Fortune's Path Podcast

• "8% of the male population is colorblind, especially to red and green. And so think about the stock market and how that reads, or any kind of financial or big data company and their prevalent uses of green and red. People see those colors in shades of yellows and beige. ...I think accessibility design is still up and coming. I think user experience as an industry is still in its infancy... incorporating it into corporate spheres, companies, what does that mean? I make it a business to help build toolkits on how to define what it is that we do."
• "Generally people put out surveys at the beginning of a workflow or when someone first drops into their site before login or after login. But where I find that type of survey being really beneficial is after they do something. So they come there with a certain thing in mind that they want to do. That is exactly when you should throw up those two questions: a rating scale or an open ended."
• "Nashville is a place of connectors: "Hey, you know what? I know this person, let me email them for you. There is that love here of meeting, meeting people organically."
• "Design principles are value statements that describe the most important goals that a product delivers for its users."
• "With with product led growth, focus on customer acquisition, your expansion and keeping your clients. There's four ways to do that. First: it's with user experience and an intuitive interface. Simplify the user journey. When someone's onboarding, consider how they quickly understand the value of the product just because of the interaction they're having with the first page or the first few pages, and then make sure that it's a consistent experience across all devices.
• "The second one is UI. You user interface is really the visual appeal of designing for attention. We touch on this with graphic design. It's bringing clarity and language to guide people through features. Think of things like feedback, how do you know this is working?"
• "Another one that helps with product led growth is interaction design. Micro-interactions, you know, something that has minimal steps to complete the task or reduce friction and encouraging people to use the product later. A notification saying, hey, you forgot something! Those are all ways that, you know, kind of brings growth. You don't necessarily think about it."
• "The last one is showcasing something that you can use for free. But then explaining: 'hey there's these other features that you might like!' And being exploratory with that."

• On the risk of AI programing leading to crummy software: "At the end of the day AI is just a tool, right? And so it's how we choose to use it that could have impacts there. If we allow AI usage to be an excuse to move quickly [when developing software], but sloppily, then yeah, we're going to build more and more software that is is tenuous and has the potential of falling over."
• On the idea of AI being able to help junior developers become senior developers more quickly: "Unless we are intentional as an industry, we run the risk of replacing the natural apprenticeship that's been in place for a few decades."
• On AI taking our jobs: "Humans will always seek to work on the things that they're uniquely able to deliver value on, and I think so we'll just keep doing that in software development. But but I am worried about what the path looks like for people to get to that level of expertise."
• On his new venture Ducky.foo: "Ducky.foo is is the outcome of me wrestling with the disparity that AI assistants are creating in terms of junior developer versus senior developer productivity... Create a human community where more experienced developers can teach and mentor and share their hard won expertise and real world knowledge with junior developers, but do it at scale...it's not novel to think of a community of software developers of different experience levels helping each other out. But I think what is novel is that I think we can hyper scale this type of community by injecting AI into it."
• "Those with the most going into any kind of innovation tend to be the ones who benefit the most." Ducky.foo is hoping to stop this from taking place with AI innovation, and prevent the fruits of AI innovation from resting in the hands of the wealthy.
• On the toxicity of Stack Overflow and general trolling: "here's a place where AI does have a leg up. It's infinitely patient, infinitely pleasant. And so I think That's one thing we can borrow from AI as we're building Ducky.foo.”

Takeaways

• Understanding the basics of circuits and quantum computing is essential in comprehending the potential of AI.
• Transparency and explainability are crucial in AI decision-making to ensure accountability and mitigate bias.
• Data curation is a critical step in developing AI models to avoid unintended biases and improve accuracy.
• The application of AI in mortgage and loan decisions requires careful consideration of fairness and ethical implications. Higher education is correlated with earnings, but its correlation with credit worthiness is uncertain.
• Being completely blind to factors like race and gender in the hiring process may be challenging, but efforts can be made to represent everyone equally.
• Considering each subpopulation separately and simplifying the hiring process can help ensure fair representation.
• Ethical dilemmas arise when ignoring correlations that have a strong statistical relationship with outcomes.
• The application of AI in the hiring process can be effective when combined with human decision-making and a structured, data-informed approach.

Chapters

00:00Introduction and Recording Confirmation

00:38Background in Physics and Engineering

03:13Research in Material Design and Quantum Physics

04:26Understanding Circuits and Quantum Computing

06:37Transition from Research to Business

11:14Impact of Ideas and Einstein's Equation

13:14Ethics and Risks of Artificial Intelligence

17:15Applications and Limitations of AI

20:39Ethics and Bias in AI Decision-Making

25:24Transparency and Explainability in AI

29:29Data Curation and Bias in AI Models

34:07AI in Mortgage and Loan Decisions

38:15Fairness and Ethics in Lending

38:41Correlation between Higher Education and Earnings

39:21Challenges of Being Blind to Race and Gender

39:49Considerations for Representing Everyone Equally

40:24Ethical Dilemmas of Ignoring Correlations

41:08Product Development and Answering Ethical Questions

41:29Simplifying the Hiring Process

42:02Data-Informed Recruiting and Hiring

43:14Using Data to Find the Right Match

44:24Simplifying the Workflow for Recruiters

45:16Focusing on Skill-Based Factors in Hiring

46:31The Validity of Resumes in Predicting Performance

47:25Factors in Deciding a Good Hire

48:15The Tricky Nature of Job Descriptions

49:05The Importance of Skills and Job Descriptions

50:03The Value of Experience and Starting a Business

51:09The Role of Emotion in Decision-Making

54:02Introducing Scientific Process into Hiring

55:53The Application of AI in the Hiring Process

56:58The Human Element in Decision-Making

58:16Applying the Scientific Method to Business Problems

59:18Learning from Past Research and Being Skeptical

01:00:45Checking Assumptions and Being Discerning

How do you manage and measure product managers? What is the Shape Up methodology and why should you care about it? How do you build a process that creates great products?

These are some of the question Tom asks sales and product management veteran Amin Haidar, a six year veteran of Asurion, one of the largest and most profitable private tech companies in America. Tom first met Amin while he was still in college, working full-time at Healthstream while getting his degree. His intelligence, ambition and work ethic made a great impression on every one in leadership, To, included.

Amin and Tom discuss how the Shape Up methodology works, how to choose what ideas to invest in as a product manager. Amin discusses how Asurion time-boxes work into five week chunks and focuses their teams work on one thing at a time with seven person teams. Amin talks about how avoids client commitments and manages his now timeline, how he manages urgent requests, how he judges the effectiveness of his product managers, and how he gives feedback in the moment. Amin describes product management as the art of creating a process that creates great products. Amin talks about his transition from a start-up to a large mature organization like Asurion. Amin talks about his style as servant leader and when he knows he needs to be directive and what he does to support his reports when that happens. Amin talks about how he encourages his reports to question him how he tries to have no ego with his teams. Amin talks about leadership’s job is to make everyone else successful and how he creates a context for making decisions by keeping things objective as much as he can. Finally, Tom andAmin talk abut the meaning of success and raising kids.

26 year old Walter Hindman tells Tom how he became CEO after losing his job during COVID when his offer was rescinded. Walter tells Tom about Junkdrop Nashville, his junk removal business that gives reusable material to charities. Walter explains why integrity is important to his differentiation. Walter does not give his donors a tax break, but he does show them where their reusable items end up and who they benefit. Walter talks about his dream of growing Junkdrop through franchises. Tom digs into the economics and what stands in the way of scale for Junkdrop. Walter talks about who he hires and how he finds them. He talks about how important having fun is to his business. Walter talks about having to fire people. Walter tells how important earned media like being on the Today show and being written up in the Tennessean has been to his growth. Walter talks about using Google ad words. Tom tells how he felt taken advantage of by another junk removal business. Walter tells about how 1-800-Got-Junk revolutionized the junk business with their simple value—point and it’s gone. Walter has taken that idea and added the charity angle so people can feel good about where the junk goes after it’s picked up. Tom talks about creating a junk removal as a subscription business. Walter talks about why he started his business and how he was able to pick who he’s competing against. He tells how he had no capital when he started and how he coordinated with a local charity and used his own pick-up. Walter talks about hoarder houses and how strange the work can get. Walter tells how obsessed he gets when he loses a bid. Tom compares competitive intelligence to a musician who gets inspiration from other musicians. Tom describes how he was inspired by his old boss who was generous with his time and would talk to anyone who had a business in health tech. Walter closes out by telling us what he wishes he knew when he started the business that he knows now.