Mike Hudack
speaker
274 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Mike Hudack’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We can do the targeting insights measurement loop. OK, you know, let's build it.
goals around the number of advertisers that we have in the amount that they spend with us and so on and ship things which are meaningful move you in a direction instead of just shooting spaghetti at the wall and i really believe that that's important what was the best thing you shipped at monzo oh man i mean i really love flex what did you think would be really good but turned out to be a flop
I think that I have always tried to temper expectations with everyone. So 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. My theory there is that 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're shipping something that you're still embarrassed by, but you put good work into it. There's another concept behind this we should talk about in a moment. You ship this thing, and if your expectations are low and it does really well, you're going to be super happy. You're going to 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, 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.
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. 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 that's 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 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 emotionally prepared for having to do that work.
And if you're not emotionally prepared for doing that work, 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 becomes deflated. Mood goes down and you kill the project too early.
I think that you, 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. But it is to inspire. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And when you're going into a product launch, I want you really inspired. Yeah.
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, 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, 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 can have high self-esteem while being...
sober about yourself or sober about the thing that you built and realistic about it at the same time.
And what did you do to turn it around? I think there are two things that are very important. 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, we can be proud about a thing that we shipped. And then I think you also have to give people a reason to work hard or a thing to believe.
I worked on sharing at Facebook, which is like all the photos, text videos, links, everything that ends up in newsfeed from regular people. So for a while I did ads, which was like everything from companies and celebrities. And then I moved over to people. And in both cases, there's like a weird thing.
You can imagine people saying, I don't want to work on ads because I don't want to work on the thing that like makes money and detracts from the experience, right? Ads are annoying and all those kinds of things.
You can reframe that and you can say, actually, the thing that we're doing is we're helping individuals discover the products 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. And you can just totally reframe that thing. Truffle oil. Truffle oil.
Was it good truffle oil? It was great. It enriched your life. And, you know, 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.
Showing 221–240 of 274 · page 12 of 14
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