Lenny's Podcast · Mar 19Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO)
It has no PM org, a membership team and a storytelling team, and hires senior people as individual contributors. Its values came from team interviews and became an essay called Notes on Road Trips. Josh calls its structure a prototype and expects some of it to break.
Tips
- Derive company values from interviews with your team instead of inventing them▶ 27:00The process took about three months and was a team effort led by a colleague, not a CEO writing in a corner.
- Hire for heartfelt intensity, then give a bold promise and step back▶ 21:20Arc's culture lets it ship meaningful features every Friday.
- Treat the team itself as the product and build for the dream team▶ 31:00Hires include Darren (Chrome prototype, ran it 16 years), Tara (Vimeo SVP of product) and Peter (first Tumblr designer, Slack SVP of design), all joining as ICs.
- Use interviews to talk candidates out of joining, not to pitch▶ 32:00
- Celebrate hires and shipped work by naming the people behind them publicly▶ 36:10A tweet about an animation tags the designer who made it.
- Organize teams around the relationship with the human, not industry functions▶ 48:20The storytelling team has three very different people: a former Verge reporter and Snapchat marketing lead, a poet-writer lead, and a filmmaker video editor.
- Give products and teams made-up names to force first-principles thinking▶ 1:05:56Airbnb briefly called product managers producers; Arc uses 'storytelling' and 'membership' teams.
- Pick the project leader per project instead of having a PM org▶ 53:00Arc has about three people who could hold a PM title elsewhere, including Rebecca on the data team, and designers are already feeling the load.
- Hire multidisciplinary makers, and mix very different archetypes on a team▶ 54:20Josh says this can be harder but avoids a single 'Facebook way'.
