LaunchPod - Trevin Chow
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Trevin: [00:00:00] simple doesn't have to mean deficient. To make magically simple software a lot of the times is about how do we make editorial choices that actually are things like smart defaults, and I think a default and curation can be a feature in itself.

We try to take that to the, nth degree, which is what is the choices that we can make on behalf of our sellers to either eliminate decisions. They shouldn't make at all or simplify decisions so that if they didn't want to turn all the knobs and levers, they don't have to. It's actually really good out of the gate.

Jeff: Welcome to Launch Pod, the show from Log Rocket, where we sit down with top product and digital leaders. Today we're joined by Trevin Chow, chief Product Officer at Big Cartel and e-Commerce platform for independent creators to turn their art into income.

Previously, Trevin held product leadership roles at Nike, Microsoft Axon, and more. In this episode, Trevin shares how they thread the needle between brand history and innovation, respecting a 20 plus year legacy while still driving towards the future. His process for creating simple magic by making features so simple, they delight [00:01:00] users.

Even if that trades less customization for better ease of use, how AI is transforming product and design workflows by drastically cutting down the time between idea and innovation and what product leaders can learn from rethinking Simple as a benefit rather than a constraint. So here's our episode with Trevon Chow.

Alright, Trevin, welcome to the show, man. Thanks for coming on.

Trevin: Hey, thanks for having me, Jeff, and look forward to this.

Jeff: This could be a fun one. I'm really stoked about this. So, you know, just for the audience your CPO over a company called Big Cartel right now. I'm stoked 'cause I, I think it's a cool company we can get to what it is in a second just to everyone knows, but like, you know, you've had a good run of career.

You've been at a bunch of startups. Trace me was acquired by Nike and you ended up going over to Nike as a director of product. You were at Axon, you were at Microsoft. What you've been in product for like the past 20 years, it seems like Plus and a lot of great leadership roles. We're gonna dive into. What it is like to come into a company like Big Cartel and really drive product and drive innovation, but respect a brand that has just such a rich legacy and such a long history. But maybe before we jump into that, can you just give like [00:02:00] the 92nd TLDR on, on, how'd you get here?

Trevin: Yeah. So at Big Cartel, like I was recruited I got into conversations with our co-CEOs, Robin, Jonathan, a while back. I'm approaching my almost like three year anniversary there right now. I just clicked with them almost immediately. I shared a really great alignment on how to build companies, how to run companies, what they wanted to do, what my skillset was.

So it just, the more we talked about it, the more it just made a lot of sense where I just felt like it, and then I started my career like. Way back when in commerce I was at, when I was at Microsoft I was one of the founding members of the Microsoft store, which was my one of Microsoft's first direct to consumer initiatives.

so I had developed a love of e-commerce like a long time ago and I was itching to get back into it and then just came at exactly the right time. And so kind of in the B2B side and dealing with commerce was kinda like a perfect match for me.

Jeff: I gotta ask before we go forward. It's an interesting jump where you go from like Microsoft, where I feel like a, just so many product leaders I've talked to now started off 15, 20 years ago at Microsoft they had a great early product program. But going from [00:03:00] Axon, which is body cams into sports between Trace Me, which was Is that Marshawn Lynch was that,

Trevin: Russell Wilson.

Jeff: Russell Wilson. Right? It was a right team, wrong person,

Trevin: Yes. Yes 

Jeff: and that, but they got acquired by Nike. And then you kind of rolled through a bunch of startups. How do you go from Microsoft to body cams to sports, to you know, back to e-commerce and really kind of, maker focused marketplaces?

Trevin: Yeah, it's interesting. I know a lot of people that are very intentional in a way about their career. Like, oh, I want to do this and I wanna do that, and I've just been. Kind of trying to find what's the next interesting thing in terms of as at the right time and a lot of the best opportunities I've had I've really stumbled into them out of happenstance.

And I'm an insatiable builder and I just love to build stuff. You kind of see that reflecting my career, just lots of different things and it's like so varied, whether it's body cameras, social media, or you know, et cetera. So a big thing was I was at Microsoft. I, when I was a kid, I bled Microsoft.

My dad was in it and we had an old Windows computer and things like that. And really I just loved it. And I interned there when I was in college, way back [00:04:00] when, and then it just made a lot of sense, like, Hey, let's go do this. And I interned there. I ended up moving to Seattle. And then after I thought I was gonna be there a few years, and then a few years turned to a few more.

And then next thing I knew it was. 15 years and then I just had a real itch to go to something else, try something else. And you know, candidly my dad was at the same company for like 35 years and it was something I think everybody is like, oh, I don't want to be like my dad. So I really wanted to try something different.

And then so I. Joined a company called Axon, which was, it was then known as Taser, which is like Stu, everyone knows it as a stun gun company. And I was VP of product for the body cameras and their digital evidence management and did that. And then progressively over time, I just wanted to go a bit smaller and a bit smaller.

And along that road it was just, I'm just insatiably curious. I'm a builder, so I just found these interesting opportunities along the way and kind of led me to where I am now. , In a way it's almost sacrilegious to say, Hey, things just happened and I kind of went in this, and when I look back at my career, I'm something I'm really proud of and really [00:05:00] excited by, and I'm just, I'm still kind of in many ways the same person I was back then.

I'm just this technical product person that wants to build stuff and really wants to like delight customers.

Jeff: Nice. It is funny, like sometimes you look at career and I feel like very rarely is there so much intention to it. There's a backward story you can always tell and some people try, but I dunno. Even I look backwards at mine, it kind of makes sense, but when I was making decisions I gotta be honest.

It was only kind of recently that I got kind of smart about it. So,

But we're more here to talk about your most recent decision on that, which was, like you said, you met the co-CEOs at Big Cartel and coming to there, which is a really interesting company. 'cause it is marketplace, it's maker focused.

But it's really got a great, you know, legacy of what, 20 plus years of operating and a passionate base, which is the foundation of it. And that is a big thing to come into as a CPO kind of trying to, especially one that's trying to drive innovation and drive things forward. You have to respect the past and look to the future.

So let's dive into that real quick. You wanna give us the download.

Trevin: yeah. Big cartel. So we're actually, we're an e-commerce platform. , Our goal is how do [00:06:00] we help people sell online, make it magically simple for artists and small businesses, whether it's full-time career. Whether it's a passion project, what we're trying to do is really help them turn their creativity into commerce on their own terms.

And so that's why we exist. That's why the company was founded. You had mentioned like, you know, 2005, so it predates the iPhone, which is totally crazy. So we've been, you know, we're bootstrapped, we've never raid venture. And so it's just been this business that's really had this really long legacy. We have a lot of loyal customers.

Some of our sellers have been on our platform for more than 15 years selling their work. so that's why I think we show up to work every day. We have a pretty small team. We're under, you know, under 50 people. And so that's why we exist is really to help our sellers turn their passion projects into something really profitable.

Jeff: that's pretty impressive of the scale it operates at. I think last time we talked, you said that over that time it's facilitated like several billion dollars

Trevin: over $3 billion of the sales.

Jeff: wild. And no venture funding. It's just purely bootstrapped, which is great.

I mean, it's been around for a long time. It seems to work pretty well. How do [00:07:00] you look at innovation there? Or what is the product thesis, I guess, coming in as chief Product Officer?

Trevin: I think the big thing is commerce isn't going away. Like commerce is one of those things where it's the fabric of a lot that goes on and selling online, and I think back in 2005 it was very novel to be able to sell. Online, how do you take a credit card? How do you create a website? All of that you know, required to go online.

And I think over time, I think when you have a company that has a legacy like this, what's. Magical before isn't magical anymore. So the table stakes change, customer expectations change, and I think part of the challenge is how do you embrace that? How do you meet that need? How do you make sure you close the gap while having an editorial view on what does it exactly?

That our sellers want and need to make them successful because the things they needed in 2005 are very different than what they needed in 2015, 2020, and even now in 2025. So a lot of my job, the product team's job, is really trying to think that through what is required, what is necessary, and how do we make [00:08:00] decisions to.

Do things that are magically simple for them , so it's delightful. It meets their needs and really I think a lot of our challenge is. A lot of our sellers are not necessarily technical, they're small businesses, typically single person operations that brings a set of constraints sometimes a lack of technical awareness.

And so that's a different layer that I think that we have and different set of constraints that a lot of other companies that are serving similar or different types of audience in commerce what they encounter is very different than what we encounter.

Jeff: That makes sense. So you have the kind of the changing needs that they have, but also, I mean, it's one thing you guys bootstrapped the company or you know, they bootstrapped the company back in oh five. The competitive landscape too was really different. I mean, that was really. Innovative to have makers in a marketplace and the whole thing coming together and enabling that, like you said, one part was, you know, taking credit cards even 'cause that was pre stripe, I think.

But the other is, I mean, in that time there has been kind of multiple competitive venture funded companies , that have looked to own this market. And basically [00:09:00] go after exactly what you guys had done previous to that. How much does that drive, how you think about this versus. Just focusing on, you know, I wanna just create the best experience possible,

Trevin: Yeah. I think that when you're the only. Solution. It's really easy to take a, you know, a certain viewpoint on what does winning look like, what does the best product look like if you're the only product. When you introduce competitors into it, it changes things considerably. And I think you essentially almost have two vectors.

It's are we trying to do the same thing as them and then there are direct competition, or are they. More indirect. And I think for us, we see our market as, you know, it's related, obviously it's commerce and there can be obviously shared customers. 'cause we do serve small businesses as well. But we take a different approach.

We try to delight our customers through a lot of simplicity. And I think that sometimes. being simple and easy, which is I think two of the, you know, brand values that we have is like, what is our differentiator? Is we're simple and easy and best value. And I think a lot of our competitors or a lot of the offerings in the landscape can't say exactly that.

Of course, no product leader wants to say [00:10:00] My product is hard and complicated,

But I think the difference is that we take this to the very core, for us what that means is simple doesn't have to mean deficient. To make magically simple software a lot of the times is about how do we make editorial choices that actually are things like smart defaults, and I think a default and curation can be a feature in itself.

So we try to take that to the, you know, nth degree, which is what is the choices that we can make on behalf of our sellers to either eliminate decisions. They shouldn't make at all or simplify decisions so that if they didn't want to turn all the knobs and levers, they don't have to. It's actually really good out of the gate.

And so we try to really fundamentally deliver on that promise. But I think as it pertains to your question about. The competition. I see it as, you know, in many ways inspiring because you look at some of the competitors and you're like, wow, their platforms are very successful, obviously very big. they will always out feature us, but I think where we give value and why we have such a strong, loyal customer base and continue [00:11:00] to grow.

Is that our simplicity and the value promise is actually something that's differentiating for us. So we come from a different perspective, which is just how do we deliver simple magic every day? And sometimes that might mean not offering a feature at all. Because either it doesn't make sense for our audience or it doesn't make sense to have that much complexity in the way it manifests itself into other products.

And you know, there's lots, probably lots of examples I could go over that is that will demonstrate that.

Jeff: As you were talking through this, all I could kinda have in my head was the Mark Twain quote about, I would've written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time. Like it kinda sounds like, you know, you took the time to write the shorter letter and to edit and in this, you know, context and say it's to curate, to make the decision.

Do they really need that or is it just better to auto have that on, like, just have it magically happen and you don't have to go configure it, turn it on, da, or just. You don't need it. Actually it's more value for some people to just not even have to think about it at all than to have it.

Trevin: Totally. And I think that for us, like the way we think about it is one great default. Can beat [00:12:00] 10 really polite toggles. Or you have lots of software that has all these toggles and a million ways to configure it, but sometimes you step back, you say, can't you just make decisions for me?

Like why is this so hard? And so I think that curation, is a feature for us. our goal ultimately is how do we make this common path really effortlessly? Then keeping the complexity in some cases on demand, if you really want some complexity, we do reveal that in many ways in the product, but sometimes it just doesn't make sense.

And a lot of software, what they'll do is they'll say, I'll give you the complexity. I'll just bury it in a three.menu, a junk drawer over here. And for us, there's a power in. Let's not offer that at all. Because it's not even worthwhile and actually takes away from the seller's experience and actually works against them.

But that's a really tricky trade off, of course, right? Because sometimes , we have in the past made a wrong decision and had to reverse that. But I think that our success shows that we've been more right than wrong over a long period of time.

Jeff: I think that's a very undervalued skillset set or set of [00:13:00] choices to make. Well is how do we make it simple? What do we not offer if we're gonna offer it, how do we make it easy to use?

It's very easy to try and do what you guys are doing and to fall down the rabbit hole of it's actually you made it way harder than if you had just done it like the hard way.

Trevin: Totally. And I think despite how good things have gotten with software and a lot of kind of interaction models and things, it's better of course, than it's ever been, but it's also more complex than it's ever been.

The way that I like to think about it is, fundamentally it's like how do we delight our customers? First is to think about what is the goal that they're trying to. Achieve then what are the assumptions they bring with that to the goal? 'cause we always, if we have a goal, we think about things like, oh, well it's gonna mean this, it's gonna mean that.

And then what is the pain that they will have in that or expect? And then how can we relieve that? An example that I had recently was interesting. I'm based in Seattle, so Alaska Airlines is my airline of choice, and like every, person that travels for work, I like to work on the plane with wifi.

And you know what the worst thing is when you get on the plane is when the wifi doesn't work. So they had a wifi outage, but what they did, it was interesting they [00:14:00] couldn't fix the outage. They texted me three hours before and said, Hey, by the way. Wifi is unavailable on your flight. I'm literally reading this message and I'm like, oh, shoot.

And it says, just a reminder to download any material or entertainment you want beforehand. And I'm like, God, 

this is such a great message. Because if they didn't send that, what would happen? I show up, I'm disappointed. Oh, I wish I downloaded this. I wish I downloaded the PDFs or kinda documents I wanna read or.

whatnot, but they turned that actually that really painful situation into something that was much less painful. Obviously I didn't achieve my goal of being able to work on that in the same way, but I was able to achieve other work that I could do. So that was like, I think something quite interesting and I would, in that situation, actually, I consider myself actually delighted.

That experience reminds me of a lot of product experiences. I think people in general who build software like Makers, sometimes we're tempted to think about software being like, oh, it's the big hero feature.

Like let's go innovate and pioneer in X, Y, Z, like true novel in mention. I think the fact of the matter is like, Very few companies truly invent something that no one's ever [00:15:00] seen before. Then the innovation comes in like, how are you packaging the workflow, the micro experiences. The delight comes from the everyday things, the small things.

And I think that's what's really difficult because oftentimes it's not. One thing that ruins a customer experience. Of course there are things that do destroy that, but I think in the delight category, a lot of it is a, is an accumulation of really great experiences. And many times when you think of a bad piece of software, you might name something that broke, with the final straw, but when you actually trace back into it, you're like, oh, there was lots of things.

And I like to think of it as like drops in a bucket. That one drop doesn't matter. It's the last drop that matters because then the bucket starts to overfill and spill out. And so I think of that both from a delight perspective, but also from a dissatisfaction perspective. 'cause I, that's like where a lot of software fails, where we take that to heart at Big Cartel is let's sweat the details, let's sweat the little things.

Let's do and think about if we can take 10 toggles and turn them into one. Let's do that. I think that thoughtful intentionality is [00:16:00] something that I've tried to bring here, tried to reinforce the team, to build the team to that, to think about that.

And I think that this isn't unique to us, but I think it's very important for us to do it given the nature of our customers and our sellers and our platform that not only expect it, demand it, but sometimes don't even realize that's. Actually the difference maker for them of making a really successful online store for their, you know, creative projects or not at all.

Jeff: Whenever I watch something like this, I always want to go like, well, what do you mean? Like, what's the thing? What did you do? So maybe can you illustrate that, like what is an example of this where you guys did something and made that call that you think was a good example of this?

Like

Trevin: Yeah, I've got few examples. I think for that, , I think the first example I talk about is we have an abandoned cart feature. I think all of the, you know, you, everyone in the audience will have received an abandoned cart email where you added something to a cart and. You get an email that nudges you to buy.

It's a tried and true, very tested, you know, conversion optimization. And we haven't had that. We added that, you know, last [00:17:00] year. And one of those things is it's a single checkbox. you turn it on or you turn it off. And so a lot of other platforms, you know, you've gone, wait, that crazy. Wait a minute, what about the wording?

What about the timing? What about this, what about that? For us, it was a matter of like, do they actually want to. Modify the wording, change the timing. So what we did, we made decisions on that, like the frequency of the mail, the intelligence around when it is sent and even the wording in the mail.

I think there's ways that we're gonna definitely improve that, giving more customization. But I think out of the gate that simplification really drove home this point of not only was this feature easy to understand, it was easy to enable. Because I didn't need to, we didn't need to, the product didn't need to explain to anyone what is an abandoned cart mail because literally almost everyone in our seller base knows what that is.

And so that's an example. I think, you know, they want this nudges to, and this like goal, you know, test in terms of like what they want, the nudges. But then they think like, oh, I need a rule engine. I need a marketing degree to do this. And the pain they have is this whole like, setup time [00:18:00] instead.

We closed that gap and said it's a single checkbox. Another example I can think about is we recently shipped a feature for pausing subscriptions for a SaaS business, it sounds sacrilegious

Jeff: I mean, no one, right? The whole point is the multiple is driven by that. Sweet 

Trevin: totally. 

And I think it's, you know, it's tricky. Like we know a lot of our sellers have a situation where these are sometimes passion projects or they're seasonal businesses. Some of our sellers on our platform are photographers that specialize in, say, holiday photos, or they work a part of the year on custom work that they sell, and the other part of the year they're doing something else.

so Many times they don't wanna close their whole shop down, but their life or their, you know, project depends on this seasonality. They want to take a break. And so for us, I think the seller's goal is how do I take a break without losing my work and my identity online and closing the shop and really the pain and the hassle of that.

The trap for this, for the assumption they've got is, oh, there's a billing trap. It's gonna be [00:19:00] prorated. Oh, it's like a lot of support tickets and painful. We made this really easy. And so it's sacrilegious and sas, but we've made this really easy. You can go in, you're on a monthly subscription with us.

You can go in and pause your subscription for a certain number of months, and we try to give it, tell you, explain it to you in plain English. Explanation in guardrails, what's gonna happen, what's the expectation? And then we auto resume the billing after that. And I think that we found, you know, as we've iterated on that, we found a lot of success with this feature. Sellers really love it, but a lot of sellers are like, I don't need that. Like I, I sell year round. And so it's really catering and trying to give flexibility to the small percentage of our sellers that need this.

And then for the sellers that don't need this, they don't need to pause, they just go into our annual plans and away they go.

Jeff: Well, I mean, probably right, like on face it, it is anathema to anyone who thinks about a RR and wanting to, you know, lock. I've been at companies where the head of product and the head of sales and the COR, like, we wanna lock people in. How do we get them to do multi-year and da and all.

It's about committed revenue, right? But I would wager, you know, the nice thing about being bootstrapped is you don't have to report [00:20:00] out in the same way, or you don't have the same pressure. You still want to grow clearly. But I would bet that, like you said, for the people who. Don't need it who sell year round, they're not gonna pause it anyway.

The only reason they would is if they're kind of not doing well in, in the company. And, you know, their thing is not gonna continue, in which case, like you weren't gonna collect that money anyway no matter what. But for the few who need it, like it's really positive, that kind of feature is the one that gets them to stay on for a long time.

You said you have people who've been selling for 15 years or they tell a friend, or I have no data for this whatsoever, but I would bet you've probably actually made more a R off of that than you've lost.

Trevin: It's been very successful and I think that you've hit the nail on the head because the pause is a pause is what it sounds like, so it'll resume after the pause period. So the alternative to that is what have them cancel. Then resume. And we know, like this whole, saying about keeping a customer you have versus trying to acquire a new one, there's a ton of friction for someone not only to cancel, but then resume and, you know, sign up again and rebuild.

Their online presence again through Bay Cartel. That just didn't make [00:21:00] a lot of sense. And so I think this is an example of in many ways a win-win where we're able to actually meet their needs and also further our business growth as well 'cause of it.

Jeff: So speaking of magic, there's one other topic I wanted to hit on. 'Cause you've had a unique viewpoint on this is, magic can look like a lot of things. And I think lately a big thing that has seemed magical with some people or people talk about like, features just now act magical or it appears to be magical, the world of product is really changing kinda in the past.

No. 18 months with the advent of you know, chat GBT and AI in general as a product person. Leaving the big cartel conversation just more as someone who's had 20 years in product between Microsoft and startups and you know, Nike and everything in between. How are you looking at this big shift and like how are you thinking about it and how should maybe others be thinking about like, adjusting and.

Looking at career and skill sets and everything like that with what is going to be a seismic shift in how we do things product wise.

Trevin: I think totally different right now. I, and things have shifted so much. I mean, I [00:22:00] think about my career and there's mobile phones and there's cloud computing and, or I guess it's. Start with the internet, mobile phones, cloud computing, and then like ai.

And I think to pretend that AI isn't changing how we build, I think is people in denial. But I think that, you know, largely energies come around to that. I think there's lots of consideration though. We're still in early innings in ai. Like what does the future look like? A saying I heard, you know, recently was the AI we use today is the worst AI.

We're ever gonna use because it is always gonna get better. And it's crazy to me to think about how recent chat GBT 3.5 and chat G four oh and just like, what did life look like two years ago versus what it looks like now. So I think it's undeniable that things are changing, but I think in many ways.

The difference is less about, is it about ai and more about just the pace of the change. I think that's the piece that is, way more discombobulating or whatever. It's just like really challenges you to think about the timescale of so many things. How it's changed, my expectation is like so much, it's like not [00:23:00] even how we build things, but it's also in about how we even build the team and 

how the team operates.

And there's more overlap than ever. For a long time I've had a really strong viewpoint that product design and product management are so related especially in a startup, they need to be really in the same team. And now with the advent of way, things are changing the way we're building things, whether it's with AI or not, it's about.

How that overlap is so tremendous in what happens. So there's such a shorter time to idea, to insight, to shipping. And I think that collapsing, you either feel it like, we gotta work faster, we gotta work faster. Or it's like, how do we use different tooling? How do we change our expectations?

And so I think even from the hiring perspective, you know, my, my hiring for a long time has really been about. Two things. It's been about curiosity and about grit. I feel like those two things, if you, when you find that in people, it's really magical because not only are they curious, like they wanna learn things.

They wanna try things, but then the grit part is [00:24:00] they are willing to see hard things through, they're accountable for it. that really hasn't changed my philosophy in hiring, but it's really gone into like really putting a more intense focus on that. And I think. Applying that both to product and design and also making sure that, hey, how are product managers thinking about the design problems?

And then also looking at more the product designers that also can think beyond just how to tell me what you want me to design and I will go design it to really think about it. So the way I think about it is really there's even more of an overlap in those roles, way more of this Venn diagram that's converging.

I still think, obviously there's unique skill sets in both, so I don't, I'm not in the camp of product management's, dead product design's dead. It's gonna rise and there's gonna be a single person that's gonna do it all. I think it's really quite naive, but what I do think is that it's possible for a product manager to prototype and get.

An idea in front of other people much more quickly. I also think it's possible for a product designer to think through the scenarios and the [00:25:00] deeper level business considerations on their own, which levels up the entire team. so I think that's what I see the most. And then also I think maybe the last thing is what is the tools that you give teams? And I think we're still early innings. All the tools, like we use rapid prototyping tools like Lovable.

We have for example, a code insight tool called Unblocked, which is amazing. So lovable, I think everyone knows what that is. Prototyping tool. It's AI based and allows us to iterate on ideas. Really great for prototyping. Unblocked is really great because it allows a lot of our engineers, but also our non-engineers to ask questions over our code base and our notion and our ticket tracking so that you can actually ask it a question about something going on in the code base without say, interrupting an engineer or it can help an engineer.

Onboard much faster. So even that, both those things are about speed and it's about 24 by seven really getting help and being a little more self-sufficient. But you'll notice at no point did I say, oh, that means that we don't have to hire as much. I just think it means we expect [00:26:00] something different out of the output.

What I expect is more iteration. What I expect is more turns of that crank so that your drafts get better. Your final proposals get better. I think that speed and iteration is the biggest transformation that we have. that's even setting aside like, oh, let's talk about evals, let's talk about which, you know, model we should use.

Let's talk about the cost. I think all those things are important, obviously in modern product building. But I think when you bring it to the core, it's really about speed iteration and working together as a team. And then like I think the tooling and the technology really wraps around that.

Jeff: this concept of like three speeds of an organization where you have the product team the engineering team who kinda makes the product, right? And then you have go to market that sells and markets and everything like that.

And until very recently there was kind of an expected speed at which these worked and we were able to build teams that balanced it. And you know, you never had, major choke points. It, there were choke points, but they were you balance them. We knew what they were. I was talking to one company where they were talking about they've had really good adoption [00:27:00] with some of the coding tools from the engineers and just they've seen velocity of that team exponentially increase and they're like, great, we can ship a lot more.

And they did. They shipped a ton more or they got a lot more code committed. And what they basically found was a lot of the features they had built so fast, they had outpaced the product team and it was just. They built roughly the right thing. But like you said the point is the nuance is often what really makes it right.

So there's a lot of kind of not crap features, kind of crap features. And then it ended up sitting in this like pre-alpha not released to people. They just had to keep getting feedback on it and it just displaced the time that the product team ended up spending on it. It would've been usually before it just ended up being, after he was engineering, built it so quickly, but it didn't speed up their go to market.

But conversely I've talked to teams that they have changed the entire dynamic, right? One team was talking about, they have teams now have one engineer, one designer, one A IPM, and that is how they ship things. Conversely, one team was saying they now have the same number of product people, the same number of engineers, but they all just work on design sprints together the whole product team.

They'll do like eight to 11 prototypes that they come out with, and they'll release a small [00:28:00] group that they have for actual testing by people, and then whatever wins will go to the engineers. So they're shipping way faster, but like they're giving engineers kinda half baked

Trevin: I think that's a good point because I think that's really tempting to think about. It's about speed and throughput

and less can. That's totally right and I think there's this difference between like, you know, like way back in the day with this whole lean startup stuff and iteration, it's like this idea of like M-V-P-M-V-P minimum viable product.

And I've always hated that. Because it ended up being this excuse to ship something that wasn't good, I think that made more sense. When the cost of shipping was more expensive, it was slower. So, but that's speed. Let's speed, let's like, get out there, let's get like something really, minimal out there.

But I've really been this fan of this MLP with a minimum lovable you know, and really it comes back to this whole thing of like magic. How do you delight the customers? That doesn't mean it has to be fully featured every time, but it's really trying to think about in this new age of modern product building.

If you think about, I can accelerate the ideation, the prototyping, the quality of like, [00:29:00] how we're thinking about the problem that can be as important as the and really lead to shipping better outcomes versus trying to think about just ship more outcomes. Like you just said, like half baked, it's not great.

Obviously there's also a difference between early stage. I'm just throwing something at the wall, I wanna see if anyone will use it, versus something like big cartel where, you know, we have a ton of responsibility here because we are at the heart of all of our sellers ability to sell online.

So we had to split that difference. It's not just about. Throughput. And it's not just about speed. I think what I want and my team, they always joke with me. I always say the word and I don't want, or I want it, I want a lot of iteration and I want throughput. Let's do it all.

And so for me, that's my kind of lens on this where I'm like, I don't think it's an excuse just to ship more bad stuff and throw it on the wall. Let's be more considerate about it. And I think this is where we say the modern product building, whether it's AI tools or not. Is really about how do people work quicker.

With less [00:30:00] handoffs in tighter iterations. And what I have seen is, some of the people on my team, what's really amazing is they're able to go from idea to concept to usability testing very quickly. There's a, product manager on my team, Frank, that recently did this, where he went from like, I've got this idea and encouraged him to prototype it.

And he got in front of customers, I think it was within 24 hours, think of like if you just went back a few years ago. That would be incredibly difficult. And so that is real success

story. 

Jeff: image file in 24 hours would've been impressive like two years ago.

Trevin: Totally. And so I think that is like really about saying like, how did we get to just a better quality you know, work product in the interim? And the goal of that was really for him and his squad to refine their thinking. What do we think about this problem? Did our sellers resonate with our general approach to how we wanna help them solve that problem for them?

Jeff: Right. It's. If engineers are gonna move faster, we have only a few options. Like you said, this is the worst AI we will ever have. Right now [00:31:00] the ability to code is going to only get exponentially faster and better.

So we'll get to a point where basically it's nearly free to do some level of coding. You probably I think it'll be tough to fully replace people, but they're gonna get faster and faster. So I think as product folks, we need to figure out how do we build a team that can like, move quickly and work in this environment that, that keeps that pace and works in that environment also, like that's someone we need to think about from the ground If you were building a team from scratch right now, what would it look like and how do we get there and bridge that gap?

Trevin: It's funny you say that 'cause that's actually a conversation that we recently had with my team, which is the, if we were starting from zero. Starting from the beginning how would we do this different? How would we build software differently? What is the artifact we would want? Let's not do the PRD because we've always done the PRD this way.

So recently we've been like, Hey, let's just ax entire sections. Let's say that every, reasonably significant feature has to have at least two prototypes. And to demonstrate what that is, it doesn't take away from the why are we doing this? Investment. You still need to think that through. but I think making a prototype really helps you put the [00:32:00] exclamation point on this is, and this is how I'm thinking about it, instead of trying to describe to you in words.

So I think that is like the real, goal right now, ultimately this does allow us to. Make better editorial business for our software so that when we say we want to do things simple and easy, it doesn't mean it's less necessarily, it just means it's more considered.

I think that's the ultimate goal by building more considered software, you can delight more customers and that whole thing then feels more magical and that's what we're trying to do here every day.

Jeff: if you're not thinking about it in the way you said of, what would we do if we were starting from scratch? The problem is the companies that aren't thinking like that, there are a lot of companies that are starting from scratch and they're going to, you know, they're coming outta yc.

They're coming out of just. Colleges are coming they're everywhere. And a lot of people will find if you aren't thinking like that, they will move faster. 

It might not happen tomorrow, it might happen next week, but they will move fashion and you'll get innovated on. But at the same time, at the heart is how do you delight the customers? And if you keep that filter on it and that lens, and it's used in service of that. I think [00:33:00] that's how you build really great product really fast and take advantage of the speed of engineering and the speed of other pieces.

But without that editorial filter it just, it falls apart. I don't see how it works very well or how we don't just get like, you know, the dead internet theory applied to product as well. So, I love it, man. I think it's a good take. I think one that people should. Listen to.

This has been incredibly enlightening. I feel like I actually learned a couple things that I can go back to my company with, hopefully people listening. Agree. But thanks so much for coming on. This is fantastic, Trevor, and I really appreciate you taking the time.

If people wanna reach out, ask questions, learn more about Big Cartel, or talk more about making kind of simple magic. Is LinkedIn the best place to reach out

or is there something else? 

Trevin: I'm the only Trevin Chow. If you've searched my name, Trevin, like you're probably gonna 

I'm gonna be, 

Jeff: your name and you are the only one.

Trevin: yeah, best way, find me on LinkedIn. Shoot me a message there. I'm also on Twitter under Trevin as well. 

Jeff: Nice. 

Trevin: you can find me both those ways.

Jeff: Awesome. Well thank you so much for coming on, man. Have a good rest of the day. 

Trevin: Awesome. 

Jeff: building the, that simple magic. Thank you.

Trevin: Alright. Thank you Jeff. 

All right. Peace.