Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:03:59 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:03:59] S1: Yeah. So much of this is about just coming into it with like, here's what I ... It's just like having the same information. And I think there's a point about just believe they know what they're doing is so underappreciated. There's a reason they're in this role. There's a reason you're not there. There's a reason this company's doing as well as it is. And even if they are wrong, they believe they're right. So it's important to understand what they think and know and what information they have access to.
01:04:27 · Jessica Fain
[01:04:27] S0: Yeah. And I think the other piece of this is for anyone thinking about how they grow their career, how did that person get into the role that they are in? They broadened their context. They saw, sort of had great peripheral vision, and that is a way to show up in a room that is much more senior than you are, is keep your domain expertise, keep the things that you know best, but broaden your perspective, broaden your vantage point to think about it in the context of the whole ecosystem, the whole organization, the whole industry, which you often don't get a chance to stay in. And what happens at that point is you get seen as a strategic thinker. You get seen as somebody who really cares about the company's success and not just your own. And so it is actually a really, really important tool for growth, especially ... I had told April when I originally pitched her on being our chief of staff that I wanted to take the job because I wanted to know if I wanted to be a CPO when I grew up. And it's true. I still don't know because it's a really, really hard job and I have just way more respect than I ever did before that. But I think that if you want to grow into a product leadership role, expanding your viewpoint, expanding the way that you see problems, and thinking about it from a global perspective is a way to show up as that strategic leader that you say you want to be.
01:05:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jessica Fain
[01:05:58] S1: I love this advice. Just to make it very clear for people, because it's easy to just like, "Yeah, okay, I'll just expand my horizon," basically, the advice here is just think on behalf of the entire business, not just your feature, not just your little goal. It's like, what is the business trying to do? Here's how this fits into it. Here's what the CEO broadly is thinking about. The epitome of this to me is Jeff Weinstein, I think is how you pronounce his last name, or Weinstein, at Stripe. He's just like a PM on a product and he's just constantly tweeting and sharing Stripe as a business. He's just thinking about Stripe as the company and then here's this thing I work on that helps the company. [01:06:40] S0: Absolutely. And Jeff and I worked together at Box. [01:06:43] S1: Oh, you did? Oh, that is so cool. [01:06:43] S0: Yeah. [01:06:44] S1: Okay. So would you agree he's like the epitome of this?
01:06:47 · Jessica Fain
[01:06:47] S0: Oh yeah. I mean, he's so charismatic and able to really put himself in other people's shoes. I think that it is just a way to ... We just redid our PM career ladder for this year and I led that effort. And one of the things that we noted as a trait of becoming more senior is your product citizenship and how much you are embedding back in the organization and giving back best practices, mentoring others, broadening people's horizons on tooling, technology, storytelling, and of course strategy. And I think that this is such an important part of people's growth that they often undersell, but you can do it at every level in your own area. And it's about connecting the dots back up to what is important to the company. So many times I see docs that are like, "Okay, our KR is to ship this thing." And I'm like, "Why does that matter? Does anyone care?" You have to tell a story. And even if that's true, that shipping is the care, sometimes that's the case, right? But even if that's true, why are you doing that? What is the outcome for the business? Why would the CEO be excited about shipping that? It's usually because of some business outcome or user outcome that you have to tie back to their perspective of. And then I think the flip side of is if you're working on something that doesn't shift one of those outcomes or isn't urgent for the business, do you need to change course? Do you need to say, "Hey, actually, I don't think this is the highest leverage thing right now. We could actually do X to be much more effective for our broader goals."
01:08:40 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jessica Fain
[01:08:40] S1: That's where I was going to go, is just like that's the ultimate trust building move is to tell the leaders, "Okay, here's our goal, here's all these ideas, but we don't think this is the right goal and here's how this doesn't fit in and here's why we should kill this product." [01:08:51] S0: Right, exactly. Right. Think like a CPO. Put yourself in their shoes. You had Stewart on a few weeks ago and he talked about how the CEO is kind of the only one who can really kill things, things that already exist, or really make some of those super, super tough decisions. I think that is oftentimes our culture, but is a mistake. If we each think of ourselves as owners and as contributors to the business and as leaders, we will bring those opportunities up as well to both amplify the business or save it from itself. [01:09:30] S1: Do the job you want versus the job you have. Classic. [01:09:31] S0: Yes. [01:09:36] S1: Okay. Let's talk AI. I feel like you cannot do anything these days without mentioning AI in some way. How is AI changing the skill of influence? What's changed in the past couple years in trying to convince people to do the things you're hoping them to do?
01:09:51 · Jessica Fain
[01:09:51] S0: I think that we are entering a golden age of product management, not of product managers, but of product management and the core skills that made this function the thing that I love to do. More than ever, what we have to do is have really interesting ideas that are grounded in user empathy, curiosity, testing, iteration, but we will still be working in organizations where getting buy-in to those ideas and influencing people to fund not just the V1, but the much more expensive V2, three, four, and ongoing support become 10x more important. And as execution basically plummets in complexity and everyone can be a builder, PMs and product thinkers, which I think is far beyond the product management function, can be so incredibly influenced by those core skills of bringing people along for the ride. So I think that product managers for a long time have made their careers on being the most type A, the Gantt chart master, the best note taker in the business. And if AI is better than you at analyzing data or taking meeting notes or running experiments, what's your job now? So the leverage actually shifts from doing that work and being the synthesizer to deciding what work actually survives and encouraging other people to buy into that process. And I actually think it's just so incredibly exciting because PMs and other functions, engineers, designers are so empowered to bring that first version to bear to get that momentum, to get that signal on product market fit, on user benefit, and then build momentum from that point in a much faster cycle. And so it's actually an incredibly exciting place, but the act of influence, the act of stakeholder management, the act of learning... ... active influence. The act of stakeholder management, the act of learning is the 10X skill.