要从根本上不同,而非渐进地更好 | Jag Duggal(Nubank、Facebook、Google)
Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google)
About the Guest
Lenny Rachitsky: NewBank is bigger than Coinbase, Robinhood, Affirm, SoFi, and Lemonade combined. 80% to 90% of NewBank’s growth is through word of mouth.
Jag Duggal: We’re not trying to be incrementally better, we are trying to be fundamentally different. We want our customers to love us fanatically.
Shocking Nubank Metrics
Lenny Rachitsky: It feels like NewBank is one of the historically most successful companies that launching new business lines.
Jag Duggal: We built a lending product, we built an investment product, we built an insurance product, we built a series of small business products. We rarely scale a project until we know the Sean Ellis score hit a threshold that we find really compelling.
Secrets to Word-of-Mouth Growth
Lenny Rachitsky: I want to talk about strategy.
Jag Duggal: Kevin Systrom in the early days of Instagram, I heard him say it at a conference. We may not be right, but at least we are clear. Even if your strategy isn’t right, you have a very clear idea of what was supposed to be happening.
From Values to Product Craft
Lenny Rachitsky: Where do you think all this goes in the future?
Jag Duggal: Why not have the company that reinvents banking come out of Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Bogota?
Measuring Product-Market Fit
Lenny Rachitsky: Today my guest is Jag Dougal. Jag is chief product Officer at NewBank, which is one of the most under-the-radar monster businesses that you’ll ever come across with a fanatical user base, and a really unique approach to building product. Before NewBank Jag was director of product management at Facebook, leading monetization of video and third-party content, including news, gaming, and influencer content. Prior to Facebook, he was senior vice president of product and strategy at Quantcast, and group product manager and head of strategy for Display ads at Google, which was Google’s second-largest business at the time.
In our conversation, we cover how to build products that people become fanatical about, how to develop a strategy, category design, product line expansion, the future of FinTech and tons more. With that, I bring you Jag Dougal after a short word from our sponsors. And if you enjoy this podcast, don’t forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It’s the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously.
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Post-Launch Measurement Systems
Jag Duggal: Lenny, I’m honored to be here. I’m a big fan of the show, and look forward to the conversation, so thanks for having me.
Lenny Rachitsky: I’m even more honored. Thank you for being here. I want to start by sharing just some facts about NewBank that I think are going to blow people’s minds. I think a lot of people in the US especially are sleeping on NewBank, and I think this is going to help people that are listening pay even more attention to the stuff we’re going to talk about and the lessons we’re going to share.
So one, NewBank is bigger than Coinbase, Robinhood, Affirm, SoFi, and Lemonade combined. 80% to 90% of new Bank’s growth is through word of mouth. Three, NewBank has more customers than Bank of America, which is one of the four big banks in the US, while also only operating in three countries in Latin America.
”Good Enough” Isn’t Enough
Jag Duggal: That’s right.
Lenny Rachitsky: And then also, you guys held the Guinness world record for the world’s largest simultaneous unboxing for a credit card that you launched at some point. Although I think somebody beat that record, is that accurate?
The Assistente de Pagamentos Case
Jag Duggal: I believe that is correct. We’ve recently set a new world record for the first underwater credit card transaction, so we’re always looking for some fun things to do there.
Lenny Rachitsky: I like that that’s a record no one can break because it was the first one. That’s a sneaky way to get a record. That’s hilarious. So my sense is the reason that NewBank thrived and made it is, there’s this obsession with building a product that customers are fanatical about. The stat that I shared of 80% to 90% of growth is word of mouth. And this idea of growing through word of mouth in this way is the dream of every company, whether you’re consumer business, B2B, a bank especially, very unlikely that you grow at this rate through word of mouth.
So I want to try to help people learn from what you guys have figured out about how to drive such massive word of mouth growth. And maybe just to start from the product perspective, how do you build a product team and a product development process that enables you to build a product that people get fanatical about. And just want to tell all their friends about?
Automation vs. Truly Different Experiences
Jag Duggal: Yeah, I think there are a few things that are the fundamentals of making that happen. And to be clear, a lot of this predates my joining the company a little short of five years ago, but I think is an incredible story and is part of what inspired me to join. But first I would say, really think hard and tap into a very deep pain point. The large incumbent Brazilian banks were amongst the most profitable in the world, they were also amongst the most hated in the world.
And my personal experience with that is early in my career, 20 years earlier in the late ’90s, I had done a consulting project in Sao Paulo. And I remember walking to lunch one day with the client, who’s a friend of mine, and we were going to Classic Churrasque Korea in Sao Paulo. And we were walking by his bank branch, and we were at a stoplight, and he basically said, that’s my bank and I hate them. It was 1997.
And it always stuck in my head. It stuck in my head for 20 years later when David first reached out to me. So we were tapping into a deep pain point, we can go into exactly why. But that was one thing. The second thing that I would say, and this is very intentional from David, and Ed, and Chris, our founders, is we have a culture at NewBank, which is the most alive in our employees’ minds that I’ve ever experienced. Having worked at Google, and Facebook, and other places like that, I would bet that probably 80% to 90% of our employees could recite the five values to you if you stop them in the hall.
It’s not just on the wall somewhere. And the first of those values is a very peculiar phrase, set of words strung together. We want our customers to love us fanatically. And I remember when I interviewed at NewBank for the first time, and actually flew down to Sao Paulo, I remember seeing that phrase and thinking, “These are my guys. These guys are taking this seriously.” And a lot of my interview process from my side was really vetting if that was real, or if that was a sign on the wall. So you start with the intent that you are going to make your customers love you.
And there are a million reasons, operational, convenience, short-term financial viability, which is a real thing when you’re a venture-funded startup. Any number of reasons why you can compromise those things on the edges, and in a decision day to day, minute to minute, “We can cut the edges, cut the corner here on that.” And look, I don’t think we have been perfect on that, but we try very hard. And when there are hard decisions to be made, we bias in favor of the customer. The customer’s love, will they want to tell their friends, and neighbors, and family about it? And so I think that’s the heart of it.
Once you get those things right, the deep pain point, and a culture that is maniacal about making your customers fanatical, then you start to do the trade craft of product development. You make sure that you focus on customer discovery before you start building. You make sure that that discovery is focused not simply on asking the customer, but on innovating on their behalf. You make sure that you take techniques from all over the place, from Procter and Gamble, to Google, to you name it, of maybe you can’t ask the customer to tell you what massive new innovation they would love. You’ve got to observe them, and find their pain points even when they aren’t noticing it.
And then as you build, you commit to measuring whether they in fact love the product, not fooling yourself about that. And iterating like crazy over and over and over again until you get it just right. So those are some of the principles, but I think the trade craft follows the focus on finding a real deeply held, emotionally held pain point, and a culture that says, that’s your North Star.
Calling Customers Directly
Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. There’s so many threads there I’m going to follow, first of all, I want to go back to the values. So you said there’s five, you mentioned one. Can you just quickly share the rest?
Jag Duggal: The five, I’ll mention them in the order that most resonate with me. First, we want our customers to love us fanatically. Second, we are hungry and we challenge the status quo. Third, we build strong and diverse teams. Fourth, we pursue smart efficiency. And one that is in many ways underlying all of it is, we think and act like owners, not renters. We do what is right even when no one is telling us to do it. And we have many instances of our employees taking that degree of extreme ownership as they build products and get them launched.
How to Collect Data
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. And then going back to this idea of building products people love fanatically, you talked about how there’s this the number one principle, and it’s going to be on everyone’s minds when they’re building is build product people love fanatically. Talked about, you index towards if you had to make a decision, we’re going to do something people love. Is there anything more you could share about just how you operationalize this? For example, is there design reviews where just you come in, or your head of design comes in like, “Is this helping customers love us fanatically?” What’s in the systems and processes of how you operate that allows you to build that other than just cool, everyone has to remember this, this is what we’re trying to do.
Jag Duggal: Yeah, we do a few things. And again, I don’t want to also overstate that we’ve achieved some nirvana. We honor many of these things in the breach sometimes, but we have a series of techniques that we’ve begged, borrowed, stolen from other places, some of which we’ve invented on our own. But some examples, we love the Amazon mock press release technique. Explain to me before we’ve put a single engineer on the project, not explain to me actually, explain to the intended customer why they should care. Because if you can’t tell me in two paragraphs why the customer you’re building this for should care, then there’s still work to do. So that’s one technique.
We do have product and design reviews several times a week where we’re asking ourselves that question, why is this great for the customer? Why is this fundamentally different for the customer? How does this redefine the category that we are thinking about on the dimensions of quality, on the dimensions of complexity, on the dimensions of price, and usually on the dimensions of all three of those at the same time? And breaking some of the trade-off constraints that you often wrestle with, and seeing if that’s possible, which isn’t always possible, but we frequently reach for that and sometimes find it.
And then there are other things you do after you’ve built and launched a product, whether it’s alpha, beta, or a later stage. The measurement stuff. And some of your previous guests have talked about product market fit and how do you measure? Actually, it’s strange. I was sitting here in Silicon Valley for well over a decade, I landed in Sao Paulo when I first joined Newbank. And the small product team at the time is telling me about this thing called Sean Ellis score. And we recently had Sean visit us in Sao Paulo and talk to all of the product managers and designers. But we are amongst the most fanatical followers of his methodology anywhere in the world. We rarely scale a project, a product we’ve launched, until we know the Sean Ellis score and we know that it’s hit a threshold that we find really compelling.
The PM’s Power to Say No
Lenny Rachitsky: Can you describe the actual score and the approach?
Jag Duggal: Yeah, the Sean Ellis score is a really simple methodology used by lots and lots of companies that a gentleman named Sean Ellis popularized well over a decade ago. Which basically asks your customers at each stage, and at each stage you have a small number of customers, then a larger group, and growing over time. But at each stage you ask them, how disappointed would you be if this product went away? And what Sean has said is that if at least 40% of your customers are not very disappointed, not just a little disappointed, but very disappointed, he has essentially a three point scale. Not disappointed, somewhat disappointed, very disappointed.
If at least 40% are not very disappointed, you haven’t reached product market fit. Now we’ve had to do some things in NewBank, Brazilians are a culturally happier group than the global average. So for us, our threshold isn’t 40%, we’ve generally moved it up to 50%. I don’t believe we have product market fit unless 50% of Brazilians are telling us they would be very disappointed, because Brazilians are inherently polite. And more polite and more optimistic than average, so we make our own little tweaks and adjustments.
But we find that to be very helpful. As a company, this extends beyond product, we are addicted to our NPS score. And we reach for world beating net promoter scores as a company, and product vertical by product vertical as well. And we are maniacal about tracking how we do. And again, we compensate for some cultural biases, and we make sure that we hold ourselves to a high bar. But there have been, for example, in Mexico, we’ve recorded an NPS when we launched the first couple of years of 94-95.
User Research Methods and Tips
Lenny Rachitsky: That’s absurd. I’ve never heard of that.
The Co-Branded Account Hypothesis
Jag Duggal: Yeah. Which is way better than we got in Brazil, but our NPS scores skew in the 70s, 80s, and occasionally 90s. And when they dip down even one or two points, that’s a reason for alarm. And we try to figure out why and we try to make sure that we make the iterations. So those are the things we build in. Those are the things we build in.
On Strategic Thinking
Lenny Rachitsky: I’m glad you got into this, I was going to get into how you measure this stuff. So what it sounds like is the Sean Ellis survey is used as you iterate and launch towards launch. And then NPS is maybe post-launch to see how people like the product.
Jag Duggal: NPS is post-launch. We also look at metrics like churn to make sure that we’re not building a leaky bucket, and that’s part of this viral customer acquisition loop that we’ve built. We want to make sure we’re building products that are great enough that our customers will tell their friends, and we don’t have to invest as much in marketing to drive our growth. And that only works if the customers you get you retain. I have built earlier in my career products that have leaky buckets, and that’s a very frustrating treadmill to be on. So I am personally maniacal about making sure that the bucket doesn’t have a hole in the bottom.
Concentrated vs. Diversified Bets
Lenny Rachitsky: So in this Sean Ellis piece, which is really interesting because I think it’s something a lot of people can adopt if they’re trying to build products people love, and also that succeed. Is this a goal for every project? And I don’t know the strategy, or the one pager. Or is it just implied, “Okay, we’re not going to move past this gate if 50%, less than 50% of people are not very disappointed.” Is that how it’s operationalized?
Jag Duggal: Yeah, we basically operationalize it. We don’t have it as a hard and fast rule that is in black and white, but essentially that’s the question people know they’re going to get in any product review that’s a post-launch, post data product review is what’s the Sean Ellis score? How do you know that customers love it? Not just like it, but love it to the degree that they’re going to tell their friends about it. That’s pretty baked in culturally at this point.
Category Design in Practice
Lenny Rachitsky: This is an incredible insight, and I think it explains a lot of the success you guys have had. Because that’s a very high bar. Many people run the survey, and getting to past 20% is very hard. You have to be very disappointed if there’s a new product they’ve never used goes away, that’s a high bar. Most people are like, “Ah, whatever. I don’t need this thing.” And you’re saying you look for 50% of people feeling very disappointed if this new thing they’ve never used before goes away.
Jag Duggal: Yeah, that’s right. There are several on the newer side of products that we’re launching now we’re at borderline 50, and my push to the team is what are the three, four, five things you need to build to really get decisively beyond 50? And what are the segments or cohorts where it is above 50, and what is that telling us versus the cohorts where it’s lower than that? So we put a lot of analytical effort, and a lot of depth of thinking. We were in a product review several years ago, and our lead designer, whose ex Google and ex-Facebook, we were in a review together and the team was saying, “We think this is good enough for launch.”
And he used the phrase, which both Chris and Kara, one of our co-founders and I have now adopted, which is, “Good enough, isn’t good enough. Is it great enough?” Is it great enough? Because that’s the bar, particularly for some of our ten-pole products, but we try to apply it largely across the board. A lot of companies, not just in Brazil or Latam, but everywhere, spend a ton of money on marketing. Their VC budgets, VC funding basically goes to Google and Facebook. And I’ve spent a lot of my career taking that money on board for Google and Facebook. But it is a much better scenario if that’s a small portion of what you’re doing, and the main portion of what you’re doing is actually investing in making the product great that you don’t have to do that.
Reinventing Existing Categories
Lenny Rachitsky: Is there an example of a project that comes to mind that was below that bar and then you pushed it above where you’re like, “Here’s the thing we were missing.”?
From One Card to a LatAm Bank
Jag Duggal: Yeah, I’ll give you one that we’re wrestling with right now. We have a product called Assistente de Pagamentos, payments assistant. It’s right now only launched in Brazil, we haven’t yet launched it in Mexico and Colombia. Paying bills in Brazil is quite complex. There are four different ways, four different payment rails that different payments use. From the mobile payment system that has exploded in Brazil the last three years called PIX, that’s become fairly world famous in the FinTech world, to more standard and some more archaic rails as well.
So if you’re a customer, you’ve got to keep track of your bills like we all do. You’ve got to keep track of which rail, you got to collect your bills, you got to make sure that you pay them. And some of the rails actually aren’t that reliable. So you’ve paid it, it doesn’t go through. And the consequences for not paying a bill is getting reported to the credit bureau and becoming what is called negativado, having a negative mark on your credit report. And that can be a big deal for the average customer. And so this was a real deep pain point.
And as we launched the product in a Reid Hoffman style, if you are not embarrassed by V1 you’ve waited too long. As we’ve done that last year, we found that a very interesting pattern. We had a decent Sean Ellis score, borderline 40%, I forget the exact number, but basically in that ballpark. But we found that there was a small cohort of a customer base who had more than four plus commitments registered. And even more so within that small cohort an even smaller bullseye cohort who had more than four commitments on at least two of the four rails. And their Sean Ellis score hit 70% and we’re like, “Okay, the key is we need to across these rails, not have them one by one. And we need to make it easy for customers to onboard multiple bills across multiple rails.” And then the automation takes over and people see the real, benefit because there are ways …
Jag Duggal: Patient takes over and people see the real benefit because there are ways. On the surface if you said to the average person anywhere, any sort of developed country, we’re going to have a bill auto-pay, that’s on the face of it not necessarily exciting, but if you build it right, it is actually a fundamentally different experience rather than incrementally better experience. And that’s what we’ve done. We’ve systematically made dozens of iterations on the product to allow customers to in one go do multiple bills across multiple rails and make that tiny bullseye cohort that we had, segment that we had a larger and larger proportion of the customers who are trying, and by the way, that’s a journey still underway. We have a whole road map for the next year of lots of small quality adjustments that we’re going to make and we’re seeing some great feedback. We’re now over 10 million monthly actives on that product when we were struggling in the hundreds of thousands about 15 months ago.
How to Expand Your Product Line
Lenny Rachitsky: That is a really interesting insight there of just using the score and survey to narrow in on who actually loves this the most and see if there’s something there. Is that something that you generally do or is that just like, oh wow that came up in this exam?
Don’t Scale Unsolved Problems
Jag Duggal: We do that fairly frequently. When we did our, we have a high income rewards credit card. It’s called Ultravioleta. We went through a similar process where at launch there were many different customer segments, but there was one that really loved the product and it was not surprising. There were the ones where the customer spent enough each month that they got the fee waiver and then all of the other benefits that we had built in really resonated. Whereas if you’re paying the monthly fee, those other benefits were not quite as exciting or didn’t quite compensate. So we’ve done this several times and we’ve started recently combining it with trying to get very agile in getting that feedback from that bullseye segment. So we’ve told many of our product managers and designers over the last two years, don’t worry about serving 1000 customers, taking three weeks, serving 1000 customers, getting a bunch of cross tabs. Even at the end of which it’s very hard to read the real fine grain customer feedback.
So we just tell them, call 10 of them. Pick up the phone yourself. Don’t ask a researcher to come up with a plan to go do the research to then summarize it, to then bring it to you, which has so many degrees of distance built in. You pick up the phone, call 10 of them and nine times out of 10, by the time you’ve made your fifth call, you could predict what’s customer six, seven, eight, nine and 10 are going to tell you. And then you know what it is that is the gap or what it is that is truly resonating that you want to double down on. So we’re constantly trying to iterate in small ways the ways to get really that voice of the customer straight lined in to the people who are building the product.
The Future of Fintech
Lenny Rachitsky: I love this advice. I imagine as a PM that is extremely scary to go call a customer. Most people don’t do that. By the way, do you actually operationally, is it actually a call or do you recommend the email? What do you actually recommend they do because,-
Global Banking with a Single Codebase
Jag Duggal: We literally pick up the phone.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay.
Social Mechanics and Financial Automation
Jag Duggal: Pick up the phone.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. Great.
Giving Everyone a Private Banker
Jag Duggal: Because you can get tone of voice. Brazilians and Mexicans are incredibly expressive. There is a degree of real fine grain sense that the statistics never tell you.
The AI Corner
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah.
Jag Duggal: And it’s very aligned with design thinking and there’s a lot of literature around how this works well, and I wouldn’t say we’re doing it especially to the best practice scientific. We’re just like, just make the call. Make it as simple, as unobtrusive with as little overhead as possible to make sure the voice of the customer is coming directly into the teams that are building.
The Failure Corner
Lenny Rachitsky: Jeff Bezos had this quote on his Lex Friedman podcast where if you have data and you have an anecdote, usually the anecdote is right.
Jag Duggal: I love that. That sounds exactly right to me.
Rebuilding from Failure
Lenny Rachitsky: To make it even more tactical for the surveys you run, is there any tool you find? How do you actually collect this data? Is there anything interesting that you could share of just how to operationalize collecting this data?
Jag Duggal: We’ve used a series of tools, many of the main survey vendor tools, we still use many of them, but we don’t standardize or find one that dramatically changes our life beyond the mindset of we are going to make sure that this product has product market fit before we scale it. One of the things I’ve seen throughout my career as a product manager and CPO, we live with it today at Nubank every month is the pressure on the line product manager to scale the product that the entire company, the entire executive team, the entire management chain has been counting on. We’re launching this thing [foreign language 00:29:16]. We all wanted to scale. We all are very excited about it. We had the product review six months ago and we thought this is going to be amazing. And the pressure on that product manager to scale a product is immense and the job of the product manager in many instances is to say no.
And one of the things I try to say frequently within the walls of Nubank is we are not going to take a small problem and scale it because if we do that, we end up with a big mess. Something isn’t working at small scale, no problem, especially if we have a strong hypothesis and a lot of ways of getting good customer feedback. We iterate, we iterate, we get it right and then once we get it right, scaling if you do it right in many cases takes care of itself because the customer is now excitedly telling their friends.
Whereas you can pour a lot of money and a lot of effort and when you have a big app like Nubank or places like Google and Facebook, you can make any product look great for months if not years because you have such a large customer base that you can always get them to try it with all sorts of basic techniques, but you’re bouncing a dead cat. And then you’ve got a real big mess to untangle when the thing is much, much larger. So we try to be pretty disciplined about that. And that’s a lot of what the Sean Ellis does is it bring science to some of that art of making that judgment call.
Summary and Key Takeaways
Lenny Rachitsky: This point you made about it’s the PMs job to push back and stop bad things from happening I think is such an important one. A lot of PMs are just told here, build this thing and they kind of know this is not going to work, this is a bad idea, but either they don’t think they should be pushing back or they are not good at it. From the PMs you’ve worked with that are good at convincing and pushing back, like we should not do this yet, do you have any tactics or ways of communicating that you found effective for pushing back to, like you said, all this pressure that’s coming down on them?
Recommended Books Continued
Jag Duggal: One of the things I’ve learned relatively later in my career, I wish I’d learned it decade earlier, decades earlier even is how important culture is. And we talked about the five cultural tenets, but this idea of we are owners, not renters. You’re an owner of that product as the product manager or the lead engineer or the lead designer or in fact anyone on the team. If you really don’t think it’s going to work, don’t tell me what I want to hear. It’s incumbent on you, it’s expected of you as an owner to tell me the bad news and tell it to me early, even when it’s convenient, even when there’s a promotion at stake, these dynamics get very real very quickly then look, I don’t think it’s going to work and here’s why, or it’s not working and here’s why, or we should kill it and here’s why.
The second thing I would say is senior leaders at companies that have gone, especially startups that have scaled well, you usually have people who have been in that boat who have seen products that weren’t working who have killed them or who have pivoted them pretty dramatically. And there’s a lot of respect for someone who has a real clarity of thought and brings a high bar and is not simply going with the flow. So I think that’s the main thing, is bringing that ownership mindset. And the second is bringing clarity and bringing data and understanding that most senior executives in whichever company are strong-willed and bring strong opinions. That’s part of the job description. That’s okay. It is your job whether product or design or engineering or whatever function as a leader to if you think you are practicing for one of those senior jobs, it’s sort of let’s say a mid-level, it doesn’t come miraculously when you get a C-suite title, it’s something that’s going to be practiced. And it’s something that is expected and I think that’s not just a Nubank thing.
Certain cultures promote it better than others, but I think it’s pretty universally important. And so I would just encourage people to try it, understand the trade-offs, understand the challenge, articulate the other side, but if you genuinely believe it’s not yet ready to scale your products, at the end of the day, the big mess is a thing you’re still going to owe and we’re all going to forget that we told you to scale the thing. We’re all going to still blame you at the end of the day. So you might as well bite the bullet earlier, pivot it when it’s easier to do and it’ll work out better in the end.
Lenny Rachitsky: I want to come back to one more thread and then I’m going to go in a different direction. You talked a bit about talking to customers, finding innovative ideas, not just listening to what they’re telling you. There’s this whole skill of user research and interviewing customers and finding the pain point, figuring out what to build. Do you have any just, I don’t know, tips or tactics or lessons you’ve learned about just how to do this well, how to uncover the pain point and then figure out what to actually build when you’re interviewing customers?
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Jag Duggal: I’ll share a couple of thoughts, but I will tell you as a preface that it is arguably the area right now that I still wrestle with. I still think I, and we are not doing it as well. I’ve never seen it done quite as consistently great as it could be, and I think it’s an area for where design thinking and a lot of the design function can help us, but it’s very, very, it’s one of the areas of greatest inconsistency that I see in product development. Having said that, a couple of things that I see that we sometimes do really well at Nubank and other times we miss on one dimension or the other. First off, per your Jeff Bezos anecdote, the anecdote usually trumps the data. And there are many times when I see teams that are doing very sophisticated analysis and they’ve sort of forgotten what the question is or what the conclusion they can draw from it truly is. So never lose sight of the value of the customer’s words and the anecdote. That’s one.
The second one that I believe very, very strongly in is I think teams often skip the step of clearly, very, very clearly working very hard to be super crisp in articulating their hypothesis. If you don’t have a hypothesis, you’re going to spend a lot of time researching, you’re going to get a lot of data back, qualitative, anecdotal or quantitative and you’re not going to know what to make of it because it’s not either validating or invalidating your hypothesis because there isn’t a hypothesis. So it just becomes an interesting conversation.
The third one is, I’ve got a hypothesis, I’ve got it really crisp and now the pitfall is I’ve fallen in love with my hypothesis. I’m a lawyer for my hypothesis. I’m not a judge of whether the hypothesis is right or not right. So I think that’s another common pitfall. I’ve fallen into that one too many times to count. And then the last thing I would highlight is even when you have a strong hypothesis and you’re actually in the mode of doing the research, observe more than ask questions if you can, ask indirect questions more than direct questions. Would you love this product? Right. Excited product manager has been working for two months on a design. You’re searching for the problem more than the solution. You’re looking indirectly and asking from multiple directions the same question rather than trying to find a yes, they love the thing you’ve been thinking about and swaying on for a long time. And if you can, observing is better than asking, although that’s a tricky skill. Those are the things that I look for.
Lenny Rachitsky: With the hypothesis point, just to make sure people understand, your suggestion there is before you start talking to customers, doing your easy researches as a PM or just anyone on the team, essentially have a perspective on what you think is going to be true. Is that how you think about it?
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Jag Duggal: Exactly. Have a point of view on what you think the customer will say that will lead them to be really excited about your product. That way you will get very clearly eh or yes, bang the table excitement and you will know when you’re getting that reaction.
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Lenny Rachitsky: Is there an example of that just to make it even more concrete? Because I imagine many PMs are kind of feeling like they have to be unbiased and just like, let’s see. Let’s see if this is something we should do and I don’t want to bias anyone against it. Is there a quick example of a hypothesis?
Jag Duggal: One of the famous examples that’s somewhat hypothesis related and somewhat observation related is the invention of the Swiffer from Procter & Gamble. Right. The people hate mopping and they will do it and they won’t even realize how painful an experience it is because they’ve just developed the work arounds and they just deal with the burden. But if you observe very granularly what the problems are, then you can see where the problems are. And so if you bring a strong hypothesis to, that this is a real problem, even if customers aren’t telling you it’s a problem because they’ve just sort of gotten used to it. So that’s one.
We have a hypothesis at Nubank. I’ll give you one that’s live. We have a hypothesis at Nubank that the joint bank account, I was doing some research on this just last week. The joint bank account was invented in the early, it’s actually hard to say, but it was invented, depending on what source you believe, in the late 19th or early 20th century. And it was basically invented coincident with the social movement, sort of the women’s liberation social movements before women in the US were legally allowed to vote, where women were not allowed to open a bank account without their husbands prior approval. That is the era from which the joint bank account that we still live with today came from. It’s 120 to 150 years old.
I don’t think it’s surprising. Our hypothesis is it’s not surprising that that artifact, that that product is not made for the modern customer, that it is easier for me to share a Spotify playlist with my wife or my daughter than it is for me to share a savings goal just mechanically. So we’re going into a product development cycle that says there is a new social banking arrangement that is not about tweeting and it’s not about social very broadly defined. It is about our financial lives are inherently social. And it is very hard to share with my spouse, with my kids, with my parents who might be helping me pay for my child’s education as an example, use case. It’s a very strong hypothesis.
But when you go into the research with the customer, you don’t try to sell them. You try to see if they’re experiencing pain points. And it becomes very hard when you’re in and they say even something a little bit in the direction of what you hope they would say to not be like, jump in with a lot of excitement and then get into more of a sell mode with them and almost try to sell against your idea, push back against your idea, make the customer sell you in the interaction. And you play the devil’s advocate. So those are the kinds of things we search for as we build products.
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I want to talk about strategy. I know that you have a very strong perspective on how to think about strategy and approach strategy. This is something that everyone always wants to get better at. Every PM is always told you want to build your strategic thinking muscles and this is really important to your career. I’d love to hear your take and how you approach developing strategy and your advice to folks.
Jag Duggal: I will readily admit, I bring a bias. I spent almost a decade at the beginning of my career right after college working in a strategy consulting firm. Right. So I bring a bias, which is to some degree, certainly for the length of time I did it, an unusual background for a product manager. When I first showed up at Google, it took me a couple of years to realize my job was not to produce a nice PowerPoint, it was to ship code. And I was doing a poor job of that for at least the first 12 to 18 months. But I think there is almost a countervailing dogma in Silicon Valley or in tech companies more generally, that strategy is easy and execution is everything. And I think that’s probably because there are a small number of companies that get the strategy right, but the legendary companies that we all know about not only got the strategy right, but then executed it really crisply. What we don’t hear about are the companies that got the strategy wrong, never got even into the conversation and all of their great execution was multiplied by zero.
Great execution multiplied by a poor strategy is a waste of everyone’s time. And because the strategy isn’t clear, you can waste a lot of time executing years and years against something that was destined never to work. One of my favorite quotes from the Valley, from Kevin Systrom in the early days of Instagram, I heard him say it at a conference, this is pre the Facebook acquisition. And he was like, I don’t know how old. He had just left Google. He was probably, I don’t know, 20 some years old. He said, “We may not be right, but at least we are clear.” And what I love about that is even if your strategy isn’t right, and it will never be exactly right because no plan ever is, you will have a clearer read on if you are going off course because you have a very clear idea of what was supposed to be happening.
And so I think being very clear in your strategy is really important. You’ve had some great guests on the podcast. Richard Rumelt is one of my absolute favorites. He’s written a couple of books, one called Good Strategy Bad Strategy, another more recent one called The Crux, where he does a great service to the world by even more than describing what strategy is, focusing at the beginning about what strategy isn’t. Strategy isn’t an ambitious goal, it’s not an aspiration, it’s not a set of financial outcomes. It is a coherent plan for how you going to apply your strengths in a leveraged way against a core important problem. And that’s a very, very rough paraphrase of the way he thinks about the world. And I find that we often confuse strategy with a vision, a broad idea, a very, very broad, vague aspiration. Nubank strategy isn’t we want to be the world’s largest neo bank. We do, but that’s not an interesting way to dimensionalize the problem.
In 2014, we had millennial, middle-class, urban Brazilians who hated paying credit card fees and were not able to get credit in the first place because they were too young and without a credit history. And we could offer them not just a lower-priced credit card, but a no-fee credit card, which was an emotional thing. That fee got people angry and we could do that because we were branchless and digital. Now that is a coherent description of a very specific problem for a very specific set of customers with a very specific solution based on a very specific advantage. By the way, all of this predated my, this has got nothing to do with me. I wasn’t there. But that’s what I mean. Strategy is very specific, it’s very detailed, it’s very locked in. And working backwards from that I think is really, really important. And if you get that strategy right, it informs the minimal set of activities you need to do to get…
Jag Duggal: … minimal set of activities you need to do to get traction and to win, whereas if you don’t have that degree of coherence, you’re trying to serve all the customers. Maybe we should go to Mexico prematurely. All sorts of things happen and your execution gets very diffuse, and you can’t even tell why you’re not getting traction across the company, whereas strategy allows focus and it allows a much more rapid read of whether your focused bets, your concentrated bets, are actually working.
You’ve had some investors on your podcast over the years, and they will tell you that concentration is what builds wealth, diversification is what preserves wealth. And you’re a startup. You’re not trying to preserve anything. You’re trying to build something. It requires concentrated bets, not hedging. And because you’re concentrating bets, those bets are high stakes. You need to be very, very clear on what bets you’re making and why you think it’s going to succeed.
Lenny Rachitsky: When you work with PMs on your team in the past that are trying to get better at this muscle and following this advice that you’re sharing of strategy, what do you find most helps them build this muscle? Is it just doing it over and over and over and over? Is it reading good strategy, bad strategy, practicing it? What do you find is most helpful in helping you build this muscle?
Jag Duggal: One is taking it seriously. It’s a little bit like what we talked about with Nubank’s culture. First, you got to want the customer to love you fanatically as something that you value. After that, I think frameworks really help, whether it’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, whether it’s Play to Win from a relatively recent guest of yours, Christopher Lochhead, who I really admire, whether it’s Where to Play and How to Win from Roger Martin, which is a phenomenal book about-
Lenny Rachitsky: He’s coming on the podcast in a few weeks.
Jag Duggal: Is he? He’s fantastic. And having those frameworks, all of which in many ways, if you synthesize them, are getting at the same thing around focus, around a clear understanding of the customer, around not trying to be in the words that we literally have on Nubank coffee mugs, “We’re not trying to be incrementally better. We are trying to be fundamentally different.” These are all very similar ideas expressed in slightly different ways.
Once you understand the frameworks and you distill them, then it’s about practicing them and practicing them is scary. Hedging is appealing. Hedging means you don’t have to make choices. Hedging sounds smart. Concentrating all your bets is the thing that desperate people do, and startups are desperate entities because they’re burning cash in almost every instance. But successful startups, the ones that become profitable… I’m very wary, given the places I’ve worked, of the successful company with one or two monster products, and Nubank is now in that fortunate position, that starts to get conservative, that starts to forget that focus, concentration, customer obsession are every bit as important, that even though the company won’t go bankrupt if products three, four, five and six don’t succeed because products one and two are monster cashflow drivers, that’s a slow path to death.
And so practicing that discipline and having, and I use this word very intentionally, having the courage to make those hard choices and to concentrate the bets, which goes against, by the way, a lot of what’s taught in business school and a lot of MBAs is really important, and then it’s a matter of you get better the more you do it and you get more practiced and more grooved and more principled in how you get to a methodology the more you do it.
Lenny Rachitsky: Did you say the mugs at Nubank say, “Be fundamentally different”?
Jag Duggal: The product team, a little over a year ago we put together some schwag, which was fundamentally … I have a mantra within the company since roughly the time I joined, which is, “We’re in the business of being fundamentally different, not incrementally better.” Again, it goes back to only fundamentally different, gets customers to tell their friends. Incrementally better.
And by the way, there are certain features … I don’t want to overstate the case … There are certain features where you’re in the incrementally better business. Not every single thing of the hundred things you launch in a year can be fundamentally different, but we’re searching for those anchors that are going to be fundamentally different all the time around which you build some sustaining innovation as well, but we are in the fundamentally different business, not the incrementally better business.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love that, and that’s a great segue to where I wanted to go, which is I know you’re a big fan of category design. You mentioned Christopher Lochhead, former guest. This is actually one of the more common debates on this podcast of do people believe in we should be creating our own category or should we not? Is that a terrible idea? Is it a good idea? It feels like you’re in the camp of this is actually very good and important. I’d love to hear your perspective and also just how Nubank did this.
Jag Duggal: You know Lenny, literally earlier in this week, I was listening to your podcast with I believe it was Todd Jackson, ex Gmail product leader and now venture capitalist, and you guys had a very interesting discussion about it, and I think he took largely the other side of the argument that you go in a category where customers are already spending money. And it’s hard to argue with that fairly robust logic.
I will tell you how I think about it. It forced me to think about where are the nuances in how I believe. I think overall, particularly at a company level, successful companies are typically in the fundamentally different business. They’re in the new category business. Google was in the new category business. Netflix, Airbnb, you can go down the long list, Salesforce, et cetera, et cetera. That’s really important.
In Nubank’s case, we were the first, and actually, it’s not that important that we were the first, but we were very intentionally trying to build a branchless bank based on the rise of the smartphone in Brazil and Latin America at that time, the sort of rapid inflection, and a branchless bank that could bring, as David likes to say, put a bank branch in your pocket, where at the time access was the big problem, and that you could do that on a digital cost structure that allowed you to essentially disruptively price across the board was the thing that led to the massive wave of success, multiplied by, unlike almost everywhere else in the world, including in the US where the answer was, “We’re going to do the bank account first.” Nubank’s answer was, “No, we’re going to do credit first and credit is 10 times harder and 100 times more risky,” because you get credit wrong as a young company that doesn’t know how to do it yet, you’ve blown everything up. The money’s never coming back. Those two, again, concentrated bets, defining a new category, were I think the key to our success.
Now, there are times when you’re trying to go into an adjacent market. We’ve recently gone into a market called Consignado in Brazil, which is secured lending for government employees. Very stable job, easier to underwrite against their salary at a much lower interest rate. That’s a market that’s existed for a couple of decades in Brazil, and our job was to go in there, and we believe we built something that is fundamentally different. It wasn’t digital. It went through middlemen. We built it D to C, and we’ve been able to undercut the pricing pretty dramatically.
So even within an established category, we’ve tried to build a fundamentally different experience, but there are also times when, look, it’s not quite me too, but the differentiation’s a bit more incremental. But at the company level, I think it’s absolutely imperative to be designing your own category so you can then dominate it and defining your own category. And even when you’re entering a place where customers are spending money, I think going in with a mindset that says, “This is going to be a bit better,” and I think Todd would probably agree with this, given the way he described it, you should try to be reinventing that category, even if you’re not inventing that category.
Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. I like this battle we’re forming here of people on two sides of this debate, and I’m excited to see where it goes over time. It feels like the do not create a category side is winning so far in terms of volume, but there’s a lot of passion from this other side.
Jag Duggal: I’m happy to be on the contrarian side.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, there’s a few more things I want to touch on before we wrap up. It feels like Nubank is one of the historically most successful companies launching new business lines. I think you guys are maybe like 10 years old, and how many products slash business lines are there at this point?
Jag Duggal: It depends on how you categorize it, but I would say we have roughly a dozen to 20 core product lines.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, that’s wild.
Jag Duggal: Our story started as, we were a Brazilian credit card monoliner in an app and all the rest of it. Around the time, slightly before, but around the time I joined the phase two of the company, the mandate of what we were trying to do, which has really been the story of the last five years, was we were going to go from a Brazilian credit card company to a full solution Latin American bank, which meant we launched five new products. We launched a bank account, which allowed us to go from being a secondary banking relationship to increasingly a primary banking relationship. About half of our 90 plus million customers, we are the primary relationship. We built a lending product, we built an investments product, we built an insurance product, we built a series of small business products.
While we were doing that, we were also making the leap to prove, despite a lot of skepticism, that our business model was exportable and not a unique Brazilian phenomenon. So we launched into Mexico and launched into Colombia and now we are starting to take the full suite of products and go beyond credit card in Mexico and Colombia as well.
So depending on how you look at that matrix, we are a dozen plus products and we’re working on the phase three of our products, which is moving beyond financial services. We’ve launched an e-commerce marketplace within our app, which is perhaps a bit counterintuitive if you’re coming from the US. And we’re also envisioning a world where banking is, again, to use the phrase that we love at Nubank, fundamentally different than it has been in the last 100 years. And we believe that social technology, self-driving and AI technologies can build a just completely different experience, where we’re not building a bank branch and putting it in your pocket. We’re building a personal banker, which today, I don’t know, 10 million people around the world have access to and you got to have a lot of money to do it.
We believe that job can be democratized ultimately to all eight billion people on the planet, and we believe it can be done better for those eight billion even than the 10 million are getting today. But that’s a lot of work, and that’s, to use Christopher Lochhead and his co-author’s language, that’s the new category that we are trying to define over on a global basis.
Lenny Rachitsky: It’s going to be a tiny little banker to fit in your pocket, tiny little person.
Jag Duggal: That’s it.
Lenny Rachitsky: I want to follow on this thread, but before we get there, so in terms of adding new product lines and business units, watching how Nubank has done this, is there something you’ve learned about just how to do this well? I’m imagining there’s a spreadsheet where, “Here’s all the things we’re going to do in the future. Here’s how we’re thinking about all the factors of all the new businesses we can launch.” Is there anything there you’ve seen of just like, wow, that’s a really smart way of thinking about the sequencing slash where to expand next that you think other folks can learn from?
Jag Duggal: I wish I could tell you that there was this predestined master plan that was so scientific. The reality is smart people around the table with a culture of robust debate and real candor about the pros and cons is how we went about it, and a constant re-examination of how things are going, what’s going well, what’s not going well, what’s taking off, what’s not yet taking off, what are the principles by which we’re making these decisions has been important.
Some of these things are obvious. If you’re running a bank, a bank account is probably a good product at some stage, but a lot of it in terms of sequencing and when we invest where, some of it’s obvious, what’s the TAM and where’s the customer paying, but a lot of it is art and a lot of that resolution of the art and the debate. It comes from a fairly robust debate, so I’m avoiding your question. I have no good answer.
Lenny Rachitsky: Just a lot of complicated decision making, but I think what’s interesting is, coming back to your very early lesson, is using the gate of is this hitting this 50% of people be very disappointed before launching feels like a key.
Jag Duggal: Yeah. That’s the one thing is we try not to scale big problems, and so we try to solve our problems when things are small. Our ultra violetta are higher income, rewards-based credit card. We launched, it happened to be, I think it was July 4th, 2021 was the launch date, so it’s easy for me to remember. We started scaling it two to two and a half years later.
In the meantime, we were in the lab figuring out where’s the product market fit? Why is it not resonating? Oh, it’s resonating with these guys. What do they particularly love it? Let’s iterate there. And now we’re at a point in the last six to nine months where we can start scaling aggressively, learning some of the credit dynamics that are different and reinventing some of those methodologies, and there’s a second phase of scaling that will come. But yeah, one form of distraction we don’t get into is fixing massive problems that we’ve overscaled before they were ready. That’s a bit of an overstatement, but nothing’s quite that clean, but generally true.
Lenny Rachitsky: Coming back to your thoughts on the future of FinTech and in LATAM especially, you talked about how the vision is essentially a banker in everyone’s pocket. Is there anything more there? Just where do you think all this goes in the future in terms of FinTech banking for people in LATAM and then globally?
Jag Duggal: Yeah, there are a handful of principles, call them hypotheses, that we believe, and there are, I should be super clear, unproven hypotheses that will take years for us to prove out, and I’m sure there will be pivots along the way as we learn that things aren’t quite the way we would’ve hoped at the beginning. But first off, the idea that banking should be holistic, that we need to provide a full solution across what we call the five or six financial seasons of someone’s life, right? We spend, we save, we invest, we borrow, we protect, et cetera. And that’s a lot of what we’ve been working on for the last handful of years.
So one is we want to be a full solution bank. Second, something we have started, we have had some real success in on the business side, we’ve made some mistakes on the technical side that we are iterating through is, we are trying to build, and some might argue I’m overstating a bit, but just to be clear, we are trying to build what we believe is the first global bank on a single code base.
I come from a world places like Google and Facebook, Google, my first product management experience. I was not allowed to launch unless my product was ready for 40 countries and 40 languages. I believe language number 40 was Finnish, so we were always making sure the thing worked in Finnish. And there are good reasons why ADVA, global online advertising, worked that way. It was a great principle by Google.
When you get into FinTech and into banking where the regulations are very local, where the stakes are much higher, that you serve the right 300 by 250 ad, there is a lot of pushback on that kind of, “We’re just going to scale this everywhere,” sort of mindset. And so how do you marry those two things? There are global banks like Citi or Santander, a lot of them have been built up through acquisition. A lot of them are on distinct code bases and technology infrastructures. We believe there’s a lot of leverage if you can build a global bank on a single code base. That’s another principle that we are trying to make real.
The third is that social mechanics around your financial life, not in general, not another WhatsApp, not another Twitter, and self-driving automation. Why do I have to remember to pay this bill every month? Why do I have to remember to save for my child’s university education every month? Why can’t I keep my life goals really well-organized? Which is almost impossible to do. My wife and I open up different bank accounts at different banks just to try to do that job, which is, talk about customer workarounds. How do we make the life life cycle of managing your financial life exponentially easier, leveraging these technologies and then using AI, which is an overhyped term right now, but AI to turbo-boost these tasks?
We have a phrase we’ve started using at Nubank, which I really like. David first introduced it. Customers everywhere around the world live harshly unoptimized financial lives. I think that’s true regardless of income level, regardless of geography, regardless of sort of life stage of where people are at. If you have a young child, it is very hard to keep track of all the things you should be doing. You should be opening a savings account of a specific kind that stacks advantage in this way.
These are problems that should be solved and should be solved soon and can be automated and where insights can be brought to bear for customers who are not super sophisticated in their level of financial education, which by the way is almost all of us. Some of the people who think they’re the most sophisticated are the ones who burn the most money in casinos that they call the stock market.
And so these are some of the principles around which we are the next phase. What if there were someone right next to you who could tell you what the smart move was to make today at this life stage? You’ve just had a child, you’ve just gotten married, you’ve just bought a house, you just want to remodel, whatever it might be. We think the technology is there or thereabouts to be able to do that. Why not have the company that reinvents banking come out of Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Bogota? Why does it have to come out of San Francisco, New York or London? We see no reason why it can’t be us, so we’re going to give it a whirl.
Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. I love all of this. I can’t wait for this to be real. You mentioned AI, so I just have a couple more questions. You mentioned AI. We have a recurring segment on this podcast called AI Corner, so let’s walk over to AI Corner.
Jag Duggal: All right.
Lenny Rachitsky: Usually I ask how you use AI in your day-to-day and your team, just like what are the tools and things you find useful to help your team operate with AI and tooling, but I’m also curious just how you’re integrating AI into the product. You touched on this a little bit, but just how AI is going to supercharge the stuff that you’re building.
Jag Duggal: We use some of the tools that everyone is using these days. Our ringfenced version of Chat GPT and some of the standard tools, we’re using them in some of the obvious initial wave ways. How can we improve our customer experience? If you’re fanatical about customers, you’re fanatical about customer experience, and Nubank has always been that way. How can we make it even better while we’re also making it more efficient? So we’re doing all of those things as part of our coming up the learning curve in the last 18 or so months.
And then we’re starting to think about what are the ways in which we can build AI native products. And I will not pretend to you that we’ve cracked that code, but a former boss of mine spoke a while ago, Fidji Simo, who’s now the CEO of Instacart, but she was talking about the evolution when she was the product lead for Facebook Ads back when the big migration from the desktop to mobile was happening, and she talked about we needed to become mobile native.
And by analogy, companies today need to figure out what does AI native mean, not how do we append AI at the corners of the product, but how do we build it at the heart? What would you design if these tools existed from the start? I mean, Facebook’s migration to mobile is a phenomenal example of that pivot. And they like to joke, and I wasn’t there at Facebook at the time, but they liked to joke at Facebook, even seven, eight years later when I joined, about the company had IPO’d and needed to find a business model and Fidji was responsible for making that happen. And the core of it was bringing this mobile native mindset. So we are trying to think through what is an AI native mindset? In financial services, what would that look like? And that requires …
… services. What would that look like? And that requires analysis as much as analogy, and we are very much in the middle of that process and we don’t know all of the answers. The metaphor of a what if everyone in the world, regardless of their income or wealth, had a private banker sat next to them that they could turn to whenever they needed to is a good metaphor. And so we are using that metaphor and seeing where it takes us.
Lenny Rachitsky: Let’s now move on to a different corner, failure corner. This is another recurring segment on the podcast. Is there a story you could share of a time in your career where you failed, where something went wrong, ideally really wrong, and how that impacted and helped you in your career? Kind of a lesson you learned from that experience?
Jag Duggal: There’s a pretty seminal story from my career that ultimately ended in failure and that I had to sort of rebuild from. I had done strategy consulting for just shy of 10 years. I decided I was going to go to grad school. I was going to pivot my career into public policy and politics. I was at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a year into that a friend of mine had, the startup he was working at Get acquired by Google I this company was premised on the idea that you could bring AdWords/AdSense style advertising to the terrestrial radio market and one of Google’s, perhaps the biggest diversification bet Google was working on at the time beyond search and display, which were up and running, was let’s go disrupt TV, radio, and print. It was 2006.
My friend convinced me to drop out of grad school, both the Kennedy school and business school. I had done a year of the Kennedy school. I was one credit short and in business school I had done a week of and move out here to California and join Google. First off, the premise of the hypothesis proved to be wrong or at least harder than we thought, and in the following way, terrestrial radio or for that matter, TV advertising, broadcast media advertising works very differently. It serves actually a different market. It serves brand advertising, top of funnel kinds of goals as opposed to the bottom funnel that Google really knew well.
Lenny Rachitsky: Back then.
Jag Duggal: So that was one piece. There were all sorts of technical methodologies like reach and frequency that are really important that we simply didn’t know about. We were determined to run an auction. We have patents to our name to this day that were how do we bring auction methodologies to work in a broadcast medium? Some very interesting technology. At the end of the day, one of the things that you really needed was a surplus of inventory, ad inventory, which there actually isn’t that much of relatively speaking compared to online. The other thing that is true is the people who control that inventory are not nearly as fragmented, so when you’re negotiating with NBC or CBS or Clear Channel, they have much more leverage than in the online world of bloggers and small websites. The fragmentation wasn’t there, the methodology was different, it was going to be a tougher slog. And in the meantime, Google made actually a very smart bet and this was a pivot on Google’s part based on a lot of learnings from the failure on the one side and some of the success happening on the side of YouTube.
In the meantime, Google had acquired YouTube and somewhere along the way, and this was over multiple years, Susan Wojcicki and the leadership team of Google and Google Ads in particular came to the conclusion that rather than Google chasing TV, let’s have TV come to Google, I.e YouTube. And we’ve seen what’s happened in the ensuing 15 years where cord cutting and all of the rest and now the online digital ad methodologies that Google is best in the world at can be applied in a much more straightforward way. But I was collateral. Me and some of the teams I was a part of, we were collateral damage in that evolution. There was a point where Google did a small layoff and it was largely concentrated in my group of this acquisition.
Along the way, Google acquired YouTube, Google also acquired Double Click and Double Click served all of the brand advertising online. And a couple of years later… Well firstly at the time I was within weeks of being laid off, having dropped out of two grad schools and moved 3000 miles west. That felt really crappy. There’s a great song from around that time, which is a mashup from Coldplay and Jay-Z. Lost. You should listen to the lyrics. Just because I’m losing doesn’t mean I’ve lost is literally the first line and I would have that on repeat at that time within a couple of years, within a year, probably year and a half maybe that was around the time I was married. So it was a lot going on. It turns out that within a year, sort of post the Double Click deal, Google decided look with YouTube as an anchor asset and some other things and the Double Click acquisition, there was a technology now pretty well established 15 years later called Real-Time Bidding, and we were going to bring the search auction methodology across the entire web for all of display advertising and we were going to use that core underlying infra to be able to build not just a spot market, direct response advertising, but a futures market which could apply to brand advertising and we are going to use that disruptive vector, something fundamentally different, not just incrementally better, to essentially dislodge Yahoo from owning brand advertising online. And I ended up getting that mandate because I had learned a lot about how brand advertising worked, 12/18 months earlier. So that was a fairly spectacular failure.
The acquisition, by the way, ended up in arbitration, big lawsuits, depositions, and it was messy from all sorts of angles. We all worked our way through that and then in the end we ended up building what is even still today, I believe Google’s second largest business, which is the display advertising business. But that transition was messy, excruciatingly difficult from a strategy perspective as we talked about earlier, but from a emotional as well and figuring out your way. Given I was new to product management, I was new to Silicon Valley, I was new to Google, I was new to advertising and I had no idea whether I was ever going to be good at it or not.
Lenny Rachitsky: Do you think the lesson there is basically that song just because you’re losing doesn’t mean you’ve lost or that you’re a loser and just keep going?
Jag Duggal: Yeah, bloody-mindedness is a dramatically underrated quality as we over-intellectualize from strategy to execution and all the other things. Sometimes persistence is key and persistence while still being clear-eyed about what the odds of success are is also key.
Lenny Rachitsky: Jag, we’ve covered everything I was hoping to cover and more. Before we get to your very exciting lightning round, is there anything that you’d love to leave listeners with or share as a last tidbit?
Jag Duggal: I would just summarize a couple of core points. I think the idea of perseverance and being very clear about what you’re trying to achieve and how much it is worth to you and how much you’re willing to fight for it, while also being very open and transparent to feedback that you’re getting from people, from the market about whether what’s working and what’s not and knowing what parts to let go and what to hold onto really tightly is an important lesson.
I think the other thing that I would just emphasize again is, and this goes a little bit back to the debate you’re trying to frame up on new category or existing category, I think within that debate there’s really a synthesis that says, and I think most people would agree, if you’re trying to break through as an insurgent, you cannot fight on the ground that the incumbents stand firm. You have got to find a disruptive vector and that means searching hard for what is fundamentally different so that it breaks through the noise and the volume of the noise has just gone up so much in the last 15 years that I think that’s even growing in importance. Incrementally better doesn’t get you there. It doesn’t get you there unless you have that hook.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love that you summarized your key takeaways. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do and I might ask every guest to try to summarize what they’ve shared because that is incredibly helpful. With that, we’ve reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?
Jag Duggal: I am ready. Let’s do it.
Lenny Rachitsky: First question, what are two or three books that you recommend most to other people?
Jag Duggal: The business books, one is Play to Win. I think that is a great modern strategy book that takes a lot of what’s happened in the digital world and summarizes it really well. Second one that I would highlight, which I think is a really good non-digital world summary and really distillation of the essence of strategy and as you mentioned earlier, he’s coming on your podcast soon from Roger Martin is Where to Play and How to Win, which I think is a classic.
And as I mentioned, I went to study public policy and politics back 15 years ago. One of the ultimate startups and one of the ultimate startup stories in my mind is the story of Singapore and there’s a autobiography of the founding prime minister of Singapore from 1965 till he retired, he passed away a couple of years ago. Lee Kuan Yew. His book about the story of being kicked out. Singapore being kicked out of Malaysia as a tiny in business terms, sub-scale, little country with no natural resources is I think inspiring. His book is called From Third World to First, and I think it’s a great story that in many ways is a parallel to what startups try to do, which is essentially go from third class to first and it’s a very tricky ride and requires a ruthless honesty about where you stand and what it’ll take to succeed. And it usually gets prettified up when told in retrospect, but it is messy every step of the way and I think it’s an awesome, unapologetic summary of what it takes to achieve greatness in a very different sphere than we’re used to talking to.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love that. I definitely want to read that now. Next question, do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you’ve really enjoyed?
Jag Duggal: There’s the great series that my wife and I watched fairly recently on HBO called the Gilded Age, which really shines a very interesting light on how technology, this is from the late 1800s, 19th century, how the technological changes disrupts both the economic world and the world of wealth, but also the social dynamics in a society. And it’s fascinating because we’re living through a new Gilded age right now and we’re seeing a lot of those dynamics, but turbocharged on social media, so extra, extra exciting.
Lenny Rachitsky: Good times. Do you have a favorite product that you have recently discovered that you really like? Either an app, some physical, anything that’s bringing you joy? I
Jag Duggal: Was listening to your podcast with Christopher Lockett and it was on the treadmill when I was doing it and in the middle of it he mentioned a product around the idea of category design. I think I forget what question you asked him and he mentioned the Lomi.
Which is your kitchen countertop composter and my 13-year-old daughter who is very idealistic and has been on us to do composting for over a year now, and we bought a Lomi and we just did our fifth batch of soil last night and it works exactly as advertised and it is fantastic and I get a great amount of joy, as does the whole family actually in doing the right thing, in doing it in a modern way, in doing it in this accelerated timeframe overnight. And it’s really a new category of product, of a kitchen appliance that I remember Christopher talking about that creating countertop space is a precious asset and we are happy we did it. That’s a very recent last three-week story.
Lenny Rachitsky: This makes me so happy. I also think, Chris, this is going to be his favorite episode of all my podcasts. A lot of love for him. That’s incredible. I got to get me one of those. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often think about, come back to, share with friends or family that’s been useful in work or in life?
Jag Duggal: In work, in the very narrow confines of work, I’ve used it at probably at least a dozen times in this podcast, which is about par for me for an hour and a half at work. We’re in the business of fundamentally different, not incrementally better. I think that’s the core motto and I think it works in a slightly modified way for life as well. You live, you build the life you want to build and it’s not going to be checking the boxes that everyone wants you to check. There was a time when I was at a consulting firm and I was a partner and I dropped out to go back to grad school and people thought I was crazy. Then there was a time when I dropped out to the horror of my parents, I dropped out of Harvard like what the hell was I thinking?
To come out to Silicon Valley and that went, as we talked about pear-shaped within weeks. There was a time when I left Facebook to not that long ago, four years ago, to go join this crazy Sao Paulo-based bank. What did I know about banking? What the hell did I know about Brazil really? If you are not clear on what it is you are trying to do, A, and B, if you are not willing to tolerate failure, then you’re just checking the boxes of someone else’s expectations. And so fundamentally different is important now it’s a luxury good. It’s easy for some of us who live in the Bay Area and in Silicon Valley too. And so I’m very conscious of that, that it’s a privilege and it’s a luxury good, but I think everyone should strive for their version of it.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love that you extend that idea not to just business but also your life. I didn’t even think that it goes that far. Final question, I know you have to run really soon, but I can’t not ask about this. Apparently you were convicted of smuggling mangoes at some point in your life. Can you share that story?
Jag Duggal: Yes. As I mentioned, I grew up in Trinidad in the Caribbean and outside my brother and my bedroom was a mango tree that was abundant and spectacular quality set of mangoes. And here in the US, and I can speak very definitively for California, the mangoes are subpar. Forget about incrementally better. They are simply subpar. And Americans, I don’t think realize what a good mango actually is and what a joy it is to behold.
Every time I would go home, I would try to bring mangoes back. And one time coming through Miami International Airport from the Caribbean, I had a dozen mangoes wrapped in newspaper, slipped in between my clothes. And I hadn’t counted on the fact that this was several months before 9/11, but I hadn’t counted on the fact that the US Department of Agriculture had got smart to the fact that if people are coming from the Caribbean, they are bringing in food. That is a given. And they’re going to try to smuggle it by. So they ran the entire plane through agricultural inspection. The guy looked through the X-ray machine and said, “You’ve got 11 mangoes in your bag, sir.” At which point I knew I was caught. And I said, “Well, you’ve missed that one.” I could see the picture. I was like, “You missed that one. It’s actually 12.”
I ended up on a agricultural watch list, but then nine 11 happened and there were three or four years where as a management consultant, I was at an airport twice a week. You used to get on your ticket SSSS, which they said was random. Every flight for three years, I was flagged for a special screening because of my love of mangoes. It was worth it. Mangoes are a misunderstood, underappreciated fruit. So if you grow up in the Caribbean, you can’t, it’s hard to go without top quality mangoes. And so I still struggle here in Cali.
Lenny Rachitsky: I hope you’ve been rehabilitated from your life of crime at this point.
Jag Duggal: I have been rehabilitated and one of the great things about working with the Brazilian companies, the quality of mangoes in Brazil are top-notch. So I get to partake fairly regularly these days.
Lenny Rachitsky: It’s unfair. I am going to ask you for your some mango recommendations. Jag, I’ve kept you long enough. I feel like this podcast episode was definitely not incrementally better. It was certainly fundamentally different. Thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Where can folks find you if they want to reach out and maybe follow up on stuff and how can listeners be useful to you?
Jag Duggal: Thank you, Lenny. I really enjoyed it. I appreciate it. Very kind words. Best place to find me is probably on LinkedIn, Jag Duggal, a relatively unique name, fairly easy to spot and find there. And I am always looking for stories and for opportunities. I’m always looking for stories of fundamentally different. I would love to hear those, especially when they’re done against the odds or when there’s a more convenient or easy choice. And we are in the business of building the world’s first social and self-driving AI-powered bank, which sounds like a lot of NBA gobbledygook I know, but Silicon Valley buzzwords, but we mean it. And so anyone who wants to join what we call the purple revolution, our brand color is purple, love to hear from you wherever you are in the world. We have people everywhere.
Lenny Rachitsky: And if they’re interested, is it like newbank.com/careers?
Jag Duggal: I believe that’s right. Yes.
Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. By the way, do you have a color, a name for your purple brand color?
Jag Duggal: We call, not we, our customers call the little purple credit card, the [foreign language 00:22:00 Hoshinyo Hosho] in Portuguese means purple. [foreign language 00:22:03 Hoshinyo] basically means little purple card. And there was actually a moment, a point when there was a risk because of some regulatory issues that were happening in Brazil in 2016 where there was a chance that NewBank would have to shut down. And it turns out the Central Bank, our customers called the Central Bank and said, “You cannot let this happen.” And from that day, one of the engineers said when it was just a hundred or so people, “The future is purple,” and we have T-shirts all over NewBank saying the future is purple, so that’s part of our origin story.
Lenny Rachitsky: I’ll let you go. Jag, you’re awesome. I feel like this is going to help a lot of people. Thank you so much for being here.
Jag Duggal: Lenny. Enjoyed it so much. Thanks a lot. Great to chat.
Lenny Rachitsky: Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Glossary
| English | 中文 |
|---|---|
| AdWords/AdSense | AdWords/AdSense(Google 的在线广告产品) |
| AI Corner | AI Corner(播客的固定环节) |
| AI native | AI 原生 |
| bloody-mindedness | 执拗(此处指不服输、咬紧牙关坚持的品质) |
| C-suite | C-suite(企业高管层,指 CEO、CFO、CPO 等以 C 开头的最高管理层职位) |
| category design | 品类设计(一种产品战略方法论,旨在创造并主导全新品类) |
| Christopher Lochhead | Christopher Lochhead(品类设计理论的倡导者,播客往期嘉宾) |
| churn | 流失率(用户取消或停止使用产品的比率) |
| Citi | 花旗(Citi,全球性银行) |
| Clear Channel | Clear Channel(美国最大的广播电台运营商,后更名为 iHeartMedia) |
| Consignado | Consignado(巴西的一种担保贷款模式,通常以借款人工资直接扣款偿还) |
| cord cutting | 剪线(指取消有线电视台订阅、转向流媒体服务的趋势) |
| CPO (Chief Product Officer) | CPO(首席产品官) |
| cultural tenets | 文化原则 |
| David | David(指 David Vélez,Nubank 创始人兼 CEO) |
| design thinking | 设计思维 |
| DoubleClick | DoubleClick(Google 2008 年收购的数字广告技术公司) |
| DTC (Direct to Consumer) | DTC(直接面向消费者,跳过中间商的销售模式) |
| failure corner | 失败角(播客的固定环节) |
| Fidji Simo | Fidji Simo(前 Facebook 广告产品负责人,现任 Instacart CEO) |
| From Third World to First | 《From Third World to First》(李光耀回忆录,记述新加坡从发展中国家跃升为发达国家的历程) |
| incumbent | 传统在位者(指行业中已有的占据主导地位的企业) |
| Instacart | Instacart(美国线上杂货配送平台) |
| Kennedy School of Government | 肯尼迪政府学院(哈佛大学的公共政策研究生院) |
| Kevin Systrom | Kevin Systrom(Instagram 联合创始人) |
| LATAM | 拉美(拉丁美洲地区的简称) |
| leaky bucket | 漏桶(比喻用户流失率高的商业模式,新进来的用户不断从底部漏走) |
| Lee Kuan Yew | 李光耀(新加坡建国总理) |
| Lex Friedman | Lex Friedman(播客主持人) |
| Lomi | Lomi(厨房台面式家用堆肥机产品) |
| mobile native | 移动原生 |
| mock press release | 模拟新闻稿(Amazon 常用的产品规划方法,在开发前撰写假想的产品发布新闻稿) |
| negativado | negativado(葡萄牙语,指因欠款被列入信用黑名单的负面信用记录状态) |
| neo bank | 数字银行(无实体网点、完全在线运营的银行) |
| North Star | 北极星(指引方向的核心指标或原则) |
| NPS (Net Promoter Score) | NPS(净推荐值,衡量用户忠诚度和口碑的指标) |
| payment rails | 支付通道(完成支付交易的底层基础设施和网络) |
| PIX | PIX(巴西实时移动支付系统,由巴西央行于2020年推出) |
| Play to Win | 《Play to Win》(Christopher Lochhead 合著的战略框架书籍) |
| product market fit | 产品市场契合度 |
| Real-Time Bidding | 实时竞价(在线广告中实时竞拍广告展示位的技术模式) |
| resonant | 引起共鸣(此处保留原文语境含义,指内心深处产生回响) |
| Richard Rumelt | Richard Rumelt(战略管理学者,著有《Good Strategy Bad Strategy》《The Crux》) |
| Roger Martin | Roger Martin(战略管理学者,曾任 Rotman 管理学院院长) |
| roxinho | roxinho(葡萄牙语,意为”小紫色的”,Nubank 用户对其紫色信用卡的昵称) |
| Santander | 桑坦德(Santander,西班牙全球性银行) |
| schwag | 周边产品(公司制作的带有品牌标识的赠品,如文化衫、马克杯等) |
| Sean Ellis score | Sean Ellis 评分(衡量产品市场契合度的指标,以提出者 Sean Ellis 命名) |
| SSSS | SSSS(美国机场安检中的 Secondary Security Screening Selection 标记,表示需接受额外安检) |
| Susan Wojcicki | Susan Wojcicki(Google 前 CEO,YouTube 前 CEO) |
| TAM (Total Addressable Market) | TAM(总可达市场,指某个产品或服务所能触及的全部市场需求总量) |
| tentpole products | 核心支柱产品(公司最重要、最具代表性的旗舰产品) |
| The Gilded Age | 《The Gilded Age》(HBO 出品的电视剧,讲述 19 世纪末美国镀金时代的故事) |
| Todd Jackson | Todd Jackson(前 Gmail 产品负责人,现为风险投资人) |
| Trinidad | 特立尼达(加勒比海岛国特立尼达和多巴哥的主岛) |
| Ultravioleta | Ultravioleta(Nubank 旗下面向高收入人群的奖励信用卡产品) |
| Where to Play and How to Win | 《Where to Play and How to Win》(Roger Martin 著作,关于战略选择的框架) |
| workaround | 变通办法(用户为绕过产品缺陷或不便而自行采取的替代方案) |
Reformatted by reformat_english.py
要从根本上不同,而非渐进地更好 | Jag Duggal(Nubank、Facebook、Google)
逐字稿
Lenny Rachitsky: Nubank 的规模比 Coinbase、Robinhood、Affirm、SoFi 和 Lemonade 加起来还大。Nubank 80%到90%的增长来自口碑传播。
Jag Duggal: 我们追求的不是渐进式改进,而是根本性的不同。我们希望客户狂热地爱我们。
Lenny Rachitsky: 感觉 Nubank 堪称历史上在新业务线拓展方面最成功的公司之一。
Jag Duggal: 我们做了贷款产品、投资产品、保险产品,还有一系列小微企业产品。在确定 Sean Ellis score 达到我们认为真正有说服力的阈值之前,我们很少去规模化一个项目。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我想聊聊战略。
Jag Duggal: Kevin Systrom 在 Instagram 早期,我听他在一次会议上说过:我们可能不对,但至少我们是清晰的。即使你的战略不正确,你也非常清楚本来应该发生什么。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你觉得这一切未来会走向何方?
Jag Duggal: 为什么重新定义银行业的公司不能出自圣保罗、墨西哥城、波哥大呢?
嘉宾介绍
Lenny Rachitsky: 今天的嘉宾是 Jag Duggal。Jag 是 Nubank 的首席产品官。Nubank 是你所能遇到的最被低估的巨头级企业之一,拥有狂热的用户群和非常独特的产品打造方式。加入 Nubank 之前,Jag 是 Facebook 的产品管理总监,负责视频和第三方内容(包括新闻、游戏和网红内容)的商业化。再之前,他是 Quantcast 的产品和战略高级副总裁,也曾担任 Google 展示广告部门的产品群经理和战略负责人,当时该部门是 Google 第二大业务。
在我们的对话中,我们讨论了如何打造让人狂热的产品、如何制定战略、品类设计(category design)、产品线扩展、金融科技(FinTech)的未来等等。接下来,为您带来与 Jag Duggal 的对话。如果你喜欢这档播客,别忘了在你常用的播客应用或 YouTube 上订阅和关注。这是避免错过未来节目的最佳方式,也能极大地帮助这档播客。
令人震惊的 Nubank 数据
Lenny Rachitsky: Jag,非常感谢你来到这里。欢迎做客播客。
Jag Duggal: Lenny,很荣幸来到这里。我是这档节目的忠实听众,期待我们的对话,感谢邀请。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我更荣幸。谢谢你来到这里。我想先分享一些关于 Nubank 的事实,我觉得这些数据会让很多人大吃一惊。我觉得很多人,尤其是美国的人,对 Nubank 还不太关注。我希望这些信息能让听众更加重视我们接下来要讨论的内容和经验。
第一,Nubank 的规模比 Coinbase、Robinhood、Affirm、SoFi 和 Lemonade 加起来还大。第二,Nubank 80%到90%的增长来自口碑传播。第三,Nubank 的客户数量超过美洲银行(Bank of America)——美国四大银行之一——而它仅在拉丁美洲的三个国家开展业务。
Jag Duggal: 没错。
Lenny Rachitsky: 另外,你们还曾创下吉尼斯世界纪录——同时拆箱人数最多的信用卡发布活动。不过好像后来有人打破了这个纪录,对吗?
Jag Duggal: 我记得没错。我们最近又创下了一项新的世界纪录——完成了第一笔水下信用卡交易。我们一直在寻找一些有趣的事情来做。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我喜欢这个纪录——没有人能打破它,因为它是”第一笔”。这是一种很取巧的创纪录方式,太有意思了。
口碑增长的秘诀
Lenny Rachitsky: 我的感觉是,Nubank 之所以成功,核心在于对打造让客户狂热的产品有一种执念。我刚才分享的那个数据——80%到90%的增长来自口碑传播——每家公司都梦想着能以这种方式增长,无论你是消费品还是 B2B,尤其是银行,以这种速度通过口碑增长是极其罕见的。
所以我想帮助大家学习你们是如何实现如此大规模的口碑增长的。也许我们可以先从产品角度切入:你如何建立一个产品团队和产品开发流程,让你能够打造出让人为之狂热、忍不住要告诉所有朋友的产品?
Jag Duggal: 我认为有几个核心要素是关键。需要说明的是,其中很多在我大约五年前加入公司之前就已经存在了,但我认为这是一个非常精彩的故事,也是吸引我加入的原因之一。首先,我会说要真正深入思考,触及一个非常深层的痛点。巴西那些大型传统银行是全世界最赚钱的银行之一,同时也是全世界最令人厌恶的银行之一。
Jag Duggal:
我个人的亲身经历是,早在职业生涯初期,大约二十年前,九十年代末的时候,我在圣保罗做过一个咨询项目。我记得有一天和客户——也是我的朋友——一起走路去吃午饭,我们要去圣保罗一家叫 Classic Churrasque Korea 的餐厅。路过他的银行网点时,我们在红绿灯前停下,他基本上就是说,那是我的银行,我恨它。那是1997年。这件事一直刻在我脑海里。二十年后当 David 第一次联系我时,它仍然记忆犹新。所以我们触及的是一个非常深层的痛点,至于具体原因我们可以展开谈。但这是第一点。
第二点我想说的是,这来自 David、Ed 和 Chris——我们的创始人——非常有意识的刻意设计。Nubank 有一种文化,在我看来,这种文化在员工心中的鲜活程度是我前所未见的。我在 Google、Facebook 等地方都工作过,但我敢打赌,如果在走廊里随机拦住我们的员工,大概80%到90%都能给你背出公司的五个价值观。它不只是挂在墙上的标语。而第一个价值观是一句非常独特的表述,几个词串在一起——我们希望客户狂热地爱我们。我记得第一次面试 Nubank 的时候,专程飞到圣保罗,看到那句话时我就想,“这就是我要找的人。这帮人是认真的。“而从我的角度来说,面试过程中很大一部分精力其实是在验证这句话是真的,还是仅仅是墙上的一句标语。所以你的出发点必须是:你要让客户爱上你。
在实操中有无数理由——运营上的、便利性上的、短期财务可行性上的(这对于风险投资支持的创业公司来说是非常现实的问题)——有各种理由让你在边缘上做妥协,在日常的、每分钟的决策中,“我们可以在这一点上打个折扣、偷个懒。“话说回来,我不认为我们在这一点上做得完美无缺,但我们确实非常努力。当需要做出艰难抉择时,我们偏向于客户一方。客户的爱——他们会不会想把这件事告诉朋友、邻居和家人?我认为这才是核心所在。
从价值观到产品工艺
一旦你把这些事情做对了——深层的痛点,以及一个致力于让客户狂热的文化——接下来你就可以开始做产品开发的专业工艺了。你要确保在开始构建之前先专注于客户发现。你要确保这种发现不只是简单地询问客户,而是替他们进行创新。你要确保从各个地方汲取方法论——从宝洁到 Google,不胜枚举——因为你可能没法直接问客户他们想要什么颠覆性的新创新。你必须去观察他们,在他们自己都没有注意到的时候发现他们的痛点。然后在构建的过程中,你要承诺去衡量他们是否真的热爱这个产品,不要在这方面自欺欺人。然后疯狂地反复迭代,一次又一次,直到把它做到恰到好处。这些是一些原则,但我认为这些专业工艺是建立在找到真正深层的、触及情感的痛点之上的,文化则是告诉你,那就是你的北极星。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太精彩了。这里面有太多线索我想追踪,首先,我想回到价值观的话题。你说有五个,提到了一个。能不能快速分享其余的?
Jag Duggal: 这五个,我按照对我个人最 resonant 的顺序来说。第一,我们希望客户狂热地爱我们。第二,我们充满饥饿感,挑战现状。第三,我们建设强大而多元的团队。第四,我们追求聪明的效率。还有一个在某种程度上是所有一切的根基——我们像所有者而非租客一样思考和行动。即使没有人要求,我们也做正确的事。我们有很多员工在构建产品和推动上线的过门中,展现了这种极致的主人翁精神。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好。回到打造让人狂热地爱的产品这个话题,你谈到了这是第一原则,每个人在构建产品时都要把它铭记在心,做决策时偏向于做让人热爱的东西。关于你们如何在实际中操作这一点,还有什么可以分享的吗?比如,是不是有设计评审会,你或者设计负责人走进来说,“这个是不是在帮助客户狂热地爱我们?“你们的系统和流程中有哪些机制来支撑这一点,而不仅仅是——很酷,每个人都得记住这个,这就是我们的目标?
Jag Duggal: 好的,我们做了几件事。同时我也不想夸大其词,好像我们已经达到了某种至善境界。我们有时候也会在这些原则上有所偏离,但我们有一系列从其他地方借鉴、改良、偷师而来的方法,也有一些是我们自己发明的。举几个例子——我们非常喜欢 Amazon 的模拟新闻稿(mock press release)方法。在投入任何一个工程师之前,先向我解释——其实不是向我解释,而是向目标客户解释——为什么他们应该关心这件事。因为如果你没法在两段话里说清楚你为之构建产品的客户为什么应该在意,那就说明还有功课要做。这是一种方法。
我们确实每周有多次产品和设计评审会,不断问自己这个问题:这对客户为什么是好的?这对客户来说为什么有根本性的不同?这如何在我们所思考的品类中实现重新定义——在质量维度上、在复杂度维度上、在价格维度上,通常是同时在这三个维度上?并且打破那些你经常需要权衡的取舍约束,看看有没有可能做到,虽然并非总能做到,但我们经常朝那个方向努力,有时候也确实能做到。
衡量产品市场契合度
然后在构建和上线产品之后——不管是 Alpha、Beta 还是更后期的阶段——还有一些其他的做法,就是那些衡量方面的工作。你之前的一些嘉宾谈过产品市场契合度(product market fit)以及如何衡量它。说来也巧,我在硅谷待了十几年,第一次加入 Nubank 时飞到圣保罗,当时那个小小的产品团队给我讲了一种叫 Sean Ellis 评分的东西。最近我们还邀请 Sean 到圣保罗,给所有的产品经理和设计师做了分享。但说实话,我们是全世界最狂热的他的方法论追随者之一。我们很少在我们上线的产品还没有测出 Sean Ellis 评分、并且达到我们觉得真正有说服力的阈值之前就去大规模推广。
Lenny Rachitsky: 能不能描述一下具体的评分和方法?
Jag Duggal: 好的,Sean Ellis 评分是一套非常简单的方法论,被非常多的公司使用,由一位名叫 Sean Ellis 的先生在十多年前推广开来。基本做法是在每个阶段询问你的客户——每个阶段你都有一小批客户,然后逐渐增多,随时间增长——在每个阶段问他们:如果这个产品消失了,你会有多失望?Sean 的观点是,如果至少40%的客户不是”非常失望”——不是”有点失望”,而是”非常失望”——他基本上用的是三个选项的量表:不失望、有些失望、非常失望。
Jag Duggal: 如果至少40%不是”非常失望”,那你就还没有达到产品市场契合度。当然,在 Nubank 我们需要做一些调整——巴西人从文化上比全球平均水平更乐观开朗,所以我们的阈值不是40%,一般来说我们把它提高到了50%。我认为除非50%的巴西用户告诉我们他们会”非常失望”,否则我们就不算达到了产品市场契合度,因为巴西人天生更礼貌,比平均水平更礼貌、更乐观,所以我们做了一些自己的微调。
但我们觉得这个方法非常有帮助。作为一家公司,这其实不仅限于产品层面——我们对 NPS(净推荐值)分数简直上了瘾。我们追求世界顶级的 NPS,全公司如此,每条产品线也是如此。我们对追踪自己的表现近乎偏执。同样,我们会补偿一些文化偏差,确保对自己的标准不打折扣。举个例子,在墨西哥,我们上线头几年记录到的 NPS 是94到95。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这太离谱了,我从来没听说过这样的数字。
Jag Duggal: 是的。这比我们在巴西拿到的分数高得多,不过我们的 NPS 通常也在70多、80多,偶尔到90多的水平。一旦哪怕只下降一两个点,那就会拉响警报。我们会去查明原因,确保做出相应的迭代。所以这些都是我们内建到流程中的东西,都是内建到流程中的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 很高兴你聊到了这个,我本来也打算问你们怎么衡量这些东西。听起来 Sean Ellis 调查是在迭代和推进上线的过程中使用的,而 NPS 则是上线后用来了解用户对产品的满意程度。
上线后的衡量体系
Jag Duggal: NPS 是上线后的指标。我们也会关注流失率(churn)这类指标,确保我们不是在做一个漏桶——这也是我们构建的病毒式用户获取闭环的一部分。我们要确保打造的产品足够出色,让用户愿意主动告诉朋友,这样我们就不必在营销上投入太多来驱动增长。而这只有在留得住你获取的用户的情况下才成立。我职业生涯早期做过有漏桶问题的产品,那是一个非常令人沮丧的跑步机。所以我个人对确保桶底没有洞这件事非常偏执。
Lenny Rachitsky: 关于 Sean Ellis 这部分真的很有意思,因为我觉得很多团队都可以借鉴,如果他们想打造用户热爱并且能成功的产品的话。这是每个项目的目标吗?是写在策略文档或一页纸提案里的?还是心照不宣的——“好吧,如果不到50%的人不是非常失望,我们就不会通过这个关卡”?实际操作中是怎样的?
Jag Duggal: 是的,我们基本就是如此运作的。我们没有把它写成白纸黑字的硬性规则,但本质上大家都知道,在任何产品评审会上——尤其是上线后、有数据了的产品评审——他们一定会被问到:Sean Ellis 评分是多少?你怎么知道用户爱这个产品?不只是喜欢,而是爱到会推荐给朋友的程度。这已经深度融入我们的文化了。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这个洞察太精彩了,我觉得它能解释你们取得的很多成功。因为这是一个非常高的标准。很多人跑这个调查,超过20%都很难。要让别人对一个从未用过的新产品感到”非常失望”,这本身就是一个很高的门槛。大多数人会想,“呃,无所谓,我不需要这东西。“而你们的标准是50%的人在一个新东西消失后会感到非常失望。
“足够好”还不够
Jag Duggal: 对,没错。我们有几款较新的产品目前卡在50%的边缘,我给团队的压力是:你需要做的三件、四件、五件事是什么,才能明确地跨过50%?哪些细分人群或群组高于50%,这告诉了我们什么?而低于50%的群组又说明了什么?所以我们在分析上投入了大量精力,也进行了深入的思考。几年前我们在一次产品评审会上,我们的首席设计师——他之前在 Google 和 Facebook 工作过——当时团队说,“我们认为这已经足够上线了。”
他说了一句话,我和 Chris、Kara——其中一位联合创始人——后来都采纳了这句话:“足够好还不够好。它够不够好?“它够不够好?因为这就是我们的标准,尤其是对我们的核心支柱产品,但我们也尽量在全局范围内推行这个标准。很多公司,不仅在巴西或拉美,而是全球各地,在营销上砸了大量资金。他们的 VC 预算、VC 资金基本都流向了 Google 和 Facebook。我职业生涯中有很长一段时间就是在 Google 和 Facebook 那边接收这些资金的。但如果那只是你所做的一小部分,而主要精力真正投入到把产品做得很出色,让你不必这么做,那会是好得多的局面。
Lenny Rachitsky: 有没有哪个项目的例子让你印象深刻——原本低于那个标准,然后你们把它推上去的,你会说”这就是我们当时缺失的东西”?
Assistente de Pagamentos 的案例
Jag Duggal: 有,我给你讲一个我们现在正在较劲的案例。我们有一款产品叫 Assistente de Pagamentos,支付助手。目前只在巴西上线,还没有推向墨西哥和哥伦比亚。在巴西,付账单相当复杂。有四种不同的方式、四条不同的支付通道,不同的账单使用不同的通道。从过去三年在巴西爆发的移动支付系统 PIX——它在金融科技圈已经相当世界知名了——到更标准化的通道,以及一些更老旧的通道。
所以如果你是用户,你得像我们所有人一样追踪自己的账单。你还得搞清楚走哪条通道,收集你的账单,确保按时支付。而且有些通道其实不太可靠——你付了款,却没有到账。而不付账单的后果就是被报告给信用局,变成所谓的 negativado——在你的信用报告上留下负面记录。这对普通用户来说可能是件大事。所以这是一个真正的深层痛点。
我们按照 Reid Hoffman 的风格上线了这个产品——如果你对第一版不感到尴尬,那就说明你等太久了。去年我们这样做之后,发现了一个非常有趣的现象。我们的 Sean Ellis 评分还不错,大概在40%的边缘,具体数字我忘了,但基本在那个范围。但我们发现有一小群用户——他们注册了四个以上的待缴账单。而在这小群人之中,还有一个更小的核心群组——他们在至少两条不同的支付通道上有四个以上的待缴账单。这群人的 Sean Ellis 评分达到了70%。我们就意识到:“关键在于,我们需要打通这些通道,而不是一条一条地做。我们需要让用户能够轻松地跨多条通道一次性管理多笔账单。“然后自动化接管之后,人们就看到了真正的价值,因为有一些方式……
自动化与真正不同的体验
Jag Duggal: 自动化接管之后,人们就看到了真正的价值,因为有一些方式……表面上,如果你对任何发达国家的一个普通人说”我们要做一个账单自动支付”,乍一看不一定令人兴奋。但如果你把它做对了,它实际上是一种根本不同的体验,而不是渐进式的改善。这正是我们所做的。我们对产品进行了系统性的数十次迭代,让客户能够一次性跨多条支付通道处理多笔账单,把我们最初那个极小的靶心群体、那个细分群体,在尝试过的客户中占的比例越来越大。顺便说一句,这段旅程还在进行中。我们接下来一整年还有一整套路线图,要做大量细微的品质调整,目前已经收到了很好的反馈。这款产品的月活跃用户现在已经超过一千万,而大约十五个月前我们还只在几十万的水平上苦苦挣扎。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这个洞察真的很有意思——利用评分和调查来锁定谁真正最喜欢这个产品,然后看看其中是否有什么规律。这是你们的一般做法,还是说只是这次碰巧发现的?
Jag Duggal: 我们相当频繁地这样做。我们有一款面向高收入人群的奖励信用卡,叫 Ultravioleta。我们经历了类似的过程——上线时有多个不同的客户细分群体,但有一个群体真正爱上了这款产品,而且这并不令人意外。就是那些每月消费额度足够高、获得了费用豁免的客户,然后我们内置的所有其他权益才真正引起了共鸣。而如果你还在交月费,那些其他权益就没那么令人兴奋了,或者说不太能补偿回来。所以我们已经这样做过好几次了,最近我们开始将这种做法与一种更敏捷的方式结合起来,快速获取那个靶心群体的反馈。过去两年里,我们跟很多产品经理和设计师说过:别担心去服务一千个客户,花三周时间,服务一千个客户,搞一堆交叉分析表。即便到最后,也很难从中读出真正细致的客户反馈。
所以我们直接告诉他们,打十个电话就行了。自己拿起电话。不要让研究员先制定一个调研计划,再去执行,再写总结,再拿来给你看——中间隔了太多层。你自己拿起电话,打十个,十次里有九次,等你打到第五个的时候,你就能预测第六、七、八、九、十号客户会告诉你什么。然后你就知道了,差距在哪里,或者真正引起共鸣的是什么,然后你可以加倍投入。所以我们一直在不断尝试用小的方式迭代,确保客户的声音能够直通到正在构建产品的人那里。
直接打电话给客户
Lenny Rachitsky: 我很喜欢这个建议。我能想象作为产品经理,打电话给客户是件非常让人害怕的事。大多数人不会这么做。顺便问一下,实际操作中,你们是真的打电话,还是推荐发邮件?你实际上建议他们怎么做,因为——
Jag Duggal: 我们就是直接拿起电话。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。
Jag Duggal: 拿起电话。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的,明白了。
Jag Duggal: 因为你能听到语气。巴西人和墨西哥人非常善于表达。统计数据永远不会告诉你那种真正细微的感受。
Lenny Rachitsky: 对。
Jag Duggal: 这跟设计思维非常一致,有很多文献讲这种方法为什么有效。我不会说我们做得特别科学、特别符合最佳实践。我们就是——打电话就行了。让它尽可能简单、尽可能不打扰、尽可能少开销,确保客户的声音直接传到构建产品的团队那里。
Lenny Rachitsky: Jeff Bezos 在 Lex Friedman 的播客上说过一句话:如果你有数据也有一个具体案例,通常那个案例是对的。
Jag Duggal: 我很喜欢这句话。这跟我的判断完全一致。
如何收集数据
Lenny Rachitsky: 让这个问题再具体一些——你们做的这些调查,有没有什么工具?你们实际上怎么收集这些数据?有没有什么值得分享的、关于如何把数据收集落到实处的做法?
Jag Duggal: 我们用过一系列工具,很多主流调查工具都在用,现在也还在用很多。但我们并没有标准化到哪个工具能戏剧性地改变我们的工作方式——真正改变一切的是那个心态:我们一定要确保这款产品达到产品市场契合度,然后再去规模化。在我作为产品经理和 CPO 的职业生涯中一直看到一件事,我们在 Nubank 每个月也都在面对——那就是对一线产品经理施加的规模化压力。全公司、整个高管团队、整个管理层都在指望这个产品。我们要上线这个东西,大家都想规模化,大家都很兴奋。六个月前做了产品评审,觉得这会非常了不起。对那个产品经理来说,规模化的压力是巨大的,而产品经理的工作在很多情况下就是说”不”。
我经常在 Nubank 内部说的一句话是:我们不会把一个小问题拿去规模化,因为如果我们那样做,最终会得到一团大麻烦。如果在小规模上行不通,没关系,尤其是当我们有强有力的假设和很多获取客户反馈的渠道时。我们迭代、迭代、再迭代,把它做对。一旦做对了,规模化在很多情况下会自然实现,因为客户会兴奋地把产品推荐给朋友。
反过来,你可以砸很多钱和精力,当你拥有像 Nubank 这样的大型应用或者像 Google、Facebook 这样的平台时,你可以让任何产品看起来很成功,持续数月甚至数年,因为你有如此庞大的客户基础,总能用各种基本手段让他们来尝试。但你只是在让一只死猫弹起来而已。等这个东西变得非常庞大之后,你就有了一团真正的大麻烦要收拾。所以我们在这方面相当自律。Sean Ellis 评分的很大一部分作用,就是把一些科学性带入到这种需要判断力的艺术中。
产品经理的”说不”能力
Lenny Rachitsky: 你刚才说的这一点——产品经理的职责就是顶回去、阻止糟糕的事情发生——我觉得真的非常重要。很多产品经理就是被安排说”来,做这个”,他们心里其实知道这行不通、这不是个好主意,但要么是他们觉得自己不应该顶回去,要么是不擅长顶回去。在你共事过的那些擅长说服和顶回去的产品经理中——比如”我们现在不该做这个”——你有没有什么策略或沟通方式,你觉得在面对所有这些压力的时候是有效的?
Jag Duggal: 我在职业生涯中相对较晚才学到的一件事——我真希望自己能早十年、甚至早几十年就学到——就是文化有多么重要。我们谈到过五条文化原则,但这个”我们是所有者,不是租客”的理念——作为产品经理或首席工程师或首席设计师,甚至团队中的任何一个人,你就是那个产品的所有者。如果你真的觉得这事行不通,不要只说我想听的话。作为所有者,你有责任、也有义务把坏消息告诉我,并且尽早告诉我,哪怕这不合时宜,哪怕有晋升机会在即——这些博弈会非常快地变得真实起来——然后说,“听着,我觉得这行不通,原因如下”,或者”这东西没有起效,原因如下”,又或者”我们应该砍掉它,原因如下”。
我想说的第二点是,那些已经成长起来的公司——尤其是成功规模化的创业公司——里的高管,通常都曾身处类似的境地,见过不成功的产品,亲手砍掉过它们,或者做过大幅度的转向。他们会非常尊重那些思维清晰、标准很高、不随波逐流的人。所以我认为最关键的就是带着这种所有者心态。其次是带来清晰的思路和数据,并且要理解——大多数公司里的大多数高管都是意志坚定的人,都有强烈的观点。这是他们工作职责的一部分。这没问题。无论你是做产品、设计还是工程,作为团队领导者——如果你正在为将来担任某个高管职位做练习,比如说你现在是中层——这种能力不会在你拿到 C-suite 头衔的那一刻奇迹般降临,而是需要不断练习的。而且这也是被期望具备的。我认为这不仅限于 Nubank。
某些文化比其他文化更能促进这一点,但我认为它在任何地方都非常重要。所以我鼓励大家去尝试,理解其中的取舍和挑战,也去理解对方的立场。但如果你真心认为你的产品还没准备好大规模推广——说到底,那团大麻烦最终还是你来收拾。到时候我们所有人都会忘记当初是我们叫你推广的,但最后我们还是会怪你。所以不如趁早咬紧牙关,在还容易转向的时候转向,最终结果会更好。
用户研究的方法与技巧
Lenny Rachitsky: 我想再回到一个话题,然后就换个方向了。你之前谈到过和客户交谈、发现创新想法,而不仅仅是听他们告诉你什么。用户研究和客户访谈、找到痛点、确定该做什么——这是一整套技能。你有没有什么技巧、策略或经验教训,关于怎么把这件事做好——怎么在访谈客户的时候发现痛点,然后确定到底该做什么?
Jag Duggal: 我会分享几点想法,但首先我要说,这可以说是我现在仍然在摸索的领域。我仍然觉得自己、我们在这一点上做得不够好。我从未见过有谁能持续地把它做到极致,我认为这是一个设计思维和设计职能可以大显身手的地方,但它也是我在产品开发中见到的最不一致的领域之一。话虽如此,我看到我们在 Nubank 有时做得很好的几件事,也有时在某些方面有所疏漏。首先,就像你提到的 Jeff Bezos 那个故事一样——故事通常胜过数据。有很多次我看到团队在做非常精密复杂的分析,但他们已经忘了问题是什么,或者到底能从中得出什么结论。所以永远不要忽视客户原话和故事的价值。这是第一点。
第二,我非常、非常坚信的一点是——团队常常跳过一个步骤:花大力气把假设表达得极其清晰、极其精准。如果你没有假设,你会花大量时间做研究,会回收大量数据——定性的、故事性的或定量的——但你不知道该怎么处理它们,因为这些数据既不能验证也不能推翻你的假设,因为你根本没有假设。于是它只是一次有趣的对话而已。
第三点是——我有了假设,而且表达得很清晰,但接下来的陷阱是:我爱上了我的假设。我变成了自己假设的辩护律师,而不是判断这个假设对不对的法官。我认为这是另一个常见的陷阱。我自己掉进去过太多次了。最后我想强调的是,即使你有了一个强有力的假设,真正开始做研究的时候——如果能观察,就多观察,少提问;多问间接问题,少问直接问题。“你会喜欢这个产品吗?“——一个兴奋的产品经理花了两个月做设计方案,然后这样问。你应该是去寻找问题而不是去寻找对你方案的认可。你应该从多个角度间接地问同一个问题,而不是试图获得一个”是的,他们喜欢我思考了很久的那个东西”的答案。如果条件允许,观察比提问更好,尽管这是一项有难度的技巧。这些就是我会关注的东西。
Lenny Rachitsky: 关于假设这一点,我想确保大家理解——你的建议是,在开始和客户交谈、做初步研究之前,作为产品经理或团队中的任何人,你基本上应该先有一个观点,你认为什么是真的。你是这样想的吗?
Jag Duggal: 没错。要对客户会说什么形成一个观点——他们说什么会让你知道他们对你的产品真正兴奋。这样一来,你会非常清楚地得到”嗯”或者”是的,拍桌子叫好”的反应,你会知道什么时候得到了那种反应。
Lenny Rachitsky: 有没有一个具体的例子让它更形象一些?因为我猜想很多产品经理会觉得他们必须保持客观中立,就像”让我们看看,看看这是不是我们应该做的,我不想让任何人对此产生偏见”。有没有一个关于假设的简短例子?
Jag Duggal: 一个著名的例子,部分与假设有关,部分与观察有关,就是宝洁公司 Swiffer 的发明。人们讨厌拖地,他们会去做,甚至不会意识到这有多痛苦,因为他们已经发展出了各种变通办法,就这么承受着这个负担。但如果你非常细致地观察问题出在哪里,你就能看到问题所在。所以如果你带着一个强有力的假设——这是一个真正的问题,哪怕客户没有告诉你这是一个问题,因为他们只是已经习惯了。这就是一个例子。
联名银行账户的假设
Jag Duggal: 我们在 Nubank 有一个假设。我给你一个正在推进中的例子。我们的假设是关于联名银行账户的,我上周刚好在做相关研究。联名银行账户大约发明于——其实很难说准——取决于你信哪个信息来源,大约在19世纪末到20世纪初。它的出现基本上与社会运动同步,某种程度上与美国妇女解放运动相关,在女性被法律允许投票之前,女性未经丈夫事先同意是不能开设银行账户的。我们至今仍在使用的联名银行账户,就诞生于那个时代。它已经有120到150年的历史了。
我认为这并不令人意外。我们的假设是,这个产品,这个诞生于那个时代的产品,并不适合现代消费者,这并不令人意外。从操作层面来说,我跟我妻子或女儿分享一个 Spotify 播放列表,比分享一个储蓄目标还要容易。所以我们进入了一个产品开发周期,核心理念是:存在一种新的社交银行关系,它不是关于发推特,也不是广义上的社交。它关乎的是我们的财务生活本质上是社交性的。而目前,与配偶、与孩子、与可能正在帮你支付孩子教育费用的父母分享财务目标,是非常困难的。这就是我们的一个用例。这是一个非常强的假设。
但当你走进客户调研时,你不是试图向他们推销。你要观察他们是否正在经历这些痛点。而当你深入调研时,如果客户说的话哪怕只是稍微偏向你期望的方向,你就会很难克制住自己——不兴奋地跳进去,然后进入推销模式。你应该几乎是在挑战自己的想法,推动客户来说服你,在互动中让你扮演魔鬼代言人的角色。这些就是我们在构建产品时寻找的东西。
Lenny Rachitsky: 听起来是个很棒的想法。我相信这个假设。
关于战略思维
Lenny Rachitsky: 我想聊聊战略。我知道你对如何思考和制定战略有非常鲜明的观点。这是每个人都想提升的能力。每个产品经理都被告诫要锻炼战略思维,这对你职业生涯非常重要。我很想听听你的看法,你是如何制定战略的,以及对大家的建议。
Jag Duggal: 我坦率承认,我带有某种偏见。我职业生涯刚开始、大学毕业后的头十年左右,一直在一家战略咨询公司工作。所以我在某种程度上带有一种偏见,考虑到我做那行的时间长度,这对产品经理来说是一个不寻常的背景。我刚到 Google 的时候,花了好几年才意识到我的工作不是制作精美的 PPT,而是上线代码。而我在至少头12到18个月里这方面做得并不好。
但我觉得,在硅谷或更广泛的科技公司中,几乎存在一种相反的教条——认为战略很简单,执行才是一切。这可能是因为有少数几家公司在战略上做对了,而我们所熟知的那些传奇公司不仅战略正确,而且执行得非常利落。但我们没听到的是那些战略错误的公司,它们根本没进入讨论的行列,所有出色的执行都被乘以了零。
出色的执行乘以一个糟糕的战略,是对所有人时间的浪费。而且因为战略不清晰,你可能会浪费大量时间去执行一个注定不会成功的方案,年复一年。我最喜欢的硅谷语录之一来自 Instagram 早期的 Kevin Systrom,我在一次会议上听他说过,那是在 Facebook 收购之前。他当时不知道多大年纪,刚离开 Google,大概二十多岁。他说:“我们可能不是对的,但至少我们是清晰的。“我欣赏这句话的原因是,即使你的战略不完全正确——而它永远不会完全正确,因为没有任何计划是——你也能更清楚地判断自己是否偏离了方向,因为你对原本应该发生什么有非常清晰的认知。
所以我认为在战略上保持非常清晰是非常重要的。你的播客上请过一些很棒的嘉宾。Richard Rumelt 是我最喜欢的之一。他写了几本书,一本叫《Good Strategy Bad Strategy》,另一本较新的叫《The Crux》,他给世界做了一件大好事——与其说他在描述战略是什么,不如说他在开篇就着重讲了战略不是什么。战略不是一个雄心勃勃的目标,不是一个愿景,不是一组财务成果。它是一个连贯的计划,关于你如何以杠杆化的方式将自身优势应用于一个核心重要问题。这是对他世界观的一个非常粗略的转述。
我发现我们经常把战略和愿景混淆,和一个宽泛的想法混淆,和一个非常宽泛、模糊的愿望混淆。Nubank 的战略不是”我们想成为全球最大的数字银行”。我们确实想,但这不是一种有意义的分解问题的方式。
2014年,我们面对的是千禧一代、中产阶级、巴西城市居民,他们痛恨支付信用卡年费,而且由于太年轻、没有信用记录,根本无法获得信贷。我们能提供的不仅仅是一张更便宜的信用卡,而是一张免年费的信用卡,这是一种情感上的触动——那笔费用让人们愤怒——而我们能做到这一点,是因为我们是没有网点的纯数字化模式。这才是一个连贯的描述:针对一个非常具体的客户群体,面对一个非常具体的问题,提供一个基于非常具体优势的非常具体的解决方案。顺便说一句,这一切都早于我,跟我没有任何关系,我当时不在。但我想说的就是这个意思——战略是非常具体的,非常详细的,非常明确的。从此倒推,我认为真的、真的非常重要。如果你把战略做对了,它就能告诉你实现目标所需的最小活动集合……
……以及获得牵引力并赢得市场所需的最小活动集合,而如果你没有那种程度的连贯性,你就会试图服务所有客户。也许我们应该 prematurely 去墨西哥。各种各样的事情都会发生,你的执行变得非常分散,你甚至无法判断为什么整个公司没有获得牵引力,而战略则允许聚焦,并能让你更快地判断你聚焦的赌注、你集中的赌注是否真的在奏效。
集中下注与分散押注
你这些年在播客上采访过一些投资人,他们会告诉你,集中才能创造财富,分散只能保全财富。而你是初创公司。你不需要保全任何东西。你要的是建造。这需要集中的赌注,而非对冲。正因为你集中了赌注,这些赌注的赌注就很高。你必须非常非常清楚自己在下什么赌注,以及为什么你认为它会成功。
Lenny Rachitsky: 当你过去与团队中的产品经理合作,帮助他们锻炼这种能力、践行你分享的这些战略建议时,你觉得什么最有助于他们建立这种能力?就是反复练习吗?是读《Good Strategy, Bad Strategy》并加以实践吗?你觉得什么最有帮助?
Jag Duggal: 一是认真对待它。这有点像我们之前谈到的 Nubank 的文化。首先,你必须真心渴望让客户狂热地爱你,并将此视为自己珍视的东西。在此之后,我认为框架真的很有帮助,无论是《Good Strategy, Bad Strategy》,还是你节目嘉宾 Christopher Lochhead 的《Play to Win》——我非常欣赏他——或者是 Roger Martin 的《Where to Play and How to Win》,这是一本关于……
Lenny Rachitsky: 他几周后会来上播客。
Jag Duggal: 是吗?他非常棒。拥有这些框架——如果你将它们综合起来,所有这些框架在许多方面都在说同一件事:聚焦,清晰地理解客户,不要试图——用我们印在 Nubank 咖啡杯上的原话说——“我们不是要做渐进式的改进。我们要做根本性的不同。“这些都是非常相似的理念,只是用略微不同的方式表达出来。
一旦你理解了这些框架并将它们提炼出来,接下来就是实践,而实践是令人恐惧的。对冲很有吸引力。对冲意味着你不需要做选择。对冲听起来很聪明。把所有赌注集中起来是走投无路的人才会做的事,而初创公司就是走投无路的实体,因为它们几乎都在烧钱。但成功的初创公司——那些盈利了的——我非常警惕,鉴于我工作过的地方,那些拥有一两个巨型产品的成功公司——Nubank 现在也幸运地处于这个位置——开始变得保守,开始忘记聚焦、集中、客户痴迷同样重要,即使第三、四、五、六个产品不成功公司也不会破产,因为第一和第二个产品是巨大的现金流引擎——但那是一条通向死亡的缓慢道路。
所以,要践行那种纪律,并且——我非常有意地使用这个词——要有勇气做出那些艰难的选择,集中下注,这顺便说一句,与商学院教的很多东西以及很多 MBA 的理念相悖,这非常重要。然后,就是做得越多越好,越练越精,越练越有章法,越练越有方法论。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你是说 Nubank 的咖啡杯上写着”做根本性的不同”?
Jag Duggal: 产品团队在一年多前做了一些周边,上面写着”根本性地”……我从大约加入公司时起就在公司内部有一个口诀,就是”我们的事业是做根本性的不同,而非渐进式的改进。“同样,这回到一个道理——只有根本性的不同,才能让客户告诉他们的朋友。渐进式的改进……
顺便说一下,确实有一些功能……我不想把话说绝对……确实有一些功能,你做的就是渐进式的改进。一年发布的一百个功能里,不可能每一个都是根本性的不同,但我们始终在寻找那些可以作为锚点的根本性不同,然后在它们周围也构建一些延续性创新。但我们是做根本性不同的生意,不是做渐进式改进的生意。
品类设计的实践
Lenny Rachitsky: 我很喜欢这个说法,而且这恰好引向我想聊的下一个话题。我知道你是品类设计的忠实拥趸。你提到了 Christopher Lochhead,他是之前的嘉宾。这其实是本播客上最常见的辩论之一——人们是否相信我们应该创造自己的品类,还是不应该?这是个糟糕的主意吗?是好主意吗?感觉你站在”这其实非常好且重要”这一边。我很想听听你的观点,以及 Nubank 是怎么做的。
Jag Duggal: 你知道 Lenny,就在本周早些时候,我还在听你播客上——我相信是 Todd Jackson,前 Gmail 产品负责人、现在的风险投资人——你们的讨论,非常有意思,他基本上站在了另一边,认为你应该进入一个客户已经在花钱的品类。这个逻辑相当扎实,很难反驳。
我来告诉你我是怎么想的。这促使我思考我信念中的细微之处在哪里。我认为总体而言,特别是在公司层面,成功的公司通常都是做根本性不同的生意。它们是新品类的生意。Google 是新品类的生意。Netflix、Airbnb,你可以列出一长串,Salesforce,等等等等。这非常重要。
在 Nubank 的例子中,我们是最早的——其实是不是最早并不那么重要——但我们非常刻意地试图基于当时巴西和拉丁美洲智能手机的快速普及、那个急剧的拐点,去构建一家无网点银行,一家正如 David 喜欢说的那样、能把银行网点装进口袋的无网点银行——当时获取金融服务是最大的问题——而你可以在一个数字化成本结构上做到这一点,使你能够在全范围内进行颠覆性定价,这才是带来那波巨大成功的关键。再加上,与世界几乎其他所有地方——包括美国——不同,那些地方的答案是”我们先做银行账户”,Nubank 的答案是”不,我们先做信贷,而信贷难十倍、风险高百倍”,因为作为一个还不懂信贷的年轻公司,如果你把信贷做错了,一切都完了。钱再也回不来了。这两个——同样是集中的赌注——定义一个新品类,我认为是我们成功的关键。
当然,也有一些时候你试图进入一个相邻市场。我们最近进入了巴西一个叫 Consignado 的市场,即面向政府雇员的担保贷款。工作非常稳定,以他们的工资为依据更容易进行承销,利率也低得多。这个市场在巴西已经存在了二十多年,而我们的任务是进入这个市场,我们相信自己构建了一个根本性不同的产品。原来的模式不是数字化的,要经过中间人。我们做了 DTC(直接面向消费者),并且能够大幅压低价格。
在已有品类中也要重新发明
所以即使在已有的品类中,我们也试图构建一种根本性不同的体验。但有时候,说实话,也不完全是在做一个”我也有”的产品,只是差异化会更增量一些。但在公司层面,我认为设计并主导你自己的品类、定义你自己的品类是绝对必要的。即便你进入的是一个客户已经在花钱的领域,我认为你也应该带着一种心态进去——“这会比现有方案好一些”——而且我想 Todd 大概也会同意他的描述方式——你应该试图去重新发明那个品类,即便你并非在创造那个品类。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太精彩了。我很喜欢我们正在形成的这场辩论,两边各有其人,我很期待看它随时间如何演变。感觉目前”不要创造新品类”这一方在声量上领先,但另一边的热情也非常高涨。
Jag Duggal: 我很乐意站在少数派这一边。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,结束前我还想再聊几个话题。Nubank 看起来是历史上在推出新业务线方面最成功的公司之一。你们大概十年历史,现在有多少个产品/业务线?
Jag Duggal: 这取决于你怎么分类,但我会说我们大约有一二十条核心产品线。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好吧,太疯狂了。
从单一信用卡到全方位拉丁美洲银行
Jag Duggal: 我们的故事起步时是一家巴西信用卡公司,只有一款产品,在一个 app 里,诸如此类。在我加入前后——大约就是那个时候——公司的第二阶段开始了,我们的使命,也就是过去五年的故事,是要从一家巴西信用卡公司转型为一家全方位解决方案的拉丁美洲银行,这意味着我们推出了五款新产品。我们推出了银行账户,这使我们从一个次要的银行关系变成了越来越多客户的主要银行关系。在我们九千多万客户中,大约一半以我们为主要银行关系。我们做了贷款产品、投资产品、保险产品,以及一系列小微企业产品。
与此同时,我们也在努力证明——尽管有很多质疑——我们的商业模式是可以输出的,而不是一个独特的巴西现象。所以我们进入了墨西哥和哥伦比亚,现在也开始在墨西哥和哥伦比亚把全套产品线扩展到信用卡以外。
所以,看你怎么看这个矩阵,我们有十几款以上的产品。我们正在推进产品的第三阶段,即超越金融服务。我们在 app 内上线了一个电商市场,如果你从美国的角度来看,这可能有点反直觉。我们也在构想一个银行完全不同于过去一百年的世界——再次用我们在 Nubank 喜欢的说法——从根本上不同。我们相信社交技术、自动驾驶和 AI 技术可以构建一种完全不同的体验。我们不是在把一个银行网点装进你的口袋,而是在构建一个私人银行家——今天,全世界大概只有一千万人能享受到这种服务,而且你得很有钱才行。
我们相信这个角色最终可以被普及到地球上所有八十亿人,而且我们相信对这八十亿人来说,它可以做得比今天那一千万人得到的还要好。但这是大量的工作,而且——用 Christopher Lochhead 和他合著者的说法——这就是我们在全球范围内试图定义的新品类。
Lenny Rachitsky: 一个小小的银行家塞进你的口袋里,一个小小人。
Jag Duggal: 没错。
如何扩展产品线
Lenny Rachitsky: 我想沿着这条线继续聊,不过在此之前——关于增加新产品线和业务单元,观察 Nubank 是怎么做这件事的,你有没有学到什么关于如何做好这件事的经验?我在想象会不会有一张电子表格,“这是我们未来要做的所有事情,这是我们考虑各种因素来决定推出哪些新业务的方式。“你有没有看到什么让你觉得”哇,这是一种非常聪明的思考排序或扩展方向的方式”的东西,可以让其他人学习的?
Jag Duggal: 我真希望能告诉你有一个注定的总体规划,非常科学。现实是,一群聪明人围坐在桌旁,带着一种坦诚、敢于激烈辩论的文化,认真对待利弊,这就是我们做事的方式。同时不断复盘进展如何,什么在奏效,什么还没奏效,什么正在起飞,什么还没有起飞,我们做这些决策所依据的原则是什么——这些一直很重要。
有些事情是显而易见的。如果你在运营一家银行,银行账户在某个阶段可能是个好产品。但其中很多关于排序——什么时候在哪里投入——有些是明显的,比如 TAM(总可达市场)有多大,客户在哪里花钱;但很多是艺术,而那种艺术和辩论的解决,来自于相当充分的辩论。所以我在回避你的问题。我没有好的答案。
Lenny Rachitsky: 就是很多复杂的决策。但我觉得有趣的是,回到你很早学到的那一课——用”是否有 50% 的人会非常失望”作为门槛来决定是否上线——这看起来是一个关键。
不要放大没解决的问题
Jag Duggal: 是的。有一件事是我们试图避免的——不去放大问题。所以我们尽量在事情还小的时候就把问题解决。我们的 Ultravioleta,一款面向高收入人群的奖励信用卡,上线日碰巧是 2021 年 7 月 4 日,所以我很容易记住。我们大概两年半之后才开始规模化推广。
在此期间,我们在实验室里探索产品市场契合度在哪里?为什么没有引起共鸣?哦,原来这部分用户有共鸣。他们特别喜欢的点是什么?让我们在那里迭代。现在到了过去六到九个月的阶段,我们可以开始积极规模化推广了,同时也在学习一些不同的信贷动态,重新发明其中一些方法论,后面还会有第二波规模化。但没错,我们不会陷入的一种分心就是去修复那些在还没准备好之前就过度放大的巨大问题。这有点夸张了——没有什么是那么干净的——但大体上是这个原则。
金融科技的未来
Lenny Rachitsky: 回到你关于 FinTech 未来的想法,尤其是拉美地区,你谈到愿景本质上是每个人的口袋里都有一个银行家。这方面还有什么想补充的吗?你觉得这一切最终会走向何方,无论是拉美还是全球的 FinTech 和银行业?
Jag Duggal: 好的,有几条原则,或者说是假设,是我们所相信的。我应该非常清楚地说明,这些都是未经证实的假设,需要数年时间才能验证,我确定在这个过程中会有转向——当我们发现事情并非最初所期望的那样。但首先,银行应该是全面的这个理念——我们需要提供一种涵盖我们所谓的人生五六个财务季节的全套解决方案:我们消费、我们储蓄、我们投资、我们借贷、我们保障,等等。这也是过去几年我们一直在做的大量工作。
全球银行与单一代码库
Jag Duggal: 第一,我们想成为全面解决方案银行。第二,我们在业务端已经起步,也取得了一些真正的成功,在技术端犯了一些错误正在迭代修正——我们正在构建的,有些人可能觉得我有点夸大其词,但说清楚起见,我们正在构建我们认为是第一个基于单一代码库的全球银行。
我来自 Google 和 Facebook 这样的公司。Google 是我第一次做产品管理的地方。当时我不被允许发布产品,除非它已为 40 个国家和 40 种语言做好准备。我记得第 40 种语言是芬兰语,所以我们总是要确保产品在芬兰语下也能正常工作。ADVA、全球在线广告之所以那样运作是有充分理由的,这是 Google 一条非常好的原则。
但当你进入 FinTech 和银行业,监管是非常本地化的,风险也高得多——你展示的是正确的 300×250 广告——这时对于那种”我们就是要把它到处推广”的心态会有很多抵触。那么如何将这两者结合起来?全球性银行如花旗(Citi)或桑坦德(Santander),很多是通过收购建立起来的,很多运行在不同的代码库和技术基础设施上。我们相信,如果你能基于单一代码库构建一个全球银行,会获得巨大的杠杆效应。这是我们正在努力实现的另一条原则。
社交机制与财务生活的自动化
第三,围绕你的财务生活的社交机制——不是泛泛的那种,不是再做一个 WhatsApp,不是再做一个 Twitter——以及自动驾驶式的自动化。为什么我每个月都得记得付这笔账单?为什么我每个月都得记得为孩子的大学教育存钱?为什么我不能把人生目标整理得井井有条?这几乎是不可能做到的事情。我妻子和我在不同的银行开了不同的账户,就为了完成这个任务——这简直是典型的客户变通办法。我们如何利用这些技术,让管理财务生活全生命周期的难度呈指数级下降,然后再用 AI——虽然这个词现在被过度炒作了——但用 AI 来加速推进这些任务?
我们在 Nubank 开始使用一个短语,我非常喜欢,是 David 最先提出来的:全世界各地的客户都过着严重未经优化的财务生活。我认为无论收入水平如何,无论地理位置如何,无论人生处于什么阶段,这都是事实。如果你有一个年幼的孩子,要跟上所有你该做的事情是非常困难的。你应该开设一个特定类型的储蓄账户,以某种方式累积优势。
让每个人拥有私人银行家
这些是应该被解决的问题,应该很快被解决,可以被自动化,而且可以为客户引入洞察——那些在金融教育方面并非超级精通的客户,顺便说一下,这几乎是我们所有人。有些自认为最精通的人,反而是那些在他们所谓的赌场——即股票市场——里烧钱最多的人。
这些就是我们下一阶段所围绕的一些原则。如果有人就在你身边,能告诉你在这个人生阶段的今天最明智的举动是什么,会怎样?你刚有了孩子,你刚结了婚,你刚买了房子,你只想翻修一下,无论是什么情况。我们认为技术已经到位或接近到位来实现这些。为什么重新定义银行业的公司一定要出自旧金山、纽约或伦敦?为什么不能出自圣保罗、墨西哥城、波哥大?我们看不出为什么不能是我们,所以我们要放手一试。
AI Corner
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了,我非常喜欢这些。我迫不及待想看到这一切成为现实。你提到了 AI,我还有几个问题。你提到了 AI,我们这个播客有一个固定环节叫 AI Corner,那我们就走进 AI Corner 吧。
Jag Duggal: 好的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 通常我会问你在日常工作中和团队是如何使用 AI 的,比如哪些工具和方法能帮助你的团队借助 AI 更好地运转,但我也很好奇你们是如何将 AI 整合到产品中的。你刚才稍微提到了一点,但我想了解一下 AI 将如何为你正在构建的东西注入强大动力。
Jag Duggal: 我们使用的是大家目前都在用的一些工具。我们内部隔离版本的 ChatGPT 以及一些标准工具,我们以一些显而易见的第一波方式在使用它们。我们如何改善客户体验?如果你对客户狂热,你就会对客户体验狂热,Nubank 一直以来都是如此。我们如何在让它更高效的同时也变得更好?所以过去大约 18 个月里,我们在学习曲线上攀升的过程中一直在做这些事情。
然后我们开始思考,我们能够以哪些方式构建 AI 原生产品。我不会假装我们已经破解了密码,但我之前的一位老板 Fidji Simo 不久前讲过,她现在是 Instacart 的 CEO——她谈到在她担任 Facebook 广告产品负责人期间,正赶上从桌面端到移动端的大迁移,她说我们需要成为移动原生的。
以此类推,今天的企业需要弄清楚 AI 原生意味着什么——不是如何把 AI 贴在产品的边角上,而是如何将其构建在核心中。如果这些工具从一开始就存在,你会怎么设计?Facebook 向移动端的迁移就是那个转型的一个绝佳案例。他们喜欢开玩笑——我当时不在 Facebook,但我加入七八年后 Facebook 里的人还在聊这件事——公司 IPO 之后需要找到一个商业模式,而 Fidji 负责实现这件事,其核心就是引入移动原生的思维。所以我们正在努力思考,什么是 AI 原生的思维?在金融服务中它会是什么样子?这需要的是分析而非简单的类比——我们正处于这个过程的中间,并不掌握所有的答案。如果世界上每个人,无论收入或财富多少,身边都坐着一位私人银行家,需要的时候随时可以求助——这个比喻很好。所以我们正在运用这个比喻,看看它能把我们带向何方。
失败角
Lenny Rachitsky: 现在让我们转到另一个角——失败角。这是播客的另一个固定环节。你能否分享一个你职业生涯中失败的故事,某次出了问题的事情,最好是出了严重问题的情况,以及它对你的职业生涯产生了怎样的影响和帮助?也就是你从那次经历中学到的教训?
Jag Duggal: 我职业生涯中有一个相当关键的故事,最终以失败告终,我不得不从中重建。我做了将近十年的战略咨询,然后决定去读研究生,想把职业方向转向公共政策和政治。我在哈佛肯尼迪政府学院,入学一年后,我的一个朋友所在的创业公司被 Google 收购了——这家公司的核心理念是把 AdWords/AdSense 风格的广告带到地面广播电台市场。而 Google 当时在搜索和展示广告已经站稳脚跟之后,正在进行也许是其最大的多元化押注——去颠覆电视、广播和纸媒。那是 2006 年。
Jag Duggal: 我朋友说服我从研究生院退学——不管是肯尼迪学院还是商学院。我在肯尼迪学院已经读了一年,只差一个学分;商学院才上了一周。然后我就搬到了加州,加入了 Google。首先,那个假设的前提被证明是错误的,或者至少比我们想象的要困难得多。具体来说,地面广播电台,或者说电视广告、传统媒体广告,运作方式完全不同。它实际上服务的是一个不同的市场——品牌广告、漏斗顶端类型的目标,而不是 Google 真正擅长的漏斗底端。
Lenny Rachitsky: 在那个年代。
Jag Duggal: 这是其中一个方面。还有各种技术方法论,比如”覆盖和频次”,这些都是非常重要的概念,而我们根本不了解。我们执意要搞拍卖机制。我们至今还持有专利,都是关于如何将拍卖方法论引入传统广播媒体的方法。确实有一些很有意思的技术。但归根结底,你真正需要的是充足的广告库存,而与传统媒体相比,线上广告库存其实并不算多。另一个事实是,控制这些库存的人并不像线上那样分散——当你在跟 NBC、CBS 或 Clear Channel 谈判时,他们比线上世界里那些博客主和小网站拥有大得多的议价权。碎片化不存在,方法论也不同,注定是一场更艰难的硬仗。与此同时,Google 实际上做了一个非常明智的赌注——这是 Google 的一次战略转型,一方面基于那一侧失败中的大量经验教训,另一方面也得益于 YouTube 那边正在取得的成功。
与此同时,Google 收购了 YouTube。在此过程中——这跨越了数年时间——Susan Wojcicki 和 Google 的领导团队,特别是 Google 广告团队,得出了一个结论:与其让 Google 去追逐电视,不如让电视来投奔 Google,也就是 YouTube。我们在随后的 15 年里看到了发生了什么——有线用户”剪线”以及诸如此类的一切——如今 Google 最擅长的线上数字广告方法论可以以一种直接得多的方式被应用。但我成了附带损伤。我和我所在的一些团队,成了那场演变中的附带牺牲品。有那么一个时间点,Google 进行了一次小规模裁员,主要就集中在我的这个收购团队里。
从失败中重建
在这段过程中,Google 收购了 YouTube,也收购了 DoubleClick,而 DoubleClick 服务于线上所有的品牌广告。几年后……首先,当时我距离被裁员只有几周时间,而我已经从两所研究生院退学,搬到了三千英里之外的西海岸。那种感觉糟透了。那个时期有一首很好的歌,是 Coldplay 和 Jay-Z 的混音作品。《Lost》。你应该听听歌词。“Just because I’m losing doesn’t mean I’ve lost”——这简直就是第一句词。那时候我反复单曲循环这首歌。在一两年内——大概一年,也许一年半左右——那段时间我结婚了。所以那段时间发生了很多事。结果,在 DoubleClick 收购完成大约一年后,Google 做出了一个决定:有了 YouTube 作为核心资产,再加上其他一些东西,以及 DoubleClick 的收购,一项 15 年后已经相当成熟的技术——实时竞价(Real-Time Bidding)——已经建立起来了。我们将把搜索拍卖方法论推广到整个 Web,覆盖所有的展示广告。我们将利用那个核心底层基础设施,不仅建设一个现货市场式的直接效果广告,还要建设一个期货市场,服务于品牌广告。我们将利用这个颠覆性的突破口——一种根本性的不同,而非渐进式的改良——来从根本上将 Yahoo 从线上品牌广告的统治地位上撬走。而我最终拿到了这个任务,恰恰因为我在 12 到 18 个月前学到了很多关于品牌广告如何运作的知识。所以那是一个相当壮观的失败。
顺便说一下,那笔收购最终进入了仲裁程序,涉及大型诉讼、证词采集,从各个角度看都非常混乱。我们都一步步撑了过来。最终,我们建成了即使到今天我相信仍然是 Google 第二大业务的东西——展示广告业务。但那个转型过程是混乱的,从战略角度来看极其艰难——正如我们之前讨论过的——从情感层面也是如此,需要在迷茫中找到自己的方向。考虑到我对产品管理是新手,对硅谷是新手,对 Google 是新手,对广告行业也是新手,我完全不知道自己是否真的能胜任这件事。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你觉得那个故事的教训基本上就是那首歌的意思——“just because you’re losing doesn’t mean you’ve lost”,或者你不是失败者,继续前行就好?
Jag Duggal: 是的,执拗是一种被严重低估的品质。当我们从战略到执行把一切都过度智化的时候,有时候坚持才是关键。而在坚持的同时仍然清醒地认识到成功的概率有多大,这也是关键。
总结与核心要点
Lenny Rachitsky: Jag,我们已经覆盖了我希望讨论的所有内容,甚至更多。在进入你非常令人期待的快问快答环节之前,你有没有什么想留给听众的,或者想作为最后一点分享的?
Jag Duggal: 我就概括几个核心要点。我认为坚持这个概念——非常清楚自己想要达成什么,它对你有多大价值,你愿意为之付出多少努力去争取——同时也要对来自他人、来自市场的反馈保持开放和透明,了解哪些有效、哪些无效,知道哪些该放手、哪些该紧紧抓住——这是一个很重要的教训。
我认为另一件我想再次强调的事情——这也多少回到你之前试图框定的关于”新品类还是现有品类”的辩论——我认为在那场辩论之中,实际上存在一种综合的结论,而且我想大多数人会同意:如果你作为一个挑战者想要突围,你不能在传统在位者稳固的阵地上与他们作战。你必须找到一个颠覆性的突破口,这意味着要去苦苦寻找那种根本性的不同,让它能够穿透噪音。而在过去 15 年里,噪音的音量已经变得如此之大,以至于我认为这一点的重要性还在不断上升。渐进式的改良无法带你到达目标。除非你有那个钩子,否则你到不了。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我很喜欢你总结了自己的核心要点。这也是我一直想做的事情,我可能会请每位嘉宾都尝试总结一下他们分享的内容,因为那真的非常有帮助。说到这里,我们来到了非常令人期待的快问快答环节。你准备好了吗?
Jag Duggal: 准备好了。来吧。
Lenny Rachitsky: 第一个问题:你最常向别人推荐的两三本书是什么?
Jag Duggal: 商业书籍方面,一本是《Play to Win》。我认为那是一本很出色的现代战略书,把数字世界中发生的很多事情做了很好的总结。第二本我想推荐的,我认为是一本非常好的非数字领域的战略精华提炼,而且正如你之前提到的,他很快就要上你的播客了——来自 Roger Martin 的《Where to Play and How to Win》,我认为这是一部经典。
推荐书目(续)
Jag Duggal: 正如我之前提到的,我 15 年前回去学了公共政策和政治学。在我看来,最极致的创业故事之一就是新加坡的故事。新加坡建国总理——几年前他已经去世了——有一本自传,记录了从 1965 年到他退休的经历。Lee Kuan Yew(李光耀)。他的书讲述了新加坡被踢出马来西亚的故事——用商业术语来说,一个规模以下的、微小的、没有任何自然资源的国家——我认为非常鼓舞人心。他的书叫《From Third World to First》(从第三世界到第一世界)。我认为这是一个很棒的故事,在许多方面与创业公司试图做的事情是平行的——本质上是实现从第三到第一的跃迁——而这是一段非常艰难的旅程,需要对自己所处的位置和成功所需的代价有一种毫不留情的诚实。通常,当人们事后回顾讲述时,会把故事美化了,但事实上每一步都是一团糟的。我认为这是一份很棒的、不加粉饰的总结,讲述了在一个我们平时不太讨论的领域中成就伟大所需要付出的代价,毫无保留。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我太喜欢这个了。我现在一定要读这本书。下一个问题:你最近有没有特别喜欢的电影或电视剧?
近期喜爱的影视
Jag Duggal: 有一部很棒的剧集,我和妻子前不久在 HBO 上看了,叫《The Gilded Age》(镀金时代)。它以一种非常有趣的方式展示了技术——这是 19 世纪末的时代——技术变革如何同时颠覆经济世界和财富格局,以及一个社会中的社会动态。这部剧很迷人,因为我们正在经历一个新的镀金时代,我们看到许多类似的动态,但在社交媒体上被加速放大了,所以格外精彩。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好时代。你最近有没有发现什么特别喜欢的产品?可以是 app、实物,任何给你带来快乐的东西?
近期发现的好产品
Jag Duggal: 我当时在跑步机上一边跑一边听你那期和 Christopher Lochhead 的播客,他在中间提到了一款和品类设计理念相关的产品。我忘了你问了他什么问题,但他提到了 Lomi——就是厨房台面上的堆肥机。我 13 岁的女儿非常有理想主义,已经催了我们一年多要做堆肥,于是我们买了一台 Lomi,昨晚刚刚完成了第五批土壤。它的效果和宣传的一模一样,非常棒。我从做正确的事情中获得巨大的快乐——以一种现代的方式,在一个加速的时间框架内,一夜之间完成。而且全家人都有同感。这真的是一个全新的产品品类——厨房电器——我还记得 Christopher 说过,创造台面上的空间是一种宝贵的资源,我们很高兴这么做了。这是最近三周才发生的故事。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这让我太开心了。我也觉得 Chris 听了这期一定会觉得这是我所有播客中他最喜欢的一期。对他满满的爱。太不可思议了。我也得弄一台。还有两个问题。
人生座右铭
Lenny Rachitsky: 你有没有最喜欢的人生座右铭,经常想到、经常回顾、会和亲友分享,在工作或生活中对你有用的?
Jag Duggal: 在工作中,在非常狭窄的工作范畴内——这期播客我大概已经用了至少十几次了,这对我在工作中一个半小时的对话来说算是正常水平——我们的使命是做”根本性的不同,而非渐进式的更好”。我认为这是核心座右铭,而且它以一种略微修改的方式也适用于人生。你要活出你想建造的人生,而不是去勾选别人希望你勾选的框。曾经有一段时间,我在一家咨询公司做合伙人,然后我辞职去读研究生,人们觉得我疯了。后来还有一次,我让父母惊骇不已——我从哈佛退学了——我到底在想什么?
然后跑到硅谷来——正如我们之前谈到的,几周之内就搞砸了。还有一次,不太久以前,四年前,我离开了 Facebook,去加入这家疯狂的在圣保罗的银行。我对银行业了解多少?我对巴西又真正了解多少?如果你不清楚自己到底想做什么,这是第一点;第二点,如果你不愿意承受失败,那你不过是在勾选别人的期望清单。所以”根本性的不同”很重要——当然,现在这是一种奢侈品。对我们这些住在湾区和硅谷的人来说相对容易做到,所以我非常清楚这是一种特权和奢侈品,但我认为每个人都应该努力追求属于自己的版本。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我喜欢你把这个理念延伸到了不只是商业,还有人生。我甚至没有想到它可以延伸到那么远。
走私芒果的故事
Lenny Rachitsky: 最后一个问题。我知道你马上得走了,但我不得不问这件事。据说你曾经因为走私芒果被定罪过。能讲讲这个故事吗?
Jag Duggal: 好。正如我提到的,我在加勒比海的特立尼达长大。我哥哥和我卧室外面有一棵芒果树,果实丰沛,品质极佳。而在这里的美国——我可以非常确切地说,至少在加州——芒果的品质是次等的。别提什么渐进式的更好了,它们就是不行。我觉得美国人并不知道一颗真正好的芒果是什么样的,也不知道那是多么令人愉悦的一件事。
每次回家,我都会想办法带芒果回来。有一次,从加勒比海经迈阿密国际机场入境时,我带了十二个芒果,用报纸包着,塞在衣服中间。我没料到——虽然那时离 9/11 还有几个月——但我没料到美国农业部已经变聪明了,他们知道从加勒比海来的人一定会带食物,这是肯定的,而且一定会试图走私进来。所以他们让整架飞机的旅客都过了农业检查。那个人透过 X 光机看了看,说:“先生,你包里有十一个芒果。“那一刻我就知道被逮住了。我说:“嗯,你漏了一个。“我能看到那个画面。我说:“你漏了一个,实际上是十二个。”
Jag Duggal: 我最后上了农业观察名单。然后 9/11 发生了,接下来有三四年的时间,作为管理顾问,我每周在机场出现两次。你的机票上会出现 SSSS 字样,他们说是随机的。连续三年,每一次航班,我都会被标记接受特别安检——因为我对芒果的热爱。但这一切是值得的。芒果是一种被误解的、被低估的水果。如果你在加勒比海长大,你很难接受没有顶级芒果的生活。所以我在加州至今仍然很痛苦。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我希望你的犯罪生涯已经改过自新了。
Jag Duggal: 我已经改过自新了。而且和巴西公司合作的一个好处是,巴西的芒果品质是一流的。所以现在我比较经常能享受到了。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太不公平了。我回头一定要找你推荐芒果。Jag,我已经占用你够长时间了。我觉得这期播客绝对不是”渐进式的更好”——它无疑是”根本性的不同”。非常感谢你能来。最后两个问题:大家如果想要联系你或跟进一些话题,可以在哪里找到你?以及,听众可以怎样帮到你?
Jag Duggal: 谢谢你,Lenny。我非常享受这次对话,很感激你的邀请,也非常感谢你的美言。找到我最好的地方大概是 LinkedIn,Jag Duggal,这个名字相当独特,很容易找到。我一直在寻找故事和机会,尤其是那些”根本性的不同”的故事。我很想听到这样的故事,特别是在逆境中做出的选择,或者明明有更方便、更容易的选项却依然选择了不同的道路的时候。我们在做的事情是打造世界上第一家社交化、自动驾驶式的 AI 驱动银行,听起来确实像是很多 NBA 黑话和硅谷流行词堆砌在一起,但我们是认真的。所以任何想要加入我们所说的”紫色革命”的人——我们的品牌色是紫色——无论你在世界哪个角落,都欢迎联系我们。我们的员工遍布各地。
Lenny Rachitsky: 如果他们感兴趣的话,网址是 newbank.com/careers 吗?
Jag Duggal: 没错,应该是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了。顺便问一下,你们那个紫色品牌色有专门的颜色名称吗?
Jag Duggal: 我们不是自己这么叫的,是我们的客户把那张紫色的小信用卡叫做”xuxu”——在葡萄牙语里 roxinho 的意思是紫色。roxinho 基本上就是”小紫卡”的意思。实际上有一个时刻——2016 年巴西出现了一些监管问题,当时 Nubank 有被迫关停的风险。结果是我们的客户主动打电话给中央银行,说”你们不能让这件事发生”。从那天起,一位当时公司还只有一百来人时的工程师说了一句:“The future is purple”(未来是紫色的)。现在 Nubank 到处都有印着”The future is purple”的 T 恤,这是我们起源故事的一部分。
Lenny Rachitsky: 那就放你去忙了。Jag,你太棒了。我觉得这期节目会帮到很多人。非常感谢你能来。
Jag Duggal: Lenny,真的非常享受。多谢,聊得很开心。
Lenny Rachitsky: 大家再见。非常感谢收听。如果你觉得这期节目有价值,可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你喜欢的播客应用上订阅。也请考虑给我们评分或留下评论,这真的能帮助更多听众找到这档播客。你可以在 Lennyspodcast.com 找到所有往期节目或了解更多关于这档节目的信息。下期再见。
术语表
| 原文 | 中文 |
|---|---|
| AdWords/AdSense | AdWords/AdSense(Google 的在线广告产品) |
| AI Corner | AI Corner(播客的固定环节) |
| AI native | AI 原生 |
| bloody-mindedness | 执拗(此处指不服输、咬紧牙关坚持的品质) |
| C-suite | C-suite(企业高管层,指 CEO、CFO、CPO 等以 C 开头的最高管理层职位) |
| category design | 品类设计(一种产品战略方法论,旨在创造并主导全新品类) |
| Christopher Lochhead | Christopher Lochhead(品类设计理论的倡导者,播客往期嘉宾) |
| churn | 流失率(用户取消或停止使用产品的比率) |
| Citi | 花旗(Citi,全球性银行) |
| Clear Channel | Clear Channel(美国最大的广播电台运营商,后更名为 iHeartMedia) |
| Consignado | Consignado(巴西的一种担保贷款模式,通常以借款人工资直接扣款偿还) |
| cord cutting | 剪线(指取消有线电视台订阅、转向流媒体服务的趋势) |
| CPO (Chief Product Officer) | CPO(首席产品官) |
| cultural tenets | 文化原则 |
| David | David(指 David Vélez,Nubank 创始人兼 CEO) |
| design thinking | 设计思维 |
| DoubleClick | DoubleClick(Google 2008 年收购的数字广告技术公司) |
| DTC (Direct to Consumer) | DTC(直接面向消费者,跳过中间商的销售模式) |
| failure corner | 失败角(播客的固定环节) |
| Fidji Simo | Fidji Simo(前 Facebook 广告产品负责人,现任 Instacart CEO) |
| From Third World to First | 《From Third World to First》(李光耀回忆录,记述新加坡从发展中国家跃升为发达国家的历程) |
| incumbent | 传统在位者(指行业中已有的占据主导地位的企业) |
| Instacart | Instacart(美国线上杂货配送平台) |
| Kennedy School of Government | 肯尼迪政府学院(哈佛大学的公共政策研究生院) |
| Kevin Systrom | Kevin Systrom(Instagram 联合创始人) |
| LATAM | 拉美(拉丁美洲地区的简称) |
| leaky bucket | 漏桶(比喻用户流失率高的商业模式,新进来的用户不断从底部漏走) |
| Lee Kuan Yew | 李光耀(新加坡建国总理) |
| Lex Friedman | Lex Friedman(播客主持人) |
| Lomi | Lomi(厨房台面式家用堆肥机产品) |
| mobile native | 移动原生 |
| mock press release | 模拟新闻稿(Amazon 常用的产品规划方法,在开发前撰写假想的产品发布新闻稿) |
| negativado | negativado(葡萄牙语,指因欠款被列入信用黑名单的负面信用记录状态) |
| neo bank | 数字银行(无实体网点、完全在线运营的银行) |
| North Star | 北极星(指引方向的核心指标或原则) |
| NPS (Net Promoter Score) | NPS(净推荐值,衡量用户忠诚度和口碑的指标) |
| payment rails | 支付通道(完成支付交易的底层基础设施和网络) |
| PIX | PIX(巴西实时移动支付系统,由巴西央行于2020年推出) |
| Play to Win | 《Play to Win》(Christopher Lochhead 合著的战略框架书籍) |
| product market fit | 产品市场契合度 |
| Real-Time Bidding | 实时竞价(在线广告中实时竞拍广告展示位的技术模式) |
| resonant | 引起共鸣(此处保留原文语境含义,指内心深处产生回响) |
| Richard Rumelt | Richard Rumelt(战略管理学者,著有《Good Strategy Bad Strategy》《The Crux》) |
| Roger Martin | Roger Martin(战略管理学者,曾任 Rotman 管理学院院长) |
| roxinho | roxinho(葡萄牙语,意为”小紫色的”,Nubank 用户对其紫色信用卡的昵称) |
| Santander | 桑坦德(Santander,西班牙全球性银行) |
| schwag | 周边产品(公司制作的带有品牌标识的赠品,如文化衫、马克杯等) |
| Sean Ellis score | Sean Ellis 评分(衡量产品市场契合度的指标,以提出者 Sean Ellis 命名) |
| SSSS | SSSS(美国机场安检中的 Secondary Security Screening Selection 标记,表示需接受额外安检) |
| Susan Wojcicki | Susan Wojcicki(Google 前 CEO,YouTube 前 CEO) |
| TAM (Total Addressable Market) | TAM(总可达市场,指某个产品或服务所能触及的全部市场需求总量) |
| tentpole products | 核心支柱产品(公司最重要、最具代表性的旗舰产品) |
| The Gilded Age | 《The Gilded Age》(HBO 出品的电视剧,讲述 19 世纪末美国镀金时代的故事) |
| Todd Jackson | Todd Jackson(前 Gmail 产品负责人,现为风险投资人) |
| Trinidad | 特立尼达(加勒比海岛国特立尼达和多巴哥的主岛) |
| Ultravioleta | Ultravioleta(Nubank 旗下面向高收入人群的奖励信用卡产品) |
| Where to Play and How to Win | 《Where to Play and How to Win》(Roger Martin 著作,关于战略选择的框架) |
| workaround | 变通办法(用户为绕过产品缺陷或不便而自行采取的替代方案) |
此文档由 AI 分片翻译(translate_long_document)