Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny)

The PM job can become a little too internal, influencing my stakeholders and getting alignment and all these things. But if you can't sell or support your own product, I don't trust you to build the product. You think every PM should keep a decision log? We all talk about product sense. To me, it's just a fancy way of saying you can make good decisions with insufficient data. PMs need as many reps as possible in making decisions, documenting the rationale behind those decisions, and then crucially seeing the outcome of them. We have a lot of interesting approaches to hiring, including this idea of a unsell email. When you get to offer stage. I send an email and I say all the terrible things that are probably going to reinforce their fears. If you can tell them that up front and they can read that whole email and still be equally excited to join, you find yourself in A plus hire. I'm curious if you found any interesting uses of AI in your work. We are not even beneath The dust on the surface when it comes to what's gonna change.

Today my guest is Kevin Yen. Kevin leads product for merchant experiences at Stripe. Before that, he built the restaurant business and the ecosystem teams at square. And most recently was head of product and design at Mutiny. He also makes ice cream and as you'll hear in their conversation was a pretty competitive eater for some part of his life. In our conversation, Kevin shares a ton of unique and insightful perspectives on how to be a successful product manager.

including how to get into product management, how to improve your relationship with your engineers and designers, bunch of advice on hiring, why you should keep a decision log, How to automate your customer research. plus a ton of really powerful stories around failure and AI and career. This episode is for anyone looking to become a better leader. thinker and builder of products.

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