Product Lessons From Growing Eventbrite, Pinterest and GrubHub

"You have to feel comfortable that a lot of the times, you're still going to get it wrong"

- Casey Winters, Ex-Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite

Other valuable insights from the session:

• "There's a tendency because we have more ways to accumulate data and insights, to try to completely de-risk everything that we're going to build, and it can cause analysis paralysis or research paralysis. A lot of times the best way to collect data is to go do something and see the reaction."

• "Features are not easy to build, and once they are built, they are even harder to maintain especially as you multiply them across all the new features you are building."

• "A product manager is there to make sure the right decisions get made, not to make them. The fewer decisions a product manager needs to make, generally, the better a product manager is doing because the team's well informed and can make them closer to the code or closer to the Figma file"

Watch the full session here.

More Snippets of Tactical Entrepreneurial Wisdom

• Instead of focusing your sales call on the offer and what's included, consult your customers on what you would do if you were in their shoes, and break down the exact strategy and plan you would implement. Some people will run with it themselves, but most will end up asking: "can you just implement that for us?"

• Delete everything that is not absolutely necessary on your website. Instead of adding messaging that you think might be interesting for customers, only include messaging that came out of a customer's or prospect's mouth before. The homepage should essentially be just value prop + social proof, social proof and more social proof + call to action.

• The VC investor you are pitching to is your sponsor at the VC firm. Often, other people in the firm will need to give their approval as well. Steer the conversation to help your sponsor convince his/her team.