与巨人竞争:The Browser Company 如何打造产品的内部视角 | Josh Miller(CEO)
Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO)
Genuine Passion of the Team
Josh Miller: We want people that show up to our company with some fire in their belly, something that they are out to do. And for each person it’s a little bit different. For some people it may be UI Craft details. For other people, it may be achieving double the performance with a quarter of the engineering headcount. Everyone has something, but they show up with this heartfelt intensity. And I think even relative to everything else, I’m going to say, that’s it. If you have a team that has heartfelt intensity and is there for a purpose and something to prove, you get it. You give them a very exciting, ambitious product and get out of their way and they will do remarkable work.
Intro to the Podcast
Lenny: Welcome to Lenny’s podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard one experiences building and growing today’s most successful products. Today my guest is Josh Miller. Josh is the CEO and co-founder of a company called The Browser Company, which makes a product called Arc, which has quickly become my default web browser. I fell in love with this product as soon as I started using it and wanted to get a glimpse into how Josh and his team approached the craft of product. There’s this cohort of companies like the Browser Company, [inaudible 00:01:09], a few others that are just laser focused on building the best possible user experience, almost above all else. And I wanted to spend some time exploring this trend with Josh. We cover how he thinks about prioritization, team building, storytelling, company values, metrics, shipping, building in public so much more.
Josh is such an earnest, genuine and humble human, and it was such a pleasure getting to learn from him. And, just to be clear, I’m not an investor in the Browser Company and I barely knew anything about the company before I chatted with Josh. So, I’m just a fan. And as a special surprise, Arc is normally invite only. But if you’re listening to this now, check the show notes for a special link that’ll get you right in to use the browser, if you want to play with it yourself. With that, I bring you Josh Miller after a short word from our select sponsors.
Speaker 3 (00:02:01):
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Josh, welcome to the podcast.
Josh Miller: Thank you so much for having me, Lenny.
What is Arc
Lenny: It’s absolutely my pleasure. You are the CEO and co-founder of The Browser Company, which builds a product called Arc. Can you just talk about what is The Browser Company? What is Arc? And then whatever you can share about just like the scale of Arc at this point. That’d be really interesting to hear.
Core Metrics: D5/D7
Josh Miller: Sure. I hope you don’t mind me doing this. I’m curious, I hear that you may, may or may not use Arc? How would you describe Arc to somebody?
Product Philosophy: Rethinking Silicon Valley
Lenny: The simple explanation is it’s just the best web browser that I’ve used. So, to me it’s a browser. I know that you have a bigger vision than that, but that’s the way I see it as a layperson who hasn’t seen the full vision.
Optimizing Feel Over Metrics
Josh Miller: Awesome. I think we can go home now. That’s great. That’s awesome.
Lenny: There we go.
Facebook vs. Snapchat
Josh Miller: No. To be totally honest with you and your listeners, we have a really hard time describing Arc, which is something I’m not proud of. But it is, objectively, a replacement for your default web browser. And people who try it seem to really love it, and most people seem to have a hard time using the internet in the old way. So, that may sound like I’m being coy, but we have work shopped many a one-liners and the words have escaped us so far. So, to be honest, it is on our to-do list to get sharper about that.
And then in terms of our scale, since we have a lot of product managers listening, I’ll give you the PM answer to that question, which is, we really focus on one key metric as it relates to tracking our growth or how we are doing. We call it D5, D7. A lot of other companies call it L5, L7. But the human explanation for that is how many people turn to Arc at least five days a week? That is all we obsess over from a metrics perspective, because for us it captures retention, engagement, and growth in a single metric. You can’t game it. Right? So from retention perspective, it’s not just opening it accidentally once a week. You need to open a tab on a day in order to count as an active for a day.
But so it tracks retention. It tracks engagement because five days a week is no joke. There are very few apps or pieces of software you actively use five days a week. And then, obviously, it tracks growth, because of we track the count. So that is what we track. And then we also don’t obsess over absolute numbers, because if we’re successful, if you zoom out and out and out, any point in time will be inconsequential and small. So, what we really look is growth rate week over week. So, relative to last week, what is our growth rate? And for the past eight months or so, we’ve been growing over 10% every single week. So very, very thrilled with that. Do not think that will continue If anyone is listening. I would be shocked if we continue like that for another eight months. But, yeah. We obsess over how many humans use Arc five out of seven days a week. And we really want that number to grow as fast as possible every single week.
Making “Feel” Optimization Work
Lenny: I love that we’re already talking about metrics and retention. This is off to a good start.
Josh Miller: You got to know your audience. Lenny.
Values Behind Fast Iteration
Lenny: We’re going to talk about just how public you’re about everything. But would you be for sharing your retention actual numbers? The D5 and D7 you just mentioned?
Josh Miller: Yes. With the asterisk that I didn’t prepare for that. So, Rebecca correct me on Twitter after this, if this is wrong. So once again, we don’t look at DAU retention. We don’t look at weekly active-user retention. We really just look at D5 D7 retention. Depending on the cohort, that’s somewhere between low to mid-30s and low 40s. So really, really fantastic. Again, not going to continue. If there is anyone on this call that is going to check this in a year, it will be lower I’m sure. But so far, we’re really thrilled with it.
And most importantly, in the same way, we don’t look at absolute gross growth number, we don’t look at retention in this moment. We look at, is it improving cohort by cohort? And so, what I think I am most proud of is that, if you go back a year, by all means our retention curve, we were really proud of it. And I think one of the best in our category of software. But, what I’m really proud of is, 12 months later we’ve been inching it up and up and up, despite getting further away from the earliest most passionate adopters. So, our retention curve’s going up and up a little bit, which is-
Origins of These Values
Lenny: All right. All right. If you haven’t shared that, that’d be cool to share on Twitter someday. I’m a retained user.
Josh Miller: I’m going to wait and you can share this clip. We’ll share this clip.
The Writing Process
Lenny: Okay. Okay. I love it. We’re just ready. We got the marketing strategy coming together. So, I told you this ahead of the chat, but the reason I wanted to have you on this podcast, even though, as folks may know, and as I’ve told you, I try to actually avoid founders and CEOs on this podcast to give other folks a platform who aren’t often invited on podcasts. But the reason I wanted to have you on is, I just feel like Arc is a remarkable product. It blew me away the first time I used it. I don’t know if you saw it, I tweeted as soon as I signed up? I had to share how awesome it was. I was like-
Josh Miller: Of course I saw it. It made my day.
Recruiting Top Talent
Lenny: Okay. Okay, great. And, also as an outside observer, it just feels like you’re building remarkable culture and team that’s really unique. And, so I just want to selfishly learn from how you think about product and team building and all the things that go into it. So yeah.
Josh Miller: Thanks for saying that, Lenny. What a cool way to kick off an interview.
Attracting Through Mission and Vision
Lenny: Absolutely. First question I have along those lines is, you mentioned at some point that your product building philosophy is a reaction to the traditional Silicon Valley way of building product. I’m curious to hear what led you down that road? Why did you feel like you had to react to it? And then how would you just describe your product building philosophy at The Browser Company?
Josh Miller: I’ll share this caveat once and never again in this interview. But I want anyone listening to know, I’m someone who doesn’t believe there is a single right way to do things. So, what I’m sharing today is truly just what we have found works for us in this moment for what we are doing. But, I remember when I was earlier in my career, I’d listen to podcasts like this and take it as dogma, because there are these people that had done it and I respected what they’d built. So, if any of this sounds like “better than thou,” it’s not intended to. This is just what we found works for us and what we care about. [inaudible 00:09:59].
Okay. So early in my career started a company also with Hursh, my current co-founder and CTO. We were fortunate enough to have that company acquired or acqui-hired by Facebook and spent a number of years working at Facebook. And remarkable organization, probably the best executing I’ve ever seen at that period of time. And, by the way, I’d never been a PM before, so I’m not complimenting myself, I was just learning for the first time. But what struck me at Facebook in call it 2014, and I’ve seen through to this day, is Silicon Valley, at least the most modern version of Silicon Valley, has this obsession with graphs, and has this obsession with numbers and metrics.
I mean, you saw me in the previous answer, I’m talking about D5, D7. What’s a D5, D7? And, it is an incredibly effective way to achieve certain outcomes, to focus on numbers, because it’s very quantitative, it’s objective. You can see the graph go up or go down, or stay flat depending on what you want. But what we’ve found is that optimizing for metrics leaves a lot on the table and it misses a lot. And so, what we do at The Browser Company is we talk about optimizing feelings. How do we want to make someone feel on the other end of our software? Do we want to make them feel joy? Do we want to make them feel fast? Do we want to make them feel organized? Do we want to make them feel focused? What is it the feeling we are trying to evoke in whatever we’re doing on a specific project, or a specific feature, or a specific piece of storytelling content?
And I can imagine what’s going through the heads of your listeners right now, which is probably a number of things. But among others, that sounds really damn romantic. If they’re like, “Okay. You optimizing for feelings.” But if you allow me, I would posit that actually this modern way of optimizing for numbers and graphs, especially for what we all do every day, which is make things and put in the world, is what’s fairly odd. Because, if you just to yourself daydream about, what are your favorite products or product companies and brands, while it may sound cliche for me, Nike. Nike was one of the first companies that at a very deep level resonate with me as a child. Disney? Disney, same thing. Apple? Before I was a professional in an industry, these were the brands and the products that they made that really made me love something that was ostensibly a commercial product I could buy.
What do you think Walt Disney was optimizing for when he was crafting Disneyland? What do you think Phil Knight was thinking about when he made that first version of the Nike running shoe? What do you think Steve Jobs was imagining and daydreaming about when thinking about the iPhone or the Macintosh? By all means, numbers are a fantastic way to be honest with yourself about whether or not you are achieving what you aim to do. But at the moment of creation, at the stage as product people, wondering what should we do, and why, and how? We think it’s much more important for us to think about the human, the person at the other end, and how we really want to make them feel.
I think one tangible example of that is when I was at Facebook, I joined in the midst of Snapchat’s ascendancy. And, there was a lot of feelings about how are we doing, should we be worried? And the way that we would have that conversation would be, how many times per week do people share on Facebook? Do they post something? We even had an acronym OBPS. It’s like seared into my memory. What is OBPS? And how is it trending over time? Well, I think we should have been asking, and what we at least would ask at The Browser Company and our way of product development is, “Do we think people feel closer to their friends and family?” Or something of that nature?
I think that’s what Snapchat got so right. They weren’t obsessing about something like, “How many people put an image into the composer and hit the plus button. And the number of times per week means success.” They were thinking about something much more human and essential. And so, that is what we’ve [inaudible 00:14:07] The Browser Company. Don’t optimize for metrics, don’t optimize for graphs. Use that as a way to keep you honest, and use it as a tool in your toolkit. But fundamentally, none of us are here for that. We’re there to make people feel something.
Experimenting with Public Transparency
Lenny: As you pointed out, I think a lot of the people are listening are like, “I love that. I wish I could do that. I want to optimize for feelings, but then I got to drive the business forward. I got goals to hit. I want to keep people accountable.” I’m curious how you operationalize this approach? How do you actually implement this idea? I imagine you still have goals and metrics and you guys, you talked about retention and things like that.
Building Radical Trust
Josh Miller: Yeah. Obviously it’s difficult to do that in the abstract for another company, and it may not work for every company and every product. But, for example, one of the reasons we found this to be so effective so far is, if you pick the right feeling, it typically tracks pretty closely with the metric you care about. So, for example, we don’t have a growth team and we have no semblance of growth projects. However, in many of the new features that we put out into the world, we want people to feel surprise or joy or an emotion like that. Guess what? When people feel that way, they go, “Oh, my God, what was that?” And they start telling their friends and family about it, and they start dropping a screenshot in Slack, et cetera. So, there’s one example on the consumer side. I’ve never built traditional enterprise software selling to CIOs, et cetera. But I can imagine maybe someone in the IT department of a large enterprise wants to feel smart, or wants to feel ahead of the curve or wants to feel secure and ease at what they’re doing.
I think sometimes we just forget that whoever your buyer is, or whatever your business objective, at the end of the day we’re a bunch of people in a bunch of rooms at the other side of these screens. And just thinking about that person, it could be a buyer, it could be a customer. But I think the truth is the answer to the question Lenny is, when I was earlier in my career, I was searching for the answers or the way to do things, the right, the wrong, the binary. I think anyone that’s been doing this or anything for a while learns that it’s all nuanced. It’s a spectrum. It depends. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
But I think the true answer, Lenny, is just optimizing for metrics so purely is deeply flawed in my opinion. Optimizing for feelings so purely is flawed as well. And it depends on what you are doing, what the project is and a lot of other things. But I think the reason we come out so strongly is, I do think Silicon Valley has tended so far towards optimizing for graphs and metrics, that if we can reel it back in a little bit, at least as just one company, I think that will be good. But the truth is, it’s both. We need to use all the tools we can get, but I think hopefully that’s one way that people can operationalize.
Lenny: I’m curious, just to poke out a little bit, how you actually implement that? So maybe as an example, you recently launched this Peek feature, where you mouse over, I think, a link and it opens up in a little browser that doesn’t last. Do you put together a little spec of some sort of, “We’re trying to create surprise, and maybe here’s a metric we think about it.” What’s actual day-to-day operational approach to a new feature, in terms of feelings versus metrics?
Key Podcast Takeaways
Josh Miller: Yeah. The truth is I don’t think we’ve operationalized it as formally as we should one day. And we’ll probably need to one day. The lucky thing is we are a very tight group of individuals that have now worked together for a long time. So not so formal as there’s a PRD at the top of it, we list out the emotions. It’s much more, with that project, get Ben in a room and whoever else is working on it and say, “All right. So here’s what we’re trying to do for people. Here’s the problem we’re trying to solve or the way we fit in their day. And in that moment people want to feel very light and airy.”
So, for the Peek feature [inaudible 00:18:07] he’s referencing the use cases. You’re on Hacker News and you want to probably in pretty quick succession check out five to seven URLs. And you’re not really sure which one you’re going to spend time on, but you’re going to open a bunch of stuff really quickly. And Peek allows you to effortlessly just peek into it, without leaving Hacker News and context switching to this whole new tab and going back and forth. So in that scenario, the conversation was how do we make it feel really airy and effortless to just whoop, pop it up, pop it back down, lightness, airiness, speed, agility. So again, it’s not that we have a, “What is the number one feeling and the number two feeling?” It is much more conversational at this stage, but I am actually really excited. Hopefully we got the privilege one day to have such a large team that we have to figure out a way to do it. So, that’s an example of how we think about it.
Lenny: It’s a good segue to a question I wanted to touch on. So, I asked Scott Belsky what I should ask you. He’s a big fan of yours. I don’t know if he’s an investor? But he’s just like, “I love Josh.” And asked him, “What should I ask Josh?” And one of his questions was about, you guys ship very quickly. You’re shipping meaningful features every Friday. And you also close the loop really well with customers when they come ask for something. You’re like, “Hey, here. We did it.” What is it that you do, and what can people learn from the way you all operate that allows you to ship quickly?
Unusual Teams: Membership and Storytelling
Josh Miller: Well, first of all, thank you Scott, if you’re listening. It’s somewhat of an awkward question admittedly, because it’s like someone complimenting you about your product. It’s always impossible to really take and accept the compliment, because you see all the blemishes. Of course we see all these ways in which we don’t ship fast enough and could be doing a better job listening and building with members. But, at risk of sounding a bit cliche, I really think we ship our values. So, we thought a lot about our values as a company. You can read about them online. And I think if you examine those values and then you look at your compliment or Scott’s compliment, you can see [inaudible 00:20:05] one-to-one. So the first, and I really think the most important is, we hire people that show up with heartfelt intensity.
And, a lot of companies I think obsess over craft details. They’ll be a value like, “We obsess over the details.” What we say is, we want people that show up to our company with some fire in their belly, something that they are out to do. And for each person it’s a little bit different. For some people it may be UI Craft details, for other people it may be achieving double the performance with a quarter of the engineering head count. Everyone has something, but they show up with this heartfelt intensity. And I think even relative to everything else, I’m going to say, that’s it. If you have a team that has heartfelt intensity and is there for a purpose and something to prove, you give them a very exciting, ambitious prompt and get out of their way and they will do remarkable work. So, showing up with heartfelt intensity.
Our second value is assume you don’t know. Assume you don’t know. And the value “assume you don’t know” is, even if you’re a subject matter expert. We have someone in our company that literally built the first version of Chrome and ran it for 16 years. But he more than anyone embodies this beginner’s mind of, “I have no idea how this should work or what will happen.” And the follow up to that value is, “So we got to get going.” It’s like dropping in a new city. You just got to walk out the door of your Airbnb turn left and … Maybe you’ll turn right and then you’ll hop on the subway, but you just got to get going and see what you find. And so, we have this attitude of, you’re showing up with this heartfelt intensity. But you start by saying, “I’ve no idea what I’m doing. I have no idea what’s going to happen.” So we’ve just got to get going. And that biases in a default to action.
We have another value of, start by asking, “What could be?”, which is pushing ourselves to be as aspirational, ambitious as possible. So the Peek feature that you mentioned, we just didn’t want to solve the problem of context switching. We wanted to almost blur the line between native and web software, and make it feel like a sheet of paper. And really pushing ourselves to be as ambitious as we can be, which is the consequence of blowing back around and more deeply motivating the people working on it.
So, I mean, I could keep going. We have a value, “You’re doing it for the crew when you got to swarm. When you got to swarm,” and we have value of, “make them feel something.” But I think what it all adds up to is, a team that has a lot of heart, has a lot of intrinsic motivation and a, “It’s the first day of my career. I wonder what’s going to happen?” attitude. And I think all of those things add up to a culture which is, “Let’s get something out there. Let’s see what happens.”
Lenny: How did you come up with these? What was the process to come up with company values? Because I know a lot of companies are like, “We should come up with these.” How do you do that?
Building Teams from First Principles
Josh Miller: The secret is I hate corporate values. I’ve never resonated with them. And I’m fortunate, we’re fortunate enough, to have a lot of really spectacular, experienced leaders in our corner. And I got hammered to the first year, two years on, “Josh, where are your values? How can your team operate without values?” And I always experienced them on the other end as almost corporate propaganda, these cliche fortune cookie, Panda Express-like, “You should care about the detail.” It didn’t resonate with me. And the thing that clicked was maybe a year and a half, two years into working, I just kept hearing the same things from the team. And I would do things like a year into someone joining, “How’s it going? What’s going well? What’s not?” And I realized that there are some traits that define our team, extremely organically and naturally. No one told people what our values were.
Again, because I was this naive, ignorant 31-year-old being like, “Values are a corporate, late-stage capitalism creation,” and just very, very hardheaded. And it was really special two years in, hearing from the team why they love The Browser Company, why they think we’re doing … Just the passion there. And then we challenged ourselves to what became a value. Well, if something about the five one-liners on the corporate webpage feels off, start by asking what could be in dream a little bit. And what I realized was, all of the statements people would say about what they loved about The Browser Company, what they thought defined the way we work, they reminded me of how I like to take road trips. I’m a big traveler. I’m a big fan of dropping in somewhere new and just exploring. And so we just had this “Aha!” Moment. Let’s, instead of having a corporate landing page with five value titles and subtitles, let’s write a manual for how to take a road trip.
So we wrote an essay called “Notes on Road Trips” that use this semi-biographical, but mostly fictional, story about a person and their father taking a road trip when they’re a teenager, to tell the story of how we do things at The Browser Company. And share these values, but in a way that hopefully won’t feel so propagandary and feel a little more, you’re reading an essay. So I say that, again, not to say there’s anything wrong with traditional values. I’m actually sure I’m going to get an earful for a lot of people that coach me and give me advice that I sounded too indignant on this podcast. But I’m pretty proud of that story because it was a great example of assuming you don’t know. We were sure that corporate values were not for us. And then very organically without trying it turned out, “Wait! They run through this company in a pretty profound way. We should put some words around it, because it’s happening whether or not we like it, or say it is or not.”
The Future of Product Managers
Lenny: That’s awesome. I have the page here and it’s quite beautiful. And, pulling to it in the show notes just very briefly and tactically, did you just sit down and start writing this thing and then people gave you feedback? How long did this process take? Just for folks that maybe you want to go down this road?
Josh Miller: Yeah. Warning downside of this process that it takes a lot longer than we thought it would, because we put so much heart into it. So, what it started with was again, in my natural one-year, check-in type conversation, starting to notice these patterns. And then we actually very comprehensively were like, “Okay. Let’s sit down and interview everyone at The Browser Company. But no survey. One by one, talking to people, asking questions. And then we pulled out those words. So, actually what’s really cool about these values, if my memory serves me, I believe every single one, with the exception of maybe a word or two, was something that someone on our team said. So we interviewed the entire team and then these are meant to be a mirror. The putting it in road trip essay form? That took a long time. That that was a lot of … Yeah. I don’t recommend the way that we did that, but-
Universal Patterns in PM Evolution
Lenny: How long is long?
Outlook on Organizational Evolution
Josh Miller: Probably three months.
The Storytelling Team
Lenny: Oh. That does not sound that long. Okay.
The General Magic Documentary
Josh Miller: Yeah. Maybe this goes back to Scott’s comment that maybe our bar to how quickly we should ship stuff including values is, it’s like I don’t know. But, yeah. It felt like a long time. And this was not just me. Just for anyone listening, this was not CEO in a corner writing a missive. This was a team effort. There’s a woman Abby on our team that did so much work on this project. The words themselves came from our team. So, it has my name I think somewhere on that webpage, but by no means was this me writing this essay in a corner with the fireplace on, or anything like that.
The Power of Naming
Lenny: Okay. Awesome. That was really helpful. As you also saw, I asked on Twitter what to ask you, and I got a ton of questions. People have a lot of questions for how y’all do stuff. The most common question turned out was from Ched Khan who had the most likes of all the questions that people asked you. And it was around hiring, that basically you’ve been able to convince some of the most amazing people in the world to join The Browser Company. Like you just mentioned, you hired the guy that built Chrome, basically, to work on Arc now. What is it that you do that convinces amazing people to join? Because everyone wants to learn from you and copy you, and do that themselves.
Why the Browser Category
Josh Miller: Thank you for that question and for all the legs. I will admit, this is also a fairly awkward one to ask. I actually just came from an interview with a candidate and they asked me a fairly similar question. And I said, “You know what? You should go ask the people that work here. It’s not me. I don’t know why they ultimately join.” But what I will tell you is, the intentionality, which is another secret, sharing a lot of secrets. This one will probably get me in trouble. I don’t care about web browsers. I’ve never cared about web browsers. I never wanted to build a web browser. If you had told me a decade ago that I’d be working on a desktop first web browser at 32, “I’d say what in my career went horribly wrong?” The origin story of this company was Hursch, who I met when I was 20. We started a company together. Lots of mistakes, a lot of successes, a lot of growing pains and figured out who we are. And a decade later we were still friends, we went to each other’s weddings.
We’d worked in all these different industries and different-stage companies and we just realized, “You know what? There are a lot of ideas that get us really excited. There are a lot of shapes and sizes.” But as we were nostalgic for looking back on the decade prior, it was groups of people and moments in time with those people that were our best memories. And so, what Hursch and I decided, long before the company started was, we want to build a company, but we want to build a company where we feel like we can hire whoever we want. And I don’t mean whoever we want in terms of who would dare say no. But we want to work on something where the greatest minds in our industry and adjacent would want to work on that prompt in a hypothetical sense. And then build an organization, build a team where we can work in the way that, after a decade of trying on a bunch of hats and ways of doing things and metrics this and [inaudible 00:30:04], we could do what was right for us.
And so, where we went to with a new web browser, let alone a web browser as a new form of computing, which is our true aspiration, to build an internet here. You can look up the internet computer YouTube video on our Browser Company YouTube page. But our ambition’s even higher than a web browser. The intention of that is, we just want to go hire our favorite people that we know and don’t know and build a team that, we’ll never get bored working with this crew, because of how incredible they are and how humble they are. And so, when you think about it like that, I as the CEO as notionally the head of product, I view our product as our team. And I know a lot of companies say that. I actually think they probably all mean it. I don’t think anyone’s being disingenuous, but we really meet it. It is the genesis of this company.
It is not a new web browser. It is, let’s build the dream team, our dream team. And let’s build a way of working that is really fun for us and really speaks to our values. And let’s go find people that resonate with that. And that trickles down to everything we do, whether it’s our policy about this or the way we do that. I’ll give you one example. Our goal of interviews is to convince people not to join The Browser Company. If I have an interview with someone, I don’t pitch them and say, “What do you want to ask me? Anything you want? I’ll be super honest, most people shouldn’t want to work here.” So I think it all starts with us viewing our product as the company, as the team, not Arc itself. And then, I think being self-aware, that that’s how I think that’s how we think.
But again, flying back things that I’ve heard, we have been fortunate. We’ve hired a lot of really remarkable people, especially on paper and especially off. I mean, all around. I’ll just give a couple examples to share one thing that I’ve heard. A few recent hires, we hired someone named Darren who, as I mentioned, he co-created the first prototype of Chrome and then ran it for 16 years. I think hundreds if not thousands of people reported to him. He joined the Browser Company as an IC. We just hired a woman named Tara. She was on the original Paper by 53 team, one of my most inspiring products at the beginning of my career. Most recently she was actually, I believe, Senior SVP of product at Vimeo and a senior director of engineering. She joined our engineering team as an IC. We just hired someone named Peter Vidani. When I was 20 building consumer social software, he was the coolest, most impressive person. He was the first designer at Tumblr. Ran the design team at Tumblr for seven years and the most recently was SVP of design at Slack. Joined the team as an IC designer.
And though that sounds like I’m bragging, the thing that was really interesting and perplexing to us was, these are people that have made a lot of money, that have had really fancy titles, that have worked on transformative projects. Why are they joining this team? And I think something that people show up to The Browser Company with is, in addition to heartfelt intensity, this aspiration that their work at The Browser Company will come to define their careers. And that’s coming from people that have done really remarkable things, by all accounts. And I think more than anything, we’ve realized that, in order for people like that to join and to show up with that, there are a number of things you have to promise and provide them, that make folks like that gravitate with the intention of doing their work of their career, ranging from an incredible and ambitious aspiration, really empowerment to act on the prompts that they’re given on behalf of the team in the way that they see fit, and truly trusting and empowering them.
A very kind culture. I think if you’ve been doing this for a decade plus, your intolerance for bullshit is very, very low. And so, by no means do I think we’re perfect. I don’t think everyone shows up The Browser Company saying, “If I’m not on the equivalent of the early iPhone team, I’m going to be bummed.” But I think generally speaking, Hursh and I, and everyone that was on the early team showed up with this aspiration of making The Browser Company the product. And I think that’s carried forward to this tumbleweed of people saying, “[inaudible 00:34:23]. That’s where I’m going to finally do the equivalent of building the iPhone.” And we all know we probably won’t, but there is that, “I want to give it one more shot. I want to go for it.” And that just tumbleweeds, I think, at some point.
Lenny: That tumbleweed is, I think a big part of it is, once you get amazing people, more amazing people want to join. So I think that’s very much helpful. Something else this resonates a lot with is, just the mission of a company is such a powerful tool for pulling people in, the best people. I’ve seen that a lot with founders. If they have a meaningful mission, it’s so much easier to hire, versus not. And clearly you’re really good at sharing that vision and mission. And then you also have a really interesting mission and vision. I think there’s also, you’re just a charismatic founder and that helps a lot too. And you’re a great storyteller.
Browsers as a Commodity Market
Josh Miller: Well, the other thing I want to add Lenny is, again putting myself in the listener, I imagine a lot of what I just said probably sounded a little bit … Could come off, if you don’t know me and you don’t, as a little bombastic or a little again romantic. Very tactically, I’ll give you something that was just who we are, but I think has helped contribute to this tumbleweed. From the very first person we hired, we celebrated them publicly. The fact that they joined. And in a very heartfelt way, telling you about them as a person and what they did. Long before we had anyone that anyone would’ve heard of before working at The Browser Company, just because it was earnest, we were really proud. Again, if you think of our original mandate as building the companies, the product, when our first designer joins, we want to tell everyone about it. That’s a product launch. That is the product launch.
And then, whenever we ship something, we go out of our way to celebrate the people that worked on it publicly. I think there’s a CEO-hero worship sometimes in Silicon Valley. I do very little at the company. Or sorry. I do very little as it relates to the thing people fall in love with Arc. I do a lot for The Browser Company, but I don’t make Arc. I didn’t make Peek. And again, that’s just who we are, which is, “Alexandre. She killed me! Look at how cool this is!” because it’s earnest and it’s honest to who we are. And then I think it creates this reinforcing cycle of you’re someone that’s done something incredible, which is, “I’m going to be celebrated. They truly want me here. I’m going to be recognized for the work that I do.
It’s not going to just accrue to this like CEO figurehead who everyone thinks is some genius visionary. And so again, by no means are we perfect. By no means do I think we get it right all the time. But, because it’s such an authentic expression of who we are and what we were trying to do, I think we do little micro implementations like that, that ladder up to that principle I got so excited about but are as simple as someone tweets about some animation. They’re like, “Woo! This was fun.” Tag Sherry. Sherry made that, Sherry’s incredible. And you don’t see that that much in Silicon Valley. You see corporate blog posts and the CEOs more than anyone else. That’s probably why you don’t have CEOs on the podcast, because you don’t want … You know this Lenny. That is why that’s your policy. You don’t want to hear from the CEOs. They’re not the ones building the product. You want to hear from the people actually doing it. That’s why I love this podcast.
Not All Software Fits One Strategy
Lenny: That’s right. That’s right. Thank you. I’d say just hearing everything you’re saying, The Browser Company sounds like an incredible place to work. I could see why people want to go work. It’s pretty simple. You touched on being public and sharing everything that’s going on. And that’s another area I wanted to spend a little time on. You guys are very transparent about what’s going on and inside the company. You bring cameras into the board meetings. I watched a half-hour meeting you had with your head of design talking about a project that’s behind scheduling. You’re trying to figure out how do we get this out the door. You just share actual things you all are doing within the company, publicly. And I’m curious just, why did you start doing that? What have you seen as a good or bad that has come from that? Is there anything you’ve shared that maybe you regret like “Oh, maybe we shouldn’t have put that out there.” What’s been your experience with that?
Must Excel in Key Dimensions
Josh Miller: Why don’t I start with the regret. It’s not yet a regret, but the thing that I wonder … Because this is very much … I may have hopefully spoken with a lot of earnest passion to some of the questions before. This is one that I would really characterize as a prototype. We really have a prototype-driven culture. And this is one that I’d put high on the list of, “Maybe we’ll regret this later.” And specifically what I hope is that, I’m uncomfortable putting myself too central in our story. But, naturally, when you’re doing storytelling publicly, there’s a gravitational pull for the CEO and the founders to be at the center of that. And so, sometimes even this morning, we had our best-performing YouTube video ever. The first one that really broke out of people that already follow us. And it’s a reaction video in classic YouTube form to MKBHD talking about our product for the first time.
And I honestly watched it right before this again, and I was like, “What the fuck am I doing? What are we doing? Why am I trying to become a YouTuber?” So, to be totally honest, I don’t regret anything yet. But I wonder if we could take this too far? So if anyone’s listening, if you see us starting to take this too far, especially as it relates to me, we want to hear about it, because that’s keeping me up. But I do think the intentions are pure and earnest, which are … And another thing that defines people that have joined The Browser Company, in addition to wanting to do the work that defines their careers, is I would characterize it as a little bit of hopelessness, maybe feeling jaded, questioning this industry that they’ve worked on or products that they’ve worked on and wanting to rediscover. But, at the end of the day, we are a group of idealists, of optimists, wanting to rediscover what we fell in love with when we were kids, whether it’s the part of our craft or the potential of technology, the internet and software.
And, as part of that, I would view Arc and the Browser Company as an experiment in we can do it. Better is possible. And as we were thinking about better as possible, rediscovering what we love and believe in deep down and trying to express it in the world, one of it related to trust. I remember when I was a teenager using the internet for the first time and early on to college, just the hopefulness of what was possible, and the belief that these people building these tools, they were like heroes to me. Not just the leaders, but the teams, the companies, the brands. And somewhere along the way, I’m not blaming a single company, I’m not even saying that anyone did anything wrong, but culturally … I was a sociology major. Culturally, we have lost trust in tech companies and in tech brands.
And so, building in public showing you our meetings, uncomfortably so, is an act in, “If we were them, why should they trust us? Why should anyone trust us?” We have your most sensitive personal data. We have your most sensitive professional data. Why should you trust us if we’ve had our trust broken again and again? And I think our hypothesis in this prototype, in this experiment is, we can have the best privacy policy in the world, but at the end of the day, again, it’s just people behind the screen. And so, even if I think about … I haven’t done interviews like this, because I worry that if you don’t know me, I come off the wrong way.
A lot of people tend to. I’ve noticed a lot of friends in my life that I know them behind the scenes, but the way that people perceive them publicly here don’t know them. They interpret it the other way, because there’s not that trust. And so our bet is that if you get to know us, Nash, Dina, me Hursch, and you really feel like you get to know us as person and all of our imperfections, we’re average looking, we’re average to all that stuff. Then when you see that we’re asking for a permission, you might trust it is because we want to make you feel a certain way that’s better. And if not … I’ll say someone tweeted something yesterday, who apparently we didn’t earn the trust yet and they haven’t gone to know us. And their interpretation of what we were doing was the worst possible interpretation you could [inaudible 00:42:40]. And, at first honestly, I felt a bit of anger, like, “Who was this person on a Thursday just saying we’re doing X and Y?” And then I realized, “You know what? I’d have the same feeling because of the experiences I’ve had with technology in the past five to 10 years.”
And so, the intention with these the building and public experiments are radical trust building. Not radical transparency, we can’t share everything, but radical trust building. You get to know us as humans and I worry that we’ll regret that, and that it could potentially turn into, “Oh, they’re trying to be internet celebrities that they’re so important, they should share everything because … Thank you, them, for gracing us with their opinions.” It’s not the intention and it feels worth taking that risk. But that’s the intentionality behind it.
Lenny: That is a really interesting insight. It makes a lot of sense for a browser to find that so important, to build that trust.
The Internet Computer Vision
Josh Miller: I haven’t done podcast interviews, I haven’t done this. I really like you. I really like the feeling of your conversations, the intentions behind them, the warmth, even your intro music is a friendly jig. So, I mean, it’s a great example, where I think it’s one of the most wonderful things about the podcasting medium is I’ve had you in my ear for a year and the people on your show and you feel a sense of trust in you and your intentions here. And your intentions both in this interview, in terms of what you’re trying to do for listeners. To some extent your show, and the warmth that you bring to it and the perception I have as a human being … We’ve never met. We’ve maybe DM’d briefly, maybe five messages exchanged. But I feel like I know you and that makes me trust you. And so, in many ways this podcast, at a meta level’s an inspiration for it.
Lenny: I feel the same way in reverse. You made this point about being worried about being two front and center for your company. I have the same exact feeling. Even though my newsletter’s called “Lenny’s Newsletter,” I only named it that because that was the default recommendation when I was signing up for Substack. I didn’t want to be this, “I know it all. Come to me. Welcome to my know-it-all place.” I really dislike that. And that’s why I created this community that lives along the side, where people can help each other, because I’m not going to have all answers. And so, I’ve had to lead into that. “All right, people.” They want a person to help them understand what’s going on, learn about … And in your videos you do a great job highlighting other people. I was watching your board meeting video and it’s like, “Here’s all team members coming along. Here they come. How are you doing?” So, anyway. All that to say, you’re doing a great job finding the balance.
Internet as the Best Platform
Josh Miller: Oh, thank you. You as well.
Lenny: I appreciate it. You talked about storytelling, and you mentioned that you have a whole bunch of odd teams at The Browser Company. One of them is a storytelling team. And that actually explains, I think, how you’re so good at making these really amazing videos, because making great videos is hard. Can you just talk about some of these odd teams that you have, that probably other companies don’t?
Interface Makers’ Conflict of Interest
Josh Miller: One of the other things that, hopefully, you’re picking up in this interview, so far, is we are a very prototype-driven culture. It goes back to the “assume you don’t know” ethos. We try a lot of experiments, and we try them related to product features related to how we work together, related to the stories we tell. So, this isn’t a category of, “I’m not sure it’s going to work, but we’re trying it,” and it seems to be working so far, at least for us. What Lenny’s referencing is, we have a handful of teams. I’ll pick two just as an examples. We have a membership team and we have a storytelling team. And though you probably recognize or are obviously familiar with those terms, those aren’t historically startup orgs, or startup disciplines and teams. And let me tell you about the intention behind both.
Membership. Membership was, when I was at Facebook, the most impressive thing to me about how Facebook built product was their user research team. Shout out to Lowie and Jane. I don’t know why you’d be listening to this podcast, but you deeply inspired me when we were at Facebook together. They had the most incredible team of user researchers. And it always felt odd to me. And this isn’t Lowie and Jane’s fault. Actually, in fact, they suffered from this. That user research almost felt like a service organization, relative to product engineering design. There’d be a PM. The PM would get assigned a researcher and the PM got to decide how to use the researcher, and ask them what to do and ask them questions. But seeing the potential for when you really get to know the people that you are building for, that you’re serving, at a really deep way, it is extraordinary. How do you build product any other way?
And so, we took that to the extreme at The Browser Company, which we said, “Let’s not think of it as customer support, customer service, customer success, user research. Those are just business terms. Those are just industry terms.” At the end of the day, what we’re saying is if there is a human being, from the moment they touch our software or our products for the first time, to, if they have it last, we need to have a deep, genuine, ongoing relationship with them.
And on day one, that may be air quote, “customer success.” “How do I use this thing?” On day 37, that might be, “I have a bug. Do you mind helping me fix it?” And on day 58, that may be, “Hey, we’re shipping the mobile app soon. What do you want from mobile? What do you want on your phone?” Other companies view that as different orgs and disciplines. We view that as, there are a bunch of people at the other end of this that we are serving from the moment they touch our product the first time. Let’s own that relationship full stack and think about it holistically. And so that’s the membership team.
On the storytelling side, very similar, different type of person. Again, we’re a humanistic the company. So, the theme here is the people on the company, the people at the other end. So if the membership team takes people from the moment they touch our product for the first time to the last, the storytelling team is about people we don’t have the privilege of serving yet. They don’t use Arc, they don’t know what Arc is. That could be an investor, air quote, “investor relations.” That could be members of the press, air quote, “PR.” That could be just people out in the world, air quote, “marketing” and one-day sales. But at the end of the day, it’s telling our story to people. It’s telling our story to people and thinking about that holistically in full stack.
So that’s how we think about teams is, we start with first principles asking, what are we really trying to do here? And what is the most direct way to manifest that, even if it’s not how other people do it? In practice, one of the benefits of that is I do think it leads to certain pieces of content. For example, that people go, “Oh, wow! I’ve never seen that before.” But again, I think anyone’s capable of this. I think we have an extraordinarily talented storytelling team and membership team, but I really think it’s as simple as the intentionality of what is the team? What are their incentives? What are the disciplines on the team? Even hiring a video editor, for example, as a small company. But the video editor, not having make a TikTok account go viral. But think about it more holistically in terms of the people.
So, again, there’s a lot that breaks down. There’s a lot that’s not going well about it. I have no idea how the scales, the 500 people … Yeah. So this is not me saying this experiment is ultimately going to be a huge success, or right for everyone or even us at different times. But that was the intentionality of the membership team, the storytelling team and others. And even product management. We don’t have PMs at the company. My title at Facebook was Product Manager. I love product management. But, we view it not as a team. We view it as a leader, a role on a project, on an effort.
And depending on the projects, different types of people should be a PM. So, we have a performance-related project going on where, of course, an infrastructure engineer should be that air quote, “PM.” We have a product project, where actually I think someone from membership should be the PM, because ultimately, yes, we’re building software product, but it is really about serving our members in a specific way, so we should have someone for membership be a PM. Again, as you can imagine, as is going through the heads of everyone listening, “That must break down in 18 ways?” Oh, it definitely does. And so I’m not promising one day it won’t change. But again, continuous through the company is, assume you don’t know. Start by asking what could be, and let’s just try some things and see what happens.
Rapid Fire Q&A
Lenny:
So, I was going to ask you actually, you talked about why you don’t have PMs. Do you think you’ll hire PMs in the future, having a PM background? Do you think you’ll get there or do you think you’ll try to stick to this? People do the PM role, depending on the project?
Josh Miller: Yeah. We’ve increasingly hiring people that at other companies may have a PM title. I’d say we have two to three right now, that could have a PM title at another company. I don’t think we will have a pm organization, or a PM role, because again, we believe depending on … If you unpack the verbs that a PM does, I think those are verbs that anyone that we hire could do. And it really depends on what is the project? And what are we trying to do? I think the thing that will be unwavering is we like to hire mutts. And I haven’t yet figured out a term that comes off as more endearing, because it’s meant to be very endearing, but … For example, there’s a woman in a company named Rebecca.
Rebecca was a data scientist we use at Cora. She got her PhD in MIT in I think behavioral psychology or something. I’m probably going to misquote that. But, got some crazy degree at MIT, and then was a software engineer at Stripe. And I’m talking about Rebecca through her resume. There’s so much about Rebecca. She plays effectively a PM role right now. She is effectively PMing our effectively our multi-player team. But what was so awesome about meeting Rebecca is her and other people at this company have the mindset of, “I make things, and I will do what I need to do to make what I want to make. Whenever that verb is, whenever that discipline is.” And that requires people that are multidisciplinary in practice and multidisciplinary in approach to their work. It’s not that we don’t hire PMs, but we want to hire people who have a multidisciplinary approach and view things as, “I like to make things. Tell me how I contribute to making it.” And sometimes they may play the verbs of a PM and sometimes it may be something else.
Lenny: This can be a really interesting story to follow. I’ve seen this journey a few times at different companies. What I find is a lot of times people that are good at other things like engineering or design, for a while, they’re like, “Yep. We don’t need PMs. I’ll do the PM job.” And then eventually they’re like, “This sucks. I hate doing this stuff. I want to design. Leave me alone. I don’t want to sit on a [inaudible 00:54:29] all day. I don’t want to be in meetings.” So eventually, it turns out, they’re like, “Okay. Let’s find someone to do this thing that loves it.” And so that’s one thing that happens.
The other thing I find is, I’m sure you’ve seen this, a lot of people are wary of PMs. They come in and they’re like, “Here’s what we’re doing,” and they’re just adults process complexity. What I find is those are just bad PMs. If you have an awesome PM, everything just gets better. Everyone’s happier, things move faster. So I think companies often get to that stage. And then also there’s just career development stuff, eventually as you scale. It’s like “What happened to my career path,” and they’re like, “All right. Well, we got to go on one road or another.” It’s hard to stay in this hybrid role. But I super respect the first principal’s approach of let’s just-
Josh Miller: And, for what’s worth, Lenny. I think you’re almost, definitely right. And I think it will almost definitely happen with us. And again, this goes back to the “assume you don’t know.” The “assume you don’t know,” is try a prototype and then assume it’s not going to work. So, even in my own experience, I remember getting to know Evan from Snapchat just enough to know how he talked about PMs at Snap. And it was, “We’re never going to hire PMs at Snap. Everyone’s a designer.” And, I have no relationship with him anymore, but you can look, there are a lot of PMs at Snapchat.
So I know from my own experience with people that I respect from a product perspective that were indignant, they would never hire PMs, their organizations now have PMs. And that’s probably for a really good reason. I would tell say also on our team, if any of our designers are listening, they’ll tell you these, whatever you want to call it, “These verbs are taking up a lot of my time, and I do not have as much time to think and dream and design and do user research.” And so, we’re already feeling it breaking into our company.
I think the intentionality, whatever comes next, whatever it is, is leaders of the project should be picked for the projects, not because they’re in a certain org at our company. And, if we ever hire people to do the PM role, we want them to think of themselves as people who make things and have lots of different disciplines and tools in their toolkit, not just the PM discipline. And, of course, even that could be wrong, and maybe in a year we cave. I got it totally wrong. We got it totally wrong. So, we’ll see. But I would also, that that of all the things I shared on this podcast so far, this is probably the one I’ll come crawling back to your podcast in a couple years, being, “Lenny, you were right. It all blew up!”
Lenny: But it’s a fun experiment and Snap is a good example. Stripes another, where they waited a long time to hire their first PMs. And I think it’s because their designers or engineers were just incredibly good at that element. And it was also very design-forward or very edge-forward, so they didn’t need as much PM skill initially.
Josh Miller: If I had to predict, I would predict that if we found that we were missing this discipline as a team, I think we would evolve Rebecca’s team, which is technically the data team, and do something closer to a technical PM or data plus [inaudible 00:57:19] Again, it’s all live, but the thought has even crossed our minds recently, that we may be wrong, and what org might we create if we need folks that have more of a background of [inaudible 00:57:29] like this.
Lenny: I’m excited for the video of this discussion that might happen. It’s also interesting, your PM that you mentioned, Rebecca is very data oriented. And then, the initial discussion we had around focus on feelings and that sort of thing. So, that’s cool that you have this really interesting balance of people that are very data focused and then this, “Okay. But let’s not obsess with that. What are the feelings we’re trying to create?”
Josh Miller: Yeah. Because again, the point of optimizing for feelings is not hire people who make feelings. It’s like Rebecca’s title is Data Lead. She runs our data team. But, Rebecca’s one of the most humanistic people I know. You meet her and you feel the warmth that you feel when you talk to you, and you ask her what she does outside of work. And so, it’s not that data doesn’t have a role. Actually I’d say, for better or worse, data is part of our practice. It’s more about what’s that top-level intentionality? What are we trying to do here? But, yeah. We have a lot of people that, data is either a noun they’ve had in their resume or it’s been a part of their practice a lot in the past.
Lenny: Awesome. One very tactical question with the storytelling team makes me think about Airbnb’s video team. A lot of people are joking internally for years and years that the videos Airbnb put out in the early days accounts for half their market cap, because they’re so good. And you’re just like, “Oh, my God, I want to go on an Airbnb.” They just make you feel so much and they’re soul made. So, what is the makeup of your storytelling team? Because I imagine some companies maybe listening, like maybe we should do something like this on our team.
Josh Miller: We have a three-person storytelling team. It’s run by a woman named Nash. There is a gentleman named Ellis, who is a … Background, started as a reporter at The Verge. Maybe there was a publication before that. But I met him when he was a reporter at The Verge covering social media. And then he ran marketing strategy for Snapchat for seven years. And then we have a person named Josh Lee, who I actually met as an intern. He was an intern at Facebook as a designer, that an intern for me at the White House when I worked at the White House, and then decided that he was over product design and over design, and totally just jumped and be like, “I’m going to be a filmmaker,” and has been making really fascinating indie films for a few years now. And he’s our video editor on the team.
And it’s so interesting. Nash’s background, she had a brief stint at NBC. But again, you get to know her and she writes poems after hours and her dream is to write a fictional book. I mean, anyone that knows Nash, especially [inaudible 01:00:00] is just a force. A force. And the three of them, what’s so interesting about them, which also relates to our design team … One of the things I also found at Facebook is there was a tendency toward homogeneity. As you know, there’s a stereotype of a Facebook PM for example, or a Google PM, the contrast between them and the way they work. And one of the things we also have purposely done on the storytelling team and otherwise, let’s hire radically different archetypes. Ellis cannot be more different than Nash. Nash cannot be more different than Josh. There’s some shared values, there’s some shared beliefs, but they’re very different.
Ditto on the design team. Our design team? They are all over the place in terms of who they are, what they’ve done, their sensibilities, their aspirations. And whether it’s the storytelling team or the design team, that can be hard sometimes, just to be honest. It’s a lot easier to say, “Hey, we’re the Acme Co storytelling team, we’re Acme Co design team. We hire designers like this and storytellers that.” We hire people all over the place. We have an extremely diverse team, but in all senses of the word. But again, the no PM thing, it’s not without flaws. I can see why a lot of large companies over time tend are like, “It’s the Facebook way or no way,” or “You’re not good for here.”
Lenny: Yeah. It’s actually I think, exact makeup of Airbnb video team. I forget what they were called. They didn’t have a cool name, the storytelling team I think. But it was a videographer, an editor and then their producer, basically.
Josh Miller: Yeah. I mean, I remember going to Airbnb’s offices early in my career and seeing the storyboards lining the walls and just being like, “I want to work here.” So, I’m actually not familiar with the … I mean, I’m familiar with Airbnb’s videos and brand marketing, fucking fantastic, excuse my language. But, yeah. I remember just walking around that office being like, “Oh, my goodness! Are they making a movie or something? I want to [inaudible 01:01:53] here.”
Lenny: Funny you say that. And for folks that want to find that, we’ll link to it in show notes. But if you Google “Snow White Airbnb,” you’ll actually see these storyboards. They basically hired a Pixar storyboard artist to draw out key frames of the journey of a host and a guest. And that became a central element of the strategy of, let’s make each of these moments as amazing as possible. And it was based on the movie Snow White. You can read about it.
Josh Miller: For what it’s worth, this is a great moment to share. All of the beliefs that I’ve shared here on behalf of our team, these aren’t things that we just originally came up with. They’re moments like when I went to Airbnb’s office early in my career and saw these Snow White storyboards lining the walls. That had an impact on me. Even the idea that you would think in terms of that moment, you could actually see the lineage to, well, how do you want that person to feel when they open that door for the first time? So, I think it’s just a great moment to shout out that we’ve accumulated a lot of doses of inspiration, like that day at Airbnb, that trickle down to us talking about optimizing for feelings. But that didn’t come in a vacuum. That’s our expression of what we’ve seen in the industry. This is building on the backs of so many people and companies that we’ve been fortunate to see.
Lenny: And now the trickling is happening from your lessons and experience and your unique approach.
Josh Miller: I hope. There’s a documentary that I highly recommend called General Magic. And it’s one of the best pieces of media I’ve seen related to technology industry. And it’s really interesting. I think there are two types of people to just be very … There are people that watch that and view it as, “Wow! What a missed opportunity,” or almost like a sad story. And I view it as, “If only we could be so lucky to assemble a group of people like that.” And the thing about that documentary, for anyone that hasn’t listened to it is, essentially was the iPhone before the iPhone, with the most legendary group of technologists working there. And it totally failed, completely failed by all traditional business definitions.
But, what stuck with me from the documentary, how proud and nostalgic and passionate those individuals were in reminiscing about their time there. And then, what they all went on to create. And the fact that even today on this podcast, I’m sitting here talking about General Magic. So, I mean, to your point of hopefully Browser Company will have ripple effects. That to me is the ultimate goal, for me personally, at a very emotional level. If we could only be so lucky. That, to me, seems like success in many ways.
Lenny: Yeah. What’s cool is you’re getting a lot of footage that will be very useful for a future documentary on the history of The Browser Company.
Josh Miller: [inaudible 01:04:30] I didn’t think about it like that, for better or worse.
Lenny: One last thought, I was going to mention it in terms of the storytelling movie-making elements of Airbnb. Fun fact, there was a period where product managers were actually called producers, because one of the founders was like, “We don’t want to manage product, we want to produce beautiful experiences,” like a movie producer. And so that was a year and a half maybe of Airbnb’s history, where product managers were producers. The problem is, we got a lot of job applicants from Emmy-winning producers and they’re like, “oh, I want to work at Airbnb.”
Josh Miller: I know this podcast is about very tactical advice. So, one tactical piece of advice I’ll give is, whether or not you like the idea of the storytelling team or something else, a byproduct of some of these experiments that we’ve found works really well is when you give something a new name, it sheds a lot of preconceived notions of what the thing should be. We found that even with product. So if you say you’re building a browser history feature, then the benefit is everyone knows what you’re talking about. And the downside is, everyone knows what you’re talking about. And you show up with these preconceived notions of what it has to be. And so, if you go back again to revalue ask what could be … In many ways the point of calling the team, the storytelling team or the membership team, or not having PMs as an organization … All of this stuff isn’t meant to be novelty for novelty’s sake. It’s meant to almost be a rhetorical tactic, to make people think truly first principles about what are we trying to do here?
And again, if at the end, producers are called PMs, that’s fine. But I assume when it was called a producer, a much more intentionality was given to you communicating and talking and discussing, what does a producer do? What’s their relationship with design? Because no one knew what the heck a producer was. And so, ultimately, that may have been failure in other ways. But that’s one of the things we found tactically to be really helpful is, whether it’s a product feature or a team, or whatever, give it a made up name just to really get to the root of what you’re trying to do there. Or not borrow too much from wherever you worked before, whatever you’ve seen, popular media or whatever.
Lenny: I love that. And it’s very undo … Like, you’ve got to undo it. It was-
Josh Miller: Exactly.
Lenny: It’s a two-way door. And I like just the vision, the value you have of just prototyping things and whatever. It didn’t work. Let’s go back to what everyone else is doing. You mentioned great product and there was something I definitely wanted to chat a bit about, which is just, there’s this group of companies who are just focused on, “Let’s just build the most amazing product experience.” And I feel like The Browser Company is at the forefront in a lot of this. But it’s like you guys, Linear, Raycast is this product, Cron. There’s probably a few more and I’d love to actually hear if there’s others that I’m not thinking about. That are just obsessed with the user experience and less focused on drive metrics, drive revenue.
And I’m curious, just where do you think this goes? What’s your take on this trend? Why isn’t every company thinking this way? Or is this just like, “We don’t know if this is a good idea in the end?” So what’s your take on this cohort of just like, “We’re just going to build the best possible product and hope it all works out,”?
Josh Miller: Yeah. Well, I’ll say first, I love those products, or many of those products you mentioned. There’s some I haven’t really used. But, for example, our company runs on Linear, and has run on Linear since day one. So, I’m a big fan of that. So, the way that we think about it is … So, I actually spent two years at a venture capital firm as an investor, called Thrive Capital. They’ve invested in Slack and GitHub and a lot of really transformative companies. But I was an investor there. I was a venture capitalist. It even feels weird to say that. And I learned a lot. A lot. A lot. A lot from that experience. It has made me, I think, a better CEO and a better product leader. And one of the things I learned is different ideas, product ideas, business ideas, company ideas come with different attributes and things that will matter to their success.
And so, when thinking about starting The Browser Company and picking this category of software, Hursch and I were incredibly intentional about what that would mean for what would need to matter for our company. And so, if you think about the web browser category, traditionally … I’m not saying forward facing, I’m not saying it is what we are doing. But, if you were to look backwards and take The Browser Company out of it, and look at the web browser category, you’d notice a few things. The first is, it’s actually one of the most consumer pieces of software out there. People forget that. That’s the opportunity to us. If you ask someone in the street, “What’s your web browser? What do you think?” They either won’t know or they won’t care, “[inaudible 01:09:15]. I don’t know.”
But what pieces of software do your parents, do your little nieces and nephews and you use? What’s at the center of that Venn diagram? Your parents hopefully don’t use TikTok and Instagram, or probably don’t. Your nieces and nephews, I hope don’t have a reason for email at the tender age of 16, or a calendar. And a web browser’s one of the few things in the middle. So it’s an incredibly universal piece of software consumer, unlike very few other things outside of a smartphone and messaging, and maybe video calling in 2023 and a web browser. So, it’s very consumer, very universal.
The second attribute is, it’s a commodity. I’m not saying that Arc is a commodity or we want it to be, but objectively web browsers are interchangeable. They all do the same thing. Increasingly, they’re literally just carbon copies of the exact same code chromium, with little tweaks, little tweaks around the edges. So, they’re all the same. It’s a commodity market. And they’re unbelievably lucrative. Browsers print cash. There is a reason why they’re owned primarily by Google, Apple and Microsoft. They’re incredibly high margin, they’re incredibly lucrative. Low marginal costs. The cost of revenue is incredibly low, et cetera, et cetera.
So we have a product that everyone in the world uses, where they’re all identical, essentially, interchangeable commodities. And if you can get people to use it, you’re going to print money. So, the attributes of that business and that product category mean, you have to win on how much do people love your product and feel an emotional connection to it, and choose your brand, your product over the other, almost not rationally, but emotionally. And so, if you tie that back to everything I’ve said before, bingo! That is what we want to work on. That’s what we want. We want to create emotional connection with people. We’re creating that emotional connection with as many people as possible and delighting them with surprises and animations, is the way you win. It’s not romantic, it is practical. In many ways it’s capitalistic. This is how we win this market if you want to think about it that way.
So, the reason I hesitate to answer your question directly is, I don’t think that applies to every category of software. And to be totally honest, I don’t know enough about the ticketing space or the calendaring space or the whatever other space to know, honestly, off the cuff, if that approach is good for those industries. As a human being, at the other end, I’m really grateful that they picked some reason to do it, whether or not it is part of their business strategy or not. It’s a really wonderful trend as a human at the other end that cares about feelings. But I would say, we actually think about it not as a, “We’re focusing on the user experience over revenue or growth.” We, in fact, picked a category of software we’re focusing on brand and user experience is how you get growth and revenue.
And, because we knew that this is who we are, and if we were building cybersecurity software that you sell to government agencies, they are not going to give a shit about rounded edges, or what color the button is, or how surprised you feel with every member update. So, we didn’t build cybersecurity software to sell to the government. So, I hope that more people build things at the craft bar of something like Linear, but that’s how we think about it, is less of a “this versus that,” and more “could we pick something we’re going to work on, where that’s how you win.”
Lenny: I think that’s a really powerful insight, that for consumer software especially, and for commoditized consumer software especially, experience is a differentiator. You need to give people a reason to even try it, and then end up sticking with it when there’s awesome alternatives. And so, just an obsession with the experience is a really smart strategy. If you get that right, people use it and continue to use it and you win.
Josh Miller: I’ve seen this with a lot of … And COVID is, I’m sure everyone listening, has a lot of the remote-work collaboration tools. A lot of them obsess, to their credit, over really interesting design details and product feature concepts that were imaginative and brought people together in new ways. And then the latency of the video of the audio audio was horrible, because they relied on some third-party API that was significantly worse than Zoom. And so, that’s a great example where in that market, that category software, you better nail latency. I think a great example of this … One of my favorite products these days, but past years is Tuple. It’s ostensibly a paired programming tool that just lives in your menu bar. I’m not paired program with anyone. It is the fastest way to talk to someone at your company. And they have an unbelievably simple user experience.
The designer, based in Lyon, France, is incredible. It’s a beautifully designed product. And it is the best audio quality I have ever experienced in a communication tool. Better than Zoom. So, that exact same product with all their craft details, sand latency, not going to do it. But also Tuple wouldn’t have beat a lot of the other competitors for me if it wasn’t unbelievably beautiful and easy and simple to use as well. So again, I think it’s like, what are the attributes you need to win and picking a market that the ones that you want to excel at and work on, are key to that.
Lenny: And also how much better you need to be. Like, if there’s a 20% better than Chrome product, people are just going, “That’s fine. I don’t need to learn something new and everyone’s using something else. I’m just going to have all these problems.” So, you got to be significantly better. And that’s a high bar for consumer products. Final question I wanted to touch on. You talked about the big vision for Arc and The Browser Company. And you mentioned this idea of the internet computer. And this is another question Scott Belsky suggested. By the way, Scott is the CPO of Adobe and just an awesome product-thinker person. And he just wanted to make sure that we touch on this, because I think there’s a big idea here that maybe people don’t realize. So, if you could just give us a brief overview of, what is just the actual vision and plan for The Browser Company and Arc, long term as a final question?
Josh Miller: Yeah. So, we call it The Browser Company of New York almost as a misdirection, because as you know from the intro, we view Arc as a replacement for your default web browser, but we’re hoping it will be much more. And so, to start at the highest level and bring it down to reality, one of the things that I’ve done many times in my career already is underestimate pretty foundational changes in how we use technology. I’ve appreciated them but underestimated them. Great example is mobile. I think me and Hursh’s first company would’ve been much more successful if we really appreciated the tidal wave that was mobile. And I think one of those macro trends we’re underestimating right now is the shift to cloud computing. The shift to the internet, which may sound weird because every big public company mentions Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. You hear about cloud, cloud, cloud and cloud. But again, that’s this business term.
What I mean by the shift to cloud computing is, everything in our technology, in our computing lives is moving to the internet. It has been moving, but it’s going to move even more. And what I mean by that is, your applications are almost all today web-based, internet-based applications. And they will all be soon. There’s very, very few pieces of truly local-only software or even local-first software left. All of our files are moving to the internet, if they’re not all already there. So if you really think about your files today, and again you ignore the word “files,” the stuff you need for work in your personal life. They’re not sitting on your desktop, they’re all URLs. It may be an air quote “PDF,” but that PDF is probably out on Dropbox somewhere and you’re accessing it as a URL.
Your photos may seem like they’re on your iPhone. They’re not on your iPhone, they’re on some iCloud server somewhere. When you get a new iPhone, they’ll be right there. The manifestation of that actually is, if you smash your device that you’re listening to this on right now, whether it’s a phone or computer, other than being sad that you lost the resale value and there’s a chore of replacing it and a cost of replacing it, you would not lose any of your stuff. So, imagine in five years our entire computing lives are not on our devices, on our computers, on our phones. They’re out there somewhere. They’re out in the internet, they’re out in the cloud, which begs the question … I remember when I was 10 and I got my first computer. It was a see-through iMac. And I wonder … My son is two. When he’s 10, what will his computer be?
And I mean computer not in the technical … Again, going back to words and the words that we use. I don’t mean computer in the literal sense of my MacBook Air, but computer in the human sense of, what you need from your computer, your stuff, your applications and tools that people … Where is that going to be? Where is his computer going to be? I think it’s obvious at this point that we’re going to have airflow computers everywhere. We already do. My car has CarPlay, my TV is a computer, my laptop is a computer. I think that’s going to be even more true in five years, where hardware is commoditizing. And it will commoditize even more. They’re becoming empty shells that don’t have anything on it. They’re just vessels. They’re just interfaces to viewing our real computer, which is out there on the internet somewhere. And so, our view is that what we are building at The Browser Company is an internet computer, is a air quote “computer,” where the move to the internet and move to the cloud accelerates and continues the tsunami as much as we think it will.
And the way we represent that is, we say we want to be to the web browser, what the iPhone was to the cell phone. Yes. The iPhone replaced your cell phone, but it really was something much more. And so, we want Arc to be the iPhone for the internet, and that yes, it replaces your default browser. But whether or not we call it the internet computer or something else, it really is that interface, this new type of computer. If you play that one step forward, then what we’re building today is, we’re building our equivalent of multi-touch gestures and the first party-notes app. But, on any new computer, any computer or computing device, the developer platform itself is much more interesting and lucrative and world changing than the first-party computer itself. And so, we have no doubt that in the next decade, if we’re successful, if we still exist, Arc as a development platform is going to be much more central to what we’re doing, building on top of these internet computers, ours and others than anything else.
So to bring that down from reality. If you think about it, the internet, the web, is really the best development platform out there in many ways. It is accessible on every single device. It doesn’t matter who makes it or the shape and size. It is free to access for individuals. You don’t need money to access it. It’s free for developers. You don’t have to pay a license to use it. There’s no 30% tax on what you make. And it’s democratic. The best frameworks can win. And so, in many ways, if you were to say, “Hey, in this future we want to see, what is the platform that we should be developing on top of, what has the best attributes?” The web has that. And that’s why you’re seeing today. Why do you think Figma is in the web browser?
Why do you think Figma’s blog post was “Meet us in the Web Browser”? Because as the development platform, developers cross platform in one click. There’s no tax. Everyone should want to and wants to make for the web. The challenge, though, is there’s an experience gap. Native software feels better for whatever reason. And the problem is the people that control our interfaces to this development platform that is the web, that is the internet, have incentives to keep it from being as good as local software, from truly native, immersive software. Apple? They don’t want you making web apps or applications for the web. They want you making them for the Mac and the iPhone so they can taxi you when you do it through the app store. And also surprisingly, Google doesn’t want you making stuff, more native and immersive for the air quote “Web,” because they want it to be indexed by their search engine.
So, there’s a reason that the Chrome extension platform is one of the most underutilized opportunities. They view it as a loss leader. They built chrome extensions just so they could have parity with Firefox. They don’t want you making extensions, because you have some immersive extension experience that’s not something that you could index in Google. And that’s taking away from doing searches. And so, I think we look at this and say, everything is heading to the internet, which means we need interfaces to the internet that are truly more robust than a browser, that are more of a computer. And if we do that, then the most interesting opportunity on top of that is actually the things other people were built on top of this development platform. And if you look at this development platform, which exists today, the worldwide web, the open internet, what is missing is an interface and a set of capabilities and APIs to make web-based experiences as immersive and rich and powerful as native experiences, which require that interface to the internet to provide those.
And our interfacers to the internet today are the web browser companies. They have perverse business model incentives as big public companies that have lost the soul of the founders, that they don’t want to do that. They don’t want to do that. So it doesn’t mean we’re going to do it. And in fact one of them may win. And I actually think that this is something [inaudible 01:22:51]. We’re trying to sell anyone in our vision. We feel fully confident there are going to be many types of internet computers and Arc may or may not be one of them. But we feel very confident that that is the future and the development platform on top of the web and the internet, and these new interfaces will be the most exciting opportunity.
Lenny: My next question was going to be how do you make money with a browser, which people get for free, really well? And now it makes a lot more sense where y’all are going. And so, with that, we have reached our very exciting lightning round. I’ve got six questions for you. Are you ready?
Josh Miller: Ready.
Lenny: Okay. So, ready? What are two or three books that you recommend most to other people?
Josh Miller: Harold and the Purple Crayon, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, which is a book about Robert Irwin. That’s my number one PM book. So, if you’re asking from the perspective of the disciplines of people listening, that book is absolutely fantastic. And then God Saved Texas by Lawrence Wright, who’s one of my favorite authors, who if you’re interested in road trips, politics, food, culture. So, three very different types of books.
Lenny: What’s a favorite recent movie or TV show?
Josh Miller: The first TV show episode I’ve cried from in recent memories, episode three of The Last of Us. I thought I was watching a zombie violence thing and I just was sitting there bawling. So that one. And then I’ve been re-watching all of the Adam Curtis documentaries on YouTube. I’m a huge Adam Curtis fan.
Lenny: I have not heard of Adam Curtis. I will have to go check that out.
Josh Miller: Hyper-normalization is my favorite. And I would view his work as less non-fictional documentaries and more video art.
Lenny: There’s been a meme of everyone saying White Lotus is the show to watch. And I feel like it’s about to transition to Last of Us. And so we will see how that goes.
Josh Miller: Can I get it first? Was I the first guest to say it?
Lenny: I think you might be actually. I forget, but I think you might be.
Josh Miller: All right. Well, I’ll say episode three, specifically.
Lenny: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. People love that one. But every episode’s awesome. Next question. Favorite interview question you like to ask people when you’re interviewing them?
Josh Miller: What would you like to ask me? That seems like a non-answer, but my interviews at Browser Company are all, “Ask me anything,” and I find what people ask, and how they follow up, is as revealing about who they are and what they care about than anything I could ask them.
Lenny: What is it that you look for in an answer that tells you, okay, this is a good candidate?
Josh Miller: Authenticity, probably more than anything else. Do they really believe what they’re saying?
Lenny: Awesome. What are some SASS products that your company uses and loves, other than … ? I don’t know if you consider our SASS, but probably not. So, yeah.
Josh Miller: I want to plug Tuple. I think I’m going to put everything on Tuple, relative to … We run on Notion, we love Notion, we love Linear. But I’d say the closet hit that I just cannot believe is not a hundred times larger company is Tuple. It is ostensibly a pair programming tool, but don’t go in with that mindset. Go in with, “I need to talk to a colleague right now,” or “a couple of colleagues right now, to do some work together,” and it is absolutely fantastic.
Lenny: I love it. I love these products I’ve never heard of that are super cool. We will link to that. Next question. What’s something relatively minor you’ve changed in how you build product, that has had a significant impact in your team’s ability to ship and execute?
Josh Miller: This past January, a couple months ago, we have started removing me from a lot of the product development process, which seems to be really healthy. So, that has been the big shift this year.
Lenny: That’s a big transition. I went through that at Airbnb and it’s great. It’s great for everyone. Final question. Best pro-tip for using Arc, that people may not be aware of?
Josh Miller: Try your best to not think of it as a browser. And have a beginner’s mind about how it works and how you might use the internet.
Lenny: Whoa! Big idea.
Josh Miller: Yeah. Big takeaway from this conversation, we got to get much better at describing what the heck we built. And why it’s good for you. So, I’m not proud of my first or last answer, but it is what it is.
Lenny: And, actually, I mentioned this in the intro and if you listen to this already, you probably heard it already, but we’re going to link … In the show notes, we’ll have a link to actually get into Arc, because right now it’s wait-listed and we have this link that will get you straight into Arc. And so go check it out. Josh, you’ve shown up with heartfelt intensity. I feel like I want to go apply for a job at The Browser Company now. But you’re not hiring product managers, so I’m not going to do that. Just kidding. Thank you so much for being here, for being so genuine and insightful and warm. And thank you.
Josh Miller: Thank you so much, Lenny. I really enjoyed this.
Lenny: Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast, 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 |
|---|---|
| Abby | Abby(人名,保留原文) |
| acqui-hire | acqui-hire(人才收购,保留原文) |
| Adam Curtis | Adam Curtis(英国纪录片导演,保留原文) |
| Airbnb | Airbnb(公司名,保留原文) |
| Amazon Web Services | Amazon Web Services(亚马逊云计算平台,保留原文) |
| Apple | Apple(公司名,保留原文) |
| Apple Podcast | Apple Podcast(播客平台,保留原文) |
| Arc | Arc(产品名,保留原文) |
| Azure | Azure(微软云计算平台,保留原文) |
| Ben | Ben(人名,保留原文) |
| CarPlay | CarPlay(Apple 车载系统,保留原文) |
| Ched Khan | Ched Khan(人名,保留原文) |
| Chromium | Chromium(开源浏览器引擎,保留原文) |
| CPO | CPO(Chief Product Officer,首席产品官,保留原文) |
| Cron | Cron(日历应用,保留原文) |
| D5/D7 | D5/D7(日活跃天数指标,保留原文) |
| Dropbox | Dropbox(云存储服务名,保留原文) |
| Ellis | Ellis(人名,故事讲述团队成员,保留原文) |
| engagement | 活跃度 |
| Evan | Evan(Snapchat 联合创始人 Evan Spiegel,保留原文) |
| Figma | Figma(设计协作工具,保留原文) |
| Firefox | Firefox(浏览器,保留原文) |
| General Magic | General Magic(科技纪录片名,保留原文) |
| God Saved Texas | 《God Saved Texas》(书名,保留原文) |
| Google(公司名,保留原文) | |
| Hacker News | Hacker News(平台名,保留原文) |
| Harold and the Purple Crayon | 《阿罗和紫色蜡笔》(儿童绘本经典,保留原文书名) |
| heartfelt intensity | 发自内心的热情 |
| Hursh | Hursh(人名,Josh Miller 的联合创始人兼 CTO,保留原文) |
| Hyper-normalization | 《Hyper-normalization》(Adam Curtis 纪录片,保留原文) |
| IC | IC(Individual Contributor,个人贡献者,保留原文) |
| Josh Lee | Josh Lee(人名,故事讲述团队视频编辑,保留原文) |
| Josh Miller | Josh Miller(人名,保留原文) |
| L5/L7 | L5/L7(同类指标的另一种命名,保留原文) |
| Lawrence Wright | Lawrence Wright(美国作家,保留原文) |
| Lenny | Lenny(人名/播客名,保留原文) |
| lennyspodcast.com | lennyspodcast.com(网站地址,保留原文) |
| Linear | Linear(项目管理工具,保留原文) |
| MKBHD | MKBHD(知名科技 YouTuber Marques Brownlee 的频道名,保留原文) |
| mutts | ”混血”型人才(Josh 用来比喻多技能跨界人才,保留原文意象) |
| Nash | Nash(人名,故事讲述团队负责人,保留原文) |
| NBC | NBC(美国全国广播公司,保留原文) |
| Notes on Road Trips | 《公路旅行笔记》 |
| Notion | Notion(协作工具,保留原文) |
| OBPS | OBPS(Facebook 内部发帖频率指标缩写,保留原文) |
| Paper by 53 | Paper by 53(产品名,保留原文) |
| Peek | Peek(产品功能名,保留原文) |
| Phil Knight | Phil Knight(人名,Nike 联合创始人,保留原文) |
| Pixar | 皮克斯(动画工作室名,使用公认中文译名) |
| PM | PM(产品经理缩写,保留原文) |
| PRD | PRD(产品需求文档缩写,保留原文) |
| prototype-driven culture | 原型驱动的文化 |
| Raycast | Raycast(效率启动器工具,保留原文) |
| Rebecca | Rebecca(人名,保留原文) |
| retention | 留存 |
| Robert Irwin | Robert Irwin(美国当代艺术家,保留原文) |
| Scott Belsky | Scott Belsky(人名,保留原文) |
| show notes | show notes(播客节目附注,保留原文) |
| Snap | Snap(公司名,保留原文) |
| Snapchat | Snapchat(产品名,保留原文) |
| Snow White | 《白雪公主》(迪士尼电影名,使用中文通用译名) |
| Spotify | Spotify(音乐/播客平台,保留原文) |
| Steve Jobs | 史蒂夫·乔布斯 |
| Stripe | Stripe(公司名,保留原文) |
| Substack | Substack( Newsletter 发布平台,保留原文) |
| SVP | SVP(Senior Vice President,高级副总裁,保留原文) |
| The Browser Company | The Browser Company(公司名,保留原文) |
| The Last of Us | 《最后生还者》(HBO 剧集,使用中文通用译名) |
| The Verge | The Verge(科技媒体名,保留原文) |
| Thrive Capital | Thrive Capital(风险投资公司名,保留原文) |
| tumbleweed | 滚雪球效应(比喻人才口碑的滚动吸引效应) |
| Tuple | Tuple(结对编程/通讯工具名,保留原文) |
| two-way door | 双向门(可逆决策的比喻) |
| user research | 用户研究 |
| Walt Disney | 华特·迪士尼 |
| White Lotus | 《White Lotus》(HBO 剧集,保留原文) |
| Zoom | Zoom(视频会议产品名,保留原文) |
Reformatted by reformat_english.py
与巨人竞争:The Browser Company 如何打造产品的内部视角 | Josh Miller(CEO)
团队的真心与热忱
Josh Miller: 我们希望加入公司的人是带着满腔热血来的,有自己想要成就的事情。每个人的燃点各不相同——有的人热衷于 UI 工艺细节,有的人志在用四分之一的工程师实现双倍性能。每个人都有自己的追求,但他们都带着发自内心的热忱而来。我觉得哪怕抛开其他一切,我也会说,这才是最关键的。如果你拥有一支充满真挚热忱、为某种目标而来、并有事情要证明的团队,你就拥有了最重要的东西。交给他们一个令人兴奋、充满雄心的产品,然后别挡他们的路,他们一定会做出非凡的成绩。
播客简介
Lenny: 欢迎收听 Lenny 的播客,在这里我会采访世界级的产品负责人和增长专家,向他们学习打造和增长当今最成功产品的宝贵经验。今天的嘉宾是 Josh Miller。Josh 是一家名为 The Browser Company 的公司的 CEO 兼联合创始人,该公司做了一款叫 Arc 的产品,它已经迅速成为我的默认浏览器。我一上手就爱上了这款产品,也很想了解 Josh 和他的团队是如何打磨产品的。像 The Browser Company这样的公司,还有其他几家,几乎把一切精力都聚焦在打造极致的用户体验上,近乎凌驾于其他一切之上。我想和 Josh 花些时间探讨这一趋势。我们聊到了他对优先级排序、团队建设、叙事能力、公司价值观、数据指标、发布节奏、公开构建等等方面的思考。
Josh 是一个非常真诚、坦率且谦逊的人,能向他学习是我的荣幸。需要说明的是,我不是 The Browser Company 的投资者,在采访 Josh 之前我对这家公司也几乎一无所知。所以我只是一个纯粹的粉丝。另外还有一个特别惊喜:Arc 通常是邀请制的,但如果你现在正在收听这期节目,可以去节目说明里找到一个专属链接,直接开始使用这款浏览器,亲自体验一下。那么,短暂赞助商之后,为您带来 Josh Miller。
Arc 是什么
Lenny: Josh,欢迎来到播客。
Josh Miller: 非常感谢邀请我,Lenny。
Lenny: 这是我的荣幸。你是 The Browser Company 的 CEO 兼联合创始人,这家公司做了一款叫 Arc 的产品。你能聊聊 The Browser Company 是什么?Arc 是什么?然后如果方便的话,也可以分享一下 Arc 目前的规模,大家一定会很感兴趣。
Josh Miller: 当然。不过我能不能先问一句——我听说你可能在用 Arc,也可能没用过,你会怎么向别人描述 Arc?
Lenny: 最简单的说法就是,这是我用过的最好的网页浏览器。所以对我来说它就是一个浏览器。我知道你的愿景远不止于此,但作为一个还没看过完整愿景的普通用户,这就是我的感受。
Josh Miller: 太好了。我觉得我们可以直接收工了。真的,太好了。
Lenny: 哈哈,那就这样吧。
Josh Miller: 不,说实话,对你和你的听众我都坦诚讲:我们一直很难描述 Arc 到底是什么,这并不是我引以为豪的事情。但客观来说,它是你默认浏览器的替代品。试用过的人似乎都非常喜欢它,而且大多数人用完之后很难再回到以前的方式上网。所以这听起来可能像是我在故作矜持,但我们确实反复打磨过很多一句话的介绍,至今还没找到合适的措辞。坦白说,把这件事说得更精准,已经列入了我们的待办清单。
核心指标:D5/D7
Josh Miller: 至于我们的规模,既然有很多产品经理在听这档播客,我就给一个产品经理式的回答。我们真正聚焦的核心指标只有一个,用来追踪增长和整体表现。我们内部叫它 D5、D7,很多其他公司称之为 L5、L7。用大白话解释就是:有多少人每周至少有五天会打开 Arc?这就是我们从数据层面唯一执着的东西,因为对我们来说,它用一个指标同时涵盖了留存、活跃度和增长,而且没法刷数据。从留存角度看,它不是偶然一周打开一次就算数——你必须在某一天实际打开一个标签页,这一天才算一次活跃。
它衡量留存,也衡量活跃度,因为每周使用五天可不是随便说说的。你每周主动使用五天以上的应用或软件,其实非常少。然后它显然也反映了增长,因为我们追踪的是绝对数量。所以我们不看绝对数字,因为如果我们成功了,把时间线拉得足够长,任何时间点的绝对数字都会显得微不足道。我们真正关注的是周环比增长率——相对于上周,我们的增长是多少?过去大约八个月里,我们每周的增长都超过了 10%。对此我们非常振奋。不过如果有听众听到这里,我觉得这不可能一直持续下去——要是接下来八个月还能保持这样的增速,我会非常惊讶。总之,我们执着的就是有多少人每周五到七天在使用 Arc,并且希望这个数字每周都能尽可能快地增长。
Lenny: 我很喜欢我们一上来就在聊指标和留存,这个开局不错。
Josh Miller: 得了解你的听众嘛,Lenny。
Lenny: 接下来我们会聊到你有多公开地分享一切。不过你愿意分享一下留存的具体数字吗?就是你刚才提到的 D5 和 D7?
Josh Miller: 好的。不过先声明一下,我没提前准备这个数据。所以如果我说错了,Rebecca 事后请在 Twitter 上纠正我。再说一遍,我们不看 DAU 留存,也不看周活跃用户留存。我们真正关注的只有 D5、D7 留存。根据不同同期群,大概在 30% 多到 40% 出头之间。真的非常棒。但再说一次,这个数字不会一直涨。如果一年后有人来查这个数据,我确定它会更低。但到目前为止,我们真的很满意。
同样重要的是,我们也不看绝对的粗增长数字,也不看当下的留存率,我们关注的是同期群之间留存是否在持续改善。所以我认为最让我自豪的是,如果回头看一年前,我们的留存曲线就已经很令人骄傲了,我认为在我们这个软件品类中是最好的之一。但更让我自豪的是,12 个月后,尽管我们离最早那批最热情的早期用户越来越远,留存曲线仍然在一点一点地往上走。我们的留存曲线在持续攀升,虽然幅度不大——
Lenny: 好了好了。如果你之前没分享过的话,将来在 Twitter 上分享出来会很酷。我是一个留存用户。
Josh Miller: 我等着你分享这段。你可以把这段视频剪出来,我们会转发的。
Lenny: 好的好的。我喜欢这个。一切都准备好了,营销策略已经成形了。我之前跟你提过,我之所以想请你上这期播客——虽然大家可能知道,我也跟你说过,我通常会尽量避免邀请创始人和 CEO 上这个播客,把机会留给那些不常被邀请上播客的人。但我想请你来的原因是,我真的觉得 Arc 是一款非凡的产品。我第一次使用时就被震撼了。不知道你有没有看到,我一注册完就发了推文?我必须分享它有多棒。我当时——
Josh Miller: 我当然看到了。那让我开心了一整天。
Lenny: 太好了。而且,作为一个外部观察者,感觉你们正在构建一种非凡的文化和团队,非常独特。所以我就是想自私地向你学习,学习你对产品、团队建设以及相关一切的思考方式。
Josh Miller: 谢谢你这么说,Lenny。这真是一个很棒的开场。
产品理念:对传统硅谷方式的反思
Lenny: 没错。沿着这个方向,我的第一个问题是,你曾提到你的产品构建理念是对传统硅谷产品构建方式的一种回应。我很好奇是什么让你走上了这条路?为什么你觉得需要做出回应?你会如何描述 The Browser Company 的产品构建理念?
Josh Miller: 我想先声明一点,这句话在这次采访中我只说一次。我想让所有听众知道,我是一个不相信存在唯一正确做法的人。所以我今天分享的,真的只是我们在此刻、对我们正在做的事情所发现的行之有效的方法。但我记得在我职业生涯早期,我也会听这样的播客并把它们奉为圭臬,因为那些人做成过事情,我尊重他们打造的产品。所以如果这些话听起来有点”高人一等”的意思,那绝非本意。这只是我们发现对我们有效的方式和我们看重的东西。
好。我的职业生涯早期和 Hursh——也就是我现在的联合创始人兼 CTO——一起创办了一家公司。我们很幸运,那家公司被 Facebook 收购了,或者说是 acqui-hire,之后我在 Facebook 工作了好几年。那是一个了不起的组织,可能是我见过的执行力最强的公司,至少在那个时期是这样。顺便说一句,我之前从没做过 PM,所以我不是在夸自己,我只是在从头学起。但在 Facebook,大约是 2014 年左右,让我印象深刻的是——而且一直延续到今天——硅谷,至少是现代版的硅谷,对图表有一种执念,对数字和指标有一种执念。
你看,刚才我在回答上一个问题时就在谈 D5、D7。D5、D7 是什么?聚焦于数字确实是一种非常有效的方式来达成某些目标,因为它非常量化、客观。你可以看到图表上升、下降或持平,取决于你的目标。但我们发现的是,单纯为指标优化会遗漏很多东西,会错过很多东西。所以我们在 The Browser Company 做的是,我们谈论的是优化感受。我们想让软件另一端的那个人有什么样的感受?我们想让他们感到愉悦吗?想让他们感到快速吗?想让他们感到有条理吗?想让他们感到专注吗?无论我们在做一个具体项目、一个具体功能,还是一段具体的内容叙事,我们想要唤起的到底是什么感受?
优化感受而非指标
我可以想象你的听众现在脑子里在想什么,可能是很多种想法。但其中之一大概是,这听起来太浪漫了。他们可能会想,“好吧,你在优化感受。“但请允许我提出一个观点:实际上,这种现代的为数字和图表优化的方式——尤其是对我们每天都在做的事情而言,即创造东西并把它们放到世界上——才是相当奇怪的。因为,如果你静下心来想一想,你最喜欢的产品或产品公司、品牌是什么?虽然说出来可能有点老套,但对我来说是 Nike。Nike 是最早在很深层次上与童年时期的我产生共鸣的公司之一。Disney 呢?Disney 也是一样。Apple 呢?在我成为这个行业的专业人士之前,这些品牌和它们创造的产品,是真正让我爱上那些表面上看只是商业产品的东西的原因。
你觉得华特·迪士尼在打造迪士尼乐园时在优化什么?你觉得 Phil Knight 在制作第一版 Nike 跑鞋时在想什么?你觉得史蒂夫·乔布斯在构想 iPhone 或 Macintosh 时在想象和憧憬什么?毫无疑问,数字是一种极好的方式来诚实面对自己是否正在实现你的目标。但在创造的那一刻,作为产品人,思考我们应该做什么、为什么做、怎么做的时候,我们认为更重要的是去思考那个人——另一端的那个人——以及我们真正想让他们感受到什么。
Facebook 与 Snapchat 的对比
一个具体的例子是,我在 Facebook 的时候,恰逢 Snapchat 崛起。大家有很多焦虑,我们做得怎么样?我们该担心吗?而我们讨论这些问题的方式是,人们每周在 Facebook 上分享多少次?他们发了什么帖子吗?我们甚至有一个缩写叫 OBPS。这个缩写深深刻在我的记忆里。OBPS 是什么?它的趋势如何?而我认为我们当时应该问的问题是——至少在 The Browser Company 我们会问的是——“人们是否感觉与朋友和家人更亲近了?“或者类似的问题。
我觉得这正是 Snapchat 做得非常对的地方。他们没有执迷于”有多少人把图片放进编辑器然后点了加号按钮,每周这样做的次数就代表成功”这类问题。他们在思考的是某种更加人性化、更加本质的东西。这就是我们在 The Browser Company 所坚持的。不要为指标优化,不要为图表优化。把数据当作一种诚实面对自己的方式,当作工具箱里的一件工具。但从根本上说,我们没有人是为了这些数字而来的。我们在这里是为了让人们感受到某种东西。
如何将”为感受优化”落地
Lenny: 正如你所说,我想很多听众会觉得:“我很喜欢这个理念,我也希望能这样做。我想为感受优化,但我还得推动业务向前发展,我有目标要完成,我要让团队负起责任来。” 我很好奇,你是如何将这种方法落地的?你们实际上是怎样执行这个理念的?我猜你们仍然有目标和指标,你们也谈到过留存之类的东西。
Josh Miller: 是的。显然,站在抽象的角度替另一家公司做这件事是很难的,而且它可能并不适用于每家公司和每个产品。但是,举例来说,我们之所以发现这种方式到目前为止如此有效,原因之一是——如果你选对了感受,它通常与你关心的指标密切相关。比如说,我们没有增长团队,也没有任何类似于增长项目的东西。然而,在我们推出的许多新功能中,我们希望人们感受到惊喜、愉悦或类似的情绪。你猜怎么着?当人们产生这种感受时,他们会说:“天哪,那是什么?“然后他们就开始告诉朋友和家人,开始在 Slack 里发截图,等等。所以这是消费者端的一个例子。我从未做过向 CIO 等角色销售的传统企业软件。但我可以想象,大型企业 IT 部门的人可能希望自己感觉聪明,或者希望感觉自己走在前沿,或者希望在工作中感到安全和从容。
我觉得有时候我们只是忘记了,无论你的买家是谁,无论你的商业目标是什么,说到底我们都是一群人,坐在屏幕那一端的一个个房间里。想想那个人,他可能是买家,也可能是用户。但我觉得真正的答案是——当我职业生涯早期的时候,我一直在寻找答案,寻找做事的方法,什么是对的,什么是错的,非此即彼。我觉得任何在做这件事或其他事情做了一段时间的人都会明白,一切都是微妙的。它是一个光谱。要看情况。有时候管用,有时候不管用。
但我觉得真正的答案,Lenny,是纯粹地为指标优化在我看来有很深的缺陷。纯粹地为感受优化同样有缺陷。具体要看你在做什么、项目是什么以及很多其他因素。但我觉得我们之所以如此坚定地站出来表态,是因为我认为硅谷已经过度倾向于为图表和指标优化了,如果我们能把它往回拉一点,哪怕只是作为一家公司这样做,我觉得也是好的。但事实是,两者都需要。我们需要使用能获得的所有工具,但我希望这是人们可以将这种理念落地的一种方式。
Lenny: 我很好奇,想再深挖一下,你们实际上是怎么执行的?举个例子,你们最近推出了 Peek 功能,就是你把鼠标悬停在一个链接上,它会打开一个小型浏览器窗口,不会持久存在。你们会不会写一份小规格文档,比如”我们要创造惊喜感,也许这是我们关注的一个指标”?在日常工作中,针对一个新功能,你们在感受与指标之间的实际操作方式是怎样的?
Josh Miller: 嗯,说实话,我觉得我们还没有把它流程化到将来某一天应有的那种正式程度。将来可能确实需要做到那一步。幸运的是,我们是一个非常紧密的小团队,在一起共事已经很长时间了。所以并没有那么正式——不是在 PRD 顶端列出各种情绪。更多的是,针对那个项目,把 Ben 和其他参与的人叫到一个房间里,说:“好,我们想为人们做什么?我们要解决的问题是什么,或者我们如何融入他们的日常生活。在那个时刻,人们希望感觉非常轻快、自在。”
以 Peek 功能为例——他在说的那些使用场景是:你在 Hacker News 上,可能想快速连续查看五到七个链接。你还不太确定哪个值得花时间,但你会快速打开一堆东西。而 Peek 让你毫不费力地预览一下,不需要离开 Hacker News,不需要切换到一整个新标签页来回跳转。所以在那个场景下,我们的讨论是,如何让它感觉非常轻盈、毫不费力——唰地弹出来,唰地收回去,轻快感、自在感、速度、敏捷。所以说,我们并没有一个”第一优先感受是什么、第二优先感受是什么”的列表。在现阶段,它更多的是对话式的。但我其实真的很期待——希望有一天我们有幸拥有足够大的团队,从而不得不想出一种正式化的方式来做这件事。这就是我们思考方式的一个例子。
快速迭代背后的价值观
Lenny: 这正好可以过渡到我想聊的一个问题。我问过 Scott Belsky 应该问你什么。他是你的超级粉丝。我不知道他是不是投资人?但他就是说”我太喜欢 Josh 了”。我问他”我应该问 Josh 什么?“他的其中一个问题是关于——你们发布速度非常快。每个周五都在发布有意义的功能。而且当客户来提出需求时,你们的闭环做得非常好。你们会说:“嘿,我们做好了。“你们到底是怎么做到的?人们能从你们的运作方式中学到什么,才能做到快速发布?
Josh Miller: 首先,如果你在听的话,谢谢你 Scott。说实话这问题多少有点让人不好意思,因为就像有人夸你的产品一样,你永远无法真正坦然地接受这个赞美,因为你看到了所有的瑕疵。当然我们也看到自己在很多方面发布得不够快,在倾听用户和与成员共建方面可以做得更好。但是,冒着听起来有点老生常谈的风险,我真心认为我们发布的是我们的价值观。作为一家公司,我们对自己的价值观做了很多思考。你可以在网上读到这些内容。我觉得如果你审视那些价值观,再看看你的赞美或者 Scott 的赞美,你会发现它们之间是一一对应的。第一个,也是我认为最重要的——我们招聘的人带着发自内心的热情(heartfelt intensity)来到这里。
很多公司,我觉得它们痴迷于工艺细节。它们会有类似”我们痴迷于细节”这样的价值观。我们说的是,我们希望来到我们公司的人肚子里有一团火,有他们想要做成的事情。对每个人来说,这团火略有不同。对某些人来说可能是 UI 的工艺细节,对另一些人来说可能是用四分之一的工程师人数实现两倍的性能。每个人都有自己的追求,但他们都带着这种发自内心的热情而来。而且我觉得相比其他一切,我要说的是——这就是关键。如果你有一个团队,他们带着发自内心的热情,为了一个目的而来,有想要证明的东西,你给他们一个令人兴奋的、雄心勃勃的命题,然后不要挡他们的路,他们会做出卓越的工作。所以,带着发自内心的热情而来。
Josh Miller: 我们的第二个价值观是”假设你不知道”。假设你不知道。这条价值观的意思是,即使你是某个领域的专家也一样。我们公司有一个人,他确实构建了 Chrome 的第一个版本,并且管理了它 16 年。但他比任何人都更体现了这种初学者心态:“我不知道这应该怎么运作,也不知道会发生什么。“这条价值观的后续是,“所以我们得动起来。“就像来到一座新城市,你得走出 Airbnb 的门左转……也许你会右转,然后跳上地铁,但你就是得动起来,看看会发现什么。所以我们有这样的态度:你带着发自内心的热情来到这里,但你一开始就告诉自己,“我不知道自己在做什么,我不知道会发生什么。“所以我们必须动起来。这自然形成了一种默认行动的倾向。
我们还有一条价值观:先问”可以是什么?“,这是在推动自己尽可能地去追求最宏大、最雄心勃勃的目标。比如你提到的 Peek 功能,我们不只想解决上下文切换的问题,我们想几乎模糊原生软件和网页软件之间的界限,让它感觉像一张纸。真正推动自己做到尽可能雄心勃勃,其结果是反过来更深刻地激励了参与其中的人。
我还可以继续说下去。我们有条价值观,“到了必须集体攻坚的时候,你是在为团队而战”,还有一条是”让他们有所触动”。但我认为这一切汇聚起来的结果是,一个很有心的团队,有很多内在动力,带着一种”这是我职业生涯第一天,我想知道会发生什么”的态度。我觉得所有这些汇聚成了一种文化:“先把东西做出来,看看会发生什么。“
价值观的由来
Lenny: 你们是怎么想出这些的?制定公司价值观的过程是怎样的?因为我知道很多公司会说”我们应该搞一套价值观出来。“你们是怎么做的?
Josh Miller: 秘密是我讨厌公司价值观。我从来没有对它们产生过共鸣。我很幸运,我们有幸得到了很多非常出色的、经验丰富的领导者的支持。在头一两年,我不断被人敲打:“Josh,你的价值观呢?你的团队没有价值观怎么运作?“而我总觉得那些东西更像企业宣传,那些老套的 Fortune Cookie、Panda Express 式的”你应该注重细节”。这些东西引不起我的共鸣。让我开窍的事情大概是工作了一年半到两年的时候,我不断从团队那里听到同样的说法。我会在某人入职一年后做一些交流:“最近怎么样?什么做得好?什么不好?“然后我意识到,有一些特质非常自然地、有机地定义了我们的团队,没有人告诉过大家我们的价值观是什么。
再说一遍,因为我当时是个天真无知的 31 岁,觉得”价值观是企业的、晚期资本主义的产物”,非常非常固执。两年后,听到团队讲述他们为什么喜欢 The Browser Company,为什么觉得我们做的事情……那种热情真的很特别。然后我们给自己一个挑战,这也后来变成了一条价值观:如果企业网页上五条标语让你觉得不对劲,那就先问”可以是什么”,做做梦。然后我意识到,人们说的关于他们为什么喜欢 The Browser Company 的所有话,关于他们认为什么定义了我们的工作方式,让我想起了我喜欢的公路旅行方式。我很喜欢旅行,很喜欢到一个新地方然后就探索。所以我们就有了一个”顿悟”时刻:与其做一个企业落地页上面放五个价值观标题和副标题,不如我们写一本关于如何进行公路旅行的手册。
所以我们写了一篇散文叫《公路旅行笔记》,用一个半自传、但主要是虚构的故事——一个人在少年时代和父亲一起进行公路旅行——来讲述我们在 The Browser Company 做事的方式。分享这些价值观,但用一种希望不会那么像宣传的方式,更像你在读一篇散文。我这么说,不是说传统价值观有什么问题。实际上我很确定会有很多给我建议、指导我的人听了这期播客后要对我一番说教,觉得我听起来太愤世嫉俗了。但我对这个故事相当自豪,因为它是”假设你不知道”的一个绝佳范例。我们曾经确信公司价值观不适合我们。然后非常自然地,在没有刻意为之的情况下,结果发现——“等等!它们以相当深刻的方式贯穿了这家公司。我们应该用一些文字把它们表达出来,因为不管我们喜不喜欢,不管我们说不说,它都在发生。“
写作过程
Lenny: 太棒了。我这儿打开了那个页面,确实很美。稍后我会把链接放在 show notes 里。简单从实操角度问一下,你是坐下来就开始写这个东西,然后别人给你反馈吗?整个过程花了多长时间?给那些可能想走这条路的人一个参考。
Josh Miller: 嗯,这个方法的一个弊端是它花的时间比我们预想的要长得多,因为我们投入了很多心血。所以,一切的开始还是在我自然的一年期沟通中,开始注意到这些模式。然后我们实际上非常系统地做了一件事:“好吧,让我们坐下来,逐一采访 The Browser Company 的每一个人。不用问卷。一个一个地跟人谈话,问问题。“然后我们从中提取出那些话语。所以,这些价值观真正厉害的地方在于,如果我没记错的话,我相信每一句话——可能除了个别词语——都是我们团队中某个人说过的原话。我们采访了整个团队,然后这些价值观就是一面镜子。至于把它写成公路旅行散文的形式?那花了很多时间。那确实是很多……嗯,我不推荐我们采用的那种方式,但是——
Lenny: 很长是多长?
Josh Miller: 大概三个月。
Lenny: 哦,听起来没那么长嘛。好吧。
Josh Miller: 对。也许这又回到 Scott 说的,也许我们对发布速度的标准——包括价值观在内——就是,怎么说呢,我不确定。但,确实感觉很漫长。而且这不仅仅是我。对正在听的人说,这不是 CEO 躲在角落里写的一篇宣言。这是整个团队的努力。我们团队有位叫 Abby 的女士,在这个项目上做了大量工作。那些话语本身来自我们的团队。所以那个网页上可能某个地方有我的名字,但这绝不意味着是我一个人在角落里壁炉旁写出了这篇文章。
招聘顶级人才
Lenny: 好的,太棒了。这真的很有帮助。如你所见,我也在 Twitter 上问大家应该问你什么,收到了大量问题。大家对你们做事的方式有太多疑问。最常见的问题来自 Ched Khan,他的问题在所有提问中获得了最多的点赞。问题是关于招聘的——基本上就是,你成功地让世界上一些最优秀的人加入了 The Browser Company。就像你刚才提到的,你基本上招到了构建 Chrome 的那个人来现在做 Arc。你到底是怎么说服这些优秀的人才加入的?因为每个人都想向你学习、复制你的做法,自己也能做到。
Josh Miller: 谢谢你的提问,也感谢大家的点赞。我得承认,这个问题其实也挺让人不好意思回答的。我刚刚才面完一位候选人,他问了我一个非常类似的问题。我说,“你知道吗?你应该去问问在这里工作的人。不是我。我也不知道他们最终为什么选择加入。“但我可以告诉你的是,我们的刻意性——这又是一个秘诀,今天分享了很多秘诀。这个可能让我惹上麻烦。我并不在乎网络浏览器。我从来就不在乎网络浏览器。我从没想过要做一个网络浏览器。如果十年前你告诉我,我 32 岁的时候会在做一款桌面端优先的网络浏览器,我会说”我的职业生涯到底出了什么可怕的差错?”
这家公司的起源,是 Hursh,我在 20 岁时认识了他。我们一起创办了一家公司。犯了很多错,也取得了不少成功,经历了大量的成长阵痛,也认清了彼此是什么样的人。十年后我们依然是朋友,参加了彼此的婚礼。我们在各种不同的行业和不同阶段的公司都工作过,然后我们意识到,“你知道吗?有很多想法让我们非常兴奋,形态各异、大小不一。“但当我们怀旧地回顾过去十年的时候,真正构成我们最美好回忆的,是那些人和与那些人共处的时刻。所以,Hursh 和我在公司成立很久之前就做了一个决定:我们想创办一家公司,但这家公司要让我们觉得自己能招到任何我们想招的人。我说的不是”谁敢说不”那种意思,而是我们想做一些我们这个行业以及相关领域最顶尖的头脑在假设意义上也愿意去做的事情。然后建立一个组织、一支团队,让我们可以用经过十年尝试各种角色、各种做事方式、各种指标后,找到最适合我们自己的方式来工作。
所以,我们最终做了一个新的网络浏览器,更不用说要做一个作为新型计算形态的网络浏览器——那才是我们真正的愿景,构建一个互联网计算机。你可以在 The Browser Company 的 YouTube 页面上搜索”internet computer”那个视频。但我们的雄心甚至高于做一个网络浏览器。做浏览器的初衷,只是我们想招揽我们认识和不认识的最喜欢的人,建立一支我们永远不会厌倦与之共事的团队,因为他们太出色了,也太谦逊了。
所以当你这样去想的时候,我作为 CEO,名义上是产品负责人,我把我们真正的产品视为我们的团队。我知道很多公司都这么说。我其实觉得他们可能都是真心的,没有人是在虚伪地讲,但我们是真的把这个当作核心。这是我们公司的起源。它不是一个新的网络浏览器。它就是——组建梦之队,属于我们的梦之队。然后建立一种对我们来说真正有趣、真正体现我们价值观的工作方式。再去找到与这一切产生共鸣的人。这种理念渗透到我们做的每一件事里,不管是这个政策还是那个做法。
举个例子。我们面试的目标是说服人们不要加入 The Browser Company。如果我和某人面试,我不会推销自己,而是说”你想问我什么?什么都行?我会非常坦诚,大多数人其实不应该来这里工作。“所以我认为,这一切的起点是我们把公司、把团队视为我们的产品,而不是 Arc 本身。然后,我认为还需要有自知之明,知道这就是我们的思维方式。
不过话说回来,从我听到的一些反馈来看,我们确实很幸运,招到了很多真正了不起的人,无论从履历上还是实际能力上都是——全方位地优秀。我举几个例子,分享一件我听到的事情。几位最近入职的人:我们招了一个叫 Darren 的人,正如我之前提到的,他共同创建了 Chrome 的第一个原型,然后负责运营它长达 16 年。我想直接向他汇报的人有成百上千甚至可能上千人。他加入 The Browser Company 时是一名 IC。我们刚刚招了一位名叫 Tara 的女性,她是最初 Paper by 53 团队的成员,那是我职业生涯早期最令我深受启发的产品之一。她最近一个职位是 Vimeo 的产品高级副总裁,以及工程高级总监。她加入我们的工程团队时也是一名 IC。我们刚招了一个叫 Peter Vidani 的人。当我 20 岁做消费者社交软件的时候,他是那个最酷、最让人印象深刻的人。他是 Tumblr 的第一位设计师。在 Tumblr 领导设计团队七年,最近一个职位是 Slack 的设计高级副总裁。他加入团队时是一名 IC 设计师。
虽然这听起来像是在吹嘘,但真正让我们感到有趣和困惑的是:这些人已经赚了很多钱,拥有非常光鲜的头衔,参与过变革性的项目。他们为什么要加入这支团队?我觉得人们来到 The Browser Company 时身上带着的,除了发自内心的热情,还有一种渴望——他们希望自己在 The Browser Company 的作品能成为其职业生涯的代表作。而这些是已经做出了真正卓越成就的人说出的话。我认为最重要的是,我们意识到,要让这样的人愿意加入,并且带着这种心态出现,你必须向他们承诺并提供一系列条件,让这类人才被吸引过来,抱着做出职业生涯代表作的意图而来——包括一个令人惊叹且雄心勃勃的愿景,真正的赋权让他们以自己认为最好的方式去执行团队给予的课题,以及真正的信任和授权。
一种非常友善的文化。我觉得如果你在这个行业做了十几年,你对废话的容忍度会非常、非常低。所以,我绝不是认为我们完美无缺。我也不认为每个来到 The Browser Company 的人都会说”如果我不是在相当于早期 iPhone 团队那样的团队里,我会很失望。“但总的来说,Hursh 和我,以及早期团队的每个人,都带着这样的期望——把 The Browser Company 本身打造成产品。我认为这种精神一直延续至今,形成了一种滚雪球效应,人们说”那里就是我要去完成相当于打造 iPhone 那样壮举的地方。“我们心里都清楚大概率做不到,但就是有那种念头:“我想再试一次。我想全力以赴。“而这种念头,到了某个时刻,就会像滚雪球一样越滚越大。
使命与愿景的吸引力
Lenny: 那个滚雪球效应——我觉得其中很大一部分原因是,一旦你招到了优秀的人,就会有更多优秀的人想加入。我觉得这确实非常有帮助。另外让我深有共鸣的是,公司的使命本身就是吸引最优秀人才的强大工具。我在很多创始人身上都看到过这一点。如果他们有一个有意义的使命,招聘就会容易得多,反之则难得多。显然你非常擅长传达那个愿景和使命。而且你们的使命和愿景本身就非常有趣。另外我觉得,你本身就是一个很有魅力的创始人,这也帮了大忙。你还是一个很棒的讲故事的人。
Josh Miller: 我还想补充一点,Lenny。再说一次,把自己放在听众的位置上,我想我刚才说的很多东西可能听起来有点……如果你不认识我,不了解我,可能会觉得有点夸夸其谈,或者有点过于浪漫化了。说点实在的,我跟你们分享一个做法——这本来就是我们的本性,但我认为它也帮助促成了这种滚雪球效应。从我们招聘的第一个人开始,我们就公开庆祝他们的加入,而且是发自内心地讲述他们作为一个人是什么样的人,他们做了什么。远在我们招到任何外界知名人士之前,我们就已经在这么做了——仅仅因为那是真诚的,我们真的为他们感到骄傲。再说一次,如果你把我们最初的使命理解为打造公司、打造产品,那么当我们的第一位设计师加入时,我们就要告诉所有人这件事。那就是一次产品发布。那就是产品发布。
每次我们发布什么东西的时候,我们都会特意公开庆祝参与其中的人。我觉得硅谷有时候存在一种 CEO 英雄崇拜的风气。我在公司做的事情其实很少。或者换个说法——在那些让人们爱上 Arc 的具体事物上,我做的贡献很少。我为 The Browser Company 做了很多事情,但 Arc 不是我做的。Peek 也不是我做的。再说一次,这就是我们的本性——“Alexandre,她太厉害了!看看这有多酷!“因为这是真诚的,这就是我们的真实样子。而且我认为这会形成一个正向循环:如果你是一个做出了非凡成就的人,你会想”我会被庆祝。他们真心希望我在这里。我的工作会得到认可。”
“功劳不会全都归于那个 CEO 偶像——那个所有人都以为是某种天才远见者的人。“所以,再说一次,我们绝不是完美的。我也绝不是觉得我们每次都做对了。但是,因为这是对我们自身和我们所做之事的一种真实表达,我觉得我们会做一些微小的实践——就像我刚才激动地描述的那个原则一样——但具体到操作层面,其实就是有人发了一条关于某个动画的推文,他们说”哇!这个太好玩了”,然后我们标记 Sherry。Sherry 做了这个,Sherry 太厉害了。你在硅谷不太常见到这种做法。你看到的是企业博客文章,CEO 的曝光比任何人都多。这可能就是为什么你的播客上不怎么请 CEO,因为你不想——你很清楚这一点,Lenny。这就是你的原则。你不想听 CEO 说什么。他们不是在打造产品的人。你想听的是真正动手做这件事的人。这也是我喜欢这个播客的原因。
公开透明的文化实验
Lenny: 没错,没错。谢谢你。听了你说的这一切,The Browser Company 听起来是一个令人难以置信的工作场所。我能理解为什么人们想去那里工作。原因其实很简单。你提到了公开透明,分享公司里发生的一切。这也是我想花点时间聊一聊的另一个话题。你们对公司内部的情况非常透明。你们把摄像机带进董事会会议。我看过一段半小时的视频,是你和设计负责人讨论一个进度落后的项目——你们在想办法怎么把这个东西做出来。你们就是公开分享公司内部正在做的真实事情。我很好奇,你们为什么开始这样做?你从中看到了什么好处或者坏处?有没有什么是你分享了之后觉得”嗯,也许我们不该把那个公开出来”的?你在这方面的体验是什么?
Josh Miller: 不如我先从可能的后悔说起吧。目前还不算后悔,但有一件事我一直在想……因为这件事确实非常……我希望在回答之前的一些问题时,我表现出了足够的真诚和热情。但这件事,我真的会把它描述为一个原型(prototype)。我们确实有一种原型驱动的文化。而这件事我会放在”也许以后会后悔”的清单上比较靠前的位置。具体来说,我希望的是——我不太舒服把自己放在我们故事的核心位置。但是,当你公开讲故事的时候,自然地,CEO 和创始人会有一种引力,被拉到故事的中心。所以,甚至就在今天早上,我们有一条有史以来表现最好的 YouTube 视频——第一条真正突破了既有关注者圈子的视频。那是一条经典 YouTube 形式的反应视频,回应 MKBHD 第一次谈论我们的产品。
说实话,就在这次访谈之前我又看了一遍,我心想:“我到底在干什么?我们到底在干什么?我为什么要试图成为一个 YouTuber?“完全坦率地说,目前还没有什么后悔的。但我担心我们会不会把这件事做过头了?所以如果有人在听这期节目,如果你看到我们开始走得太远了,尤其是跟我相关的部分,请告诉我们,因为这件事让我很不安。但我确实认为我们的出发点是纯粹的、真诚的——而定义 The Browser Company 成员的另一个特质,除了想要做出定义自己职业生涯的工作之外,我会说还有一点幻灭感,也许是感到厌倦,对她们所在的行业或参与过的产品产生了质疑,想要重新找到方向。但归根到底,我们是一群理想主义者,一群乐观主义者,想要重新找回我们小时候爱上的那些东西——不管是我们的手艺本身,还是技术、互联网和软件的潜力。
作为其中的一部分,我会把 Arc 和 The Browser Company 看作一场实验——一场证明”我们可以做到”、“更好的可能性是存在的”的实验。当我们在思考”更好是可能的”这件事、在重新发现我们内心深处热爱和相信的东西并试图将它们表达出来的时候,其中一个维度就是关于信任。我记得我十几岁第一次使用互联网的时候,以及大学早期,那种对可能性的憧憬,那种相信——那些打造这些工具的人,在我眼里就像英雄一样。不仅仅是领导者,而是团队、公司、品牌。但在某个节点上——我不是在归咎于某一家公司,我甚至不是说任何人做错了什么——但从文化层面上说……我是社会学专业的。从文化上,我们已经失去了对科技公司和技术品牌的信任。
所以,公开构建、给你看我们的会议——甚至到让人不太舒服的程度——就是一种实践:“如果我们是他们,凭什么信任我们?凭什么有人信任我们?“我们掌握着你最敏感的个人数据。我们掌握着你最敏感的职业数据。如果你的信任一次又一次被辜负,凭什么还要信任我们?我认为我们在这个原型、这场实验中的假设是——我们可以拥有世界上最好的隐私政策,但归根到底,屏幕后面也只是人而已。所以,即使我想到——我没有做过很多这样的访谈,因为我担心如果你不认识我,我会给人留下错误的印象。
激进的信任构建
Josh Miller: 很多人往往会这样。我注意到生活中很多朋友,我了解她们私下是什么样的人,但公众并不认识她们,人们会做出截然相反的解读,因为缺乏那种信任。所以我们的赌注是——如果你认识了我们,认识 Nash、Dina、我、Hursh,你真的觉得自己了解我们作为人的样子,了解我们所有的不完美,我们长相平平,各方面都很普通。那么当你看到我们在请求某项权限时,你也许会愿意相信,那是因为我们想让你获得更好的体验。如果不是这样……我想说,昨天有人发了条推文,显然我们还没有赢得她的信任,她也没有花时间了解我们。她对我们所做的事情做出了最糟糕的解读,你能想到的最坏的解读。起初说实话,我确实有点生气,心想:“这个人是谁,在一个星期四跑来说我们在做这做那?“然后我意识到,“你知道吗?如果是我,我也会有同样的感受,因为过去五到十年我与科技打交道的那些经历。”
所以,这些公开构建的实验,其目的是激进的信任构建。不是激进透明——我们不可能什么都分享——而是激进的信任构建。让你把我们当作活生生的人来认识。我担心我们有一天会后悔这样做,担心它可能演变成:“哦,她们想当网红,她们觉得自己多重要,所以什么都要分享——谢谢你们来给我们指点迷津。“这不是我们的本意。但我觉得值得冒这个险。这就是背后的用意。
Lenny: 这个洞察真的很有意思。对于一款浏览器来说,把信任看得这么重要,花这么大力气去建立信任,确实非常合理。
播客带来的启发
Josh Miller: 我之前没怎么做过播客访谈,没做过这种事。我真的很喜欢你。我真的很喜欢你对话的感觉,背后的用心,那种温暖,连你的片头音乐都是一段友善的小调。所以,这是一个很好的例子——我认为播客这种媒介最美妙的地方之一,就是我已经在耳边听了一年你的声音,还有你节目上的嘉宾,你会对你们、对你们的初衷产生一种信任感。你的初衷,无论是在这场访谈中,还是你想为听众做的事情。在某种程度上,你的节目,你带来的温暖,以及我对你作为一个人的感知……我们从未见过面。我们也许在私信里简单聊过,大概交换了五条消息。但我感觉自己认识你,这让我信任你。所以,在很多方面,这个播客——从元层面来说——就是我们这样做的一个灵感来源。
Lenny: 我的感受完全一样,只是方向反过来。你提到了担心自己在公司面前过于突出的问题,我也有完全相同的感受。虽然我的 Newsletter 叫”Lenny’s Newsletter”,但我之所以取这个名字,只是因为注册 Substack 时的默认建议就是如此。我不想搞成那种”我什么都懂,来找我吧,欢迎来到我的万事通殿堂”的感觉。我真的很不喜欢那样。正因如此,我才创建了这个并行的社区,让大家可以互相帮助,因为我不可能拥有所有答案。所以,我不得不接受这一点——好吧,人们需要一个人来帮助她们理解正在发生的事情、学习新东西……而在你的视频里,你很擅长突出其他人。我看了你们的董事会会议视频,里面是:“这是所有团队成员,她们来了。你好吗?“所以,总之,我想说的是,你在寻找平衡这件事上做得很好。
Josh Miller: 哦,谢谢。你也一样。
Lenny: 谢谢。你谈到了讲故事,还提到 The Browser Company 有很多不同寻常的团队,其中一个是讲故事团队。这其实解释了——我觉得——你们为什么能做出那么出色的视频,因为做好视频很难。你能不能谈谈你们的一些其他公司可能没有的、这些不寻常的团队?
不寻常的团队:会员团队与讲故事团队
Josh Miller: 希望你在这次访谈中到目前为止还能感受到另一件事——我们是一个非常原型驱动的文化。这回到了”假设你不知道”的理念。我们做大量的实验,包括产品功能方面的,也包括团队协作方式方面的,还包括我们讲的故事方面的。所以这不属于某个特定类别,而是”我不确定这会不会奏效,但我们在尝试”,而到目前为止,至少对我们来说,似乎效果不错。Lenny 提到的,是我们有几个特别的团队。我举两个例子。我们有一个会员团队,还有一个讲故事团队。你大概认识或熟悉这些词,但它们在历史上不是创业公司的组织架构,不是创业公司常见的职能和团队。让我讲讲这两者背后的用意。
会员团队。关于会员团队,当我在 Facebook 的时候,Facebook 做产品让我印象最深的,是她们的用户研究团队。向 Lowie 和 Jane 致敬。我不知道你们为什么会听这个播客,但我们在 Facebook 共事时,你们深深启发了我。她们拥有最出色的用户研究团队。但有一件事一直让我觉得奇怪。这不是 Lowie 和 Jane 的问题。事实上,她们自己也深受其害——用户研究几乎像是一个服务性组织,相对于产品、工程、设计而言。会有一个 PM,PM 被分配一位研究员,然后由 PM 决定怎么使用这位研究员,决定问她什么问题、让她做什么。但当你真正深入了解你为之构建、为之服务的人的时候,那种潜力是惊人的。否则你怎么做产品?
所以,我们在 The Browser Company 把这件事做到了极致。我们说:“不要把它想成客户支持、客户服务、客户成功、用户研究。那些只是商业术语,只是行业术语。“归根到底,我们的意思是——如果有一个人,从她第一次接触我们的软件或产品的那个瞬间,直到最后一次使用,我们都需要与她保持一段深刻的、真诚的、持续的关系。第一天,那可能是加引号的”客户成功”——“这东西怎么用?“第37天,那可能是”我遇到一个 bug,你能帮我看看吗?“第58天,那可能是”嘿,我们很快要发布移动端应用了,你希望移动端有什么?你希望在手机上做什么?“其他公司把这看作不同的组织和职能。我们把这看作——在另一端有一群人,我们从她们第一次接触我们产品的那个瞬间就在服务她们。让我们全栈地拥有这段关系,整体地去思考它。这就是会员团队。
在讲故事这一边,非常类似,只是类型不同的人。再说一次,我们是一家以人为本的公司。所以这里的主题是——公司里的人,以及另一端的人。如果说会员团队负责的是从用户第一次接触产品到最后一次的全过程,那么讲故事团队负责的是那些我们还没有荣幸服务的人。她们不用 Arc,不知道 Arc 是什么。那可能是投资人,加引号的”投资者关系”;那可能是媒体人,加引号的”公关”;那可能就是世界上的普通人,加引号的”营销”以及有朝一日的销售。但归根到底,就是向人讲述我们的故事。向人讲述我们的故事,并全栈地、整体地思考这件事。
从第一性原理出发构建团队
Josh Miller: 所以,这就是我们思考团队的方式——从第一性原理出发,问自己:“我们真正想要做的是什么?实现这个目标最直接的方式是什么?“即使那不是其他人的做法。在实践中,这样做的一个好处是,我确实认为它能催生某些让人们惊叹”哇,我以前从没见过这种东西”的内容。但话说回来,我认为任何人都有能力做到这一点。我觉得我们有一个极其出色的讲故事团队和会员团队,但我真心认为关键就在于那种意图性——团队是什么?她们的激励是什么?团队中有哪些专业能力?比如作为一家小公司,招聘一位视频剪辑师。这位视频剪辑师不是为了让 TikTok 账号爆火。而是从更整体的角度去思考那些人。
所以,再说一次,这套方式有很多问题。有很多事情并不顺利。我完全不知道这套方式能不能扩展到500人的规模……是的。所以我不是说这个实验最终一定会大获成功,也不说它适合所有人,甚至不保证它在不同阶段对我们自己都适用。但这就是会员团队、讲故事团队以及其他团队的意图所在。甚至产品管理也是如此。我们公司没有 PM。我在 Facebook 的头衔就是产品经理。我热爱产品管理。但我们不把它看作一个团队。我们把它看作一个项目、一项任务中的领导角色。
根据项目的不同,不同类型的人应该担任 PM。比如,我们正在进行一个与性能相关的项目,当然应该由一位基础设施工程师来做那个加引号的”PM”。我们还有一个产品项目,实际上我认为应该由会员团队的人来做 PM,因为归根到底,是的,我们在构建软件产品,但它真正关乎的是以特定方式服务我们的会员,所以应该让会员团队的人来当 PM。再说一次,你可以想象,所有听众脑子里现在一定在想:“这在18个地方都会出问题吧?“哦,绝对会。所以我不是承诺有一天这不会改变。但贯穿整个公司的理念依然是:假设你不知道。先问”可能会是什么样”,然后让我们尝试一些东西,看看会发生什么。
Lenny: 先问”可能会是什么样”,我喜欢这个价值观。
关于 PM 的未来
Lenny: 所以,我其实想问你——你谈到了为什么你们没有 PM。鉴于你有 PM 的背景,你觉得未来会招 PM 吗?你觉得会走到那一步,还是尽量坚持现在这种根据项目让不同人承担 PM 角色的方式?
Josh Miller: 会的。我们越来越多地在招一些在其他公司可能有 PM 头衔的人。我可以说我们现在有两到三个在其他公司完全可以有 PM 头衔的人。但我不认为我们会有一个 PM 组织或 PM 角色,因为再说一次,我们相信——如果你把 PM 做的事情拆解成一个个动词,我认为那些动词是我们招的任何人都能够做的。真正取决于项目是什么?我们想要做什么?我认为不会改变的一点是,我们喜欢招”混血”型人才。我还没找到一个听起来更讨人喜欢的说法,因为这个词本身是很有感情的、非常亲昵的……比如,我们公司有一个叫 Rebecca 的。
Rebecca 是我们在 Cora 用过的数据科学家。她在 MIT 拿到了博士学位,好像是行为心理学之类的。我可能会说错。但总之在 MIT 拿了一个很厉害的学位,然后在 Stripe 做软件工程师。我这样通过简历来介绍 Rebecca,其实 Rebecca 远不止于此。她现在实际上扮演着一个 PM 的角色。她正在为我们那个多人协作团队做 PM。但和 Rebecca 相识时最令人赞叹的是,她和公司里其他人都有这样的心态:“我做东西,我会做任何需要做的事来做出我想做的东西。不管那个动词是什么,不管那个领域是什么。“这需要那些在实践中多技能、在方法上跨界的人。不是我们不招 PM,而是我们想招那些有多技能方法论的人,把事情看作”我喜欢做东西。告诉我怎么贡献力量来做这件事。“有时候她们可能扮演 PM 的那些动词,有时候可能是别的。
PM 角色演变的普遍规律
Lenny: 这会是一个非常有意思的故事,值得持续关注。我在不同公司见过好几次这样的历程。我发现很多时候,那些擅长其他事情的人,比如工程或设计,有一阵子会说:“对,我们不需要 PM。PM 的活我来做。“然后最终她们会说:“这太糟了。我讨厌做这些事。我想做设计。别烦我。我不想整天坐在会议里。我不想开一个又一个会。“所以最终,她们会说:“好吧,找一个喜欢做这件事的人来做。“这是会发生的一件事。
另一件我发现的事是,我确定你也见过,很多人对 PM 有戒心。PM 进来说:“这是我们要做的”,她们只是在充当流程复杂性的管理者。但我觉得那些只是糟糕的 PM。如果你有一个优秀的 PM,一切都会变得更好。每个人都更开心,事情推进得更快。所以我觉得公司通常会走到那个阶段。另外还有职业发展的问题,随着规模扩大。就像”我的职业路径怎么办”,然后她们会说:“好吧,我们得走这条路或那条路。“很难一直留在这个混合角色里。但我非常尊重这种第一性原理的方法——让我们直接——
Josh Miller: 而且,说句实话,Lenny。我认为你几乎,绝对是正确的。我认为这几乎肯定也会发生在我们身上。再说一次,这又回到了”假设你不知道”。“假设你不知道”的意思是,尝试一个原型,然后假设它不会成功。所以,甚至在我自己的经历中,我记得曾经接触过 Snapchat 的 Evan,了解过他谈论 Snap 的 PM 的方式。他说的是:“我们永远不会在 Snap 招 PM。每个人都是设计师。“我已经和他没有联系了,但你可以看到,Snapchat 现在有很多 PM。
所以我从自己的经历中知道,那些我从产品角度尊敬的人,曾经信誓旦旦地说永远不会招 PM,她们的组织现在都有了 PM。这大概是有很好的理由的。我还想说,在我们团队中,如果我们的任何设计师在听这段,她们会告诉你,这些——不管你想叫它什么——“这些动词正在占用我大量时间,我没有那么多时间去思考、去构想、去设计、去做用户研究。“所以,我们已经感受到了它在我们公司里的裂痕。
组织演化的展望
Josh Miller: 我认为关键在于——无论接下来发生什么——项目负责人的选拔应该是基于项目本身,而不是因为她们在公司某个特定部门。而且,如果我们以后招人做 PM 的角色,我希望她们把自己看作是”做事的人”,手上有各种不同的学科和工具,而不仅仅是 PM 这一门手艺。当然,即使这些也可能都是错的,也许一年后我们就妥协了。我完全搞错了,我们完全搞错了。走着瞧吧。不过我也想说,到目前为止我在这个播客里分享的所有内容中,这大概就是那件——几年后我会爬回你的播客,说” Lenny,你是对的,全搞砸了”的事。
Lenny: 但这是一个很有趣的实验,Snap 就是一个很好的例子。Stripe 是另一个,她们等了很久才招第一批 PM。我觉得这是因为她们的设计师和工程师在那个环节上真的非常出色。而且她们也非常以设计为先导,或者非常以边缘体验为先导,所以初期不太需要那么多的 PM 能力。
Josh Miller: 如果非要我预测的话,我猜如果我们发现团队缺少这门学科,我倾向于从 Rebecca 的团队——技术上是数据团队——演化出一个更接近技术 PM 或者数据加其他能力的角色。再说一次,一切都在动态变化中,但这个念头最近确实在我们脑海中浮现过——也许我们错了,如果我们需要有更多这类背景的人,我们该建一个什么样的组织。
Lenny: 我很期待将来可能出现的这场讨论的视频。还有一点很有意思,你提到的 PM 人选 Rebecca 非常数据导向,但你一开始又谈到专注于感受之类的东西。所以你们有这种非常有趣的平衡——一部分人非常聚焦数据,同时又有一种声音说,“好吧,但不要执迷于此,我们想要创造什么样的感受?”
Josh Miller: 对。因为说到底,优化感受的初衷并不是去招一群专门”做感受”的人。Rebecca 的头衔是 Data Lead,她管我们的数据团队。但 Rebecca 是我认识的最有人文气质的人之一。你见到她就能感受到那种温暖,跟你说话时感受到的那种温暖,你去问她工作之外做什么就知道。所以不是说数据没有用武之地。实际上我想说,无论好坏,数据已经是我们实践的一部分。关键在于顶层的目标是什么——我们到底要做什么?但确实,我们团队里有很多人,数据要么是她们简历上的一个词,要么是她们过去实践中很大的一部分。
故事讲述团队
Lenny: 太棒了。关于故事讲述团队,有一个非常实操的问题——这让我想到了 Airbnb 的视频团队。很多年来内部一直在开玩笑说,Airbnb 早期发布的那些视频占了她们市值的一半,因为做得实在太好了。你就是会想,“天哪,我想住 Airbnb。” 它们让你产生如此强烈的感受,有灵魂注入其中。所以,你们故事讲述团队的组成是什么样的?因为我想可能有些公司在听,想着也许我们也应该在团队里做类似的事情。
Josh Miller: 我们有一个三个人的故事讲述团队。由一位叫 Nash 的女性负责。还有一位叫 Ellis 的先生,他的背景——最初在 The Verge 做记者。也许之前还在别的媒体待过。但我认识他的时候,他在 The Verge 跑社交媒体的新闻。之后他在 Snapchat 做了七年的营销策略。然后我们还有一位叫 Josh Lee,我最早认识他的时候他还是实习生。他先是在 Facebook 做设计实习生,后来在我白宫工作期间给我当过实习生,再后来他觉得自己对产品设计厌倦了,对设计也厌倦了,完全跳出来,说”我要去做电影”,过去几年一直在拍非常有意思的独立电影。他是我们团队的视频编辑。
很有意思的是 Nash 的背景——她在 NBC 短暂待过一段时间。但同样,你了解她之后会发现她下班后写诗,她的梦想是写一本小说。认识 Nash 的人,尤其是——,都知道她就是一股力量,一股不可忽视的力量。她们三个人最有趣的地方,也和我们设计团队有关联——我在 Facebook 发现的一个倾向是同质化。你知道,有一个关于 Facebook PM 或 Google PM 的刻板印象,她们之间的对比以及她们的工作方式。而我们在故事讲述团队和其他团队里有意做的另一件事就是:招截然不同的原型。Ellis 和 Nash 不可能更不同了。Nash 和 Josh 也不可能更不同了。她们有一些共同的价值观、共同的信念,但她们非常不一样。
设计团队也是一样。我们的设计团队?她们的身份、经历、审美倾向、志向——五花八门。不管是故事讲述团队还是设计团队,说实话这有时候会很难。说一句”嘿,我们是某某公司的故事讲述团队,我们是某某公司的设计团队,我们招这样的设计师、那样的故事讲述者”要容易得多。我们招的人各种各样。我们有一支非常多元的团队,而且是全方位的多元。但话说回来,不设 PM 这件事也不是没有缺陷。我能理解为什么很多大公司随着时间推移会变成”这是 Facebook 的方式,否则免谈”,或者”你不适合这里”。
Lenny: 对。其实我觉得,Airbnb 视频团队的人员构成几乎一模一样。我忘了她们叫什么了,她们没有一个酷名字,应该就叫故事讲述团队。但就是一个摄像师、一个剪辑师,然后一个制作人,基本上就是这样。
Josh Miller: 对。我记得我职业生涯早期去 Airbnb 办公室的时候,看到墙上挂满了故事板,就想”我想在这里工作”。所以其实我不太了解——我是说,我熟悉 Airbnb 的视频和品牌营销,太他妈好了,恕我粗口。但我记得在那个办公室里走来走去就想,“天哪!她们是在拍电影还是怎么的?我想在这里工作。”
Lenny: 你说这个太巧了。想找那些内容的人,我们会在 show notes 里放链接。但如果你搜”Snow White Airbnb”,你会看到那些故事板。她们基本上请了一位皮克斯的故事板画师,把房东和房客旅程中的关键帧画了出来。然后这成为了她们策略的核心元素——让我们把每一个这样的时刻都做得尽可能惊艳。这是基于电影《白雪公主》的。你可以去读一读。
Josh Miller: 借此机会值得分享一下。我在这里代表团队分享的所有这些理念,并不是我们凭空想出来的。比如我职业生涯早期去 Airbnb 办公室看到那些《白雪公主》故事板挂满墙壁的那一刻——那对我产生了深远的影响。甚至”用那个时刻来思考”这个想法,你实际上可以看到它的血脉——你想让那个人第一次打开那扇门时有什么样的感受?所以我觉得这是一个很好的机会来致敬——我们积累了很多这样的灵感来源,比如那天在 Airbnb 的经历,最终流淌到了我们今天谈论的”优化感受”。但这不是凭空而来的。这是我们对行业中所见所闻的表达。这是站在我们有幸见到的那么多人和公司的肩膀上。
Lenny: 而现在,这种流淌正在从你们的经验和独特做法中继续传递下去。
《General Magic》纪录片
Josh Miller: 希望如此。有一部纪录片我强烈推荐,叫 General Magic。这是我看过的与科技行业相关的最好的影像作品之一,真的很有意思。我觉得世界上有两种人,直白地说……有一种人看完之后觉得,“哇,多么错失的机会”,或者几乎觉得是个悲伤的故事。而我的看法是,“要是我们能幸运到聚集起那样一群人就好了。” 关于那部纪录片,给没看过的人简单说一下——它本质上就是 iPhone 之前的 iPhone,有最传奇的一群技术人在那里工作。然后它彻底失败了,按所有传统商业定义都完全失败了。
但那部纪录片让我印象最深的,是那些人在回忆自己在那里的时光时,所流露出的那种自豪、怀念和热情。还有他们后来各自创造的东西。以及这样一个事实——甚至直到今天,在这个播客上,我还在谈论 General Magic。所以,我的意思是,你说到希望 The Browser Company 也能产生涟漪效应——对我来说那就是终极目标,对我个人来说,在非常感性的层面上。如果我们能有那样的运气就好了。在我看来,那在很多方面就是成功的定义。
Lenny: 很酷的是,你们在拍摄大量的素材,这些对未来拍一部关于 The Browser Company 历史的纪录片会非常有用。
Josh Miller: 我还没从这个角度想过呢,不管是好是坏。
命名的力量
Lenny: 最后还有一点,关于 Airbnb 的讲故事和电影制作元素。一个有趣的事实——有一段时间产品经理实际上被称为”制作人”(producer),因为其中一位联合创始人说,“我们不想管理产品,我们想制作美丽的体验”,就像电影制作人一样。所以那大概是 Airbnb 历史上一年半的时间里,产品经理都叫制作人。问题是,我们收到了大量艾美奖获奖制作人的求职申请,他们说,“哦,我想去 Airbnb 工作。”
Josh Miller: 我知道这个播客主要是关于很实操的建议。所以我想给一条实操建议——不管你喜不喜欢故事讲述团队这个想法或者其他什么,我们在这些实验中发现的一个副产品是:当你给一样东西起一个新名字时,它会摆脱很多关于这个东西应该是什么样的先入之见。我们发现即使在产品层面也是如此。如果你说你在做一个浏览器历史记录功能,好处是每个人都知道你在说什么。坏处也是每个人都知道你在说什么。你带着这些关于它必须是什么样的先入之见出现。所以如果你回过头来重新思考它可能是什么……在很多方面,把团队叫做故事讲述团队、会员团队,或者组织里不设 PM——所有这些并不是为了新奇而新奇。它几乎是一种修辞策略,让人们真正从第一性原理去思考——我们在这里到底想做什么?
如果最终制作人被叫回了 PM,那也没关系。但我猜想,当它被称为制作人的时候,人们会更有意识地去讨论和交流——制作人做什么?他们和设计团队的关系是什么?因为没有人知道制作人到底是干嘛的。所以最终这在其他方面可能是一种失败。但我们发现的一条实操经验是,不管是产品功能还是团队,或者别的什么,给它起一个编造的名字,可以真正帮你触及你在那里想做的事情的本质。或者不要过多借鉴你之前工作过的地方、你见过的东西、流行媒体或者别的什么。
Lenny: 我很喜欢这个。而且这是可以撤回的……就像,你随时可以改回来。这是一种——
Josh Miller: 没错。
Lenny: 这是一扇双向门。而且我喜欢你们的愿景和你们所持有的那种价值观——就是不断去做原型试验。不行就算了,我们回到大家都在做的方式。你提到了很棒的产品,这让我确实想聊一个话题——有这样一群公司,他们专注于”我们就是要打造最惊艳的产品体验”。我觉得 The Browser Company 在很多方面处于最前沿。就是你们、Linear、Raycast、Cron 这些产品。可能还有几家,我很想听听有没有我没想到的。就是那些痴迷于用户体验、不那么关注驱动指标和驱动收入的公司。我很好奇,你觉得这会走向何方?你对这个趋势怎么看?为什么不是每家公司都这样想?还是说,“我们也不知道这样做最终是不是个好主意”?所以你对这群”我们就打造最好的产品,然后希望一切都会好起来”的公司怎么看?
为什么选择浏览器这个品类
Josh Miller: 嗯,首先我想说,我很喜欢那些产品——或者你提到的那些产品中的很多个。有一些我还没有真正用过。但举个例子,我们公司用 Linear 运转,从第一天起就用 Linear。所以我是它的大粉丝。我们思考这个事情的方式是……我其实曾在一家叫 Thrive Capital 的风险投资公司做了两年投资人。他们投资了 Slack、GitHub 以及很多真正具有变革性的公司。但我在那里是投资人,我是个风险投资家。说这话甚至让我自己都觉得奇怪。我从那段经历中学到了很多。非常多。非常多。非常多。它让我,我认为,成为了一个更好的 CEO 和一个更好的产品领导者。我学到的一件事是,不同的想法——产品想法、商业想法、公司想法——都带着不同的属性,以及对其成功至关重要的不同要素。
所以在考虑创办 The Browser Company 并选择浏览器这个软件品类时,Hursh 和我非常审慎地思考了这意味着什么,什么对我们公司来说必须是重要的。如果你想想网页浏览器这个品类,从传统角度看……我不是在做一个前瞻性的判断,我不是说这就是我们在做的事。但如果你往回看,把 The Browser Company 拿掉,单看网页浏览器这个品类,你会注意到几件事。第一,它实际上是最面向大众消费的软件之一。人们经常忘记这一点。而这恰恰是我们的机会。如果你在街上问一个人,“你的网页浏览器是什么?你觉得怎么样?” 他们要么不知道,要么不在意,“我不知道。”
但哪些软件是你的父母、你的小侄子侄女和你都在用的?那个韦恩图的中心是什么?你的父母大概不用 TikTok 和 Instagram——或者大概率不用。你的小侄子侄女,我希望他们在 16 岁的年纪还没有理由用邮件或日历。而网页浏览器是少数几样在中间的东西之一。所以它是一款极其大众化、极其普遍的消费软件,几乎没有什么东西能与之相比——除了智能手机、即时通讯,可能还有 2023 年的视频通话,以及网页浏览器。所以它非常大众,非常普及。
浏览器是一个大宗商品市场
Josh Miller: 第二个属性是,它是一种大宗商品(commodity)。我不是说 Arc 是大宗商品,也不是说我们想让它成为大宗商品,但客观地说,网页浏览器是可互换的。它们做的都是同一件事。而且越来越多地,它们简直就是完全相同代码——Chromium——的翻版,只在边缘做了一些小小的调整,小小的调整。所以它们都一样。这是一个大宗商品市场。而且它们的利润惊人地丰厚。浏览器在印钞票。它们主要由 Google、Apple 和 Microsoft 拥有,这并非没有原因。利润率极高,收益惊人。边际成本极低。收入成本极低,等等,等等。
所以,我们面对的是一个全世界所有人都在用的产品,它们本质上完全相同,是可互换的大宗商品。而如果你能让人们使用你的产品,你就能印钞票。因此,这个业务和这个产品品类的属性意味着,你必须在人们有多热爱你的产品、是否与它产生情感连接上取胜,让他们几乎是出于情感而非理性地选择你的品牌、你的产品而不是别的。所以,如果你把这和我之前说的一切联系起来——没错!这正是我们想要做的。这就是我们想要的。我们想与人们建立情感连接。我们正在与尽可能多的人建立那种情感连接,用惊喜和动画让他们愉悦,这就是获胜的方式。这不是浪漫主义,这是务实的。在很多方面,这是资本主义逻辑。如果你想那样理解的话,这就是我们如何赢得这个市场的方式。
并非所有软件品类都适用同一策略
所以我之所以犹豫不直接回答你的问题,是因为我认为这并不适用于每一个软件品类。而且完全坦诚地说,我对票务领域、日历领域或其他什么领域没有足够的了解,无法当场判断这种方法对那些行业是否有效。作为一个站在另一端的普通人,我真的很感激他们出于某种原因选择这样做,不管这是否是他们商业战略的一部分。作为一个在乎感受的、站在另一端的普通人来说,这是一个非常美好的趋势。但我想说,我们实际上不是把它想成”我们在用户体验之上优先于收入或增长”。事实上,我们选择了一个品牌和用户体验就是获取增长和收入之道的软件品类。
因为我知道这就是我们是谁,而如果我们在做卖给政府机构的网络安全软件,他们才不会在乎圆角设计,不会在乎按钮是什么颜色,不会在乎你在每次成员更新时是否感到惊喜。所以我们没有去做卖给政府的网络安全软件。所以我希望更多的人以 Linear 那样的工艺水准来打造产品,但我们的思考方式不是”这个 vs 那个”的选择,更像是”我们能不能选择一个,在那里获胜的方式正是我们所擅长和热爱的”。
Lenny: 我觉得这是一个非常有洞察力的观点——对于消费软件,尤其是大宗商品化的消费软件,体验就是差异化所在。你需要给人们一个理由去尝试,然后在已有优秀替代品的情况下还能留下来。所以,对体验的痴迷是一个非常聪明的策略。如果你把这一点做对了,人们会使用它、继续使用它,然后你就赢了。
在关键维度上必须做到极致
Josh Miller: 我在很多产品上见过这种情况……新冠疫情期间,我相信每个听众都接触过大量的远程协作工具。其中很多——值得肯定的是——在非常有趣的设计细节和产品功能概念上下了很大功夫,富有想象力地以新的方式把人们连接在一起。但是视频和音频的延迟却非常糟糕,因为它们依赖某个第三方 API,而那个 API 明显比 Zoom 差得多。这就是一个很好的例子,在那个市场、那个软件品类里,你必须在延迟上做到极致。我觉得一个很好的正面例子是……这些年我最喜欢的产品之一是 Tuple。它表面上是编程配对工具,就驻留在你的菜单栏里。我根本没在跟任何人配对编程。但它是跟你公司里某个人说话最快的方式。而且它的用户体验极其简洁。
设计师住在法国里昂,非常厉害。这是一个设计精美的产品。而且它是我用过的所有通讯工具中音质最好的。比 Zoom 还好。所以,同样是这个产品,如果保留所有那些工艺细节,但换掉延迟——就不行了。但反过来,Tuple 如果不是同时做到极其美观、极其易用和简洁,也不会打败其他竞争对手赢得我。所以我再次认为,关键在于你需要哪些属性才能获胜,以及选择一个那些你想要精进和投入的属性恰好就是致胜关键的市场。
Lenny: 还有就是你需要好出多少。比如,如果有一个比 Chrome 好 20% 的产品,人们只会说,“还行吧。我不需要学个新东西,而且所有人都在用别的。我只会碰到各种各样的问题。” 所以你必须好得多才行。这对消费产品来说是一个很高的门槛。最后一个问题我想谈谈。你讲过 Arc 和 The Browser Company 的宏大愿景。你提到了”互联网计算机”这个概念。这是 Scott Belsky 建议的另一个问题。顺便说一下,Scott 是 Adobe 的 CPO,也是一位非常出色的产品思考者。他特别希望我们聊到这一点,因为我认为这里有一个大想法,也许很多人还没有意识到。所以,作为最后一个问题,你能不能简要概述一下 The Browser Company 和 Arc 的长期愿景和计划?
互联网计算机的愿景
Josh Miller: 好的。我们之所以叫 The Browser Company of New York,几乎可以说是一种障眼法,因为正如你在开头介绍中所知道的,我们将 Arc 视为你默认网页浏览器的替代品,但我们希望它远不止于此。所以,从最高层面往下落到现实,我在职业生涯中已经多次犯过一个错误——低估了那些相当基础性的、我们使用技术方式的变化。我注意到了它们,但低估了它们。一个很好的例子是移动浪潮。我觉得我和 Hursh 的第一家公司如果当时真正意识到移动那波滔天巨浪的话,会成功得多。而我认为我们目前正在低估的宏观趋势之一,就是向云计算的转移。向互联网的转移——这听起来可能有点奇怪,因为每个大型上市公司都在提 Microsoft Azure 或 Amazon Web Services。你到处都能听到云、云、云、云。但同样,这是一个商业术语。
我所说的向云计算的转移是指,我们技术生活中的、我们计算生活中的一切都在向互联网转移。这一直在发生,但还会转移得更多。我的意思是,你的应用几乎全部已经是基于 Web 的、基于互联网的应用了。而且很快它们全部都会是。真正纯粹本地的软件,甚至本地优先的软件,已经所剩无几了。我们所有的文件都在向互联网转移——如果它们还没有全部在那儿的话。所以如果你认真想想你今天的文件——再次说明,忽略”文件”这个词——你在工作和个人生活中需要的东西。它们不在你的桌面上,它们全都是 URL。可能是加了引号的”PDF”,但那个 PDF 大概也在 Dropbox 上的某个地方,你是通过 URL 来访问它的。
你的照片看起来好像存在你的 iPhone 上。其实它们不在你的 iPhone 上,它们在某个 iCloud 服务器的某个角落里。当你换一部新 iPhone 时,它们就会出现在那里。这一点的实际表现是,如果你把你现在正在用来听这个节目的设备砸碎了——不管是手机还是电脑——除了心疼损失了二手残值、换新设备的麻烦和费用之外,你不会丢失你的任何东西。所以,想象一下五年后,我们整个计算生活都不在我们的设备上,不在我们的电脑上,不在我们的手机上。它们在某个地方。它们在互联网上,它们在云端。这就引出了一个问题……我记得我十岁的时候得到了我的第一台电脑。那是一台透明的 iMac。我一直在想……我儿子现在两岁。等他十岁的时候,他的电脑会是什么样子?
Josh Miller: 我说的”电脑”不是技术意义上的……再说回语言和我们使用的词汇这个话题。我说的”电脑”不是我的 MacBook Air 字面意义上的那个电脑,而是人类意义上的——你需要从电脑里得到的东西,你的东西,你的应用和人们使用的那些工具——它们会在哪里?他的电脑会在哪里?我觉得现在很明显的是,我们到处都会有”空气”电脑。我们其实已经有了。我的车有 CarPlay,我的电视是一台电脑,我的笔记本是一台电脑。我认为五年后这一点会更加明显,因为硬件正在商品化。而且会进一步商品化。它们正在变成什么都没有装的空壳。它们只是容器。它们只是查看我们真正电脑的接口——那台真正的电脑就在互联网上的某个地方。因此,我们的观点是,我们在 The Browser Company 正在构建的是一台互联网计算机,是一台加了引号的”电脑”——如果向互联网和向云端的迁移真的像我们预期的那样加速、继续像海啸一样涌来的话。
我们表达这个愿景的方式是,我们说我们想对网页浏览器做的事,就像 iPhone 对手机所做的那样。是的。iPhone 取代了你的手机,但它其实是远超手机的东西。所以,我们希望 Arc 成为互联网的 iPhone,是的,它取代你的默认浏览器。但不管我们叫它互联网计算机还是别的什么,它其实就是那个接口,一种新型的电脑。如果你把这个推进一步,那么我们今天正在构建的就是——我们在构建我们自己的多点触控手势和第一方笔记应用的等价物。但是,在任何新的电脑、任何计算机或计算设备上,开发者平台本身永远比第一方电脑本身更有趣、更有利可图、更能改变世界。所以我们毫不怀疑,在未来十年,如果我们成功了,如果我们还存在的话,Arc 作为一个开发平台,会比其他任何东西都更加成为我们所做之事的核心——人们在这个互联网电脑上、在我们的和别人的一切之上进行构建。
互联网作为最好的开发平台
所以把这个愿景落到现实中来。如果你想一想,互联网、Web,在很多方面其实是最好的开发平台。它可以在每一台设备上访问。不管是谁制造的、不管形状和大小。它对个人用户是免费访问的。你不需要花钱就能访问它。它对开发者也是免费的。你不需要付费购买许可证。你赚的钱也不会被抽走 30% 的税。而且它是民主的。最好的框架可以胜出。所以在很多方面,如果你说,“在我们想要看到的未来中,我们应该在什么平台之上开发,哪个平台拥有最好的属性?“Web 拥有这些属性。这就是为什么你会看到今天的现象。你觉得为什么 Figma 在网页浏览器里?
你觉得为什么 Figma 的博客文章标题是”来网页浏览器里见我们”?因为作为开发平台,开发者一键就能跨平台。没有税收。每个开发者和每个人都应该、也想要为 Web 开发。但挑战在于,存在一个体验鸿沟。原生软件感觉更好,不管原因是什么。而问题在于,控制我们通向这个开发平台的接口的那些人——这个平台就是 Web,就是互联网——他们有动机阻止它变得和本地软件一样好,阻止它成为真正原生的、沉浸式的软件。Apple?他们不希望你为 Web 开发应用。他们希望你为 Mac 和 iPhone 开发,这样他们就能通过 App Store 对你收税。而同样令人意外的是,Google 也不希望你为加了引号的”Web”制作更原生、更沉浸的东西,因为他们希望它被自己的搜索引擎索引。
接口厂商的利益冲突
所以,Chrome 扩展平台是最大被低估的机会之一,这是有原因的。他们把它当作一个亏本引流的产品。他们开发 Chrome 扩展只是为了和 Firefox 保持对等。他们不希望你做扩展,因为如果你有某种沉浸式的扩展体验,那是 Google 无法索引的东西。那会分流搜索行为。所以我们看待这件事时会说,一切都在向互联网迁移,这意味着我们需要比浏览器更强大的互联网接口,更像一台电脑的接口。如果我们做到了,那么在此基础上最有趣的机会其实是其他人在这个开发平台之上构建的东西。而如果你看这个今天就已经存在的开发平台——万维网、开放的互联网——它缺少的是一个接口和一套功能与 API,让基于 Web 的体验能像原生体验一样沉浸、丰富和强大,而这需要那个互联网接口来提供。
而我们今天通向互联网的接口就是那些网页浏览器公司。作为已经失去创始人灵魂的大型上市公司,它们有着扭曲的商业利益激励——它们不想做这件事。它们不想做这件事。所以这不意味着我们会做成。事实上其中一家可能最终会赢。而且我实际上认为这是某种……[听不清]。我们试图向所有人推销我们的愿景。我们完全相信会有很多种类型的互联网电脑,而 Arc 可能是其中之一,也可能不是。但我们非常有信心,那就是未来——建立在 Web 和互联网之上的开发平台,以及这些新的接口,将是最令人兴奋的机会。
闪电问答环节
Lenny: 我的下一个问题本来想问你们怎么靠一个人们免费使用的浏览器赚钱。现在你们的方向就说得通多了。那么,我们进入了非常令人兴奋的闪电问答环节。我为你准备了六个问题。准备好了吗?
Josh Miller: 准备好了。
Lenny: 好。开始吧。你最常推荐给别人的两三本书是什么?
Josh Miller: 《Harold and the Purple Crayon》,然后是《Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees》,这是一本关于 Robert Irwin 的书。这是我的头号 PM 书。所以,如果你是从听众的职业角度来问的话,那本书绝对非常棒。还有一本是 Lawrence Wright 的《God Saved Texas》,他是我最喜欢的作家之一。如果你对公路旅行、政治、食物、文化感兴趣的话,非常值得一读。三本非常不同类型的书。
Lenny: 最近最喜欢的电影或电视剧是什么?
Josh Miller: 最近记忆中第一部让我落泪的电视剧集,是《最后生还者》第三集。我以为自己在看一个僵尸暴力的片子,结果就坐在那里哭得稀里哗啦。所以推荐那个。然后我一直在 YouTube 上重看所有 Adam Curtis 的纪录片。我是 Adam Curtis 的超级粉丝。
Lenny: 我没听说过 Adam Curtis。我得去看看。
Josh Miller:《Hyper-normalization》是我最喜欢的一部。我觉得他的作品与其说是非虚构纪录片,不如说是影像艺术。
**Lenny:**最近有个流行趋势,大家都在说《White Lotus》是必看的剧。我感觉风头马上就要转到《最后生还者》了。我们拭目以待吧。
**Josh Miller:**我能抢个先吗?我是第一个提到这部剧的嘉宾吗?
**Lenny:**我觉得你可能确实是第一个。我记不清了,但我觉得你是。
**Josh Miller:**好吧,那我具体推荐第三集。
**Lenny:**嗯,嗯,完全同意。大家都爱那一集。不过每一集都很棒。下一个问题。你面试别人时最喜欢问的问题是什么?
**Josh Miller:**你想问我什么?这听起来像是在回避问题,但我在 The Browser Company 的面试全都是”问我任何问题”,我发现人们问什么,以及他们如何追问,比我能问他们的任何问题都更能揭示他们是怎样的人、在乎什么。
**Lenny:**你在回答中寻找什么,来判断这是一个好的候选人?
**Josh Miller:**真实性,可能比其他任何东西都重要。他们是否真正相信自己说的话?
**Lenny:**很好。你们公司使用并喜欢的 SaaS 产品有哪些?除了……我不知道你算不算我们这类 SaaS,可能不算。嗯,说说看。
**Josh Miller:**我想推荐一下 Tuple。我打算把所有东西都迁移到 Tuple 上,相对于……我们用 Notion 运营,我们喜欢 Notion,也喜欢 Linear。但我想说,最让我惊喜、难以置信它不是一家大一百倍的公司,就是 Tuple。它表面上是一个结对编程工具,但不要带着那个预设去用。把它想成”我现在需要和一个同事聊一下”,或者”几个同事,一起做点事情”,它真的非常棒。
**Lenny:**太好了。我喜欢这种从没听说过但超级酷的产品。我们会在 show notes 里放上链接。下一个问题。你在构建产品的方式上做了什么相对小的改变,却对团队交付和执行的能力产生了重大影响?
**Josh Miller:**今年一月,几个月前,我们开始把我从很多产品开发流程中移出去,看起来效果非常好。所以这是今年最大的一个转变。
**Lenny:**这是一个很大的转变。我在 Airbnb 也经历过这个过程,效果很好。对所有人都好。最后一个问题。使用 Arc 的最佳小技巧,可能大多数人不知道的?
**Josh Miller:**尽最大努力不要把它当成一个浏览器。用初学者的心态来看待它的工作方式,以及你可能如何使用互联网。
**Lenny:**哇!很大的理念。
**Josh Miller:**是啊。这次对话最大的收获就是,我们必须更好地描述我们到底造了个什么东西,以及它为什么对你有益。所以我对自己的第一个和最后一个回答都不太满意,但事实就是如此。
**Lenny:**另外,其实我在开头提到过,如果你听到这里,可能已经知道了,但我们会在 show notes 里放一个链接,可以直接进入 Arc,因为目前它是排队等候制,而我们有这个链接可以让你直接用上 Arc。所以去试试吧。Josh,你带着发自内心的热情来了。我现在都想去 The Browser Company 应聘了。但你们不招 PM,所以我就不去了。开个玩笑。非常感谢你能来,如此真诚、有洞见、温暖。谢谢你。
**Josh Miller:**非常感谢你,Lenny。我很享受这次对话。
**Lenny:**非常感谢你的收听。如果你觉得这期节目有价值,可以在 Apple Podcast、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,这真的能帮助其他听众找到这个播客。你可以在 lennyspodcast.com 找到所有往期节目,或了解更多关于这个节目的信息。下期见。
术语表
| 原文 | 中文 |
|---|---|
| Abby | Abby(人名,保留原文) |
| acqui-hire | acqui-hire(人才收购,保留原文) |
| Adam Curtis | Adam Curtis(英国纪录片导演,保留原文) |
| Airbnb | Airbnb(公司名,保留原文) |
| Amazon Web Services | Amazon Web Services(亚马逊云计算平台,保留原文) |
| Apple | Apple(公司名,保留原文) |
| Apple Podcast | Apple Podcast(播客平台,保留原文) |
| Arc | Arc(产品名,保留原文) |
| Azure | Azure(微软云计算平台,保留原文) |
| Ben | Ben(人名,保留原文) |
| CarPlay | CarPlay(Apple 车载系统,保留原文) |
| Ched Khan | Ched Khan(人名,保留原文) |
| Chromium | Chromium(开源浏览器引擎,保留原文) |
| CPO | CPO(Chief Product Officer,首席产品官,保留原文) |
| Cron | Cron(日历应用,保留原文) |
| D5/D7 | D5/D7(日活跃天数指标,保留原文) |
| Dropbox | Dropbox(云存储服务名,保留原文) |
| Ellis | Ellis(人名,故事讲述团队成员,保留原文) |
| engagement | 活跃度 |
| Evan | Evan(Snapchat 联合创始人 Evan Spiegel,保留原文) |
| Figma | Figma(设计协作工具,保留原文) |
| Firefox | Firefox(浏览器,保留原文) |
| General Magic | General Magic(科技纪录片名,保留原文) |
| God Saved Texas | 《God Saved Texas》(书名,保留原文) |
| Google(公司名,保留原文) | |
| Hacker News | Hacker News(平台名,保留原文) |
| Harold and the Purple Crayon | 《阿罗和紫色蜡笔》(儿童绘本经典,保留原文书名) |
| heartfelt intensity | 发自内心的热情 |
| Hursh | Hursh(人名,Josh Miller 的联合创始人兼 CTO,保留原文) |
| Hyper-normalization | 《Hyper-normalization》(Adam Curtis 纪录片,保留原文) |
| IC | IC(Individual Contributor,个人贡献者,保留原文) |
| Josh Lee | Josh Lee(人名,故事讲述团队视频编辑,保留原文) |
| Josh Miller | Josh Miller(人名,保留原文) |
| L5/L7 | L5/L7(同类指标的另一种命名,保留原文) |
| Lawrence Wright | Lawrence Wright(美国作家,保留原文) |
| Lenny | Lenny(人名/播客名,保留原文) |
| lennyspodcast.com | lennyspodcast.com(网站地址,保留原文) |
| Linear | Linear(项目管理工具,保留原文) |
| MKBHD | MKBHD(知名科技 YouTuber Marques Brownlee 的频道名,保留原文) |
| mutts | ”混血”型人才(Josh 用来比喻多技能跨界人才,保留原文意象) |
| Nash | Nash(人名,故事讲述团队负责人,保留原文) |
| NBC | NBC(美国全国广播公司,保留原文) |
| Notes on Road Trips | 《公路旅行笔记》 |
| Notion | Notion(协作工具,保留原文) |
| OBPS | OBPS(Facebook 内部发帖频率指标缩写,保留原文) |
| Paper by 53 | Paper by 53(产品名,保留原文) |
| Peek | Peek(产品功能名,保留原文) |
| Phil Knight | Phil Knight(人名,Nike 联合创始人,保留原文) |
| Pixar | 皮克斯(动画工作室名,使用公认中文译名) |
| PM | PM(产品经理缩写,保留原文) |
| PRD | PRD(产品需求文档缩写,保留原文) |
| prototype-driven culture | 原型驱动的文化 |
| Raycast | Raycast(效率启动器工具,保留原文) |
| Rebecca | Rebecca(人名,保留原文) |
| retention | 留存 |
| Robert Irwin | Robert Irwin(美国当代艺术家,保留原文) |
| Scott Belsky | Scott Belsky(人名,保留原文) |
| show notes | show notes(播客节目附注,保留原文) |
| Snap | Snap(公司名,保留原文) |
| Snapchat | Snapchat(产品名,保留原文) |
| Snow White | 《白雪公主》(迪士尼电影名,使用中文通用译名) |
| Spotify | Spotify(音乐/播客平台,保留原文) |
| Steve Jobs | 史蒂夫·乔布斯 |
| Stripe | Stripe(公司名,保留原文) |
| Substack | Substack( Newsletter 发布平台,保留原文) |
| SVP | SVP(Senior Vice President,高级副总裁,保留原文) |
| The Browser Company | The Browser Company(公司名,保留原文) |
| The Last of Us | 《最后生还者》(HBO 剧集,使用中文通用译名) |
| The Verge | The Verge(科技媒体名,保留原文) |
| Thrive Capital | Thrive Capital(风险投资公司名,保留原文) |
| tumbleweed | 滚雪球效应(比喻人才口碑的滚动吸引效应) |
| Tuple | Tuple(结对编程/通讯工具名,保留原文) |
| two-way door | 双向门(可逆决策的比喻) |
| user research | 用户研究 |
| Walt Disney | 华特·迪士尼 |
| White Lotus | 《White Lotus》(HBO 剧集,保留原文) |
| Zoom | Zoom(视频会议产品名,保留原文) |
此文档由 AI 分片翻译(translate_long_document)