Humanizing product development

Adriel Frederick is a VP of Product at Reddit who previously led marketplace and pricing teams at Lyft and was an early PM on Facebook's growth and user acquisition team. The conversation covers incubating new products inside large companies, building diverse global teams, operating algorithm-heavy products with human judgment, and the nuts and bolts of growth and experimentation.

01Key learnings

• Make new R&D or incubation teams feel core to the company mission and share their wins, so the rest of the organization doesn't reject them.
• For algorithm-heavy products, decide explicitly what the algorithm owns versus what people own, and design interfaces that let humans set constraints and strategy.
• Treat operational control as a first-order product requirement when a marketplace needs day-to-day human adjustments like weather or competitor responses.
• Stay close to users and separate valid criticism from noise; go experience the product yourself rather than reacting to press headlines.
• Use data to point toward problems, but watch real users in the marginal and worst-case segments to find the root causes data alone can't reveal.
• Focus growth work on removing friction from core actions and grinding on fundamentals, since growth hacks alone rarely sustain a product.
• Use a portfolio of bets: a few big 'cannonball' investments plus smaller 'lead bullet' experiments, and avoid incremental thinking that adds up to nothing meaningful.
• As you move into leadership, invest in organization design and empathy, aligning colleagues' goals with shared objectives instead of relying on individual technical excellence.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.