Jaryd Hermann is Director of Product at Backstage, a software platform that connects creators with the talent and crew they need for projects. In addition to his work building and growing marketplaces and B2C and SaaS products, he is the founder of a PM newsletter, How They Grow, where he shares how the best companies grow and thrive. Jaryd also co-founded and previously served as CEO of WECAST, a one-stop-shop marketplace for content creators to transact with any production input.
In our conversation, Jaryd talks about how companies can ship products and features quickly while also making them beautiful, human-centric, and delightful. He also shares his passion for his newsletter and what inspires his research, topic ideation, and writing.
Following interests and crafting a newsletter
You’re involved in a lot of projects in your professional life, such as your newsletter, How They Grow. As creator and writer, how do you select topics and how has your approach evolved?
The newsletter is designed for product managers and founders. First and foremost, however, it’s for myself. I write very selfishly — I cover the topics that I want to write about, such as companies or areas of product management that I find interesting or want to do a deep dive into.
As part of this process, I try to learn everything I can about the product, the business, and the organization’s growth model, and share that as a second-order effect of my learning. This approach has worked very well — I’ve grown the newsletter audience to 25,000 readers. What’s served me best is following my own interests in terms of what my knowledge gaps are and writing from a lens of what I would want to read and learn about. I find that keeps the content very actionable.
The evolution has come from getting input from readers. I keep my reader base in mind and follow what I think they would be interested in reading as well. I’m my main customer, so the sweet spot is where I’m able to blend a lot of my own experience as a product manager and former founder into the piece.
How do you go about gathering or securing reader feedback, and do people reach out to you directly?
Most of it is unsolicited, which is great. Some people reply directly or leave comments on social posts. I have a community on Substack, which I love. It’s not a one-to-one relationship however, it goes both ways, and I take a lot of that feedback. I have power readers, as well as other creators in the space, who read my work and who I’ll bounce ideas off. I’ll also do first-party surveying.
A lot of that feedback has helped me in terms of a deep-dive roadmap. From a product management perspective, even though I’m my own customer, I still want to hear what other customers want and are feeling. That plays into how I approach the writing style formats and themes.
Have you found that AI has impacted you at all in terms of discoverability, given that there may be more competition from AI-generated content?
From a competition perspective, I don’t believe so. I was chatting with someone from CommandBar’s SEO content team while I was doing research there. He said they have observed two polarizing pieces of content. One is the short form of the Morning Brew — a very quick TLDR. Then, there’s the long-form, in-depth content. The middle ground tends to be where SEO falls, and people don’t want to read AI-generated SEO content. They don’t find it helpful — they want something that they know is written by a human.
On Substack, you can choose creators to follow. I follow five or six people whose work I read religiously. I know they’re writing the work, and I wouldn’t sign up for a paid subscription if the content was generated by AI. I find that AI is helpful for quick research, like if I’m trying to find out how a company accomplished something. I use Perplexity, which shows me all the sources and aggregates them for me. That’s sped up my process of gathering and synthesizing information, but that’s the extent to which I find AI to be a true value-add.
Creating structured conversations
You’ve interviewed a lot of high-profile folks, such as the CRO of Shopify. How do you prepare for the interviews?
From the research standpoint, first and foremost, I’m always learning as much as I can about the company in advance. I want their information to either fill gaps in certain areas or provide never-before-covered information. I’ll read the work of my interviewees and listen to podcasts they’ve been guests on. I find it easiest to come in and start with a very small detail, such as, “I was reading your piece recently and you said something that caught my attention. I’d love to hear more about how that’s worked for you.”
Ultimately, I always try to think about the question through the lens of what the interviewee will likely be energized talking about. I’ve found that it’s best to avoid keeping things too rigid — you need to be prepared to move questions around. It needs to be a conversation, but with some structure.
What themes resonate best with your readers overall?
I’ve seen a lot of interest in tactical details. For example, Kris Rasmussen from Figma shared how they have this whole concept of work in progress. It involves having a long-term view of where you’re going, and everything you work on needs to tie into a story of how it plays into the company’s five-year or 10-year vision. At Figma, that means compounding the productivity of design and moving into a platform for this design beyond the core designer. At the same time, everything you’re working on needs to be in flux.
I’ve also seen great traction on content from the personal early-stage startup perspective. For example, when I chatted with James Evans from CommandBar, he shared a very specific detail about pitch decks. He said, “As a founder, the pitch deck is, first and foremost, for you and your team. It’s not for the investor. You are putting in your time and effort, and you should think of the pitch deck as proof to yourself that ‘I can communicate this idea. There’s a market for it. I’m excited by this. Here’s how we want to do it.’ You need to create the pitch deck first and that will translate to an investor deck.” People love those small insights that are easy to apply.
‘Lean into what works for you’
You mentioned that some of the motivation for your newsletter is that you do it for yourself — in a way, almost creating a personal masterclass. Beyond creating your newsletter, what is your personal learning routine like?
I’m a top-five-percent reader on Substack, so I’m reading everything I can and trying to curate things for my Friday piece. I have a lot of friends who I support by reading their work. For me, even outside of the newsletter, it’s all about reading. Substack is my biggest source. I also have buckets of things that I know that I want to keep wising up on. I follow a handful of people who I trust deeply on certain topics, such as Noah Smith in the economic sector.
There are a few leaders in that space whose work I’ll read religiously. For pieces that really stand out, I will sometimes follow the rabbit hole a bit. I’ll check out any links within the article to pull that thread as much as possible on a topic. I used to listen to podcasts every morning, but nowadays I generally gravitate more toward reading.
At its core, learning has two layers: ingesting the information and using the information. You could use it either by applying it at work or in life, or by writing about it. When you form a take on something that you’ve read, you crystalize your interpretation. It doesn’t have to be high-stakes writing that turns into a newsletter — it could even be your notes where you captured your thoughts about the piece you read.
Do you devote a specific time each day for reading and research?
I carve out 6–8 a.m. every day to work on my newsletter. Sometimes I just read, make notes, and work on structuring. For personal stuff, I’ve tried the approach of reading for a certain interval at a specific time, but that creates more pressure for me and takes some enjoyment out of it. I’ve fallen back to trusting myself to consume content when I have time. I realized that I need flexibility around that. But I know a lot of people like very rigid structures, and that works for them. I recommend leaning into what works for you — you want to enjoy doing it.
Looking at company playbooks in context
We talked about competitive analysis briefly. What is your process like and how do you determine which elements you’d like to either borrow or avoid?
Whenever I’m looking at an organization’s playbook or examples, I think about not just what that company did, but the context. For example, why did Airbnb create an SEO landing page this way? Or, more importantly, why did a business in a similar context to us make a specific choice? When you find companies that work from that context — in the same problem space as your company — you can look at what they did as inspiration.
From a competitive perspective, I try to use the product as much as I can. This might sound a little bent because it’s both from a product management lens and a writer lens — I’m researching and writing about a company while also trying to understand it as a competitor. I do all the general internet research to understand how the company is appearing in searches. I use all the different tools out there to try to understand where their audience is, how they’re growing, and which pages are working.
Is there an example you could share of something you saw in an adjacent industry that you thought was interesting and were able to adopt?
One piece that’s front-of-mind for us right now is gamification. It’s not a common marketplace trend. It’s offered with some consumer products such as Duolingo, Headspace, and Calm. We’re trying to understand how to drive more engagement through our app on both sides of the marketplace and solve it from a similar context.
We also have a consumer audience. As a result, we may be able to borrow some of the elements we’re seeing to build some gamification into our product for job applications. We think that the space is really interesting, and no one else in our market is doing that, from a career tooling perspective within the entertainment world.
Do you find that some brands hesitate to take a more fun and colorful, user-first approach because they’re concerned it may diminish the ‘professional look’ of their products?
Yes, and I talked about this with a friend Aakash who writes the Product Growth newsletter. He was previously the VP of product at Apollo, a modern go-to-market platform. They were moving up-market and trying to introduce some consumer-focused components to the product, like on-screen confetti. At a fundamental level, individual users are people. Someone who uses Apollo for work may use Duolingo on the side. It’s those kinds of inferences that help create great experiences within products. A lot of companies that were once very traditional, enterprise, and buttoned up, are starting to become more user-centric.
The power of craft and beauty
You have a philosophy that execution beats strategy. Could you share an example of a company that you admire that really internalizes this?
The company that I think is doing this best in the newsletter ecosystem is beehiiv. beehiiv is run by Tyler Denk, who was previously at Morning Brew. He built all the tools around what made Morning Brew a very effective media company. His strategy was to enable others to have Morning Brew power in the newsletter world, which was a growing space. That was the strategy. Very simple.
They’ve really won the market. Substack has a big valuation, but beehiiv ships things that people want every day. They announce them beautifully — through emails, LinkedIn, etc. They’re building in public. One of their biggest strategic advantages is that they’re constantly adding things. Seeing how fast they’re building creates a lot of trust. They’re relentlessly moving forward.
Lastly, you’ve highlighted that craft and beauty are underrated growth levers. Could you say more about those aesthetic considerations and how you incorporate them into your product development process?
My friend, Kyle Poyar from Growth Unhinged, was talking about this emerging startup playbook. In the past, there was this notion of an MVP — build something light, get it out the door, and people will start using it. That was true when the competition was an Excel sheet, a piece of paper, or some non-technical thing. Now, very seldom is that your competition — it’s almost always another software product or tool.
The best examples I can think of that combine craft and beauty are Arc, by The Browser Company, and Linear, which is taking on Atlassian and Jira. Arc is not solving a different type of problem than Chrome. Arc is also a browser, it’s a window into the internet, but Arc knows there’s a market of builders and people who appreciate a new approach to things. A lot of the stuff in the product is just there to be delightful or because it makes a ton of sense to the user. That’s its differentiator. Arc is not different from Chrome outside of being a higher craft product for a small set of users.
The same goes for Linear. They looked at Jira, Atlassian, and other huge tools, and said, “For a builder in this modern company that appreciates craft and beauty, we are going to delight them in every point of the experience.” Arc uses music when you join the product. It’s surprising. They use light animations and small details that create a higher bar of expectation.
That’s why I think some of these MVPs are being pushed out further and further to a higher craft. They deliver a more remarkable experience because now, that’s what you have to do to build a great product. At Backstage, we didn’t build our business through that lens, originally. We built our design and features to be better than our competitors, but now, as we go through our roadmap, we are looking at our active projects and bringing in the ethos of, “OK how do we just really delight people across this experience?”
Maybe this sounds counterintuitive to building quickly and getting a product out the door, but I believe you can do both. There’s a mindset of making a product as beautiful and as human-centric as you can. That’s working really well for this new era of bespoke software.