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@gem_ray
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product @browsercompany · #anjunafamily
San Francisco, CA
Joined April 2009
apple prioritized gate numbers because it’s useful to people to navigate in an airport terminal. google prioritized place pins… because it drives their KPIs?
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We just started testing Figma at Instagram. Wow. Photoshop > Sketch felt like a 10x improvement and I didn't realize a product could do that over Sketch. Apparently it can!.
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a single in person meeting with a coworker brought me closer to them than a year of weekly zoom 1:1s. claiming there’s no difference feels delusional to me.
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great products are built in spite of OKRs, not due to them. example: apple maps's design is unquestionably superior to google maps because they don't have 100 pm's playing game of thrones to grow their feature OKRs. they don't need to cram anything that doesn't make sense.
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this is what products look like when pm's constantly overrule designers.
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how to quickly climb the big tech career ladder:. volunteer for “priority” projects, ship them super fast and land “impact”, then jump onto another “priority”, leaving behind bugs, poor UX and tech debt to other people to solve; rinse and repeat.
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10 person startups hiring product managers feels so suspicious. what’s the ceo doing, if not working on product?.
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being a product manager is having either not enough engineers or too many engineers on your team until you die.
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✨ life update ✨. i joined figma to work on editor and AI – my dream job! 🎉. if you’re a pm who loves design and is fascinated with generative AI, let’s connect - i'll be hiring. and designer friends who have thoughts and feedback on core editing features, inbox is open 👋.
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pm interviews: "design a product solving these user needs". pm, actually: "we spent a billion $ building this tech because a vp wanted us to. nobody knows what needs it solves. now justify its existence to keep your team from being disbanded in a re-org.".
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the best way to avoid making hard decisions in product - adding a setting
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uber’s UI somehow managed to turn into even more of a clusterfuck since the last time i complained 😆
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your job as a PM is motivating your team, which means there's no room for you to appear upset or unmotivated. it's exhausting. the only people i can be real with are other pm's. but feels contrived having to book meetings to connect during wfh 😐.
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there’s only like three companies in the world where this kind of attention to detail is celebrated and encouraged organizationally. all other “impact” focused co’s are like “it didn’t measurably increase engagement? worthless…”.
The rain in iOS 15 weather app lands on the forecast section, it’s more than just a backdrop 🌧. Love these little details 😍
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big tech co’s hire expensive senior designers but still end up with poor design bc it’s much harder to make structural changes to incentives and slavish metric chasing. there’s great talent in most companies already. they’re just stifled by the organization around them.
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tiktok is testing doing virtual plastic surgery on your face (warping your facial structure) BY DEFAULT. surely this makes people post more but holy shit…
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why does “open in app” button always open app store for apps you already have installed?.
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companies overtly reliant on a/b testing created a whole generation of product managers who haven’t developed any subjective taste for what’s good - their only yardstick is test results. and it really shows.
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pm's could get 80% of the benefit of a strategy doc with 20% of work, but end up excessively polishing the delivery because we get evaluated on “were execs impressed by it” more than “did it actually work” (as real outcomes show up much later than the next perf cycle).
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this app is currently #1 on the app store, incredibly simple and incredibly fucking genius. from @thefuturematt.
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something i've learned as a senior pm is saying "can you help me understand?" when my inside voice is more like "what the fuck are you talking about".
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at a loss for words about the design of marissa meyer's new app. quite literally.
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some pm’s are in it due to genuine interest in building stuff and some sleepwalk into it from target schools because it’s a “prestigious job”. once i noticed this, it became really clear why i love partnering with certain pm’s but not others.
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left: sep 3, 2019. visiting josh and hursh who had just started on something new (didn't even have a name yet!). distinctly remember feeling "i’d kill to work on something early stage and with this crew again.". right: sep 3, 2024. that day is today 😄
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did apple make a policy change letting employees tweet about their work? seeing a lot more activity this year than previous years, i do appreciate getting to know the people behind the work.
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This “shimmering box” loading indicator design is from Facebook Paper (2014). It may have been a massive product flop, but it’s impressive how design patterns it introduced live to this day.
SwiftUI gives you .isPlaceholder(true) in WidgetKit, which makes it incredibly simple to generate a placeholder Widget view ✨
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a secret at big companies is sometimes you can avoid doing something long enough until you no longer need to do it.
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in many organizations, product leaders lack the personal taste/eye to care about this and design function is left toothless to push back.
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in every company there's at least 4 different manually updated spreadsheets of what people are working on, all slightly outdated in a different way.
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used uber after a long while and … looks like “product teams be buildin product” happened . this up feels straight up claustrophobic
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there's so many awful pm interview questions but i finally came across one i truly love:. name a product that is badly-designed but still popular. why is it badly designed and still popular? how would you improve it?.
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i’ve come to think that ease of experimentation in big tech companies can actually be a disadvantage, because teams often start using it as a replacement for sound product and design thinking.
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it still hasn't fully hit me, but tomorrow is my last day at facebook/instagram/meta after almost 9 years. i'll use this as an opportunity to remind you to set up 2-factor 😄
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a mystery for product teams is why addressing user complaints sometimes don't move metrics. users power through bad UX to meet their needs; so improvements may not get them to use more. they'll def be more satisfied but unfortunately that doesn't show up in an a/b test. .
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life changing - defaulted mac os to paste without formatting. as easy as setting up this shortcut in the settings app.
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designers – if you were interviewing a PM to understand if you'd work well together, what questions would you ask?.
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imo there’s way more value in AI fixing a thousand paper cuts in your workday than trying to do your job for you.
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nyc mta’s train app has shockingly good design - even better than apple maps!. google is what you’d expect - tons of clutter iteratively added over time. no typographic hierarchy, everything kind of blends in, “live” information stands out more than critical things like which
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my partner has a new coworker who put “MBA” after their name in their slack and zoom handles 🤭.
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All product leaders claim to care about quality and craft. When rubber meets the road though, almost everyone prioritizes business metric impact, time to market, new features etc. over quality. Easier said than done.
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a lot of "OG" facebook designers still swear by photoshop to do UI work😬.
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trying to understand why every 5 million dollar house in san francisco seems to be staged with a cow statue
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this stage is …. big. can’t wait to deep dive into what we built for y’all on thursday!.
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being a senior PM is typing out “i'd do anything to not attend a meeting about this”, then deleting it and instead sending “let me know how i can help async! 🥰🥰🥰”.
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former coworker asking for a referral sent me a resume, where they claim credit for things i did. 🤦♂️.
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there’s tons of great “evergreen” PM advice but we don’t talk enough about aspects that are culture dependent. if you work at apple and behave like an ideal amazon pm (or vice-versa); you’re going to have a very, very hard time.
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legendary coworker. "let's not meet, i'll save your time and email, it'll force me to clarify my thinking". 🤯.
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There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state. The other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people. – Commander Adama (Battlestar Galactica).
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apple: "Don't use notifications to send marketing or promotional content unless people explicitly agree to receive such information" also apple:
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why is it that every product team goes from "complete chaos" straight to "feels like filing your taxes" when introducing process?.
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pm's really have the worst tools compared to any other product discipline. designers got figma, engineers got vscode, data science has looker. meanwhile we're manually updating project status in google sheets every day 🙄.
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none of the great ideas I encountered in my career came from contrived brainstorming exercises during yearly planning.
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it's obvious how much talent we were missing out on, now that we're speaking to remote candidates. two awesome PM's from LA are starting on my team. so thankful we can make that work now.
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one of my favorite figma traditions - creating figjam cards for coworkers' notable moments. tomorrow's my last day at figma, so i got a sweet goodbye card. will definitely miss working with this super talented team. 🫡
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google maps is absolutely killing it with their new metric “amount of crap we crammed into one screen”
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usual pm story – your team simultaneously ignores your asks to help roadmapping yet complain afterwards that they feel left out.
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i'm sure some metric could rationalize having three navigation bars stacked on each other (in addition to the bottom nav) but. this is just bad product.
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(i’m just butthurt because i always seem to end up in the second group… 🙃).
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it’s wild how boomerang (most notable creative format in recent history) was built secretly from execs but officially funded efforts from any company has failed to produce an equivalent success. maybe … perhaps … planning + process kills creativity?.
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if you struggle to listen to every episode of @lennysan podcast, here’s four i got a lot out of i’d recommend:. 1. @mattmochary 2. @shreyas 3. @fishmanaf 4. @jackiebo
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i was in turkey for a wedding during the 2016 coup. my employer at the time, facebook, sent a *security detail* to extract me from my parents' house and get me out through germany (bc us had cancelled flights from turkey). still astounded by that experience.
Just tried a new product: @bookprotectors. It's an on-demand security detail—or more simply: Uber with guns. What a time to be alive.
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imho assuming what can’t be measured isn't real is the biggest failing of modern “impact focused” product development . and probably the top reason most products suck these days.
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Replied to an email after 16 years and reconnected with someone whom I can say gave me my first tech gig 🥰
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the main thing i've learned building LLM based features: it's 10x easier to make a cool demo, but 10x harder to ship to production.
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I’ve been procrastinating for 5 years on sharing my experience on transitioning from design to PM. Here it is. Thanks for having me @designdetailsfm!.
This week, we caught up with @gem_ray to talk about transitioning from design to product management, the tension between the roles of PD and PM, why products fail, and so much more ✌️. Episode + show notes:
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when asked to use their own product, most pm's superficially try features (dummy post to test account) instead of fully immersing in the use case (producing a video on a topic every week to grow a following). despite being in the product all day, they never get real insights.
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(Aside: When @tarngerine and I joined Facebook in 2014 nobody used Sketch. While it quickly spread as we evangelized it and became the primary tool, old school FB designers held onto Photoshop for many many years after. Old habits die hard 😀).
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free startup idea: a service to tell whether your new logo looks like genitals, hitler, etc.
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my first vp-level product review today! coworkers were shocked i've never done one of these before despite several huge launches under my belt and i was like. "that was a feature, not a bug" 🙃.
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got 10x more response from my team when i asked for their hot takes, instead of hypotheses. definitely going in my offsite playbook 😄.
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you could eliminate 90% of meetings if people actually read and replied to emails on time.
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want to make an AI plugin for figma? we published a template to help you get started much faster!.
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i'm infinitely grateful for the lifestyle & opportunities the US has afforded me, but having to survive the first years scarred me for life. no matter my savings + career progress, i find it hard to feel complete emotional safety the way people born here do.
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many, many product teams go on needless vision quests because they're too proud to notice the right solution is what's been done already.
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in a previous life not too long ago, i was also that growth pm looking for desperate excuses to spam people to hit an arbitrary metric goal before end of a quarter. so i feel you, uber growth team.
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imo your overall quality of life is better at places where people put in more than 9-5 but are passionate and engaged; compared to amazing work-life balance but everyone is kind of checked out.
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"product principles" teams write are usually useless because they're either apple pie positions ("our product should be simple" - duh, who wants the opposite) or conveniently ignored when they oppose business outcomes.
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@taylor_gilbert as the product manager of uber eats, i want to put entry points everywhere, so that i get a bonus.
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it would take 5 minutes out of a gmail engineer's day to fix this copy paste bug and take us out of our misery. what i don't get is don't gmail team members run into this bug every day? how is this still broken after over a year?
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I’m so burnt out 😣. I could take time off, but Airbnb’s nearby are pretty much booked until end of year and hanging out at home in the same room where I work doesn’t feel that recharging 😔.
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10 years since stewart butterfield's famous blog post – i think we can all agree slack not only failed to achieve stewart's vision, but actively inflicts the exact pain he described. slack:.- overwhelms us with neverending flow.- makes us anxious and frustrated that we miss
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apple maps didn’t know a whole section stretch of 101 flooded and shut down. you’d think they’d have decent data in the bay area given so many employees live here. google maps’s design is very cluttered but it’s more reliable. maybe that matters more for a map app.
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TODAY AT 10:30am PT - i'll be 🤿 deep diving into the new AI features from my team !!! stream it live here: hope you enjoy and let
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i suggested we add a text label to an icon button and this one change shows as much impact as all of the team's other launches combined 😳.
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