Kevin Niparko: Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams | E1066

I think the key learning is go listen to your smartest customers. Sit next to them. Really learn what they are doing with your product, because that can really inform and give you early signal as to what's gonna be big. (instrumental music plays)

Kevin, I am so excited for this. As I said, it's so unfair. I hear so many stories about you before, uh, but I'm so ready for this. So thank you so much for joining me first.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me on.

Not at all. But I wanna start with your beginning, because you started as an analyst. So how did you make the move from analyst to product? Let's start there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So, you know, happy to be on, and really ex- excited to share some of the stories around building Segment over the years. Uh, yeah, so I actually started as Segment's first data analyst, so I was really helping their early team figure out the business model, product direction, and go-to-market strategy through our own internal data. I joined right around the Segment Series A, and, you know, being the lone data analyst at a very small data company means you're often the internal customer who's using the product every day, sort of the frontline tester for a lot of the new ideas, the dog eating the dog food. And so, you know, I developed this perspective on how the product should work, specifically geared towards analysts, uh, business intelligent use cases. And so, uh, I had really formulated a, a perspective on the opportunities that were sitting around the data that Segment was helping our customers collect. And as Peter and the CEO and, uh, fo- co-founders were formulating the product, he made the hop over to, uh, product from a- analytics.

Can I ask, did you find it an easy transition to make?

Yeah, yeah. It's a great question. I like to think analysts make incredible, uh, product managers, largely because, uh, you're forced to think broadly about the business, really dive deep into data, both quantitative and qualitative, and the signals that you can gather to really inform strategy. And so, you know, I felt like there was a great foundation there. I also think being, uh, you know, in the early stages of a company, you end up playing a lot of different roles, uh, and seeing a lot of different parts of the business. So analytics took on the role of growth at times, of partnerships, of sales ops, and so you really get a unique lens across the business sitting in analytics.

I think it's so important to have that multifaceted view so you can have the empathy for each part of the organization. But before we dive into kind of products and a lot of the products, you were also at Bridgewater, which does shape so many people's perspectives in many ways. Calvin told me I had to ask this one. What are one to two of your biggest takeaways from your time at Bridgewater?