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
And I think the organization felt like it hadn't shipped anything of quality in a long time. 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 Page Insights. 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 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 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 is the new bar. Like if you just go in and you say, oh, well, you know, we're going to ship like this. There's no example. There's no example of having been done before. The bar is not set. I think that's a much more difficult conversation.
Yeah, almost always. 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 the minimal amount of work. 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 time scale. So, 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 really want to target their ad. They don't want to think about optimization. They don't want to think about, they want to sell more product, you know?
And so the simpler machine you can give them to do that, the better. And I think that that has been the path that Facebook ads has taken over the years.
Yeah, well, 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 designer. And then I think a PM is optional.
That team should work together against clear, coherent, outcome-based goals, which are not ship goals, but are like, we are going to increase the revenue that we generate for this thing by 10% is a decent goal. But a better goal is we're going to increase...
people's satisfaction with the product by 10%, or we're going to increase people's sales by 10%, which we believe is going to lead to a 10% increase in revenue, you'll find that that often leads to a 20% increase in revenue. 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. And I think that they have to feel
truly empowered to reach that goal and feel supported by somebody who checks in and says, oh, do you have everything that you need? How are you doing? Are you on time? Are you on schedule?
MARK BLYTH Well, implicit, I guess, 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 understand who your user is, what they want to accomplish.
You should understand your strengths and weaknesses in doing that and have a theory of the thing that you're going to build and how it is going to accomplish your goals and the user's goals. 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 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 you don't really know until you ship.
You can do user research along the way, but the reality is that users lie when you talk to them, and they will always tell you what 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. If they churn, you were wrong. One of the big mistakes I think people make is they then give up too early.
So your theory of the world might be 20% wrong, but that means that it's 80% right. 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 I think often people get dejected when they push up.
I really believe that people in their soul know that long before you tell them that. And I think that that's true of people who are... 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 they feel like they need to just keep chugging away because they don't want to let down their investors or they don't want to let down their manager.
When actually the best thing to do is when you realize that you're at that point, 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. My time is super valuable. Your money is super valuable. Let's figure out how we can get some of both back. 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.
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