product management

“I think there's a tendency in product management and product design to want to do meetings where there's kind of this big reveal and an aha to the audience. And it's kind of the opposite of how you want to handle most of these situations. You want to de-risk t…”

“The, how much all of the challenges that senior executives are dealing with come down to people. Versus, you know, product, right? So it's like, you know, it's fun to think about designing products, optimizing, doing user discovery and, you know, what testing,…”

“The other thing is that you don't need a coach who's done the job before. And that's another, I mean, obviously I've done the job before, so I'm sort of undermining part of my own selling point here, but coaches are trained to coach people on any topic. So whe…”

“Product management is you are a leader from day one in product management, right? And, you know, there's leadership all over the place, but that's sort of your job. You're a leader. You don't have any formal authority. But you're a leader, you're expected to l…”

“The product manager is responsible for making sure that the solution is valuable and viable. And that is hard. That is hard. That takes real work. And that's part of the how that's a pretty damn integral part of the how as well. Now you don't tell the engineer…”

“At good companies. It really hasn't changed much at all. And I mean, for more than 20 years, it really hasn't changed at good product companies. Now the techniques they use have changed. In some dramatic ways, but the job, the principles hasn't.”

“And at some point during that one year, I realized that while I was a good engineer, I was perhaps A top 20% engineer. I realized that I would never be a great engineer, that I would never be a top 10% engineer, because I saw those engineers and the fortune of…”

“You should be spending some time on internal optics because it creates energy, it creates awareness, it creates excitement, it creates opportunities for feedback. Those are all really great things, and they will enable greater impact and better execution for y…”

“Purely based on the word that has come to label a behavior that alternatively could be about, how do I shift the direction on something? Or how do I help the business actually succeed when I disagree with somebody about something? And that's a very different m…”

“As a PM, you are a leader. You have to provide a buffering or damping effect on the team. And that goes two weeks. Sometimes we're doing stuff that everybody thought was amazing. This is the best thing we've ever seen. And you kind of got to bring people back …”

“You can't do homework. You can't do exercises. You can't do fake stuff. You have to work on real products at real companies with real customers, with real data to get better at product management.”

“One of the trickiest bits about it is that there's no clear, obvious pre-training you can do that gives you like a baseline set of understanding that you can use to be a product manager.”

“You have to shift from doer to editor is the way I think about it. You have to shift from my job is to do the work to my job is to make the work better. My job is to plus the work, to review the work, to help other people solve problems.”

“So I think if you, let's say you want to explain the rest of the company what you're You and the team are up for the next three to four months, so to say. And then I think that's two weeks of work, not eight hours a day, obviously, but two weeks of work, maybe…”

“I find you don't need to be listening to and reading everything all the time. It's just like, I need to figure out how to prioritize. Let's see what's out there.”

“It's really, really hard to get into product. And there isn't a really set path to do that. So what I've seen is the path that we just talked about, join a startup, and then from there go into different companies. And then the other path is, that is typical, i…”

“These competencies, I think, are the same for APMs as they are for CPOs. And I can talk a little bit about how they change as a person gets more senior. But these 12 areas are equally important regardless of where you are within your product management journey…”

“My favorite interview question is tell me about a product that you love. And I can have that question last five minutes. I can have that question last 60 minutes. And so that's the first question that I'll typically ask people during a screening interview. I u…”

“Build for your best user, not your worst user. And what I mean by that is, I think it's actually really easy to kind of get stuck or to sort of focus on like, what if there's abuse of this product or think about all the ways in which the product won't be used …”

“I think we actually had our first PM at, I want to say about a hundred employees.”

“And to this day, when people ask me, hey, like, what's your advice for going into product management? I'm like, well, you should go get a sales job. I think it's like pretty, pretty valuable.”

“I think it's really tempting as a manager to build a team in your image because you understand their skillsets and you value those skillsets and you're going to be able to detect and assess those skillsets better. But the best product teams in my mind have rea…”

“And as a PM, you will never need to actually train or code.”

“I can count on one hand the companies who have blocked their product managers from speaking to customers. And those companies are not product companies. I mean, they do not believe in product management. They might say they do, but they don't.”

“And it's much more valuable to have that background than to have this specific domain expertise background. Like, those are complimentary, but as a PM, having the solid PM background is the more valuable piece, I would say.”

“I think I agree with my friend Ken Norton on this and that you shouldn't probably start in product. Go be an engineer or be a designer, you know, work, get to know businesses”

“I think we sort of forgot in the industry that many times the fastest way to learn is to ship.”

“And you know, that's gonna go away over the next five years. And it sort of takes us back to what product management used to be like, which was, you know, you didn't have all these resources around. You didn't have all this time to figure it out because if you…”

“I think the real PM job is the least likely to get replaced over time. Because you need, you know, real subject matter expertise. You need to, you know, be trading off a lot of different types of things and making good decisions for the company and for your cu…”

“So I think at this point, it's a pretty good no code, low code tool. And it's obviously gonna become a lot more than that. But for a lot of these other use cases that people are touting, there's a decent chance confidently tells you the wrong thing. And that w…”

“I think getting into startups as a product manager is a pretty awesome way to get into product because it's just a lot of problem solving. The problem with that is you don't have anyone to teach you the right way, but the product will teach you the right and w…”

“And there's a whole business, honestly, around the business of product management, which I find really fascinating and didn't exist. And I think for better or worse, that comes with a lot of good. And in some ways I think might've removed some of the quirkines…”

“I'm actually really a big fan of a diverse set of experiences that I think learning about pre-product market fit, then seeing smoke turn into fire and witnessing and maybe shepherding that and then taking fire and turning it into something great and being an e…”

“Those tracks from a promotion and from a industry, how we perceive it. Are hard to, they're not in cement yet. They're tender. You wait six months, you wait, you know, nine months, they'll become very, very strong and solid. And I think then we'll be able to l…”

“I think it's really important to become really good at and also known for something. And what I mean by that is when you're known in your company for a particular thing, I'll give you a couple of examples. You could be known for shepherding like the most compl…”

“I've actually never seen a great PM who's in the center of it. I find the great PMs live on the edges. Like there's a, you know, there's always someone who's like this exceptional data science and the ability to maybe be a great GM and lead inspire, or maybe s…”

“I do believe that taking like a truly like academic approach towards, you know, upskilling has like fairly diminishing returns because it's tough to field curve balls in a classroom.”

“You were working on the messaging and working on the consumer positioning again, well, in advance of anything actually being live or built, like that kind of was what framed what features you wanted to build and what problems you would put on the table to be s…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“Infrastructure is the product. Period. Like, I, people are like, oh, tech debt. I'm like, yeah, it's the product debt. I cannot build a skyscraper on a shaky foundation. So it is your problem, too. It's not for the engineer to, like, be barging on the door abo…”

“I think in India, when we were in 2010, et cetera, even those different people who needed to come together to build, like say e-commerce they would come from, say, FMCG, or they would come from manufacturing, and so on. And what they would have seen in their j…”

“I think till about 2000 ten-ish there were not really many products built for the Indian consumers in the first place. Like, there were a lot of products being built, a lot of technology being built but largely because it was a back office, so you were, so you…”

“There's nothing better in learning how to solve a problem than trying to solve the problem. You know, just, you will get all the answers, the research, the failure, the mistakes, you know, all the evidence.”

“When we see sales or executive driven product management, when we see these alternatives to product management, it's not a cultural knock or a leadership knock. It's really on the individual and the discipline has to elevate itself to a place that it earns the…”

“I don't think it's tied to interest rates. I don't think it's tied to that. I think it's more tied to the quality of the leadership and the need of the business to do more than optimization.”

“I just think back to like when mobile happened, if you're a PM that jumped on mobile, you had the pick of the litter when it came to jobs in very interesting startups. And so I think we're in the same moment here where if you can ratchet down and specialize an…”

“PM is such a generalist role It's okay to go a little left and a little right to go up. And, you know, I took this marketing growth role. That was actually my first director role. It wasn't only for product. It was for marketing and I had to learn marketing an…”

“Communication lowercase c I feel like is one of the places that's going to be replaced. You know, there's, and I call it lowercase c is like the functional trading of information That allows other people to do jobs. Like, I think that these language models and…”

“If you are a PM who has strong opinions is to be very direct about how much you care about your opinions. So like now I'll do this thing. Where I'll be like, oh, I think we should do this, but I feel like medium confidence on it, so if you feel stronger, like,…”

“I started understanding these things are not just signaling. They are also anti-signaling. They are like, oh, I'm high agency, so it's sometimes ok if I'm a little brash, if I cut corners somewhere, if I am, if I sometimes come across as a little rude to some …”

“As you start becoming mid-senior, I see the conversation shifts from what can I do? How am I learning? How am I growing? To: Why is the organization not doing this for me? Why can that stakeholder not change this thing about themselves? Why do I not get to wor…”

“It's fundamentally disrespectful to go into a meeting already deciding that you're right and the other person is wrong, right? Because you can't know that for sure, right? There's always a new perspective, new data that could come in. And so you want that conv…”

“If you're really a student of product, you can't just be a student of theory. You've got to be a student of practice too. Meaning you're going and you're looking. It's like, hey, I'd love to sit in your team meetings. Can I come watch? Or your PM meetings or y…”

“Google's a fantastically engineering driven culture. And the way that they think about product management is mostly in the technical sense of like, Here's a piece of technology. What can that technology do? How do we scale it?”

“Probably everyone's learning to do a bit more of everyone else's job in this current moment. That said, I definitely think there's still immense value in product, immense value in design, immense value in engineering, and so I think those roles will continue t…”

“The place that this comes from for me is writing is clarity at scale, and a key component to a PM's job is creating clarity, both internally and externally.”

“And so it's easy, I think for a PM to say, that's not my responsibility. I define the requirements, you know, Have a menu group that goes to the next level. Designer, engineer, figure it out. No way. Like, that's fully on you, and you better be involved in tho…”

“I've seen so many times where there's been a PM, engineer, designer, like whatever role, they cannot make it work at company A. And then you see them five years later, just killing it in company B. And you're like, did they change as a person? Did they get sup…”

“I'm also, I feel honored to be on a product management podcast for a person who doesn't believe product management is real.”

“Product is usually like the last department to really just because it's smaller, I think.”

“The first step that I found is very useful, and I use this tactic every single day in meetings, is just summarization. So hearing, bringing people together, lots of different voices into a room, and hearing what they have to say, and at various times in the co…”

“I definitely think doing it within the same company is a lot easier than trying to switch companies and switch jobs at the same time, because when you're in within a company, you've already built credibility, hopefully, and if you haven't, then go crush it at …”

“At some point, if you haven't already gotten there, many of you have, but for those of you who haven't, you will get there, where your scope will be so large that no matter what you do in terms of efficiency, whatever, you know, framework you use for prioritiz…”

“And this is one of my strongly held beliefs about the art of product management, which I've made a career out of, is I think AI will collapse The talent stack. So what I mean is these jobs that have been separate will start to become one”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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 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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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'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”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”