Casey Winters

When's the last time you used your brain versus followed a process someone else designed at your company? Because I want the former, not the latter.

Consumer subscription just doesn't have any of these benefits. Consumers are way less predictable. They tend to retain worse than businesses, and they also don't have net dollar retention characteristics.

At Reforge, we're building frameworks that are tools in a toolkit. You pull them out when relevant. They're not a coloring book to stay inside the lines of.

I'm going to give you real scenarios that I expect from the role. I want to hear how you'd approach them. If you can't come up with a few reasonable ideas, figure out how to test them quickly without analyst support or research, I'm just not interested.

You're actually a company exec first and a product exec second. You have to not only truly care, but create the perception that you care about sales, about marketing, about legal, et cetera.

Once that person makes the call, it's disagree and commit time. There's no escalation path. If you're not the DRI and you're on the team and they made the call, all right. It's time to sign up and go forward on that decision.

User research is a scarce resource. We have to reserve it for the areas that have extreme uncertainty and high leverage for getting to certain.

Many times, the fastest way to learn is to ship.

A network effect is when a product or a business gets better with more users or customers using it.

The job is not to follow the process. The job is not to learn every framework possible. The job is to figure out how to add value to customers that translates into value to the business.

If what your plan is is to use paid acquisition on top of a freemium model to get a percentage of people to convert, and hopefully, stick around forever, I'd pivot right now. I cannot see it working.

During existential threats, it's like when Nassim Taleb says, 'The only rational reaction is overreaction.' Unless you have a real viable reason to assume otherwise, you got to assume the disruptor is right and base your strategy on them playing an optimal game.

We strive for this concept of what we call perceived simplicity, which is there are advanced features in the product and they are easily discoverable when you look for them, but they're effectively hidden if you're not looking for them.

As a product leader, if I'm airing on the side of which side of the spectrum I want people from, I generally will take people who are good at execution over people who are good at generating ideas, because of course there's always too many good ideas that a company need to focus and execute well on the best ones.

If you want to start managing groups of PMs, if you want to start a running a business unit, or a pillar, or a theme. I as a chief product officer, I'm going to expect you to be able to write that strategy doc without me.

It's once you unlock a fire strategy, that's when I think you think about hiring someone full time on growth to fully harness that new growth loop you've built.

If you're not an executive, whatever you're working on, you're basically writing and telling a story. And when you talk to an exec about that story, you have to start with chapter one, which is what part of the company strategy are you working on?

Executive communication is actually executives communication. You're communicating with individual executives that all have different styles and different concerns about the business.

You want to de-risk that meeting not make it a big success or fail moment... You want to anticipate that, and if you don't have enough experience say presenting to the CFO or the CEO, I as the chief product officer do, so I can impersonate them and help you understand what they're going to care most about.

If you got a product that retains well and you can't find more users for it, I don't think that's product market fit.

You want to be thinking about how your product can grow scalable pretty early on... It's not about getting a bunch of users before you have a product that works. It's about thinking strategically about how this product's going to grow itself when it's ready to do so.

The goal of your kindle strategies, these like non-scalable hacks, they only exist to unlock the fire strategies, to unlock the things that could take you to millions of users.

A lot of managers and leaders would just try to deal with issues on their own and not raise them or escalate them with me in particular... How am I supposed to evaluate things fairly if you don't let me know what's really going on?

Having marketing ops means you suck at marketing... When you say, oh, their job is to do this manual process long term. That's where I get super concerned because you're not rooting out efficiency in how you build your company.