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
Oh man, there are a few and I don't know. It's always difficult to talk about things when people are still there and all of that kind of stuff. 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 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. 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. You can see that like Yankees fans also tend to like 20 VC or whatever, right?
And the idea was that it would like help you develop creative strategies. And it turned out to be incredibly difficult to build. It required a huge amount of novel technology Like it was just a nice to have. So I think that discrete thing, I wouldn't prioritize it the same way now. When do you think you're allowed nice to have Zim product?
I'm not sure that you're really ever allowed to have nice to have Zim product. It depends on what you mean by nice to have.
I think you have to think about the cost to build it. the cost to maintain it, the cost to explain it to people, the opportunity cost of all of those things. So not just the direct set of people who are working on that and the mind share that it takes from them and everything else, but what else would you have done that would have created more value?
And 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 going to create meaningful value for your users and therefore for the company and for shareholders.
It was a fun project. I think that it was very cool, like in many, many ways. But yeah, I don't think I would build it again.
No, I think that my prioritization was, well, a little bit of both. But I think that at the time I probably had a less brutal attitude towards nice to have things. 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 lower value returned.
I don't really feel like those are the choices as I would frame them. First of all, I think it's very important to have quantitative, objective measures of success. So when you're having a debate about something, about what you should do, you need to ground that somehow 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 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 going to 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 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, OK, great, set that goal. You're going to 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. And sometimes people will back down and say, oh, it's actually 1% or half a point. And sometimes they'll say, great, thank you. And sometimes they're right. And sometimes you're wrong. And you need to make a lot of room for that. I think intellectual humility in this kind of situation is so important.
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 going to 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.
Yeah, I really believe that product is more art than science, but has to be managed through data. What I mean by that is you need to make a lot of room, and I think organizations, especially the larger they get, truly struggle with this. You need to make a lot of room for people saying,
filters and 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 going to 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 inform and correct your intuition and hone your intuition over time
Because like all art really, it's 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 either use it or they don't. To what extent is that just human mimeticism?
I think some things are naturally pleasing and some things are not. Atonality, sounds, ratios and certain colors and certain designs look beautiful to the eye and some don't. I think that that's somehow natural or innate.
Well, it just means that beauty is something else. I don't think it really changes it. 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, Mickey, Ribbit Capital invested in our seed round at Sling.
And Mickey, the founder of Ribbit, is amazing, you know, and I cherish every moment that I have with him. And he said to me at some point, 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 a hundred percent correct.
But to me, in order to have a great product, you need people, people have to use it and get value from it. It is value less without that. You may as well not have built it. 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
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