Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub)

**Casey Winters** (0:00)
Every new person in the product team is acting like they work at Google and have these infinite resources and infinite time to make sure everything is perfect.
And there became such this focus on the right way of doing product management that no one's taken any risk. And I felt like, oh, am I responsible for this? Like, I've created a bunch of, you know, frameworks on Reforge. You know, I'm onboarding these EPMs. It's like, is this my fault? But, you know, at Reforge, we're building frameworks that are tools. You know, in a toolkit, you pull them out when relevant.
They're not a coloring book, you know, to stay inside the lines of.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:41)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Casey Winters. Casey was one of the first ever guests on the podcast and the first to make a return appearance. He's a legend in the growth and product community, having worked with or advised companies like Pinterest, Reddit, Canva, Airbnb, Tinder, Thumbtack, Grubhub, and many more. He recently led product at Eventbrite for just about three years and recently returned to full-time advising and he's exploring new opportunities. In our chat, we cover something he calls the zero interest rate phenomenon product manager and how to avoid that, what he's found works best when interviewing product managers, what impact he expects from GPT-4 on the role of product management, when to trust your instincts versus your team's insights and instincts, what are all the different kinds of network effects and how do you effectively leverage them, plus a great story about what Grubhub missed that led DoorDash and Uber eat their lunch. I always learn so much from chatting with Casey and I am 100% sure you will learn a lot from this episode. With that, I bring you Casey Winters after a short word from our sponsors.
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Casey, welcome back to the podcast.

**Casey Winters** (3:39)
Thanks Lenny, great to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:41)
You are the first ever return guest to my podcast. How does that feel?

**Casey Winters** (3:46)
I feel honored, perhaps a bit unworthy, but you know, I'll go with it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:52)
Well, you're both worthy and I'm honored as well.
So thanks for joining me again. I have a lot of stuff that I want to chat about. But first of all, I'm just curious, what are you up to these days? I know you left Eventbrite as CPO, I know you're doing a few advisorships with startups, but how are you spending your days and what do you think is next for Casey Winters?

**Casey Winters** (4:09)
So I'm still spending some time with Whatnot and Eventbrite as advisors. I stepped back from the CPO of Eventbrite in October, but still working on some long-term marketplace strategy stuff, some growth strategy stuff.
I'm on the board of a company called Beak, which is like Netflix for audio in Latin America. And I'm doing some angel investing in marketplaces and what I call tech debt as a service, which is what are startups that are building out things that were hard for my teams in the past to build or maintain inside previous companies. The other thing I'm working on is revamping the product strategy program for Reforge. So I got some things keeping me busy, but definitely not as busy as I was last year.