes back to founder mode a little bit. I, 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 kinda 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, um, partially because you're probably correct at least about your company. Like, you know, a director or a VP from Google is not necessarily gonna do well at your, like, 100-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, you just shouldn't do it. Like, that relationship is just so deeply important. Um, you have to, you have to listen to yourself on these things.

    26. HSHarry Stebbings1:05:09

        When there's doubt, there's no doubt on people. Is that true or not true?

    27. MHMike Hudack1:05:13

        Not always true. I think that's an oversimplification.

    28. HSHarry Stebbings1:05:16

        Hmm.

    29. MHMike Hudack1:05:17

        Yeah, I think it'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. Uh, y- you know, everybody has a different style.

    30. HSHarry Stebbings1:05:34

        You can call in a CPO before they start their first day at their new gig. What, what advice do you give them?

Episode duration: 1:09:12