Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:18:03 · Tom Verrilli
[00:18:03] S0: I can tell you what's definitely trending down. It's folks who spend a lot of the time in their interviews talking about those alignment meetings and driving alignment and stakeholder management and those pieces. Because there's definitely a group of PMs, and I certainly used to be one of them earlier in my career, whose specialty wasn't technical or customer-oriented, it was politics. And so folks who tend to naturally lean towards driving alignment, building relationships, tell me about a time when you failed and you're like, "Oh, I didn't keep the CEO up to date with something and that led to a pivot," is definitely a thing that is a bit of an anti-pattern that trends down. What we tend to find really jumps in a PM kind of interview is, over the course of your interviews or your case study, can we see both the macro thinking and the micro thinking? I think the system works something like this and I can describe an end state, but can I almost exude impatience on, and here's how I would validate that very quickly, here's where I would push to get that done, and are you specific about the things that you've built? There's an awful lot of folks who've worked at FANG, Uber, or pick any scale company where they babysat things that existed, and they've maybe polished the edges of it as opposed to the idea of saying, we were given this problem and I had to go and come up with something unique and novel, or I had to really iterate our way through a complicated change. But I made decisions along the way and we moved. Because I think it's easy in a very large organization with inertia to go along with what's happening and not necessarily be an agent of change or be a decision maker, which is ultimately what you need PM to do.
00:19:41 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:19:41] S1: There's something you said there that I just had Elizabeth Stone on the podcast. She's CPTO at Netflix, and asked her what's the trait that is also most trending up. And she said exactly what you said initially, which was the systems thinking, thinking big picture, thinking about the bigger business, and her advice there to work on this, and I want to ask you if you have any other advice here. Say someone hears this, you're like, oh wow, I got to work on my systems thinking skills. Her advice is take one click back from your problem and think about, okay, for my manager, how do they think about this problem and how does that impact the rest of the business? Thoughts on just how somebody might develop the skill and get better at systems thinking?
00:20:17 · Tom Verrilli
[00:20:17] S0: I mean, I think the skill is exactly the right way to say it. I think you can get good at it from just a mental exercise. So you can do it in small ways. One of the things I ask a lot in product review when someone says, "Hey, we want to run an experiment," is, "Okay, what do we do if it's green? What do we do if it's red?" And if folks are like, "Actually, I don't know how my strategy would change." Cool, we haven't really thought about that. So stop and go and do the mental exercise of how it would work. And then I think it's the same thing of you can build quick local solutions if you have done the mental exercise in your head of say, well, what would happen if we had 1,000 times more usage of this than we expected? Or what are the unexpected knock-on effects that this could have? And how do you just start doing all of that in your head before you get pen on paper, before you get code in the system? And I think it helps actually unblock people to move faster too, because I think the other thing that PMs are often slowed down by is all risk. Oh, legal might, finance might, another team might. And I think one of the monikers we use internally is no, then go. As in just think through all the things that could go wrong, understand where scale will break, understand the things that might happen, and then move on anyway. Because if you've thought through all the things that could happen at scale, you're probably going to preempt a bunch of them. So I really like Elizabeth's quote there, but mine is just do the mental exercise of just playing out, if it gets really widely adopted, if it happens, if there is something that goes wrong, what will it be? You don't have to solve all of them. You've just got to think through all of them and then you end up solving more than you think.
00:21:47 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tom Verrilli
[00:21:47] S1: I love that. So it's essentially don't just focus on, will this be an impactful experiment? Think about what comes next and what comes next if this is true. [00:21:56] S0: Okay, I moved it. Particularly in a higher growth environment, you're not really looking for a 5% Statsig win. You're looking for something that totally moves the business and that has compounding effect over time. And so you just got to think through what that is. [00:22:10] S1: Something else you said that is changing in how PMs operate that you're very excited about is this move to IC work, PMs moving away from this kind of big org management world to actually doing the work. Talk about that and what that means for the role of product management.
00:22:26 · Tom Verrilli
[00:22:26] S0: I mentioned a little bit earlier, but there was this thing in the ratio land where what you did if you were really successful as a PM is you got promoted into being a director. And then all of a sudden it was like, don't be hands-on anymore. Your goal is just to coach and guide. And so we took all of our A players and then promoted them out of doing things. And they spent all of their time in alignment and they spent all of their time coaching and tweaking what their team was doing. And you get this really yo-yo development process where somebody does all this work, it goes to review, it gets told no, and you're just going back and forward in reviews. You can see my scar tissue coming through. On our team, everybody is, there are managers, there's I think four or five people across the team who manage other PMs, all of them would spend 90 plus percent of their time doing IC work. I'm still probably 50% of my time doing IC work personally. And I think there's a couple real advantages of it. The first is if you are a kind of VP product where you've got a decade plus, maybe 15 years of experience building things, hopefully your instincts as to what's going to work and not are fairly well honed at this point. You can just make decisions more quickly than people. You can have real impact very, very quickly. And it's really great for the organization to have somebody who can do that as opposed to the idea of working through three layers of we divide the problem up amongst a couple PMs. Those folks need to get into alignment. There's different engineering teams debating stuff. You just tend to go. So that's wonderful. I think the second thing is there's two ways that that ends up driving leverage. One is a VP in theory can handle the workload of multiple more junior PMs just because, as I said, they're more efficient. And that means that you see more of the board at any given point in time. And so you're far more likely to make the intuitively correct decision for how should we tune the discovery algorithm vis-a-vis people who ship slowly, which is an evergreen thing in e-comm. Well, if you are thinking about how we manage sellers who ship slowly, and you know about the power of discovery, you can, in either case, make the correct decision.
00:24:35 · Tom Verrilli, Lenny Rachitsky
One of the things that I remember plaguing Twitch for a long time, and I was probably one of the people more at fault of it than ever was discovery team and the ads team were always at war for impressions. Where do ads go in the feed? What's the impact to discovery metrics? What's the impact to ad dollars? One of the first things I did when I go up to Twitch was just put ads in discovery and make sure that there's the same PM who's accountable for both because they're going to make the natural trade-off that say the goal is GMV generated from the feed. One of them is through organic. One of them is through a paid substitution. Solve. And when you put the same person across multiple things, they tend to organically align those things and you just cut out months and months and months of back and forth and the politics that tends to take it from being company first to career first. And so having VPs mostly in IC land, having directors mostly doing IC work, even having me having to grapple with IC work keeps everybody connected to the ground floor of what's actually true as opposed to what seems true in a review. But also means that you're more likely to make the intuitively correct decision early just because why wouldn't you want Messi playing for your team rather than trying to have the academy coming along all the time? [00:25:52] S1: I love this. So when you talk about IC work for PM, what does IC work for PM in this context mean? Does it mean shipping code building or is it like running a team, owning a roadmap, writing the strategy doc? Imagine it's the second bucket.