Here's why you shouldn't always listen to user feedback - (Luba Vyaznikova | Timeleft)

User feedback is overrated. AI is nearly useless for the hardest part of product work. These are two of the arguments Luba Vyaznikova makes in this episode. Luba is Head of Product at Timeleft, a social product built around a simple idea: two clicks, and tomorrow evening you're sitting at a dinner table with 5 strangers who want the same thing as you. Timeleft now runs in 60 cities around the world. Before Timeleft, Luba spent years at Bumble and Badoo, two of the largest social products in the world. She has seen the same product problems play out over and over, and she's built strong, contrarian views on how to navigate them. If you're a Product Manager, CPO, or founder building a consumer product, this conversation is for you. A few of the questions we tackle: - Why is treating user feedback as gospel a beginner's mistake? - How do you measure success when the value happens between people? - Why did every new PM at Badoo want to remove a 40% revenue feature? - Where does AI help in product work, and where doesn't it? - What's the difference between individual and institutional AI? Enjoy the episode. - Evaluate your product’s performance: https://www.wearestellar.io/ Follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothe-frin-547ba064/ Subscribe to my Product Newsletter: https://timfrin.substack.com/ - I’m Timothé Frin, Co-Founder of Stellar. In this podcast, I meet founders, builders, and product leaders — across Europe and the US. I dive into how they think, how they build… and how they make decisions. We talk product strategy, design, artificial intelligence, team culture, and execution. Concrete conversations, action-oriented, no fluff. - TIMELINE 00:00 – Introduction 02:11 – What Timeleft is really building 04:35 – Ecosystem thinking in social products 08:00 – Bumble : more than "women message first" 09:52 – How to measure success in a social product 14:45 – Reading user feedback in a social product 21:19 – Bringing back angry users 24:06 – Chasing retention in a low-frequency product 25:04 – The Emirates first-class analogy 31:05 – Why user feedback is overrated 32:41 – The Badoo feature every PM wanted to remove 40:50 – The BlaBlaCar analogy (survivor bias) 43:23 – Where AI overpromises in Product 44:00 – Why AI can't help with product decisions 47:14 – Where AI actually helps at Timeleft 50:33 – The new bottleneck in Product teams 55:00 – Individual AI vs Institutional AI 59:23 – Why AI won't transform companies overnight