Audible lives in Newark. It's an interesting choice of location for a tech company, and one that CEO Donald Katz gambled big on when he made the decision to relocate the company in 2007. But to visit the Audible office today is to see clearly a company that is growing, growing, growing.
The purpose for our visit is to meet with Yohanes Frezgi, Director of Product, and to kick off our New York series of product management conversations.
And what a kick off we had!
Yohanes' story is about a young finance guy finding his way off the Goldman Sachs trading floor and into the eye of Silicon Valley. Like all of us, he believed his total lack of technical expertise would be a limiting factor in his moving into product. But coming from accounting, he had something even more valuable than SQL skills - a penchant for numbers.
That bright analytical mind caught the attention of entrepreneur Mark Pincus and Yohanes Frezgi got his first product management job working at Zynga - the social gaming company behind Words with Friends and FarmVille.
A little more than two years later Frezgi leveraged his education in scrappy experimentation ("ghetto testing") from Zynga and a fresh business degree from Harvard to advance to VP roles at HealthTap and Fever Labs before landing at Audible in 2016.
Yohanes and I wasted no time getting right down to the matter of what makes an idea a good one and how to apply validated learning even when your business is big.
Also in this episode:
- What are Entrepreneurs so afraid of?
- Managing Freemium vs Subscription model products
- How to tell the right story to your investors
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