The Ledger, every show

“Just don't do it. Don't rewrite. If anyone ever tells you to do a rewrite, don't do it. A side-by-side rewrite. Nope.”

“And strategy to me, and hopefully we'll talk about strategy in a bit, it's one tiny slice. You do a strategy, but it's five percent of the work that you do. Yes, it's important because you want to get your strategy right and you need to pick the right products…”

“A question I ask in every product interview is what's the worst product you've ever shipped? And that's because I don't think you're a good PM if you haven't shipped something that's really shitty. Like, you just haven't had enough reps, you haven't done it en…”

“I got to see two or three cycles of the same product, and that, I learned more from that than I did out of the, you know, year or so I spent doing other things each at a time, because you got to see the consequences of your decisions, and that's rare, and peop…”

“Another thing I hear, especially as you get further in your career, and unfortunately, if you're maybe an underrepresented person in tech, is that you need to be more strategic, and so that's feedback that almost always happens, especially if you're a woman in…”

“I don't think you're a good PM if you haven't shipped something that's really shitty. Like, you just haven't had enough reps, you haven't done it enough time, like, and it, and it's not only that you've done it, but that you can admit it, and you know which on…”

“Just don't do it. Don't rewrite. If anyone ever tells you to do a rewrite, don't do it. A side-by-side rewrite. Nope.”

“The one I like to have in this area is that people who are really excited about being data-driven, to me, that is oftentimes a red flag for their product thinking.”

“Most PMs, most jobs, most products, you're gonna be better off talking to 10 users, and you'll get more and better insights out of why things are happening than you would with any dashboard link.”

“Really, if you're going to make good content, like you have to sanitize and framework, guys, the thing that you're working on. And then slowly, I think for a lot of people who are reading it and looking at it, they, like their thinking starts to become, well, …”

“First, I think the best PMs are really good at breaking things down and simplifying things. So finding at any moment, like what is the really, truly the only thing you need to do, especially in a big company There are eight million priorities. There's 700 OKRs…”

“A phrase, actually, we were talking about David Cancel before we started carrying the water, and this was a big theme when I joined Drift, and this is about how you can't be a good PM if you're not willing to do the hard, boring, unglamorous work of customer s…”

“I don't, I'm not going to pretend like if you're just great at your job quietly that you're going to get what you want, right? You're not just, if you're toiling in the background, doing a great job, getting results, if you have a great manager, maybe you'll b…”

“To me, like, the other answer of what makes a great PM is you shipped a lot of stuff. Like, the more you ship, the more you learn, and that's why it can take years to build up expertise because you just have to ship a lot of stuff.”

“And so the most common two paths that I've seen are people who switch laterally within a company, again, challenging, but can be done, or people who join startups.”

“My advice is always, if you can get someone to stamp you with the product manager role, take it, because to your point, it's what we screen on. It's for better force. It's just like, you just have to, you have to get that first job. And then once you get that …”

“Typically speaking, when you're doing a strategy, you're doing it at a higher level. So I don't think, like, every product needs a strategy. Like, every feature doesn't need a strategy, for example. Like, you don't need to do this if you're, like, working on a…”

“Then you, there's a moment where you take this strategy, and then you look at your roadmap. And they're never the same. And the roadmap is just bloated with all of this random stuff that like, oh, well, we have to do that because of this, or we have to do that…”

“If you structure it correctly, the most important section, in my opinion, in the document is this the first part, which is like, what is the background and context? What is the problem? Why does it matter? And why does it matter now? And if you get those thing…”

“I would generally say a rule of thumb would be pretty much every doc you write, you can delete the first two paragraphs that you've written. You don't need them.”

“You should be able to walk all the way from your company's mission down to the individual priority on your team and see the logic chain and why you got there. And if anyone doesn't agree with it, they can call out where their disagreement lands, like in that l…”

“Yeah, it's probably the best thing I've ever done for my career, and I, I'm so grateful for the people who, whose idea was who supported me, you know, especially Adrift when that became such a part of what we were doing at that time.”