Chris Vasquez

Growing a product is scary

2025-03-05T13:05:22-05:00

Hey there,

You know that black hole feeling that can form in your stomach when stepping out of your comfort zone? Yeah, me too.

As I prepare to head to the Small Business Expo to talk about AWeber and our Newsletter Assistant, I'm feeling those nerves. But here's the thing — growth doesn't happen in the safety of our comfort zones. It happens when we stare fear in the face and take the leap.

We've built something awesome with our Assistant. It's already helping thousands of people actually automate the most time consuming parts of their email marketing (the actual research and writing), allowing them to focus on what they love. But for it to grow, I need to leave the safe space behind my desk and talk to the people who need it most. It's about connecting, sharing our story, and showing how the Assistant can transform their businesses.

Here’s why it’s worth it:

Community Connection: Meeting people face-to-face helps me understand their needs better and build a community around the shared values and goals we have as people.
Real Feedback: Direct conversations provide insights that no amount of raw numeric data can reveal. They also give opportunities for follow-ups. So if someone tells me they hate it, or something seems confusing, I can dig in.
Shaping Messaging: Hearing people in their own words is invaluable for refining our positioning and messaging to better land with our audience.

If you’re in Miami on March 6, come say hi at the Expo. And if you haven’t tried it yet, check it out for free for your own business. It’s really easy, just give the Assistant your website. There’s no step 2!

Here’s to facing fears and embracing growth,

Later, homefries.

Chris

647 Lawson Ave
Havertown PA 19083
US

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Unwrapping 3 Gifts That Shaped My Life

2023-07-20T14:55:10-04:00

If you'd rather listen to this newsletter, check out the video.

Hey,

My 40th birthday is coming up and I'm boomeranging between existential dread and syrupy nostalgia for times when I was younger.

I've been think a little about where I am now, but a lot about how I got here. Somewhere in the process of excavating the people and places I've had the joy of experiencing, I started thinking about previous birthdays, and how certain gifts had a completely unexpected impact on my life.

When I was seven, my mom gave me an architecture book with magnetic pieces for reconstructing the famous buildings it described. I was homeschooled through my entire educational career in a wonderfully unstructured way and spent much of my time wandering through books.

I have vague memories of spending hours reading about famous architecture and trying to recreate them from the palette of magnets.

But I have a very strong memory of first reading about Falling Water, Frank Lloyd Write's ode to the humble glory of a forest creek.

That house showed me that buildings could be more than just walls, ceilings, and floors; they could be livable works of art. The introduction to Write opened my eyes to the idea that design could be a job.

Not long after, my dad brought home a Tandy 1000 computer. The 3.5" disk drive and boxy profile would make the thing unrecognizable to kids today as a computer, but to me, it was pure magic. My dad loved technology and would periodically come home with a pocketful of games and programs he'd picked up on the sneakernet.

I spent way to much time in front of that computer.

At first most of my time was playing games like Toobin or Altered Beast with my friend Paul. Thinking about Altered Beast 30 years later still makes me stressed out.

Before long I wanted to make games of my own. I started writing simple text-based adventures. I can guarantee you they were awful. But I remember feeling like a 1337 hacker when something worked end to end. I moved on to taking out books from the library that taught me to build visual pool tables by copying page after page of code.

That computer taught me that I could work magic if only I learned the magic words (basic at the time). It also taught me to love to tinker.

The last gift was a trip to Disney World my mom put took me on not long after my parents divorced. She packed my four sisters and two brothers into our massive Econoline 15 passenger van and took the drive across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and on to the most magical place on earth.

Before my mom and dad divorced we had a comfortable middle class life. We lived in a big house with a garden in the front, swing set in the back and no real want for anything. After they separated, our lives became dramatically more stressful (we would go on to be evicted from 3 houses in the next several years).

I wouldn't say that trip to Disney was the best financial decision; but damn if it wasn't a sweet one. My mom knew that things were about to change for us and moved a minor mountain to give us a spellbinding adventure.

One night from that trip stand out to me most. My mom took a few hours to visit the park with me alone. We spent the twilight cycling through my favorite ride, Space mountain. The thing I remember most vividly wasn't the ride. It was riding the tram to and from the park, talking with my mom about all the trivial things that seem like the world to an 11 year old.

My mom taught me how small actions that show care and interest in someone are often the things that actually make a mark on their life.

These three gifts hold a lesson: success and growth depend on the people around us.

As we navigate life, let's remember to give generously and appreciate the gifts, both big and small, that have formed us.

I'd love to hear what gift had the biggest, most surprising impact on your life.

✌️ Chris

Reply to let me know if you think I'm wrong. I would sincerely love to hear from you.

Later, homefries.

Chris

647 Lawson Ave
Havertown PA 19083
US

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I can make any dragon

2023-05-01T07:45:03-04:00

As a creator I want to be confident so I can get past creative blocks.

My 10 year old niece Maddie wanted to start a savings account. She texted me to talk through how she could start a "company" to earn some money. She loves drawing dragons and like a skilled corporate raider, saw an unserved market of people who craved custom dragon artwork.

Her site launched on a Thursday night and by the next day she had 16 orders. My role in the organization is to communicate order to her. I picked one from the backlog and asked if she could do it.

Oh to have the confidence of a 10 year old dragon drawer.

"I can make any dragon" is my new mantra in the face of a creative problem. The utter disbelief that any dragon might be unmakeable was inspiring.

I'm not a terribly confident creative writer and I'll do just about anything to distract myself from writing. Just last night I made patatas bravas while avoiding writing this very newsletter.

I'd never made them before and had no reason to make them last night. Yet I found myself huddled over a frying pan at 8:00pm, dunking wave after wave of potatoes (note: huddling over a pan while essentially deep-frying potatoes is a bad idea - ask my eyebrows).

But once the potatoes were done and the kitchen was cleaned, it was time to make my dragon. As I'm writing this, I'm reminding myself that I can make any dragon. You're reading the proof that I made this one.

The lesson is one of perspective. Could Maddie draw dragons if she didn't believe she could? Yes, I've seen them and know it's possible.

But would she draw dragons if she didn't believe she could? No. She probably wouldn't. And she definitely wouldn't be selling them.

If you've got an idea or project where you don't feel like you're making any progress I've got a question for you. Do you actually believe you can do it?

If you do, great, you've just wasted a few minutes reading this. Hopefully something else I send will be helpful.

But if you don't believe you can, here's the followup. Do you have some evidence that you can? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you do - even if that evidence is just curiosity about the subject.

Now you've got to make a choice, do you believe your fear telling you you can't make the dragon, or the evidence you can?

Like Chico Marx said, "Who ya gonna believe? Me or your OWN eyes?"

✨🎇🎆

Other Stories.

People Don’t Want Something Truly New, They Want the Familiar Done Differently - I'm a big fan of Jakob's Law which describes the fact that folks probably spend way more time in other programs than yours, so you should build things that feel familiar to use. This article from Nir Eyal teaches the lesson in an interesting seaweed style wrapper.
A fascinating look into Taco Bell's innovation kitchen - I happen to be a crunchwrap connoisseur (I spelled that so wrong that spell check couldn't help me and I had to google it), but was completely unprepared for the amount of weird experimentation that goes on at Taco Bell.

If you like these emails and want help me grow, sharing a snippet you found interesting on social media with a link back to the newsletter is the most helpful thing you could do. Feel free to @clickpop on most platforms if you do.

Reply to let me know if you think I'm wrong. I would sincerely love to hear from you.

Later, homefries.

Chris

647 Lawson Ave
Havertown PA 19083
US

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Barf

2023-02-01T09:23:51-05:00

As a human I want to be the hands my friends and family barf into so I can help them be their best selves.

If you'd rather listen to this newsletter, check out the video.

Dog Barf Leadership Training

I have two little dogs, one of whom is named Munchie. He's cute, sweet, and a great companion; unfortunately he has an incredibly weak stomach.

Every morning I give them each half of a hard-boiled egg to start the day. I started doing this while covid stay at home orders were first put in place and the boys liked it so much I've just kept doing it.

The other morning I got an egg out of the fridge, peeled off the shell, and cut it up into little pieces for each of them. Munchie trundled over, ate his first piece out of my hand and immediately barfed right into my open palm.

My mind went blank for a second and then quickly cycled through a carousel of possible reactions - should I get mad at my little friend? Give up on morning eggs forever? Barf myself? Thankfully I settled on calmly getting up, washing off my hand, and giving the dogs the rest of their eggs.

Why... oh why am I telling this story? I think there's a lesson about leadership in all that puke.

In 2012, Google started a project - dubbed Project Aristotle - to understand what makes a team really work. They looked at all sorts of things like the specifics of individuals in the team and team processes and found that one thing impacted a team's likelihood of succeeding more than anything else: Psychological Safety.

Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor, defines "phycological safety" as a "shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking." These effective teams were made up of people who trusted that their teammates were open to new ideas and weren't looking to backstab or find fault for ego's sake.

Psychological safety gives people energy from understanding they have the freedom to try, be themselves, and sometimes fail without the rest of the team falling upon them like Brutus and his friends on the Ides of March.

An important disclaimer: This is not a recommendation that you should let people overstep your boundaries. Boundaries are healthy and folks violating clearly set boundaries are likely not people you should engage with.

To create these psychologically safe environments, leaders have to be conscious of whether our reactions to mistakes, failure, and different approaches create an environment that is supports team members in the midst of a challenge, or tears them down.

Sometimes your team members, you friends, and your family are going to barf in your hands. The way you react is going to shape how comfortable they are coming to you and collaborating with you in the future.

✨🎇🎆

Other Stories.

Vans Stab High Central America - I love surfing, and do it poorly. This web series from Van's is such a fun look at a group from all over the world ripping in an off the wall surf contest whose rules seem... flexible.

Reply to let me know if you think I'm wrong. I would sincerely love to hear from you.

Later, homefries.

Chris

647 Lawson Ave
Havertown PA 19083
US

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A Story of Coffee Spoons

2021-08-03T08:50:09-04:00

As a product manager I want to make beneficial behaviors easier to do so I can help more folks do them and be successful.

If you'd rather listen to this newsletter, check out the video.

Every morning I perform a beverage ritual where I get a cup of coffee, dump a spoonful of sugar into it, and move on.

I know I should drink less coffee, I know I should add less sugar to it; but it's hard for me to make a change here.

Recently, Liz (my fiancé) made a small change that had a big impact on how much sugar I take.

She put a smaller spoon in the sugar bowl.

When I get a cup of coffee, a lot of what I'm doing is habit. After she switched the spoons I still get my coffee and add 1 spoon of sugar. Although I noticed the swap, the benefit I saw in having more sugar didn't outweigh the effort of having to get a bigger spoon. I've cut the sugar I'm adding into my coffee by half thanks to a change in spoons.

What Liz did is called choice architecture.

This illustrates the potential we have to impact people through small changes in the way we present options to them. We see this at AWeber all the time. When we add something new to a prominent place on the dashboard, more people interact with it just by focusing more attention on the feature. This is an example of the same principle that leads super markets to place sugary cereals at kids eye level.

When we're thinking about how to shape people's behavior to set them up for success, consider how hard it is to get to the features they need to interact with. It can have a major impact on behavior.

Resources on Choice Architecture:

Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
Nudge theory
Why Not Nudge? A Review of Cass Sunstein’s Why Nudge
Choice Architecture 2.0: How People Interpret and Make Sense of Nudges

✨🎇🎆

Other Storylines.

Group X - A brilliant and funny write up of the design process and philosophy for a an anonymous group of artists and curators that are focused on breathing new life into the public art space in Philly
Redefining what a map can be with new information and AI - The best maps app gets even bester. Wild to see how these maps are getting steadily better at reflecting the realtime, changing world.

Reply to let me know if you think I'm wrong. I would sincerely love to hear from you.

Later, homefries.

Chris

New Features are Rarely the Answer

2021-07-27T08:30:07-04:00

As a product manager I want to be able to separate impact from engineering time so I can have the best possible backlog.

If you'd rather listen to this newsletter, check out the video.

One of our biggest responsibilities as product managers is the day to day management of our backlog. Working with the team to make sure that the things we need to build and do are well documented, prioritized, and eventually executed on. A good product manager cares about the state of their backlog and knows it inside and out.

However, since the backlog is so important to our team success and so much of the backlog is made up of engineering tasks, it can be easy to come to the misplaced belief that the only (or the most effective) way to affect change is through coding new things.

This bias is often summed up with the phrase, "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail;" but that's never been particularly satisfying to me since it is often used in circumstances where the person has more than just the single metaphorical hammer and most often the hammer is a person and not a hammer at all. I dug a little into the origin of the phrase, which are much more interesting that the cliche.

It turns out that the first time this hammer concept is recorded was in Professor of Philosophy Abraham Kaplan's Law of the Instrument: "Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding." Later on, Abraham Maslow (of hierarchy of needs fame) would write in The Psychology of Science, "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

Both of those original statements are clear on the point that if someone truly only has a hammer, it can lead to a bias. As product managers we have way more than just our backlog of engineering tasks (a hammer). We often have team members in marketing (a megaphone) and CS (a ladder). We have companies to partner with and in some cases integrations (a multi-purpose ratcheting screwdriver), onboarding emails and in app messaging (a... series of automated onboarding emails). So the bias usually doesn't come from an actual limitation, but from a self-imposed restriction in our thinking.

Beyond that fairly pedantic issue is the much greater one. The people we work with aren't tools and they aren't anywhere near as one-dimensional as the figurative hammer. Our teammates, whether they're engineers, marketing folks, cs team members, or anyone else, has a lifetime of experience and creativity to bring to the problems we want to solve. Are some people better at solving certain problems than others? Sure. Does that mean we should view some or all of them as blunt, single-purpose instruments as opposed to heart and soul team mates? certainly not.

The knowledge that we have these teammates with varying skillsets and perspectives gives us the chance to go back to our initial problem and identify ways to get to our goal that don't necessarily involve engineering new features (I wrote A Framework for Decision Making to list out a simple series of questions to ask yourself to make more effective decisions).

We should make sure that we're regularly checking that we're focused on the most important business and customer problems and not a specific toolset. Some things to think about:

What areas of the platform are most underused, with the highest correlation with success and stickiness that we could be educating more people about?
What do we already know, or what can we surmise about the people who use our product from their behavior that we aren't currently using to make their experience more personalized?
What emerging best practices are out there that use our existing features that we can education people about?

To be clear, this doesn't mean we shouldn't build new things. It just means that since our engineering time is finite, we need to focus it on the highest priority new things, and use the other capabilities we have to solve the problems they can.

Remember, you have more than just a hammer. You have a whole workshop full of tools to work with and a team of smart, talented people to collaborate with.

✨🎇🎆

Other Storylines.

Group X - A brilliant and funny write up of the design process and philosophy for a an anonymous group of artists and curators that are focused on breathing new life into the public art space in Philly
Redefining what a map can be with new information and AI - The best maps app gets even bester. Wild to see how these maps are getting steadily better at reflecting the realtime, changing world.

Reply to let me know if you think I'm wrong. I would sincerely love to hear from you.

Later, homefries.

Chris

Life Lessons from a Lapsed Surfer

2020-08-30T23:15:02-04:00

Life lessons from a lapsed surfer.

I spent some time over the last couple of days at the shore. In between bouts of relaxing in the sand and splashing in the waves with Elz and Liz, I took some time to surf.

It's been more than a decade since I surfed with anything resembling regularity. My time on the water, both by myself and while teaching Elz (who did great) gave me the vocabulary I needed to express some life lessons I've learned over that time period.

1. The Jersey shore is an awful place to surf; but even there you can find waves and have fun if you’re willing to be patient, keep your eyes open, and work for them.

2. Paddling out is the toughest part. You won’t get any of the thrill of sliding down the face of a wave unless you first push through those same waves breaking past you. If you’re going to get out, you can’t be afraid. You can be prudent, wait for a lull, find a channel to take you outside; but you can’t be afraid once you decide to paddle out.

3. There comes a time, when you drop in, when you have to commit. You can decide to pass on a wave when you see it from a distance, or when it's right upon you, or even when you're already paddling in, but once you tip over the edge there’s no turning back, and if you waver you will bail.

4. As with almost anything, the only way to get stronger and better is to struggle, fail, and try again. You’ll mess up duck dives and get tumbled into shore, you’ll wipe out and get dragged along the bottom of the ocean, and you’ll miss waves because you didn’t move early enough or paddle hard enough for them. Learn and move forward and you’ll improve, give up and you won’t.

5. There will always be other waves. Maybe not today, but as long as you keep paddling out there will be more waves.

6. This is all so much more fun with a friend. There were a couple hours where Elz and I were just sitting on our boards on a mostly flat ocean. It was one of my favorite stretches of time the whole trip.

From Chris

This one's about progress.

2019-03-02T10:40:04-05:00

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This one's a little different.

2019-02-16T09:16:03-05:00

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One thing to do to help an interview for a product position go well.

2019-02-10T12:30:07-05:00

One thing to do to help an interview for a product position go well.

Try out the product.

One of the most important responsibilities I have on the team at AWeber is building that team. I get to meet, interview, and hire the product managers, UX designers, and UI designers that work to define and design our product. As I reflect on the common characteristics of interviews with folks who have made the greatest impact on the team, one thing starkly stands out.

Those people took the time to try out the product prior to the interview.

Before diving into why this is such an important contributer to a positive interview, I want to make one thing clear:
I’m not suggesting that job-seekers jump through a crazy series of hoops to impress future employers.

I just believe that, for someone interviewing for a product role, not only is the using the product you hope to work on good preparation, it's also good due dilligence to help ensure you go into the interview with your eyes as open as possible.

There are also situations where actually using the product isn’t feasible. For example, if it’s an expensive enterprise product or a product without a trial¹. AWeber has a free trial, so the barrier to trying it out is relatively low.

Why does using the product make such an impact on the interview process?

Whether you’re in UX, UI design, or product management, one of the core things you offer is an interest in understanding motivations, experiences, and the stories that lie behind the obvious. When someone I'm interviewing has tried out the product, I find that they often come to the interview with questions that give insight into how they think about problems. What assumptions do they make and why? What do they focus in on and talk about when discussing what their interactions with the product say about our users, design philosophy, and approach to the market.

This makes for some really fascinating and helpful conversation beyond the general "who are you and what do you do" questions of an interview.

The other positive aspect of these interviews is the people I get to talk to often come with pointed feedback about the product. As noted above, this gives amazing insight into how they think about the technology, people, and how the two interact.

As a job-seeker, going to an interview with this type of feedback also gives you an opportunity to look out for something important. When you share critical feedback about a product, how does the interview team react? A healthy product organization should be open to feedback and opportunities to improve, regardless of the context. How a product team reacts when you share feedback about improving their product could offer insight into how they treat feedback in their actual development process.

To summarize, using the product prior to an interview for a product position not only prepares you to offer relevant questions and insights, it also equips you with tools to help you better understand the organization you're looking to join.

As always, I'd love to hear your feedback. Think I'm completely off base? Let me know.

¹ If the product doesn’t have a trial. You could get similar helpful insight by checking out technology review communities like Captera or G2 Crowd.

Chris Vasquez

Growing a product is scary

Unwrapping 3 Gifts That Shaped My Life

I can make any dragon

Barf

Dog Barf Leadership Training

A Story of Coffee Spoons

Resources on Choice Architecture:

New Features are Rarely the Answer

Life Lessons from a Lapsed Surfer

This one's about progress.

Progress

👂🏼 What I'm listening to:

👀 What I'm watching:

This one's a little different.

This edition's a little different.

🦜 Tweets I ❤️ed.

One thing to do to help an interview for a product position go well.

What's in today's email?

One thing to do to help an interview for a product position go well.

Try out the product.

👂🏼 What I’m listening to.

🦜 Tweets I ❤️ed.