How You.com's Chief Product Officer decides what really matters to build 🚀

Startups always have more ideas than resources and prioritization becomes the hardest skill. What's your framework for deciding what not to build?

Yeah, great question. Let's start with what we aim for. Our vision is to help the world create agents. So simply put, a simple heuristic is if it doesn't accelerate agent adoption, we're not going to do it. Now, underlying that premise is I tend to use three filters. One is, is a particular feature or customer request going to create an accruing advantage? Does it make it easier for me to create a compelling solution that actually becomes greater than the sum of its parts? And that's one test that I always look for. The next is, does that create a differentiation for me in market? Is it something that only we can credibly deliver, like our trusted web search APIs or transparent source controls? If not, we need to think twice about that. And then third, we look at enterprise impact. That's very important for us. Whether it's enterprise impact for a developer or enterprise impact for a for cio, is that going to help move that needle? And if a feature doesn't pass at least two of those three tests, it's going to get dropped on the floor. And so those are really what we look at in our general heuristics about when do we invest, when do we not invest? And that clarity of filters is something that the whole team understands. So they know that when they're coming to a product review internally, they need to think through these three questions and have an understanding of where their particular future might lie and understand why the business might invest there. And I think having that clarity throughout the organization, organization helps us become a more efficient and more value oriented organization.