Why most product managers are unprepared for the demands of a real startup

We strive for this concept of what we call perceived simplicity, which is there are advanced features in the product and they are easily discoverable when you look for them, but they're effectively hidden if you're not looking for them.

As a product leader, if I'm airing on the side of which side of the spectrum I want people from, I generally will take people who are good at execution over people who are good at generating ideas, because of course there's always too many good ideas that a company need to focus and execute well on the best ones.

If you want to start managing groups of PMs, if you want to start a running a business unit, or a pillar, or a theme. I as a chief product officer, I'm going to expect you to be able to write that strategy doc without me.

"Fire strategy" refers to a highly effective or successful growth strategy that has proven to work well for the company.

It's once you unlock a fire strategy, that's when I think you think about hiring someone full time on growth to fully harness that new growth loop you've built.

If you're not an executive, whatever you're working on, you're basically writing and telling a story. And when you talk to an exec about that story, you have to start with chapter one, which is what part of the company strategy are you working on?

Executive communication is actually executives communication. You're communicating with individual executives that all have different styles and different concerns about the business.

You want to de-risk that meeting not make it a big success or fail moment... You want to anticipate that, and if you don't have enough experience say presenting to the CFO or the CEO, I as the chief product officer do, so I can impersonate them and help you understand what they're going to care most about.

If you got a product that retains well and you can't find more users for it, I don't think that's product market fit.

You want to be thinking about how your product can grow scalable pretty early on... It's not about getting a bunch of users before you have a product that works. It's about thinking strategically about how this product's going to grow itself when it's ready to do so.

Casey Winters uses "kindle strategies" to refer to small-scale, manual tactics and "fire strategies" for scalable growth methods that can reach millions of users.

The goal of your kindle strategies, these like non-scalable hacks, they only exist to unlock the fire strategies, to unlock the things that could take you to millions of users.

A lot of managers and leaders would just try to deal with issues on their own and not raise them or escalate them with me in particular... How am I supposed to evaluate things fairly if you don't let me know what's really going on?

Having marketing ops means you suck at marketing... When you say, oh, their job is to do this manual process long term. That's where I get super concerned because you're not rooting out efficiency in how you build your company.