From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng

1. Prioritize Growth Mindset in Hiring

Make growth mindset a primary hiring criterion, especially for final interviews, as it’s a ‘meta unlock’ that ensures self-reflection, openness to feedback, and continuous improvement within the team.

2. Hire for Six-Month Autonomy

When hiring, aim for individuals who will be autonomously telling you what needs to be done within six months, rather than you telling them, setting a high bar and fostering a learning environment.

3. Build a Diverse ‘Avengers’ Team

As a leader, view your team as a product and intentionally hire individuals with diverse ‘superpowers’ and natural motivations, fostering healthy debates to achieve the best outcomes.

4. Balance Growth with Craft

Create healthy tension in your team by assigning different charges: one focused on growing the product (numbers) and another on maintaining design, aesthetic, and craft.

5. Strategic Planning for Scale

When scaling a product from one to 100, plan your ‘chess moves’ in advance and build robust systems that enable sustainable speed, rather than just moving fast and breaking things.

6. Measure Everything with a Growth Team

Implement comprehensive measurement for your product’s performance, ideally by building a growth team early on (one to ten phase), as they drive rigor in data collection and analysis.

7. Growth Team Drives Rigor

Hire a growth team over just an analytics team because growth leaders are tied to outcomes, ensuring insights are acted upon and fostering a more rigorous, data-driven culture across the entire team.

8. AI Startup Moat Strategy

For AI startups, build defensibility by acquiring proprietary data and creating a flywheel to generate more, and by deeply understanding and integrating into a specific vertical’s existing workflow.

9. Hard Work Trumps Breakthroughs

Many valuable tech companies succeed not from initial technological breakthroughs, but by applying ‘hard work’ and ’elbow grease’ to build valuable products on existing tech, constantly polishing and iterating based on user needs.

10. Prioritize Product Craft

Invest in high levels of product craft and delight, as this can overcome distribution advantages and make users willing to switch to a superior experience.

11. Product is Holistic Experience

Understand that ’the product’ is the entirety of the user’s consumption, not just the digital interface; sometimes external factors like price or ETA are more impactful than app pixels.

12. Deeply Empathize with Customers

Truly empathize with customers by deeply feeling their pain and experiencing their problems firsthand, rather than just theoretically understanding them, to build impactful products.

13. Intentionally Define Problems

Be highly intentional and precise when defining the problems you aim to solve, using clear language to ensure everyone understands the core challenge.

14. Obsess Over Language Craft

Pay meticulous attention to the words used in communications like slide decks or vision docs, as crafting language carefully prevents misinterpretation and has multiplicative downstream effects.

15. Develop Question-Asking Skills

As AI advances, focus on developing the ability to ask the right questions, as this will be a key differentiator and a higher-level abstraction skill for future work.

16. Align Products with Human Needs

Build products that have a strong ‘impedance match’ with fundamental human desires and needs, as this alignment is crucial for long-term success.

17. Optimize for Learning Opportunities

Prioritize roles and environments where you can maximize your learning, as continuous growth and acquiring new skills are key to a fulfilling career.

18. Cultivate Grit and Vision

When building, maintain grit, a clear vision, and direction to persistently pursue your goals, especially when establishing data flywheels or overcoming challenges.

19. Act with Conviction

Make decisions and act with conviction, even if you might not be entirely right, as indecision can be more detrimental than a potentially imperfect but clear path.

20. Develop Unique Insights

Cultivate and articulate unique insights or a strong point of view about how the world works, as this indicates conviction and can lead to breakthrough products.

21. Practice ‘Say, Do, Did’ Communication

Adopt the ‘say, do, did’ communication framework: clearly state what you’ll do, communicate progress, and confirm completion. This ensures alignment, invites feedback, and closes the loop on tasks.

22. Balance Craft Obsession with Wisdom

As a product person, obsess over the details of craft, but simultaneously develop the wisdom to discern which details truly matter and where to strategically apply your effort.

23. Adopt Portfolio Approach

When scaling, use a portfolio approach (e.g., 70-20-10 or 50-50 for startups) to allocate resources, recognizing that scaling is a ramp rate, not a binary switch.

24. Prioritize Cohorted Retention

Focus on cohorted retention as the primary metric for product success, as it indicates sustained user engagement, rather than just raw user numbers or volume.

25. View Failures as Lessons

Adopt a mindset where failures are seen as lessons, not losses, allowing for continuous learning and growth from setbacks.

26. Hustle Required for AI Value

Even with advanced AI like AGI, significant human ‘hustle’ and building effort are required to channel its power into useful, human-centric products that solve real problems.