How to build great products—lessons from Amazon, Facebook, Twitter & Deel. | Aaron Goldsmid, Head of Product at Deel

Aaron was Director of Product at Amazon, VP Product at Twilio, PM at Facebook and Twitter. Now he’s head of product at Deel where he reports directly to the CEO. Deel was founded in 2019— now, just 5 years later, it’s worth $12B and raised over $650M. 

We go deep on what it takes to build world-class products, how early-stage founders can balance customer feedback, vision and data, and how the best product leaders are leveraging AI today.

Keywords

productivity, AI, product development, user experience, product management, customer feedback, product market fit, technology, innovation, startups

Why you should listen

• Why you’re better off trying to enhance than replace with AI— at least today.
• Why you need to deeply understand your users to build products they truly love. 
• How to avoid the customer feedback trap and only build features that move the needle.
• How and when to hire your first product manager. 
• What makes a product truly great 

Timestamps:

(00:00:00) Intro
(00:10:25) AI Solves the Informational Retrieval Problem
(00:14:54) AI Agents Aren't Real Yet
(00:18:12) Signals that Could Lead Towards to PMF
(00:23:04) Finding the Customers Need
(00:25:17) Hiring Product Managers
(00:28:00) Difference Between an excellent Product vs an Okay One
(00:34:17) Prioritizing Bug Fixing vs Feature Requests from Existing Users

Send me a message to let me know what you think!