Ian McAllister
Senior Director of Product for Vehicles, Uber. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
Ian McAllister is the Senior Director of Product for Vehicles at Uber. Previously, he led teams at Amazon, where he created Amazon Smile, and served as Director of Product Management at Airbnb.
Everything Ian McAllister said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
McAllister: PMs who prioritize well generate 5x the impact
“Given the same amount of skill, intelligence, and resources, a product manager with a great Innate ability to prioritize is going to generate five X the impact of someone without that skill.”
McAllister: Forecasting, executing, and measuring separates PMs from consultants
“You know, what separates product managers from consultants sometimes is you forecast and then you execute, and then you measure and validate, and that helps you build your instincts.”
McAllister: Pushing back effectively is essential for leadership advancement
“Pushing back effectively. This is an art and a skill, but I think your ability to do this is pretty correlated with your ability to grow and succeed as a leader, because if you say yes to everything, you're gonna go nowhere.”
McAllister: Trust is built by repeatedly setting and meeting expectations
“You know, trust is just built by repeatedly setting and meeting expectations. And I think that's a good kind of mantra to think about as a PM, like, you know, my meeting, the expectations that I set and not just doing good things, but like calling your shots, …”
McAllister: Executives prioritize offensive growth over risk mitigation and efficiency
“It's true that executives wake up if something drives dollars or customers or offense things. And, you know, it just maybe shouldn't be this way, but a little less interested in things that may be less than a risk that just the risk never happens. It comes to …”
McAllister: PMs should own unstaffed functions until someone else takes ownership
“And it just means, you know, you don't own marketing or you don't own this other function, but you own it until you find somebody else to own it. And so that's not necessarily thinking big in terms of scale or whatever, but in terms of how you think about your…”
McAllister: Product leadership requires operating existing products, not just building new ones
“Being a product leader is not just about building new things. It's about, you know, how well you run, which you've already built. And if you, If you're really paying attention to the product that you operate, it will give you ideas for things you could do to d…”
McAllister: Leaders have more impact teaching mental models than giving prescriptive advice
“I think you'll have a lot more lasting effect if you could kind of abstract it to a degree and teach the lesson, because then that person will hopefully learn the lesson and can apply it to a bunch of future situations, and also understand the why more, and it…”
McAllister: Amazon's 'working backwards' method works without the PR/FAQ format
“Teach that and write some posts about with templates and things like that, because it's a great way to start of like the press release has a paragraph about the problem. That's what you write, and then you write the solution paragraph, and then the customer qu…”
Jeff Bezos uses three specific criteria to evaluate new product investments
“And I sort of asked him like, what's your criteria for sort of investing in something new? And he said, well, it's like three things. One, is it a big idea? And then second, is it something we should be doing? So if maybe you have an idea, if you have this new…”
McAllister: Combining available tech ingredients fails the working backwards test
“The most common thing that I see that kind of tips me off is that when they talk about something, there's different pieces in the pantry, right? And they're like, we have these ingredients, we could put them together. We could add these two things together and…”
McAllister: Amazon maintained a secretive, heads-down culture around 2010
“A lot of Amazon people I sort of felt were just like so hundred percent heads down. It was a little bit of a secretive culture, not maybe like Apple, but it was pretty private.”
McAllister: Effective PM communication requires answering first before explaining
“If you just think answer and then explain, or sometimes answer and then shut up, that actually is a tactical thing you can do to get better at communicating.”
McAllister: Correct Product Strategies Fail Without Earning Stakeholder Support
“Well, I would say that if you have a certain approach, now you may be, you believe it's the right one. It may be the right one, but if you don't build the support and the relationships, you know, that they're going to help carry that out and execute on that st…”
The other half of the tape: Ian McAllister's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Lenny Rachitsky 1
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Lenny's Podcast 1
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ian's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Senior Director of Product for Vehicles, Uber | 1 | 14 | — | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |