Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:47:52 · Amol Avasare
[00:47:52] S1: Yeah. I think it just really depends on the industry, the size of company. Any company where you're building something that's much more developer-focused, you're going to rely on the engineers a lot more. Earlier companies, you don't have as much of this cross-functional coordination, stakeholder alignment nonsense that you need all these PMs for, so you can get by with less. But then as a company scales, and if I think about, okay, now you have this ratio where maybe the one PM became two PMs from productivity, that the five engineers became 20 engineers, the one designer maybe became three designers. If you think about what is the best use of time for that PM, I think this is a really interesting thing, of how much should PMs be actually shipping things themselves versus everything else? I think in the world where you're limited on engineering, the PM should definitely be shipping things. I think in today's world, it's a good way to get an understanding of the tools, which is really important. So the PM should be shipping for that reason. But if I'm one PM or two PMs and there's 20 engineers, I think about what is the incremental value I can add with my time? And is it actually shipping the 21st PM feature or is it saying, "How am I getting a little bit better at guiding the team on what the right opportunities are?" And so that's where I think in this world, you may have all these engineers who are like mini PMs, and the better that happens, that's where I would love to be doing more of. But still, if you then get a really good PM who can come in and can improve that, the why and the what particularly by 5%, that is such a high leverage higher.
00:49:45 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[00:49:45] S0: This is such an interesting insight you're making. It's so counter to how a lot of people are thinking PM is evolving. What I'm hearing here is, because PMs are so behind, because engineers are just getting so much done, there's many people here, "Okay, you need to be prototyping, you need to be shipping PRs as a PM." What you're saying, which I completely agree with, is your time is much better spent helping PM basically, and helping the engineers become better PMs themselves. And the leverage there is a lot higher than you spending time coding, shipping PRs in most cases. [00:50:17] S1: I think that's true in certain circumstances. I think that as a smaller company, I don't know that that's the case. In a smaller company where it's all hands on deck, I think you probably need to be shipping. I think if you're in a company where budgets are very tight, and engineers are very tight, and you're not able to just hire because money's unlimited, then you need to do what is needed to accelerate the impact your team's going to have. Right? So there's going to be a number of cases, where as a PM, the right thing to do is to be like, "Screw it. I'm shipping and I'm going it the whole way." But I'm talking here more about the larger companies, more scaled businesses. Yeah, if you have 20 engineers, is it the highest use leverage of your time to ship an extra feature, or figure out how do I up-level everything that we're doing, get the user insights better, et cetera?
00:50:17 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:50:17] S1: I think that's true in certain circumstances. I think that as a smaller company, I don't know that that's the case. In a smaller company where it's all hands on deck, I think you probably need to be shipping. I think if you're in a company where budgets are very tight, and engineers are very tight, and you're not able to just hire because money's unlimited, then you need to do what is needed to accelerate the impact your team's going to have. Right? So there's going to be a number of cases, where as a PM, the right thing to do is to be like, "Screw it. I'm shipping and I'm going it the whole way." But I'm talking here more about the larger companies, more scaled businesses. Yeah, if you have 20 engineers, is it the highest use leverage of your time to ship an extra feature, or figure out how do I up-level everything that we're doing, get the user insights better, et cetera? [00:51:14] S0: Yeah. And I think there's also an element of shipping to learn, building a prototype so that you can have a better opinion. A lot of people talk about just, "I'm just going to try three things, see how it goes and that'll help inform the roadmap." This is now the PRD, is look at it instead of talking about it. So there's a lot of value there still.
00:51:14 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[00:51:14] S0: Yeah. And I think there's also an element of shipping to learn, building a prototype so that you can have a better opinion. A lot of people talk about just, "I'm just going to try three things, see how it goes and that'll help inform the roadmap." This is now the PRD, is look at it instead of talking about it. So there's a lot of value there still. [00:51:29] S1: That's very true. I think that's a great point. So even for me now where we've got number of PMs, we've got many engineers, there are certain times when I'm like, "I want to articulate the idea I have in my head." It's just better for me to prototype it and show it. Right? So I think that is really important. And then we are very scrappy. So we're a big company by name, valuation, but we're extremely scrappy, and just the focus internally is just minimize bureaucracy and just go. And so probably 70%, maybe 60, 70, 80% of what we ship does not have a PRD. I'm averse to PRDs. I think I just hate documentation. I'm just like, "Go, go, go. Just cut the blockers." 20, 30% of stuff where it's like, it's important, it's really important to get right. The documentation should be really good and that people should spend a lot of time on it. But by and large, I think PRDs are just outdated at this point, and you can just kick things off with a good team without needing to do that sort of thing.
00:51:29 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:51:29] S1: That's very true. I think that's a great point. So even for me now where we've got number of PMs, we've got many engineers, there are certain times when I'm like, "I want to articulate the idea I have in my head." It's just better for me to prototype it and show it. Right? So I think that is really important. And then we are very scrappy. So we're a big company by name, valuation, but we're extremely scrappy, and just the focus internally is just minimize bureaucracy and just go. And so probably 70%, maybe 60, 70, 80% of what we ship does not have a PRD. I'm averse to PRDs. I think I just hate documentation. I'm just like, "Go, go, go. Just cut the blockers." 20, 30% of stuff where it's like, it's important, it's really important to get right. The documentation should be really good and that people should spend a lot of time on it. But by and large, I think PRDs are just outdated at this point, and you can just kick things off with a good team without needing to do that sort of thing. [00:52:34] S0: Say more about that. What do you do to help make sure, because people can build so fast, or spend a lot of time going in the wrong direction, ship things that are not what you're asking? How do you kick off a project and clarify, "Here's what we're doing"? Is it just a conversation or is there anything beyond that?
00:52:48 · Amol Avasare
[00:52:48] S1: It really depends on the size of it. And this kind of goes back to the two-week thing. So why we have that two-week thing, it's more like, how do I have some filter to say if we're investing heavily into something, we should apply more thinking behind it versus if it's a smaller set of investments, just go for it? And as a growth team, again, you do have a decent amount of these smaller things that you do. So for very small changes, like, "Oh, there's a thing coming. We need to have an upsell for it. What is it the thing we're doing?" This is just on Slack. This is just purely on Slack. It's just messages back and forth. And I think it also depends on having a good caliber of engineer in there, but engineers can understand, like, "Hey, I know you said this, but what about that for the audience?" And so we're lucky we have good product-minded engineers in that sense, but all these smaller things are very much just on Slack back and forth, and that's what you do. For the larger things, I think I very firmly believe in a proper kickoff. So we still do ... Just there's so much going on at this place. No one's got time, no one knows what's going on. And so doing a cross-functional kickoff, get legal, get safeguards, get everyone in the room and just be like, "This is what we plan to do. What do you care about? What do you care about? What do you care about?" That 30-minute meeting for larger things is just, I think, still so important to just streamline all the mess that may happen later if you don't do that work early on.