Kevin Yien
Kevin Yien leads product for merchant experiences at Stripe. Before that, he meandered his way from being a technical designer to a product manager, built the restaurants business and ecosystem team at Square, and most recently was head of product and design at Mutiny. He also makes ice cream and teaches for fun.
Career (separate track) Skills
Starting in a role that builds or sells the product provides the best foundation for understanding how to convert team potential into customer value.
"So for me, the sort of foundational three are going to be engineer, designer or salesperson. I think sales also gets not a bad rep, but a misrepresented reputation in tech where all they care about is..."
Discovery & Research Skills
Product sense is built by consistently documenting decision rationales and comparing them against actual outcomes to calibrate intuition.
"We all talk about product sense. To me, it's just a fancy way of saying you can make good decisions with insufficient data. PMs need as many reps as possible in making decisions, documenting the ratio..."
Operating Cadence & Communication Skills
Effective writing allows a product manager to communicate and maintain clarity across an entire organization simultaneously.
"writing is clarity at scale, and a key component to a PM's job is creating clarity both i"
Team & Organization Skills
Exposing the most difficult parts of a job to a candidate before they sign ensures their commitment is based on a realistic understanding of the environment.
"When you get to offer stage, I send an email and I say all the terrible things that are probably going to reinforce their fears. If you can tell them that upfront and they can read that whole email an..."