Richard Chen’s Post

We're hiring for some *very* special roles at Mozilla in our Innovation Studio as we build out some additional innovation pods. Principal Product Manager, New Products AND Senior Staff Product Designer, New Products. Are you an entrepreneur who wants to build new stuff with the support of larger organization when you need it? Are you passionate about building an AI future? Enterprise offerings? What about technology that helps families and protects kids? AI-generated Website builder? Yep. Products that make online shopping better and more trustworthy? Yep. Bug bounties for GenAI exploits?!? You betcha. The agent of the future - beyond the browser? Holy 🐄! Having a track record of building and shipping 0-to-1 is a MUST for this role. So is the ability to get stuff done independently and fast. The future of the internet depends on it! These are all areas we're exploring in our New Product Strategy. Come work with me, Imo Udom and tons of talented folks at Mozilla. Apply at the links below. If you're going to DM me I want to hear about the successful 0-to-1 project you built, what problem it solved and what it achieved.

🚀 Calling All Software Engineers! Let’s Innovate Together! 🚀 Hello #LinkedIn community! 👋 I’m thrilled to connect with fellow software engineers who share a passion for cutting-edge technology and disruptive solutions. 🌟 As an entrepreneur and tech enthusiast, I’ve been brewing an exciting software concept that has the potential to revolutionize the all-in-one Saas industry. 🌐 🌐 Why You Should Care: Innovation: We’re pushing boundaries and redefining the status quo. Impact: Our solution addresses certain elements that I have personally encountered in my technical and online journey. Collaboration: I believe in the power of collective genius. Let’s build something remarkable together! 🙌 Why Connect with Me? I’m actively seeking feedback, collaboration, and potential co-founders. If you’re a software engineer, UI/UX designer, or just someone who loves tinkering with code, let’s chat! 🤝 📩 Reach Out: Feel free to connect, drop me a message, or comment below if you’re curious to learn more. Let’s ignite creativity and turn this idea into reality! 🚀 #SoftwareEngineers #TechInnovation #StartupIdeas #Collaboration

DVA is not associated with this job posting Principal Product Manager, New Products USA https://lnkd.in/gQzUwFSX About this team and role: Mozilla’s New Product group is a fast-paced organization of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial-minded individuals. We build new products from the ground up, explore methods of investment and acquisition and experiment quickly to solve exciting problems for people that can form the basis of new Mozilla businesses. As a Principal Product Manager, you will lead a small dynamic team, often beginning with just two people, to explore and bring new concepts to life through rapid iterations and prototyping. You should be comfortable leading product across all stages of the early product lifecycle from discovery through launch and initial growth. We are looking for someone who thrives in an entrepreneurial setting, has startup experience and a track record of delivering, and can navigate the unique challenges of building 0 to 1 products. What you’ll do: Identify a new Concept: Identify compelling problems to solve and ideate on potential solutions. Product Vision & Strategy: Lead and own the end-to-end product lifecycle for new product initiatives, from concept through launch, early traction, and iteration. Set clear goals for product success, ensuring alignment with Mozilla’s mission and strategic vision. Customer Discovery: Conduct market research and user interviews to identify unmet needs and validate product ideas. Cross-functional Collaboration: Work closely with cross-functional teams to define product requirements, prioritize features, and deliver high-quality products that align with user needs and business goals. Data-Driven Decisions: Continuously gather and analyze qualitative and quantitative data to measure product performance, iterate on features, and drive improvements. Effective Communication: Clearly articulate product plans, benefits, and outcomes to a wide range of audiences, including internal partners, leadership, employees, and users. #employment #jobs #hiring #job #jobsearch #recruitment #career #work #careers #recruiting #nowhiring #resume #jobhunt #business #jobseekers #hr #jobopening #staffing #humanresources #jobseeker #hiringnow #interview #recruiter #jobsearching #vacancy #covid #education #jobinterview #jobopportunity #employmentopportunities

If you've just stepped into the Software Engineering world as a new grad, getting a grip on this could really speed up your journey to the next level Joining Meta as a new grad, I felt hesitant to ask questions. Not just shyness, but unsure how to seek help. I feared asking would seem weak, believing independence was key among the brilliant minds around me With that mindset, whenever I got a project, I'd dive straight into coding, stressing over piecing it together. This pressure made me code non-stop until I hit a wall. Only then I would pause to look back on what are we trying to build—a big mistake In my early days, while developing key features for Business Messaging in ads, I followed the same old mindset and didn't question the product enough. Midway, I realized we were missing two crucial components requiring extra content. This might seem like a minor oversight, but it led me to align more closely with the product designer and my product manager. However, that's not where the tale ends! At Facebook, with their intense focus on privacy, especially for ads products, Most contents must be reviewed by the privacy team. Here's where it got tricky for me: this triggered a privacy review, extending my timeline by 2-3 weeks 😳. For a new grad, this was quite intimidating. Yet, it was a valuable lesson. Not asking "why" and "what are we trying to achieve" turned into one of my biggest roadblocks! This experience taught me a crucial lesson: if you're technically stuck, you can dive into the code base to find a way out, affecting only you. But if you're unclear about the product's purpose, oh man, it consumes both time and effort, and sadly, it's your results that bear the brunt I learned that people value impact above all. Nobody keeps score of how you overcame obstacles. Asking "Why are we doing this?" is the key to moving forward without dropping the ball. Asking ‘why’ will keep you ‘high’🙌 #seekinghelp #whywedowhatwedo #newgrads

Who should be your first hire if you take the PLG route? Engineer? Product Manager? PLG Lead? Storylane’s first hire was a product designer. Because when you choose PLG, people must understand what your product is offering in the first five minutes. Otherwise, they're not going to come back to you. From day 1, our focus was on building and iterating until we got each aspect of the product right. Here’s how we went ahead with this approach: 1. Draw a wireframe the good old way Using pen and paper, we would create wireframes for how we envisioned the product to behave. 2. Design a product screen for it We’d then pass it on to our product designer, who’d flesh it out as an actual product UI design by mapping user journeys. 3. Share it with our early customers to validate it We did this in batches for different customers based on their size - startups, mid-market, and enterprises. Akash Bansal and I would get on calls with our customers to identify common themes, patterns, and challenges, if any. 4. Create different variations for the same screen until it resonates with our customers It’s difficult to get everything right on the first iteration. Since our goal was always in sight, we kept testing and creating multiple variations of the product journeys until we got it right. I’m not saying this is the only way. But it’s what has worked for us. Who was your first hire? #PLG #Team #Hiring 

80%+ of engineers never make it to Staff, because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means. They think it's about knowing a lot within a particular domain when it's actually about their ability to adapt. I saw this first-hand as I worked with a brilliant Staff Engineer at Meta. They didn't join as Staff, but instead got promoted from Senior -> Staff in just 1 year, over 5x faster than industry average. This engineer joined my team at Portal, which was purely Android. However, they came from an extensive iOS background with 0 Android experience. Most engineers would be terrified of such a situation. Not this engineer. What stood out to me is that they wasted 0 time reading docs and consuming content. They just started coding. And holy hell, their initial code was bad. But not for long. They went to every experienced Android engineer in the org (including me) and pushed us to explain exactly why their code sucked. They integrated this deluge of feedback at light speed, and after just 2 months, you couldn't even tell that this engineer came in with no prior Android background. This is what it truly means to be a Staff engineer. It's not about the value you add within 1 specific space. It's about your fundamentals which allow you to add tremendous value to *any* space. To deep dive into the exact tactics this Staff Engineer used to learn so quickly and the senior -> staff promotion, check out our in-depth explainer here: https://lnkd.in/gUkyKEnJ #techcareergrowth #softwareengineering #staffengineer #promotion #growthtips #techlead

10 things I learned working as an engineer at Meta: 1. Time spent working ≠ Impact. You can work for weeks on a feature or product that customers don't care for. On the other hand you can get a quick win with a few lines of code by going for low hanging fruit or a customer pain point 2. Ruthlessly prioritize everything. There'll always be an unlimited number of tasks on your plate. Not all of them are important. Some are 'nice to haves' and others are 'must haves'. Focus on the P0s - the 'must haves' and don't get lost meandering through P2s and P3s 3. Move fast. Have an idea? Test it out with a quick MVP instead of spending months building it only to find out that no one wants it. For example adding a small button that opens a dialog box with the words "coming soon" can help you gauge interest in a feature 4. Fail fast. You will save so much time testing ideas and failing quickly rather than expending months creating something inconsequential and then failing slowly 5. Data wins arguments. Instead saying what you feel the direction of the product should be, bring some proof to the table 6. Sometimes data lies. For example cherrypicking particular metrics at the expense of others. Confusing goals with metrics. Building a hypothesis on something that isn't statistically significant. Or poor code design resulting in incorrect logging. All these can skew the data and lead you in the wrong direction 7. Pick the right goals and metrics. Most product teams instinctively choose MAU (monthly active users) as their top level metric, however this doesn't always help them make the best product decision. If a user reloads their tab once a month that gets counted as MAU... Instead consider top level metrics that actually help you derive better product decisions, such as: meaningful engagement, revenue per user and others 8. Have systems in place to catch bugs. Bugs are an inevitable part of programming and some are bound to get through. Ensuring there are different layers along the way to catch them can help reduce the number of bugs pushed to prod. For example: engineers should be responsible for writing their own integration tests, code should never be pushed before a diff review from another engineer, robust testing frameworks in place during the push process, QA for after code is pushed as well as extensive logging, monitoring and alerts for the live product. The final 'bug catcher' in this process are the users themselves and you want to do everything in your power not to get to that point 9. No need to reinvent the wheel. Chances are you're either working in an existing codebase, building above an existing API or working on a pre-existing problem. You can save heaps of time just by searching around. And for everything else there's chatGPT that writes code better than we do. Just make sure to make the necessary tweaks to fit those snippets of code into your own 10. Diversity of thought. Get different opinions from everyone in the team, always

One thing I’ve learned in my first 10 months at Meta… Don’t ask a senior eng what to do or how to do something. Instead, explore different approaches and ask the senior eng which they would recommend. For example, when devising the tech plan for a new feature that requires storing and retrieving new data, don’t simply ask what data solution you should use. Instead, scour internal wikis, existing code patterns, etc, to learn about the data storage solutions available. Then list out the pros and cons specific to your use case in terms of latency cost, capacity usage, reliability, implementation complexity, etc. Sending that breakdown to the senior eng (along with your own proposal for what you think the best choice is) will not only make their lives easier, but prove to them that you’re capable of working at the next level. Of course, there are exceptions. For example, if there’s a quick question that a senior engineer could answer in 30 seconds, but would take you 2 hours to figure out on your own, it makes sense to ask. What do others think? What types of questions should you ask senior eng and how should you decide whether to ask a question or figure it out on your own? #softwareengineer

Why can't our industry evolve beyond this? What's so wrong with working together, where seniors practise storytelling of concepts they know but need to learn how to explain, and juniors simply committed to listening and asking follow-up questions. Juniors need to commit, but not to drudgery. Seniors need to teach, but not through "RTFM" ("Read the freaking manual") or LMGTFY. Working in pairs and mob programming isn't always feasible, but treating things like this as normal is unfortunate and ignorant. The ultimate irony is that senior devs talk about what's "beyond the code", yet we can't seem to think beyond "RTFM" for the less experienced. If you feel affected by this but have never tried mob programming, I'll personally mob with you, if anything to help shed some perspective. Just send me a DM. ♥