Month: February 2020

A New Year & A New Adventure

/ Adam Nash / 3 Comments

Some personal news to share today.  After a great tour of duty at Dropbox, I’ve decided to take the leap into something new.

Having a January birthday has always added a little weight to my New Year’s resolutions, and as it turns out, 2020 was a big one for me. 45 might not be the biggest milestone birthday, but combined with the weight of a new decade, it had me thinking deeply over the holidays. Fortunately, I was able to spend a good deal of time with friends & family, and by New Year’s Eve I felt comfortable with a simple, but important, decision.

2020 will be different. This will be the year that I go off on my own.

The hardest part of this process was telling my team at Dropbox. I feel so very fortunate to have had the opportunity to lead such an amazing group of professionals. And as proud as I am of what we accomplished in 2018 & 2019, I’m even more excited about what this team will deliver for their customers in 2020 & beyond. 

For me, I’ll be spending the next few months preparing for the long road ahead founding a company. As one of the growing number of “operator-angels,” I’ll continue to advise and support the talented teams at the companies where I’ve invested over the past 8 years. Primarily, though, I’ll be spending time on a couple of specific fintech ideas that I think have the potential to be great companies. 

I have spent over 20 years learning to build & design great products and great companies, but somehow never my own. As an angel investor, I’ve now helped fund and advise over fifty amazing founding teams, and have had a front row seat to their struggles and successes. It’s time to take the plunge.

And who knows? I hear 45 is the best time to start.

Be A Great Product Leader – Amplify 2019

/ Adam Nash

On October 8, 2019, I was asked to give my talk, “Be A Great Product Leader” to a huge audience at Amplify 2019, the product management conference organized by Amplitude.*

The talk is named after possibly my most famous blog post on the topic of product leadership from 2011, Be A Great Product Leader.

For those of you who have seen earlier renditions of this talk, this version was cut down to thirty minutes, and as a result has a subset of topics. All of the lessons in this talk started as blog posts:

  1. The Secret to Product Prioritization. Three Buckets
  2. Find the Heat. Don’t Be Afraid to Talk About Emotion.
  3. Einstein’s Razor. Make Things As Simple As Possible, But Not Simpler.
  4. Obsess About Your Non-Users. Growth Comes from Them.
  5. Solve the Product Maze Backwards. Think Back from the Future.
  6. Know Your Superpower. Product. Design. Engineering.

Over the past ten years, I’ve given versions of this talk at over twenty different companies and conferences, but there has never been shareable video of it. Fortunately, Amplitude captured the video and  posted full video of all of their talks, including mine.

Product leadership continues to be a hot topic in the industry, and I hope that these lessons will help inspire more people to become great product leaders.

 

* Special thank you to Melinda Byerley for making the introduction!