Good Friction: Interview With Product Leader Yue Zhao

These days, Yue spends her time in Barcelona as a career coach, mentoring Senior and Director-level product managers to lift them to the C-Suite, especially for those from underrepresented backgrounds. She wrote The Uncommon Executive about her work helping such managers break into executive roles, and it brings meaning to her everyday life to be able to help others reach their potential. But Yue was not always a career coach; she got where she is today by leading product at Thumbtack, Meta, and as Chief Product and Technology Officer at Fuzzy Pet Health.

In this interview, Yue shares an example of how she leveraged behavioral design in her work at Thumbtack through the design of an onboarding questionnaire. And she found, perhaps surprisingly, that adding friction to the process in the form of additional questions actually led to higher conversion.

Tell me something I don’t know. (Anything!)

The cobblestone designs of the sidewalks in Barcelona are of flowers.

Which fiction book would you recommend to product leaders? Why?

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy. So many important life lessons. It is easy to lose your priorities in life when leading and building…