Kevin Yien

Has built products across three very different contexts -- Square's restaurant business, Mutiny's startup environment, and Stripe's merchant platform -- giving him unusually broad pattern recognition about what works where. Their core argument: Product sense is making good decisions with insufficient data -- and the decision log is its piano scales. The evidence is specific: Yien's personal decision log, which he has kept for years and reviews regularly, including many entries where he was wrong. Furthermore, the practice of writing down predictions about other companies' roadmaps and comparing a year later. In Kevin Yien's own words: "We all talk about product sense. It's this super mystical thing that no one knows how to get better at. To me, it's just a fancy way of saying you can make good decisions with insufficient data, and the core of that is decisions." (Demystifying product sense and connecting it to his decision log practice.)

Having led product at Stripe (merchant experiences), built the restaurant business at Square, and headed product and design at Mutiny, Yien has operated across B2B and B2C contexts where customer research directly drives product decisions at massive scale. Their core argument: Automate customer research to make it continuous, not episodic. The evidence is specific: At Stripe, Yien advocates PMs maintain direct text/message relationships with key customers. Furthermore, his decision log practice -- documenting rationale and checking outcomes -- builds product sense through deliberate reps. At Square, building the restaurant business required deep direct customer understanding of a specific vertical. In Kevin Yien's own words: "We all talk about product sense. To me, it's just a fancy way of saying you can make good decisions with insufficient data. PMs need as many reps as possible in making decisions, documenting them, and seeing how they played out." (Connecting product sense to decision-making practice, not just research.)