'Be Willing to be Embarrassed' - an interview with Farzad Darouian
As the current Principal Product Manager for Data Engineering at Zillow and having previously held a wide variety of PM roles at Amazon, Farzad Darouian is no stranger to innovation and the importance of data. He recently caught up with The Official Pretotyping Podcast to discuss his innovative Amazon bookmark gift card idea, his history with and passion for pretotyping, and his belief that rapid experimentation bridges the gap between specialisations to create incredible products.
At the top of the interview, Farzad explains to hosts Jonathan Sun and Robert Skrobe that he didn’t originally set out down the path of product management, citing the 3 career options his parents offered him instead: “doctor, lawyer or engineer.” He says that it wasn’t until he “moved from the East Coast to Seattle and joined a health insurance company that I started to get a taste of what product management actually entailed.”
Farzad soon realised that this was the perfect career path for him, loving that it “was idea focused but it was also metric-driven. You could have an idea but you needed a result. Idea, result. Idea, result. And that’s the kind of thing, that mindset kind of clicked with me.” This newfound passion for products led Farzad to Amazon, and an innovative idea that he is renowned for in pretotyping circles: the Amazon bookmark gift card.
Enter, pretotyping.
“This product was really my career starter at Amazon and really created a step change in my career path,” he explains, detailing how it also added to his “visibility and ability to have an impact and understand the pretotype process.” A true culmination of Farzad’s previous experience as a data engineer, the bookmark gift card was born out of a search for sustainability, but not just environmental; Farzad sought “to create sustainability in both memory, emotion and the physical product itself.”
“I loved Amazon gift cards but I didn’t like how quickly they vanished,” he explains. “[You] give a gift card, you receive it, you claim the code, you throw it away, it’s gone. The sentiment attached to it is gone, the plastic is gone, everything is gone. There is no use for it.” Farzad began to ponder this question of sustainability, whilst also maintaining a lens of measurability: “How do you [...] bring some sustainability and some reusability into this, but also affect a business metric? [...] That’s how it started, I was trying to figure it out.”
Farzad’s background was an asset to him here: “I was a data engineer, so I knew when gift card spikes were happening.” Using data that Amazon had already collected (learn more about the importance of collecting your own data or YODA here), the question then became how he could prove it was a viable product idea: “You get no funding at Amazon unless you have a document or an idea that makes sense.”
It all started with napkins.
Farzad had first heard of pretotyping a little while before the bookmark idea when a colleague had sent him through an article that detailed a new innovation method. “Pretotyping does something that, I think, is very difficult to do in the corporate world, which is bring an idea into reality very, very quickly with limited cost or no cost at times.” With the concept of pretotyping already in mind, Farzad thought of the simplest, quickest and most straightforward way he could test out his idea.
“Everything was on napkins.” he says, explaining that he folded up “one as the bookmark, another folded like a book, [and then I] went through 9 different Amazon buildings just stopping random people to ask them what they thought.” When asked how he initially measured the success of this pretotype, Farzad says that it was all about smiles: “I got more smiles than ‘this is stupid’, so that’s how it started.” For the record, the Amazon bookmark gift card was released in 5 different countries and still maintains a 4.9 rating in a majority of those locations.
Not just a product validation tool.
Whilst many of Farzad’s pretotypes have been to do with product development, he explains that he has “also used it in conducting organisational meetings.” He expands by saying that “it’s much easier to use the pretotype process where we just create a new org chart with new skills, new roles, and then show it to leadership and say ‘hey, what do you think?’ [...] before you start doing anything.” As with its product development uses, this allows you to gather data and validate (or invalidate) ideas before using up time and resources on something that not everyone is happy with or that won’t work.
This is a method he’s continued to use in his current role at Zillow, though he admits that he initially struggled with ways he could implement the process in a new context. “It’s not a place where you might think that pretotyping might have a cause or might not be the best place for the pretotyping process, and at first I did struggle.”
Where Farzad has found success remains in the communication and prioritisation of work internally, explaining that “finding ways to integrate and scale in business teams is where I’ve probably had the most success.” He illustrates this by asking Robert and Jonathan to “imagine you’re in charge of an engineering team. You have half a dozen machine learning scientists, extremely valuable, but you don’t get their time unless they’re going to be doing something really important.” Within this context, he then poses the question: “How do you engage a team like that if you don’t talk to them on a regular basis, in the company?”
The answer? According to Farzad, you “come up with a quick idea that does not take a lot of time and energy, [...] a quick way to come up with new features that you can bring directly to those teams and [ask them to have a go at your idea].”
“That kind of stuff is just conversation starters that have really helped me in my career in general, and helped my teams to make some big impact,” he says, explaining that this method helps teams connect earlier in the process and get an idea of where they can make progress, together. “We all have skin in the game when you’re talking about internal work. There’s not much time, there’s only so much bandwidth [...] the precision it asks for, when you hyper zoom in on something, is something that breaks down barriers.”
Farzad also believes that pretotyping can help teams and individuals overcome obstacles with company culture, specifically when it comes to companies who encourage innovation, but only within certain limits. “Even companies who say “Keep failing, we love failure,” they say that with guardrails, right? They want you on the trail, they don’t want you to run off the cliff with a million dollars.” Farzad believes that “pretotyping gives you those built-in guard rails. It’s cheap, you get instant feedback and you get ideas to reality very very quickly. It’s something that you can always use to your advantage.”
Joining the dots.
Another Amazon veteran who loves the way pretotyping helps bring an idea to life quickly is Patrick Copeland, who Farzad has worked closely with in the past (read more about The Official Pretotyping Podcast’s chat with him here). Current VP at Amazon Advertising and prior Senior Engineering Director at Google, Patrick and Farzad worked together during their shared time at Amazon. “You could tell right away that he was experienced but you could also tell right away that he cared,” Farzad explains. “He was a great skip and I really enjoyed learning from him and working with him.”
Like us, both men understand the value of data and metrics and know that pretotyping is a great way of collecting both. “Metrics are absolutely my favourite thing,” says Farzad, explaining that he uses “metrics in a way to make sure I’m doing ok. I use metrics to make sure that the business is doing ok, as a whole, and I use metrics to find new opportunities.” As with many innovators, Farzad recognises the importance of collecting your own data, adding that he also uses “metrics to try and explain everything, to look for new areas of opportunity, to have conversation starters with other teams. Metrics are critically important.”
Learning to embrace failure.
Towards the end of the interview, the hosts ask Farzad for his top tips for anyone getting started in pretotyping - here’s his top 3:
“Understand the process, read the pdf or read the book. Read articles, find other sources and just get a sense. You need to understand.”
“Try to be embarrassed. Try to do something that you wouldn’t normally do, at work or you can use it in your home life, whatever. Don’t pick something comfortable. Use it to break a boundary and you’ll be in a much better place. Because once you get rid of that fear and you’re out of that comfort zone, you’ll be able to think of wild ideas, wild metrics, all sorts of different things.”
“Just go for it. And by go for it I mean stick to the basic principles of pretotyping, if you have an idea, get it created quickly using whatever medium you feel is appropriate, and get it out there. Test it and get your data points and then cycle through the process again.”
Reiterating an earlier point, Farzad explains that professionals don’t need a certain set of skills to utilise pretotyping; for him, “that’s the fantastic thing!” The aim is to just get the idea live, to test it and go from there, he explains, emphasising that “you just get the idea live, and the worse it looks but the more positive feedback you get, the better the idea is.”
Building the right ‘it’.
To wrap up, Jonathan and Robert asked Farzad if he uses pretotyping for anything in his life outside of work: “Well, I’ve always wanted to write a book.” He goes on to explain that he has been using pretotyping in the book writing process, stating “I’ve never written a book, I’ve written docs and papers for uni, [...] so I’ve been trying to follow that model of creating the first pretotype of my book, seeing if other people are interested in it, but also using that pretotype as self-reflection for myself.”
Farzad isn’t sure anyone will ever see a finished copy (he is still in the writing and validation phase, after all), but he is enjoying the process: “[all I can do is try] to get ‘the right it’ from myself.”
Want to experience Farzad’s chat with The Official Pretotyping Podcast in full? View the full video here.
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