Prioritization

“I'm always attracted to the more chaotic problems. I just actually think that that's where product people thrive. The idea of being able to take all of these crazy inputs, trying to create a very structured model to figure out, what is true, where do we have conviction, where do we have questions, what are the most important problems to solve, how do you prioritize, how do you get a team rallied around a shared context in one single goal.”

“If I think of what I was doing in my startup, it moved way slower and there's always this balance with startups of how much do you commit to an idea that you have versus find out that it's not working and then pivot. But I think one thing I've realized at OpenAI is the amount of impact that we can have and, in fact, need to have to do a good job is so high that I have to be way more ruthless with how I spend my time now.”

“Another thing I always hear is it becomes the strategic north star for the product. One CEO said, 'We are constantly getting feature requests through sales, through customer success. And we had no way to decide what we take on, what don't we take on. This has clearly become our bar.'”

“One of the most impactful things we did pretty early on was to hone in on our overall product strategy. What's the actual market we're going after? What are the segments of that market? Who are the personas within the segments of that market? We've made a pretty clear distinction now, and teams can use that to prioritize and deliver better value for those users.”

“Identifying what is the biggest bottleneck, the biggest problem, and iterating fast on solving that problem. Then picking the next one and not overthinking, not dreaming out the long roadmap. That's a very simple algorithm. Understanding what is the biggest problem is not always simple though.”

“From the perspective of the PM, it doesn't matter if you write a good spec or you have a good interview or you do this or do that. What matters is that the product works. You're not necessarily the person who comes up with every idea. You're just the keeper of the vision. That's true for CEOs too. There's somebody who's got to consolidate, get all the good ideas, prioritize them, decide which good ideas we're going to do, and then get everybody on the same page.”

“If you don't have product market fit, and if you don't have a good enough growth strategy for at least one side of your marketplace, just forget about all this marketplace stuff. Focus on this core exchange of value, go deep with one side of the marketplace and see if you can rely on some crutch, some hack for the other side for time being.”

“You should think of yourself honestly as a venture capitalist. They don't fund every company that they meet with. We had lots of PRFAQs that were a great idea, but we didn't ship them because we had other ones that were just a better idea, which had a bigger potential impact. You want a product funnel, not a product tunnel.”