Building AI-first consumer products and modern startup operations

We have what we think of as the public roadmap. This is basically what people have asked us for... It's not going to be a game changer in terms of winning against your competition. So we have a second roadmap which we think of as a secret roadmap.

The secret roadmap is things we never talk about publicly, never tell anybody about, and we announce them and just give them to users and see the effects.

The way to cut down on time is when time is being pressured downward, a lot of times engineers, PMs, designers, they will cut on quality rather than cutting on scope. And actually you can cut on scope.

We look at every element that's going to take any time to build and we just say, what if we remove this? Is the product still useful? And we keep repeating that until we remove whatever's left and we say it's going to be useless at this point.

"That" refers to the stripped-down core feature after cutting all non-essential elements from the original design.

If that's not useful, then anything else built on top of that is also useless.

These weren't your sort of average designers. These were designers who were actually PMs as well... They were able to not just design but also do the PM part which is a big responsibility.

I actually think as a startup your job is to take on technical debt because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company.

You have a technical debt runway. Once you run out, once you've taken on too much debt... you'll get in trouble.

Our general framework for prioritization is to look for user demand, and actually the easiest way to check for user demand is to just see what has virality.

You can measure how well the product might be received even before you built anything.