David Hahn on Building Product LinkedIn, InstaCart, and GoFundMe

11/10/20 • 45 min

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In this episode, we talk with David Hahn, the former CPO of Instacart.

Throughout his career, David has learned deep and meaningful lessons about what individual and enterprise customers need -- and how to translate those needs into fun, usable products.

His resume includes a wide range of successful tech startups. So we asked him what ties those experiences at LinkedIn, GoFundMe and Instacart together.

“I think there's some times where people look at kind of growth work and say, ‘Oh, gosh, those guys are just focused on button color, et cetera.’ And the reality is that the consumers really react to relatively small differences and things like word choice and things like button placement. They very much react to how much you really simplified a particular experience.”

Quentin and Steve about designing for growth, having empathy for users, and the nuances of small adjustments.

This podcast is produced by Post Script Audio in collaboration with General Catalyst.

In this episode, we talk with David Hahn, the former CPO of Instacart.

Throughout his career, David has learned deep and meaningful lessons about what individual and enterprise customers need -- and how to translate those needs into fun, usable products.

His resume includes a wide range of successful tech startups. So we asked him what ties those experiences at LinkedIn, GoFundMe and Instacart together.

Quentin and Steve about designing for growth, having empathy for users, and the nuances of small adjustments.

This podcast is produced by Post Script Audio in collaboration with General Catalyst.

Previous Episode

Jay Parikh on Scaling Facebook's Infrastructure

In this episode, we speak with Jay Parikh, Facebook’s outgoing VP of engineering. Jay is the architect behind Facebook’s data center infrastructure and engineering teams, who helped design and execute the physical layer that underpins the platform.

"We came together and had this big meeting and decided 'Okay. Well, we have to go and build our own infrastructure.' We had really no choice given the fact that we were scaling so rapidly. And we started to just struggle with the off-the-shelf kind of solutions out there, both open source software that we had. We massaged and bent those pieces of software as far as they could probably go," says Jay.

Jay realized that he had to fundamentally change the way Facebook built resiliency into its systems. Deploying a network for 300 million people is much different than deploying one for 3 billion people.

Quentin Clark and Steve Herrod dug in deeper with Jay about what happened in the years afterward.

Next Episode

Intuit CTO Marianna Tessel on AI-First Software

In this episode, we speak with the Chief Technology Officer of Intuit, Marianna Tessel.

Marianna is a seasoned tech executive who oversees all of Intuit’s product engineering, data science, information technology, and information security teams. Marianna previously led engineering teams at Docker, Ariba and VMWare. She landed at Intuit in 2017.

Intuit makes a range of software products for taxes and business management, including TurboTax, Quickbooks and Mint. And she’s leading thousands of engineers in AI-first development to make products easier, cleaner, and more intuitive.

“I think you're going to start rewriting applications with this AI first. And just the way the world of apps re-imagined itself for mobile, it has to reimagine itself for AI. Which probably is an even more extreme transformation,” says Marianna.

Quentin and Steve spoke with her about engineering products in the midst of a pandemic that is crushing many of the small businesses Intuit serves.

This podcast is produced by Post Script Audio in partnership with General Catalyst.