Jack Brody on Product Design, Snap and Augmented Reality

Jack Brody says Snap tries to build around needs that are valuable across cultures. The company’s vice president of product discusses design, leadership and augmented reality with Harry Stebbings; his assessments of Snap products reflect his role at the company.

Brody found product design in college after feeling competent in many school subjects but not exceptional in one. Design let him combine different disciplines. A master’s in mechanical engineering reinforced his preference for design over engineering.

In 2013 he interviewed for a Snap internship when the company had roughly 25 people. Evan Spiegel convinced him he might not want to return to school, so Brody accelerated his studies. On his first day, after learning Brody had graduated, Spiegel offered him a full-time role; Brody says his internship lasted about an hour.

Brody credits Spiegel with a desire to question convention. An underdog cannot win merely by copying incumbents, he argues, but the challenge is deciding which conventions are worth questioning and testing a different approach quickly enough to limit risk.

A prototype should have only the fidelity needed to answer the question. Snap may run a market test or show a design mockup, but Brody says its teams often build rough internal prototypes in hours rather than months. Experienced product judgment helps decide what to test next.

Stebbings asks how to distinguish a bad change from a good one that users initially dislike. Brody says internal use over weeks and longer tests can show whether frustration gives way to value. The amount of friction a team accepts depends on its conviction, and lower-conviction changes need more careful rollout and feedback.

Brody says Stories took months to gain adoption rather than succeeding overnight. Snap Map also faced privacy concerns; he says location sharing required users to opt in and select friends. The team observed people posting a location and asking friends to meet, then deleting the post when someone arrived.

Asked about other platforms copying Stories, Brody says it is both validation and motivation to keep innovating. He believes Snapchat’s close-friend context produces a different style of sharing. That differentiation is his company’s assessment, not an independent comparison.

As an example of a product effort that ended, he cites Snap’s games platform. The team saw some positive signs, he says, but wound it down as the company focused resources on higher-priority opportunities. A project can be discontinued because its path is too long or distracting, not necessarily because no path exists.

Is product art or science? Brody says the process resembles the scientific method: identify a problem, form a hypothesis, build a prototype, test and iterate. The artistic element is creating something new through imagination, cultural understanding and judgment. His rough answer is 80% science and 20% art, an illustrative personal framing.

He defines creativity as combining distinct ideas into something new. Diverse lived experiences and disciplines increase the range of ideas a team can combine, he argues. For him, diversity of thought and a culture that welcomes it are foundations for repeatable innovation.

Talk is cheap only when people feel safe to speak. Brody says employees who fear ridicule or punishment will withhold ideas, reducing the set from which a team can choose. Leaders should thank people publicly for raising ideas or challenging the prevailing view and model the behavior themselves.

He prioritizes ideas across potential impact, cost and instinct about strategic fit or customer response. Stebbings adds probability of execution; Brody includes opportunity cost in the calculation. High-impact, low-cost ideas with strong conviction are easy choices, while the middle cases require judgment.

A common product mistake is becoming attached to a solution before understanding the problem. Brody recommends spending more time defining what users struggle with, then allowing possible solutions to follow.

When someone is struggling, Brody distinguishes bad intent from good intent and flawed execution. He recommends prompt, candid feedback on mistakes and expectations. In his experience, sustained conversations often lead either to improvement or to the person recognizing that another role would fit better.

Stebbings says difficult conversations can hurt more when a manager cares deeply about the person. Brody agrees they are hard, but believes honest feedback and, when needed, a change of role can help people find work better suited to them. That is his management experience, not a guarantee about every departure.

He describes tension between work, his wife and a young child. Brody says accepting that he cannot be perfect in every area helps him remain present and learn from mistakes. Stebbings relates to feeling pulled between family and entrepreneurship.

Hiring begins with defining the organization’s problem, just as product design begins with a user problem. Brody says a team might solve it by changing a process or someone’s responsibilities rather than hiring. If a skill or capacity gap remains, define the role before searching.

A formal job description is not always necessary at every stage, but a founder should know what the person must do. Brody advises talking with team members about where they are stretched and what skills are missing, treating the team as the customer for the hiring decision.

Snap typically starts with a short screening conversation, then assembles an interview panel suited to the role. Brody says he wants diverse backgrounds and disciplines on that panel, including engineers and designers who will work with a product manager.

He considers the biggest hiring mistake failing to act when a hire is not a fit. Interviews are imperfect for both company and candidate, and he says prolonged underperformance affects the team. Asked about a 50% hiring success rule, he distinguishes outright failure from the roughly half of hires he says later change or adjust roles; he does not claim half leave.

Snap rebuilt its Android app starting in 2018 after realizing that a product optimized for iPhone users was difficult to use across much of the world. Brody says technical debt had made the app frustrating and that the rewrite accelerated adoption, though he supplies no quantified causal estimate.

The company aims to make a local-feeling product globally. Brody agrees no interface can be optimal everywhere: language and teaching can be localized relatively cheaply, while changing core value is harder. He focuses on what he regards as a universal need to communicate with close friends and family.

He identifies Japan as a possible growth market because of its visual and playful culture, while acknowledging the established role of Line. His expectation that Snap could grow there is a company executive’s prediction, not evidence that it will.

Asked whether Snapchat copied Kakao’s Stories, Brody says no and describes Snap’s product rationale. Users wanted to send a snap to everyone, but the team feared a select-all button would weaken the intimacy of a direct message. Stories offered a separate, ephemeral broadcast that friends could reply to, potentially starting one-to-one conversations.

Brody says Snapchat turned the camera from primarily a way to save moments into a communication tool. Frequent camera use then opened possibilities for Stories, the map and augmented reality. This is his account of Snap’s product evolution.

He expects AR to move beyond playful lenses toward utility, such as contextual information or help with a task. He believes glasses could eventually move technology into the background more naturally than a phone, while noting Snap was still working on its glasses. This is a forecast by a company pursuing the technology.

Asked whether the first Spectacles were successful, Brody says they generated excitement but were difficult to supply during the initial surge and had shortcomings. He acknowledges they were not an iPhone-scale revenue event; he considers them successful as a learning step for later hardware. He gives no revenue figures.

In quick fire, he says angel investing reinforces a startup mindset, and advises early product practitioners to define problems before solutions. He cautions early founders against hiring only narrowly specialized people when the work requires flexibility.

Becoming a parent clarified his priorities between work and family. He advises a new product leader to be open about uncertainty early, creating space to learn and receive feedback. Brody says impostor syndrome has been a recurring concern in his own career.

He names Spiegel and Steve Jobs as product leaders he admires. Asked about Spiegel’s weakness, he says the CEO’s ambition can occasionally run ahead of current circumstances, making it valuable to have leaders who provide perspective.

Brody praises OpenAI for an unusual strategy: developing a generative technology with confidence it could address many problems, rather than starting with one narrowly defined problem. He sees AI as potentially transformative, a prediction from the 2023 interview. The conversation ends with thanks.