Product Management

“I think elevating others ambitions or reminding them of what's possible here is a huge part of the product management role. Like when folks say, hey, I think we can get this done in this way, or we can get this done by this timeline, or maybe this is the first…”

“At previous companies, like, polish was king. Getting every UI interaction or getting every little thing completely right was way more important than shipping something early, because time didn't make as much of a difference in terms of the outcome. And so, as…”

“Some pieces of our craft are actually getting abstracted by models being able to do it really effectively, maybe better than individuals can. And your craft moves from being able to do that very specific task you did in the past to Now applying it to some othe…”

“One of the cultural philosophies we had is almost no product management and have engineers that are competent enough about business problems to just write their own architecture, write their own product to solve business problems that maybe not even a business…”

“I think it's actually a complete inversion of how product development used to work to how product development happens now. And product development, you know, it always used to be, so you'd always say like, hey, product managers, you trained, oh, the product ma…”

“Actually top down is pretty good because folks at the top, generally speaking, can make quick decisions and remove all of this alignment debate. They have probably more macro context than most folks and assuming that they are genuinely in touch with ground tru…”

“The hard thing about hard things, I still think is the best book written about product management. Just from a like breadth of things that you have to go through and try and do and screw up a lot.”

“It's more of a generalist role I would claim than some of these other roles. And this is the error of the generalist. If you would ask me the AI error”

“There's this weird phenomenon that if I had to lay the course of a business, it would be for a PM to have one of their rough patches early in the fund's life. Hopefully not in the first year, but within a relative short period of time, because there's so much …”

“I would completely skip all of the, like, managing up and, like, getting buy-in and all the stakeholder stuff. That's, like, a big part of product management, but the ones you're probably more interested in are about what to build, why, positioning in the mark…”

“Product, like making decisions of what to build next, especially in early stage, I think AI's garbage at that, and I think it will be not good at it for a very long time”

“And in 99.9% of the cases, the PM doesn't want to do anything special. They want everyone to be on the same terms and the same strategy.”

“I think people who have true agency and they understand that the world around them is malleable will do great. And the folks who stick to what, tell me really, what does it mean to be a PM? What does it mean to be a designer? And like, what's my job as an engi…”

“It is more now, the way you need to think is, how do I make their workflows easier, right? It's shifted from, here's the capability, do they do utilization? To how do I take what exists in front of me and collapse the workflows and make it easier so that in a …”

“And in my, what I feel like is that the engineers that will continue to thrive are just are basically going to become more PME because the coding part is now going to be solved.”

“Well, I saw this podcast, or listen to this podcast that Peter Fenn did, and he convinced me that the idea of a PM makes no sense, basically, in the future. If you think about decomposing the logic, is what does a PM usually do? They take these inputs from cus…”

“Whether you talk about someone who used to be a PM or someone who used to be a designer or called an engineer, the skill is more like being a CEO now, which is what are we building and why? And to be a successful engineer, that trait's critical to be a success…”

“You basically get funding for your ideas in the form of engineering, design you know, cross-functional resourcing, right? That is, you should consider that VC money that's been invested in you, and your CFO, your CPO, your CEO is expecting a return.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Product management is all about influence, and that's basically parenting.”

“Although I actually do think PM is a mini CEO. Like I think people keep saying you're not, but I think you are.”

“People ask me what about product management helped me do the job I do now. I don't think there's anything to be honest, except just like things I was already into, which is just being very organized, having a very high bar for quality, communicating. Like, I t…”

“The PM design and engineering jobs in their most coarse grained forms, not in their like, really find detailed forms, but in their core screen forms as roles are all converging.”

“I came from product, and in product you have to be very careful, meaning every decision you make, it's forever. You take the most expensive resource of a company, engineering time. You put it on building something. You put that something into your product. Now…”

“In many ways coming to the table of product building with representative examples and criteria that articulate what good versus bad is for a use case is just a more precise and usable form of product management than writing a spec.”

“I think the best background to enter as a PM is either being an entrepreneur, which teaches you to think about things that matter, or being a very good analyst of some kind, like somebody who's done very deep, thoughtful analysis over how something works at Mc…”

“The constraint was always your developers writing code. And what that meant is you could get away with being a little bit sloppy and like product management, for example, maybe your specs were just sort of wishy-washy. Product marketing maybe could come in at …”

“The job is fundamentally a leadership job, and it's a tricky leadership job because nobody is actually reporting to you. So, it's like this influence, how do I get people to do what I want, you know, even though I'm not paying them, I can't fire them, I can't …”

“For the last 20 years, we've had like very fixed ratios in terms of how what gets done. Like PM takes this amount of time, developers takes the amount of time, go to market takes the amount of time. And I think that contract is basically exploding because the …”

“I see PM as, think of it as like a hire of last resort. And so I don't think a company should be allergic to hiring them, but it shouldn't be the default.”

“So when we go look at this loop, the speed of coding is accelerating, the cost is falling, and so increasingly the bottleneck is actually product management. So, so the product management bottleneck is now we can build what do we want much faster while the bot…”

“I don't think those tools are accelerating product managers nearly as much as coding tools are accelerating software engineers. So this does treat more of the bottleneck on the product management side.”

“I don't think I've ever worked for a company where these things add up to a perfect breadcrumb trail. You can trace back from, we prioritized these bits of work in this sprint because it adds up to this objective, which is part of this strategy, which adds up …”

“What I'm actually saying Is that the things you think you're fighting against are usually the things that are giving your work shape. If you let them be.”

“The thing I am proudest of saying in product management practice is that if you're doing product management really well, you never have to say yes, and you never have to say no. You're giving people options and you're helping them understand the trade-offs.”

“One is sort of working backwards from the model capabilities, and that is much more than science where I think you really need to look at what tech do we have available and what is like the most awesome way to product productize it. And if you apply to some so…”

“With software engineering becoming much faster, the other interesting dynamic I'm seeing is that the product management work, getting user feedback, deciding what features to build, that is increasingly the bottleneck.”

“The product management job is the job of addressing ambiguity, and it's ambiguity that prevents progress from being made. Sometimes it's execution, decision making, product design. That will not change. The nature of business and human interaction and companie…”

“A PM is really great at motivating something incredibly boring as existential, and so whenever I'm interviewing PMs, you know, I just ask, okay, well, what are some projects you've led, and whatever, and if they can't make it sound interesting to me, no matter…”

“The, one of the most valuable things you have is your ability to code if you're an engineer, let's say, and I wish I stuck to it more. But I think it's super important to stick to that at least because it's much better with vibe coding or whatever now.”

“And shape up teams when they hit their stride is that the PM moves upstream. So the PM is less busy with how do I get this project to like not be in a bad state when it's getting built? And they're way more in how do I understand the business context? How do I…”

“Back end ends up being about actually infrastructure, and then front end is so much more actually being a PM. You're sort of almost being like an ethnographer going into the obscure, underserved parts of the pie of GDP, and you're trying to extract out, like, …”

“Product management is listening to the market and reacting and building. And product marketers are speaking to the market, so both of them need to understand what, you know, customers very, very, you know, at a detailed level, they need to understand, have a, …”

“I think maybe, maybe the generalized version of that is do more PM start in prototyping land than they do in strictly design land? And I think the answer to that is yes.”

“And I think AI completely collapses that cycle and accelerates a lot of the upfront up funnel work where, where again, you can just do, you can build a prototype and you can show that to customers and like the PM and the designer might just work collaborativel…”

“And I think the more competitive your industry is, the more the sort of like low hang goal oriented stuff is, is already picked, right? Because every PM from every one of these companies has been asking like, well, like, you know, like, what's, what's your goa…”

“Everyone who's hiring PMs, just like when they're hiring execs, they're kind of hoping that they bring them on to solve some burning problem that they have. And so it's your job when you're in the interview process to figure out what that burning problem is. R…”

“And for example, at VRChat, we are doing both smallest and biggest work, Lenny, and they are sort of run as parallel work streams. The product management team is leading the charge of the smallest work, and the design team is leading the charge of the biggest …”

“The problem with that became they weren't PMs. They didn't have experience in the PM role. And so kind of the core, maybe the basics of what product management needed internally were missed. Like, strategic planning wasn't exactly right, or road mapping was re…”

“And then a city planner is a PM that's really good at mature products, really good at driving efficiencies at scale. They have the city. They, everything that they do touches hundreds, thousands, millions of customers immediately. And so the type of PM that yo…”

“It must be true that if there's 10 times engineers, and I would argue there definitely are, there must be 10 times product managers too. But at the same time, those 10 times product managers, because product management is ultimately about leverage, so it's abo…”

“It's interesting because people used to talk about people who are T-shaped or whatever. I've never really loved the analogy, because it's more like people are scribble shaped, like, I mean, like, there's the really best people you've worked with, they're more …”

“If you let your calendar rule you, then nothing good will happen. Like, you know, I know people talk about that a lot, but it's surprisingly common in product management in particular, that people end up ruled by their calendar. And so it's related to that who…”

“Marketing is the product. You don't make a product and then hand it to some marketing Yahoo and say, go put a logo on this.”

“It's become easier to break into product management to some degree if you can use these tools, and now you have all these tools at your disposal to go build the next prototype. But I think the bar just got higher for product managers within a company and what …”

“Normally when you're building product, you're building off of kind of a fixed technology base, right? You know what you have to work with, and you're trying to build the best product you can. Here it's like every two months computers can do something computers…”

“We set up a boot camp and, like, took every PM through Writing evals, and like, what it was like, difference between good and bad evals, and you know, we're definitely not done there.”

“Product management is dead. It, or it will be soon, and so I'm here to talk about what we're all going to do Instead.”

“I think now product work honestly takes less time, less thought, And maybe less PMs.”