Max Brun shares product lessons from Facebook Marketplace and TikTok that shaped his work at Poshmark. He emphasizes finding a wedge for early adopters, ruthless prioritization, and delaying monetization until product-market fit is solid.
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So what were some of the biggest, I would say, like learnings, you know, from your time at Facebook and then maybe TikTok that you've taken with you to Poshmark?
Yeah, there were several. So I think, you know, I keep mentioning this to folks that being a product manager at Facebook was like being an elite athlete at a— in a professional league, right? Because you— the expectations are really high to survive and to succeed. And you're getting coached by like world-class executives around you and mentors, right? And it's also like a professional league because we were gold every 6 months and then you could crush that period, but then you're back to zero, right? So you basically start at the bottom of the table, like in any soccer or any football league. So it was good. Like a lot of my, I mean, a lot of my principles that I've taken, you know, are rooted in my experience at Facebook. Like, I mean, it's just like basic product stuff. Like, you know, focus on problems, not solutions, number one. Like, you know, you should be, you know, prioritize ruthlessly, right? Number 2, right? Now, number 3 is, I'll just sort of like, I have a list of like, you know, 7 or 8 things that I kind of stick to and I sort of, it's sort of my framework whenever I build a product, right? Number 3 is, when you're seeking product-market fit, like find a wedge, like, you know, like, you know, find those early adopters, like don't boil the ocean. We got trained really well on defining metrics, success metrics, countermetrics, health metrics, and there was like a lot of rigor and thought put into finding the right metric that was unique and And sort of that kind of was representative of the mission and the vision of the product. I also learned how to take anything from idea to impact pretty fast. Like most PMs at Facebook are really good operators, so they're very, they're great executioners. So that was pretty critical. And then I think kind of learned like just that, I mean, in terms of like monetization, I think we used to say, you know, that is step 99. You wanna make sure you have a great product with product market fit. So before you apply any growth hacks or growth tactics or look to monetize, just make sure you have all that stuff figured out and stuff is working well. So I think those are the things that I took. And I think the other thing that was really critical at Facebook was to be a really good PM. Like, and actually being a good PM is to really bring, get everybody on the bus and kind of bring everybody along, right? The designers, the engineers, and they should be excited to work with you and they should feel energized and empowered and they feel like this is their product. So I think that's what, those are kind of behaviors that are sort of considered and sort of like, you know, are considered as like good PM behaviors and are also incentivized there. Yeah.
