Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook)

**Adriel Frederick** (0:00)
There are probably, I call them techno utopians, who would say, feed all data to the algorithm, give it an objective, and it will do the right thing. And I was like, yeah.
The reason that falls down is the algorithms don't understand long-term effects often, nor do they understand how people might respond to it, nor do they understand your intent for the product. I think it's really important for product managers to play that role. That is our job when you are working on algorithmic heavy products. Your job is figuring out what the algorithm should be responsible for, what people are responsible for and the framework for making decisions.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:41)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. Today, my guest is Adriel Frederick. Adriel is a VP of product at Reddit, where he focuses on incubating and scaling new products within Reddit. Before that, he was director of product at Lyft, where he led the marketplace teams and the pricing teams over the course of five years. And before that, he was an early PM at Facebook, where he spent four years leading the user acquisition team.
Adriel is one of these incredible product leaders who's way too under the radar because he doesn't spend all day on Twitter and instead is executing and building great products. One of the goals of this podcast is to highlight incredible product leaders who you may not be aware of, and Adriel is a great example. In our chat, we talk about the origins of growth hacking, how to get better as a product leader, ways to increase diversity at your company, what it was like to work on Facebook's growth team early on, the future of AI, and a lot more. It was such a joy chatting with Adriel, and I am really excited to share this episode with you. With that, I bring you Adriel Frederick.
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Hey Ashley, Head of Marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?

**Ashley** (3:08)
At least 40%.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:09)
And how many of them screw that up, and what happens when they do?

**Ashley** (3:12)
Well, based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chock full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:31)
I am 0% surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both signup conversion and increasing long-term retention.
Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important.

**Ashley** (3:46)
Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify and Zura are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile.
It's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:02)
If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile at flatfile.com/lenny. Adriel, welcome to the podcast.

**Adriel Frederick** (4:16)
It's good to be here, Lenny. Thanks for having me, man.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:18)
It's absolutely my pleasure. I actually found out about you through a guy named Jules Walter who we both know. He's a PM at YouTube and I actually asked him, who should I have on this podcast that is maybe a little bit under the radar that is just amazing? Immediately he suggested you. I'm really excited to be chatting.