Today’s episode is with David Lieb, the Director of Google Photos. Previously, he was the founder/CEO of Bump, an app that allowed users to swap contact information by physically bumping phones. Bump was acquired by Google in 2013, and formed the basis for the design of Google Photos, which launched in 2015 and passed the 1 billion users mark in 2019.

In today’s conversation, David takes us through that journey of building a consumer product from scratch and scaling it to over a billion users in just four years. He shares the mistakes they made while building Bump, what he learned from navigating big company politics at Google, and how they pinpointed the problem in the photo-sharing space.

From the precise questions they asked in user interviews, to how they stack ranked for the canonical users, there’s tons of wisdom in here for early product builders. There’s also lessons from operating at Google’s scale as well, including how his approach to planning and org design have evolved.

Learn more about the Spotify “squads’ model that David mentioned in the org design section here: https://medium.com/pm101/spotify-squad-framework-part-i-8f74bcfcd761 

You can follow David on Twitter at @dflieb, and you can learn more about his approach to building products on First Round Review: https://firstround.com/review/cognitive-overhead-is-your-products-overlord-topple-it-with-these-tips/ 

You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @twitter.com/firstround and @twitter.com/brettberson