Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside)

26:08Where I have this like massive notion database of every opportunity, big or small that's ever come up. And when a, like a piece of evidence, you know, out in the world comes in, it could be like a support ticket or like a CSM sends a gong call or like, there's a really great Slack. It's like a amazing brainstorm happening and ideas, date, piece of data, whatever it is, right? I'll file it. I like, I actually take a screenshot or whatever is I file it. And I start to like cluster these in this like really messy notion. And the reason I do this is that I've learned that, you know, we have these like roadmaps and strategies that like seem linear, but like life and customers and, you know, insights are not.

26:50So when the time does come around to work on that thing and that opportunity comes up, I can pull up that notion. And I already have a bunch of like really, you know, in the weeds, real world clues to start with. And even persuade people that we should dig deeper into this. Or for example, another advantage is that if I'm on a conversation with a person from sales or CSM from customer success, and they'll mention a request, you know, I can open that up. And I'm like, yeah, this is actually this client and that client and that client also mentioned that. And you know, you see like in their face that they feel heard like you've been listening all this time, like you've been writing this down.

27:31It's a really, I think it's really important as well. I love these tips. I love product scrapbooking as a term. It makes so much sense. It's just immediately clear what you're going to be doing. And I love how simple the approach there is. Is there anything else along those lines? Or is there something you want to share around the kind of this other bucket that I think you hinted at of helping your team set you up for success and get more done? I believe in cultivating very self -reliant teams. And I think that's really key to being having a lot more leverage as an IC, being able to manage multiple teams if needed on much bigger areas of the product.

28:09I think the key of that is having this mindset that product isn't a role. It's a team. And I read a quote once by Abby Atowati. And she's worked on Netflix and Uber and she's super experienced. And she says something like it's not about waiting for products, products said this or that or waiting for product. We're all product. And I really try to have that as the cornerstone of a culture of any team that I'm on. That I had a new teammate come up to me recently. He just joined and he was on engineering. And he came up to me excitedly. And he's like, I found a case that you didn't think about. And I was like, okay, awesome, but hold on, talk about language.

28:59Like product is not a role. It's a team. And whatever it is, I don't even know what it is. But everything that we own, like it's both design who's involved, engineering was super involved. Yes, I was there. And let's call it, hey, I found a way to improve the product. Or hey, I found something that we didn't think about. It's really, really important. So first of all, like that language, that culture, that it's not like this hub and spoke model, and like the PM is at the center and making all these decisions and passing things through. So first of all, that's like a fundamental mindset. It's really important for each team to have, to be more high -level design.

29:39I see the second thing is personally to seek to not be needed, but be valuable. And the difference is, like if you think about your day as a product manager, like look for situations where is there a game of telephone that's constantly passing through me? Are there a lot of situations where clearly you're the bottleneck, like your attention, your ability to get to something is the bottleneck. And a lot of people are waiting on you. Do you find like a lot of communication is happening in direct messages with you instead of public channels for the team? Are a lot of working meetings just like you and one other person on the team instead of maybe two or three?

30:23You know, not too many either. So all those are like opportunities where you can create a different situation where a culture on the team where people are figuring things out between themselves and maybe involving you at the very end. So one of the things that I really put a lot of energy into is really encouraging people to get conversations out of direct messages and into channels. This is like a really important way to cultivate people with just working together and figuring things out in between one another. And anytime somebody sends me a direct message, I say, this is a great question. Can you please put it in this channel with the team?

31:03I'll answer there, but it's really important for me that any decisions we make are transparent, that it's easy to find it later, that, you know, there's a few other people who should probably chime in if they want to. And this could be at the team level. I work at a company that had really, really big customer success organization. They'd constantly like find you as a PM and just DM you these questions. And I'd say, great question. Put it in like this really big channel. That way, and I give a reason. So that way other people in customer success team can search the channel and find the answer later.

31:37Right? They can help other people. And if you do this enough, it becomes a snowball effect because other people on the team will see that other people are posting in public channels and feel more comfortable with it. And that just becomes a chain reaction. Such awesome advice. There's like so counterintuitive also, I think to a lot of product managers where you're basically saying like remove yourself as a dependency, delegate more, empower everyone in your team, have engineers come up with ideas, have them write things like one page respects, things like that, like become less valuable almost, which I think is not the natural.

32:15Ten minutes. Absolutely. Become obsolete. And what's the dream? No, that's my dream. I love that. But I think they're like, if I thought if I think about trying to do this, I think you need like a real confidence as a PM and be and comfort with chaos. A lot of times PMs, they won't be the hub because the more they can control the narrative, the more they can control what people see, PCX, pinging an engineer, like, oh my god, they're just going to start working on this thing and then we have this roadmap. We have priorities. What are they? How do you manage that challenge? Yeah, there's a great phrase I heard a mentor once say, which is culture over process.

32:54You know, process is important and some of these need process to scaffold until you build the culture. But I think it's like you've got to view the team as like this asset you're building, right? This culture is an asset that you're building and you're investing in it and you're cultivating it. And you want to build something that's stronger than that's a great example. A CX person or salesperson, just directing messaging and engineer or just asking for something. You want to build something that's resilient to that. Like that's the real product that you're building as a PM, I think, is the team that builds the product and is resilient to all this.

33:29It doesn't happen overnight. It's not going to happen in the first quarter that the team is formed, but it happens, you know, over time, gradually with little messages and little interactions and positive feedback and, you know, asking people to work a little bit differently and giving them a reason why and building trust. And, you know, I think that success in my job is to build a very self -reliant team that's very resilient to all those things. I would otherwise, you know, like you said, keeping up a night and really make me worried. You shared an example of how you do that, these little mic...

34:00I call these micro interactions, like so much of a PM is these micro interactions with team members, which is so much harder now in a remote world. We can't just walk by and just do a little chat. The chat you shared, I think, is an awesome example where the language was a really powerful shift in how this person thought. Is there anything else along those lines you could share of how to create this sort of culture? One thing that I try to do is when somebody takes something that would be my job, right, and does that? Like whether it's on the design side, they, like, you know, lean in more or on the engineering side, they lean in more.

34:38People bring ideas or they say, hey, I took the liberty of doing this. It could be as small as, you know, something bureaucratic or like as big as like an idea or suggestion. I just shower them with positivity. I just show them just, you know, how excited I am, but they did that. That, you know, I just want that to happen again and then to feel even more bold. And just like, when somebody takes something off your plate, when somebody, you know, think does kind of the PM, what do you think is like, that's PM thinking, what are you doing, right? Just really want them to feel that that is extremely welcome.

35:11And I imagine there's a bunch of coaching you do to like help engineers, designers, researchers, data people think the way you think almost to kind of become more PME. Is that a part of this, too? I don't know if I would call it coaching. It's, it's like a lot, like I said, just a lot of little behaviors. So one thing I try to do along those lines is when there's something that's, you know, on me to do for someone or like the next logical step, I try to do that live with them. So if somebody asked me a question about, hey, what is the data show about this? If we went that direction, I'm like, I don't know, let's find out.

35:48Instead of saying, hey, I'll get back to you. Let's open, you know, a mixed panel. Let's play around with this. And I don't tell them, hey, you'd be great. I just show them how easy it was. Like, hey, if I could figure this out, like, you know, this Fisher Price data for PM is like this, you could totally figure this out. That's the, that's what I'm trying to imply by showing it. Or, you know, if it's a write a, create a geartick, just to make something happen quickly and document it. I like, hey, let's just do this together on the call right now and make sure I get it right. And what you see is over time, you know, some people more than others, but they start to just naturally want to do that themselves, ask you for that access.

36:24Start to do those things. Hey, you know, I did this and I wrote the geartick for it. I did this and I did the data analysis and, you know, that grows over time. You actually have a course that you're launching or is out now or about to launch that teaches a lot of these things. Talk about that. Yeah. This is a passion project I'm working on with Maven, the learning platform. It's a course called Builds Your Personal PM Productivity System. And it really goes super deep and super practical into these topics exactly. Like how to design your time, how to manage yourself, how to manage your emotions, how to cultivate self -reliant teams, how to give feedback and create a product org, you know, less, the puts less overhead on you as a PM.

37:11And yeah, that is to just take all these topics and just make this like really, really, really hands on. Awesome. I feel like I wish I had this and I feel like you're such a great person to teach this because as an IC, this is, this is how you succeed. This is the thing that makes it hard to stay as an IC. And again, with the rise of AI, almost creating a space for super ICs as we talked about, feels like this kind of stuff is going to be more and more important. So, I'll definitely link to that in the show notes. I want to shift to a different topic. I think you've kind of shown people this already, but you have a lot of very, and contrarian opinions about a lot of things.

37:49You see things a little differently. And there's a few other things that I've seen you talk about that I want to spend a little time on. So I'm just going to go through a few of them and just share whatever you want to share it. Sound good? Sure. Okay. Okay. Cool. The first is you have this phrase that, or this concept that every tech company basically has just two departments that matter. So yeah, over time, working at a bunch of hypergrowth companies, I've started to notice that there's some departments that are the reason that company won the market. And also started to realize that and this is sometimes true of the department that I'm in product, that even if product did a 10x job, it wouldn't be a 10x outcome for the company over the decade.

38:40But for example, it could be if marketing did a 10x job, the company would have a 10x outcome over the decade. And I started to observe this over the years and I noticed it's roughly usually like two things, two companies, sorry, two departments. It's roughly like two departments that this boils down to each company. So I'll just make this really concrete without naming names. The companies that I worked at, the two departments at one company was product design and support. Like those are the, like, if those two departments were 10x, then the company would win. Another company was data accuracy and customer success.

39:20Another company was the thing that made them win in the market was trust slash brand, like trusted brand and payments. And another company that I worked at looking back, what made them win in the market was marketing and engineering, like scalability. So product sometimes is on this list. So one of the companies I worked at, I mentioned in product design product, if that department does 10x impact, then the company will succeed 10x in the market. But it's, in my career, it mostly hasn't been product. Product has to do a good job. But it's not the, you know, not the biggest lever for that company, even though it's a tech product company.

40:11And I think this really crystallized for me when I finally worked in a company where product is that department. You feel that? Okay. So the 64 ,000 other question, whatever billion dollar question is, how do you know which of these, how do you know which two departments matter most? First of all, look at what really drives the growth. Like what's the growth model? You know, what are the levers? Ask those questions. How does it work? Ask officially and ask as part of your back channeling and, you know, reference checking. And the second thing is if you're really seriously checking out a company, evaluating a company, truly understand that customer.

40:47And like what are they actually paying for in this industry? You know, what is the thing that, what is the real product? What's the real value that they're getting? I clear they're paying for a product or service. But like what is beyond that? What are they actually paying for? Ask those questions. And I think that'll make it clear. I think maybe one trick here is just see what team drives growth. Oftentimes it's going to be sales. Oftentimes it's going to be product experiments they're running could be marketing. Exactly. And that department, if you're, whatever all you have, if you're in that department for that company, that's going to be your career defining work.

41:25Like that's why it's so worth it. That's going to be you're going to attract like, you know, the best colleagues your careers are going to, you know, have a step function, jump. Like it's, it's a totally different experience. And this is when people say a company is engineering driven, product driven, marketing driven sales driven. This is exactly what they mean, which team matters most to the company because they are driving most growth. So if you're a sales person on a sales driven company, you will be valued more highly than being a product person at a sales driven company. Now when I graduated from college at a friend, give me advice, he was like, don't be a finance guy at a tech company and don't be a tech guy at a finance company.

42:04This was 2009. So like, yeah, anyways. Yeah. And I think this is where a lot of people struggle where their PM at a company that is very not product driven and they read all these books about being empowered and having agency and autonomy and and instead they're just the team that people, they're just feature factories because other teams run the show and we don't need your opinions. We know we know, we know how to grow this thing, just build this thing for us. And here's the thing, that's okay. Like that's what that company needs, you know, to succeed in the market. You know, you think about the Olympics.

42:37This is analogy. It came to mind recently. It's like, if you let's say you can think like how a marathon runner looks and how a swimmer looks, right? They're very different. They look very different. You can you can spot them, you know, in the row of athletes. And if you imagine, you know, product being a lap muscle, that's product department, you know, you can be a lap muscle for a marathon runner. You can be one for a swimmer and a marathon runner needs one and it needs to work. But right, it's, do you want, where do you want to be that lap muscle on the swimmer on the marathon runner? I love that.

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44:22Check out Epo at getepo .com slash Lenny and 10X your experiment velocity let's get eppo .com slash Lenny. Let's move on to another, let's say hot take that you have, you have this kind of phrase that there's a big difference between book smart decision making and street smart decision making. What's that about? Yeah, this one comes out of a lot of mistakes I've made myself and seen around me as well. So I'm so guilty of this. Book smart decision making as a PM is all the stuff we talk about all the time. That's data, design, technology, strategy, frameworks, all that stuff and it's really important and that's why we're strong of it.

45:06Street smart decision making is taking all that and then seeing something from somebody else's point of view. This goes beyond empathy, I'll tell you what I mean, it's like giving the customers perception just as much weight as you would to logic. A really big example of this and I won't name the company. I was at this company that changed the structure of the pricing and the change was actually not meant to make more money. It was meant to unblock a payments roadmap and like enable all these feature requests that were stuck behind this fundamental change. And in preparing for this, the company did a lot of analyses and just made sure that this was really good for customers and this would only, like the numbers and the predictions and the models were like this is a positive thing.

46:07And I know all the people that were involved were the most empathetic, they really did this because they really cared about this customer. Generally, I've never seen people at the executive level, at the product level, at the data level, these are the people who really genuinely wanted the best for this customer. And they rolled out the change. In reality, bottom line, there was a big revolt on the internet. It was a big deal and I was rolled back. And the bottom line, why there was such a gap between, you know, everything, actually, by the way, all the analyses proved out to be correct. All the models, all the predictions, like everything played out, the numbers as predicted, the problem was the perception, the narrative behind it, what it looked like when you logged into the product and you saw only the negative, but you didn't see all the positive because the positive was, you know, what happened 30 days later and you saw the negative immediately, you know, a lot of things like that.

47:07And I would have made exactly the same mistake. I would, you know, I, not a criticism, I would have made more mistakes, but that's like what opened my mind to, oh my god, you have to really think more than just logical, more than just like, you know, utilitarian. Another example of this is there's a company I worked out where all the features that were on a higher plan were invisible to the lower plans, just because everything was built right fast and it was just, it was time to make them visible so people could upgrade. So we got that ready and we did this and we're about to release it and we realized, you know, tomorrow morning a bunch of customers are going to log into the product and there's all these features that they've been asking us for because they didn't know that we have them because they were locked and only on the higher plan.

48:00Suddenly, from their point of view, the company built everything that asked for and all of it requires paying more money. How are they going to feel? And so we didn't roll it out that way. We rolled out in smaller pieces and, you know, in different ways because we realized like that's going to feel really shitty. If you think about it, you know, but practically speaking or theoretically speaking, we didn't, we didn't upsell anything. We didn't start to, you know, these are all things we already had built. Everything is above board. That's the perception that was going to happen. And that's like an example.

48:39Is there anything that triggered that recognition or is it just people sitting around be like, oh, what about this? Or is it because the first example, you had a great point where customers were telling you this isn't necessarily what they want and you're like, no, no, no, you're going to do great trust us. It's going to be really good for you with their feedback, at least in the safety examples or something that's like, and what I'm asking about is like, how can people develop the skill because I love this device? I think that intuition came from spending time in the customer community and support tickets and just noticing smaller versions of that that people had feedback on and you kind of start to see what our customers at the time with what they would tend to, what their suspicions always were.

49:28And they're very trigger happy to blame the company for XYZ. And if you see enough raw data from customers or if you get on a customer call and they mention Nicole and Dimeing and all these things, you start to understand this is the target persona. This is how they think. This is what of that. A lot of hosts being really upset about changes like constantly everything that changed there and usually the changes are to help the business in some way, help the guests in many ways. And it's always this balance of we're just going to we got to do this. This is just the future. Is there anything there just real quick of just like learning when we got to do this anyway, even though they're going to be pissed versus like, oh, shit.

50:12Yes, yes, for sure. This is just, this is just like what I'm talking about is to recognize it. What you do with it, right, is a different thing. But you know, I joke when we when we do changes to like redesigns or changes to UX and we're going to get inevitable, you know, complaints, I just tell my team, we're going to deploy this and we're all going to log out of social media for two weeks. That's the strategy. Okay, let's extreme. We don't actually do that. And of course, but that's what we wish we could do sometimes. And the insight there's just social media will amplify one person's loud voice versus like how many people actually are upset about this.

50:50How important to the business, right? It's like don't pay attention to the loudest person. We're also, I think the key there is the two weeks because if people are still complaining after two weeks, okay, then there's something here. But in those two weeks, there's going to be a lot of feedback that comes from our resistance to change that they're going to adapt to and we can't won't be able to remember what was before. But you know, sometimes you make mistakes and people will, you know, if there's a real mistake, you'll know about it for a long time. Yeah, and obviously you'll pay attention to like support tickets and all that stuff.

51:25It's just yeah, obviously, yeah, so you know, and disclaimer like during those two weeks, we look at every support ticket and you know, look at everything on social media and we, for sure. Okay, two more examples about the street smart books, more that are that are really important. Oh, please, let's do it. Let's do it. This has happened twice to me where I, I worked on a team that made a very logical UX change and quickly found out that we ruined the sales demo. So for the users of the product, the, you know, the experience became a little bit smoother. It was an optimization. It wasn't an incredible.

52:07But then for the sales demo, it communicated the value less. It was harder for people to really understand, you know, in one glance. So a lot of times this comes from taking something that's very like visual and making it very efficient and small. So you might gain, you know, fewer clicks, but it'll make it harder for our, the sales team to, you know, to communicate. And for that, how moment to happen on a call, to the point where we made this change and then sales people would send me gong link recordings, you know, in the past and in the current demos and just show me the difference and it would would pain me to watch these and I was like, oh, we got to fix this.

52:47Like, people aren't getting the value of how they're even going to experience it. Okay, I know that you have a couple more hot takes that I wanted to make sure we have time for one that I love that I agree with. And it's kind of the thesis of this podcast almost, which is that there's no right way to get things done in a product team and a business in spite of what you may read online. I'd love to hear you take here. Yeah, I didn't always understand this. In fact, I moved continents because I had professional FOMO. So I moved from Israel to San Francisco because I believed and actually a lot of people, you know, had that feeling that, you know, whatever we're doing here in Silicon Valley, they know how to work.

53:33Like, that's the big leagues. And I got to work shoulder to shoulder with people who came from Apple, YouTube, Salesforce, Facebook, you know, Slack, Amazon, Stripe. Like, I got to work with the people who came from these companies I admired so much. And I came up with a conclusion that we're all just making it up as we go along in tech. We're all just improvising as we should. That's the beauty of it. Every situation is different. Every market is different. Right? Every company is different. What it takes to win is different. And so myself, I've had phases where I've been this like, zallet of, you know, everything has to be outcomes driven.

54:15And then I've gone to like, let's just ship as much as possible and figure it out. And everything needs to be maybe tested. And, you know, quarterly planning has to work this way. And should do scrum, or don't do it right. And I just realized like, there is no, it's not that simple. It's about figuring out the problem at hand and optimizing for that and having it up in mind. And just understanding that we're all improvising. That's really powerful. And I think people may hear this and be like, I think I get it. I guess for people that are just, you know, everyone's reading, reading my newsletter, reading all the newsletters, re -listening to podcasts, listening to how people work.

54:52What's your advice is it just like, what should people think in your mind when they read about how another company runs? My personal story, like, one of the things that happened when I landed in San Francisco, I really felt like an imposter. I was like, okay, well, everybody else here really knows how to work. And I need to learn from them. And six months later, I found myself giving talks and writing blog posts about how to work. And blog posts that were being used in like reforge courses and advising people and sharing. And that's what it hit me like, that's the beauty of this industry is that that can happen.

55:33Because everything is changing so fast, like, because, like, how did I get there? I was just on a team doing something really difficult and interesting in a very unique way. And you do, that's how you learn. That's like the real way to learn. My manager, Adam Fisherman at the time told me, you know, something related to this, which is like, the best networking is just to do really good work at a successful company and like, everything else will work out. So I think the same goes for like learning, right, the best learning is to just do really good work at a really good company with really good people that in self -problems that have never been solved before in this way, which will inevitably happen, right?

56:15That's what we're all doing. And everything else will work out. Like, you'll be the one writing the blog posts, not just reading them. Such important advice. So kind of the takeaway here is just if you want to become much better, if you want to be the one sharing advice versus the one reading advice, easier said than done, but the advice is work at a company doing interesting hard things, driving impact, being growing, being successful. And that's how you level up. Yeah, I love that. That's the best way. Yeah. And again, easier said than done, not everyone can join an awesome, you know, high flying tech startup.

56:53Interestingly, you did this like in Israel, right, away from the course of Silicon Valley. So you can find great places outside of yeah, outside of Silicon Valley. Absolutely. Okay. So I know that you wanted to spend a bunch of time and feel your corner, which I love. It's the recurring segment on this podcast or folks share times they failed in their career and things they've learned from those experiences. And you may, you want to need to carve out meaningful time here, which tells me that you've had a lot of these experiences for better or worse. So what I'm thinking is let's just go through a few of these stories that you think might be helpful to people to hear about times you things didn't go great.

57:29And what you've learned from those experiences, that is that sound. Yeah. Yes, really important for me to share this. I think during, you know, low points in my career, having someone share with me a failure story just really helped me understand that that's part of it. And I'm not alone. And you know, you browse LinkedIn, you see these incredible profiles with these incredible pedigrees. And what you don't see, it gives you this like sense that everybody's just had a smooth sailing and everything that's going great. And everybody has had, you know, some like everybody's been here long enough has had a ton of failure stories and ton of low points and self -doubt.

58:13So it's really meaningful to me to just talk about this. Let's do it. Let's get into it. Let's get real. So I'll say this, I've wasted twice. Twice, I've wasted an entire quarter of a growth team's time because of my poor use of user research. First time I can look back and after 12 failed AB tests and then, you know, 12 failed AB tests set us on the right path and got us to revisit our hypothesis. But if I had only spent more time with the customer, and this was, you know, the kind of AB testing that people say, no, you can do user research, you can't ask somebody what their, you know, how the button's going to affect their purchasing.

58:59But if I had spent time with the customer to just understand who they are, what motivates them, how they got there, why they're paying all that stuff I would understand that not every checkout process, you know, is the same psychology as Groupon or, you know, Amazon or booking .com. So the things that work on those sites work not just because, you know, people are the same everywhere, but they work because people are in the same mindset, you know, for Groupon, for example, Amazon is different, booking .com is different. And what you're working on, why people are buying, you know, in this situation that I was, that was in, was so different.

59:45They had so much motivation over such a long period of time, you know, they, they had, um, constant reminders, naturally in their lives that they were happy to get. And the things that didn't work were all the things that worked, you know, that the Groupon and booking and Amazon, all the e -commerce sites did. Those were not relevant. And we tried all those things and they fell flat. The moment we realized that, and it clicked for us, and all these, you know, all these AB tests that should have printed money did nothing. Once we realized that, then it really started, you know, increased conversion and it was a super successful team.

1:00:23But, man, I looked back at, if I had just, you know, I'd just use more qualitative research, even though it was an area that traditionally, you don't use qualitative research. I got to save so much time. It's also a great reminder of just not assuming wins that work at another company will win for you, which I think everyone's like, yeah, I know that, but I think people don't know that. I think they often, oh, like, look, this Amazon's killing it with this feature. We're gonna, if we add it, we're gonna, we're gonna win so hard. And so this is a great reminder, don't just take stories from other, there's something Shreyaos actually talks about a lot is don't take stories from other companies cost -full, you're a company.

1:00:59There's so many things that are not the same. Awesome. Yeah, what else? What else you got? The second example of that is, I was building a referral program and we made a user research plan and we ended up only executing half of it, which means we talked to the people who were already using it successfully. And we decided to skip talking to the people who should use it, but didn't. And we're like, yeah, we get it. It's probably the same feedback. We're in a rush for a lot of the reasons. There's a lot of pressure from just unrelated reasons and just decided that, okay, we have enough information.

1:01:38We don't need to spend more time with start shipping. And that was a huge mistake as well. We just spent so much time building something that didn't work. And, yeah, I think my lesson there is the reasons that got me to hurry and make that decision with not as much data were reasons that I just kind of took people's word for stuff. I didn't think as first principles as I should and I really caved into the time pressure. It's like tall. I learned to listen to it. Just letting it all out. This is great. And so so far, recurring theme is spend more time using research, talk to more customers. Again, somebody always hear a bit.

1:02:22A lot of people are like, I use a research. I don't need that. And we're hearing here is what a savior teamed months and quarters potential. Yeah. Each of those wasted entire quarter. Oh geez. All right. Cool. All right. What else we got? I have three times been a hair away from getting fired. I mean, by that is a senior executive has come to me and said, you are a hair away from getting fired.

1:02:51And one of them, one of them is there were changes that had a product really wanted to make. And I felt strongly that it shouldn't be made. And I voiced that directly, candidly, personally, and repeatedly. And then we had that conversation. And a colleague told me, listen, look at it this way. Like, if you trust the leadership team to adapt if something's not working, and so yeah, I trust them. Well, like what they need from you is just to rely on you that you're going to be with them, even if the disagreeing commit. Like that's what they need from you. If you're right, they'll adapt. If you're wrong, then great.

1:03:36You learned something. You know, a product or it got better. So the most important thing was, you know, there's like a song that Aleric said to go, you got to give in the win. Like it wasn't about being right. It was about just like being supportive and letting things fix themselves instead of, so that was that moment. It was really like literally that was that was the conversation. The second moment, the bigger story, but I was on that group that the my manager and I, we just weren't a fit. And that happens. It's really important to share that happens. It's it's common. And as somebody I respect deeply and has done amazing things, and I still respect them.

1:04:20And we just didn't work well together. And the next step was, okay, well, I guess, you know, it's time to let me go. And his manager was like, hey, you know, before we let you go, I want you to stay at this company. And let's find you another group to work in. So I was like, okay, he's like, just finish, you know, the initiatives you're on. Don't start new ones. And quarterly planning is coming up, sit in all the meetings, look for opportunities and things will work out. And I did that. And I didn't find an opportunity that I was excited about. And my initiatives wound down. And I didn't know, okay, well, what's going to happen.

1:05:06And then there was a group where actually three PMs left at the same time. One went on maternity leave. One got off her from fang and one had to start like an emergency tiger team out for their area of expertise. And this director, he filled two of the roles one internal hire one external hire. And it was one more role. And I reached out to him and he's like, yeah, great. You know, come put your desk next to mine. We'll just work on a few projects together, get to know each other. And I could tell after a few weeks that even though we'd been getting to know each other, he was still interviewing for that third role.

1:05:41And I realized that like something was stuck. And at the same time, the director who had a reach on say, hey, police at this company, you know, he'll find something called me with a very different tone. He's like, listen, you can't just float around without a role. If you don't find something, you know, soon we're going to have to let you go. And he was right. And so I found myself in this situation. And I actually reached out to a friend guy, Pelod, he's a friend and a mentor. I actually met him through the plenty of community. And yeah, he's here in Israel. We got coffee. And so I'll see. And he told me, listen, like clearly, you have nothing to lose.

1:06:23Like there's probably an elephant in the room, you know, this new director is wondering why do you leave this older group. He's not opening. He's not broaching the topic. So it's up to you to do it. And I was like, okay, what do I say? He's like, well, what would you say to him if you didn't have to edit yourself? You didn't have to censor yourself. And I just, I told guy, oh, this is what actually happens. What I believe, this is what I did. Could it have mattered? This, you know, he's like, he's like, dude, that's totally fine to share. You should share that. Like word for it. Just say that.

1:06:50So the next day, I took the director, you know, aside, and I had this conversation I shared, vulnerably, just like, here's what I think I messed up. Here's what I think I wasn't under my control. And that conversation just, like the vibe change, I could feel like a weight off our shoulders. I was like, we really felt like we got closer. And two days later, I was, you know, part of the group. I joined the group. Did some really awesome work there. That's such a powerful lesson right there of just opening up and being vulnerable and just sharing what you're actually feeling. And this has come up a couple of times in the podcast.

1:07:32Is what brings people closer. You think being vulnerable and showing weakness makes people think less of you, but almost always they think more of you because they didn't realize what they're doing. They didn't realize what you're going through. You kind of think they're reading your mind. Yeah, we've all been through that. Like, you know, it doesn't look like it. It doesn't, you see someone's, you think it's successfully admire. You look at some of these LinkedIn profile, you look at their resume, you look at their bio, right. It doesn't look like that, but we've all been through all of it, you know, right.

1:08:04And most times folks don't know that's what you're feeling or going through. And so just sharing here's what I, here's what I'm seeing. Here's what I'm feeling. Here's why things maybe aren't working for me. Yeah. It was a long way. Amazing. These are all some stories. What else? What else have you failed? I have single handedly tanks new payments for a whole week for a company I worked for. There's a well -meaning change. It was super logical. It was kind of streamlined. And I violated my own framework for when you run a betest. I even wrote like a blog post about this and I violated that. And I was like, oh, there's no downside here.

1:08:38And, you know, we didn't need to measure this. This is just kind of makes things way smoother. And then I get a call for marketing. They're like, why are none of our campaigns converting? Listen to your own advice. I'm going to be to sometimes. I'm going to be to sometimes if you're dealing with really sensitive flows that have big downsides, even if you think logically in your brain, there's no reason there should be a downside here. Great. The sticks are really high. Yeah. All right. Well, I have some stories. I don't know if they're failure stories, but they're kind of like Wild West. Let's do it.

1:09:11Let's do it. So it feels like it's like one time I completed disavage quarterly planning. I was, you know, my team was told to be to do one thing and we just said, no, we're going to do something else. It's not as dramatic as it sounds. It was like, you know, hey, we really, really believe that this is an opportunity. And if we delay this, there's going to be like a really nonlinear cost opportunity cost of this. And we really should do this. I'm like, no, you should still work on this. Like, okay, well, what if we, you know, made it a really small team. And it was just for one quarter. And then, you know, like fine.

1:09:41Okay. We have built that that capital to be able to do that. But, you know, I remember your W framework post. I love that. And I don't know what letter that would be. But that's how that worked. You have to the side split it off into make it a Y. But most importantly, did it work? Was that a good idea? Did it was at a right? Yeah. It was a right call that it's become way bigger team today. And yeah, I still read, you know, press releases and blog posts from the company where it's clearly that team's work. That's amazing. So, excellent. I got lucky though. Yeah. All right. All right. Sounds like again, this is this is just like Wild West, you know, Wild West, like PM is no less wild than the life itself.

1:10:29I have pulled an April Fool's prank on an executive team that resulted in my CEO seeing me like next time he saw me just look me in the eye, said, fuck you, tell and walked away. Can you describe the prank? So, the prank was, I'll say first of all, the best deeper Fool's Pranks are the ones that touch just ever so gently on people's biggest fears at that time. So in a work context, like whatever somebody's biggest strategic fear is, that quarter or like that March of that year, right? Whatever people are talking about, like you just have to touch it a little bit. They'll do the rest of the work.

1:11:07So, this company, there's this really big debate about internationalization. And should we do that? And there's a big trade off to doing it and other things we could be doing with the same resources. And the, this is just around everybody's minds, especially the leadership team. And it was March. So, my buddy and I also, the company we decided what would be people's biggest fears would be that a really big company would launch the same thing in Europe. And we created not just a fake screenshot, like not just fake news, we created a fake domain name, website publication. It was like really detailed.

1:11:52We really invested a lot on it. And of this like German website, and it was made up a tech arm of their Spiegel. We call it the Spiegel tech. We bought the domain. I'm probably incrementing myself by saying this. And then what we did is we knew that if we had sent that link on the first of April to the executive team, nobody would believe it. So, what we did is every executive on leadership team has that like senior report that they really trust. So, we got all them in on it. And the link would come from them. And each of them took it further. Like the senior engineer who's like this really critical to the company, he created a fake recruiting, poaching email.

1:12:42If I recall, I think the legal counsel created a fake cease and desist. Like we just went all out. And then, and this was on a Saturday. So we ruined the executive team's Saturday bed, like an emergency call. It was a Saturday. We ruined the executive team's Saturday. And every time that we decided that, you know, a particular executive had suffered enough, like depending when they woke up and how long they had been, you know, dealing with this, we would let them in on it, let them into the private channel and, you know, ha ha. So Monday rolls around, CO sees me, fuck you, tall, great. I'm still, I'm so employed.

1:13:26And I hear later that day that the leadership team had their Monday meeting. And somebody mentioned that, you know, even though that was a prank, he really got me thinking. And then the CTO of the company goes, wait, what do you mean prank? And he don'ts on, it don'ts on him. And he just gets up, throws down his jacket and like walks out of the room. So we forgot to tell him he had to, you know, stew with that the whole weekend. So, yeah, sometimes you got something to go stew for. That is well executed. Oh my god. It actually reminds me at Airbnb when I was, I was leading a lot of April Fools jokes year after year.

1:14:07And one of the best ones we did was we launched, it's basically we did the opposite of what you did. We launched Airbnb, which was a desk sharing service. And we made like a whole launch video. We were like announced it as like a new product Airbnb and ideas like you go get lunch and you can I'll be right back and then your desk can be rented out for like 20 minutes for 20 minutes. And we had a whole website and we had like, yeah, amazing video launching it. And basically it was the opposite. All the desk sharing companies got freaked out. Oh no. Because it's so great. It's so great. Yeah, exactly.

1:14:44Yeah. And the good news is we quickly, they quickly realized it was no, not not real. But we probably let this call some board calls. Okay. This is awesome. Any other stories? I've had thousands of people tag my CEO on Twitter calling on him to fire me. This was no by accident. But yeah. I was actually on vacation and I got bored and I was like, I haven't logged into Twitter. I haven't posted anything Twitter for a while. What's going on on Twitter? And I see that the notifications number is like maxed out. It's like 999 plus or whatever. And I was like, wait, what? And I clicked the notifications tab and I see the first tweet is has at CEO handle fired at TallReview yet.

1:15:38And I said that that has like a ton of retweets. And I keep showing down. I started piece together the story and there was a change, the pricing change that earlier I said hasn't uproar. And the internet was up in arms about this. And somebody found a blog post from a year earlier is Brian Balfour interviewed me about an onboarding experiment that we did. And part of that interview, I shared that at this company, we'd rather have fewer customers where we make a bigger impact on their lives than a lot of customers that we make a smaller impact. And kind of explaining the logic and the product principles.

1:16:22That was like really core to the mission of the company. And somebody took a very limited screenshot of that to prove that, you know, TallReview hates poor people or something. And that screenshot went viral and that those tweets got embedded on like NPR and Washington Post. And that was that was a little nerve -wracking. I wasn't fired because I actually wasn't connected to that. I wasn't on that. I really felt bad that the PR team marketing team and all that. I reached out to them. I was like, I'm so sorry. You guys are working over time because of my big mouth. And I'm like, don't worry. This is happening to everybody at the company right now.

1:17:03Everybody's having people digging stuff up unrelated stuff. But yeah, that's stuff that happened what a life you've led. Tall. Maybe just to close out this portion or discussion. Is there something that you think people should most take away from this really important stuff you're sharing of just like things that usually don't go well for people that do well in product? Like there are many things that go wrong. So the feedback I get from executives about these moments that really I think is transferable and helpful is that they know that no matter how silly I'm being or you know what kind of stuff I get myself into that they know for a fact that how much I how seriously I take everything.

1:17:49Like they know how much I'm taking if I make a funny presentation about something right and I put a lot of jokes into it but they're like you it's still extremely clear how seriously you're taking this. So I have peace of mind. Yeah, I think you have to have both. You can't just you know have these adventures or do these silly things or make these like these mistakes like it's important to give the confidence that you know you're making a mistake you're on top of it before anybody else that you know it's bothering you more than anybody else that you've if you're if you're communicating and you're trying to make it creative and like that first first of all you've done all your homework and you you know you've put a ton into it and that gives you the basis like the funny side of this is I friends who make fun of me that I work really hard to justify to like my friends that make fun of me I have friends that make fun of me but I work really hard so that I can increase the amount of bullshit that I can get away with having fired.

1:18:45Defense how you look at it but it's really important to give that to give that peace of mind. Yeah, build that trust book and then just deplete it completely. And then just throw it out the window. Tell us, is there anything else that you want to share before we get to our very exciting lighting around we've covered a ton of stuff all kind of feels like there's been three podcasts within one podcast but just before we move on is there anything else you want to share touch I don't leave listeners with. Oh, let's do it. Okay. It's a lighting round. Yeah. Well with that we reached our very exciting lightning round.

1:19:17I've got five questions. Are you ready? I'm ready. First question. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? The best book on product management that I've read is called How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. I encounter this book. My sister is a speech therapist and she had on her bookshelf at home in her apartment. And I was jet lag one night. I was listening to her and I read it. And if anybody has read Never Split the Difference by Chris Was where he talks about how he's like senior FBI agents in 70s 80s were realizing that all they were doing and they're like negotiating taxics were just not working and decided to try something different.

1:20:01And that's something is basically nonviolent communication. And he gives these amazing examples of decades of using this with kidnappers and terrorists and organized crime to diffuse situations and create productive outcomes. So this book with all due respect to FBI agents and terrorists and hijackers and kidnappers, right? This is about kids. So this book is for me, this is what really the examples, how it's communicated. It's like illustrated almost like a comic book, tons of super concrete examples. And for me, I think that's when these principles really sunk in. It's from that book really resonated with me the most.

1:20:48More than the book itself for nonviolent communication or the Never Split the Difference, both of which are awesome. So I really recommend that book. Man, I want to do a whole podcast on it. Would you learn there? But I'm going to force myself to move on. That's awesome. This is going to be really helpful to me as a new parent. There's a book that another, I'm just going to throw out a book recommendation, reverse lighting around on this topic that Joe Hudson, recent podcast, yes, recommended offline that I've found to be incredibly helpful. It's called Listen. It's an orange book. So there's a few on Amazon and we'll link to it in the show notes, which is just called Listen.

1:21:22And it's about why listening is the most powerful way to help your kids get through stuff that is challenging to them. That's like an awful title. Just listen. That's it. And then all these different ways of listening. So anyway, okay, we'll keep going. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV shape? We're really enjoyed. I recently rediscovered Ted Lasso. The first time I watched it, I got tons of recommendations. It's hilarious. I didn't connect to it. I just didn't connect to the humor. I was like, ah, okay, fine. Yeah, I stopped watching it. And then I heard a podcast where somebody recommended watching it from a point of view of like leadership lessons and they just couldn't stop recommending.

1:22:01They just so passionately recommended it. And I was like, okay, let me revisit this. And when you watch it from that point of view, it's mind blowing. If you think about, I'm sure, you know, a ton of people listening to this have watched the show. You think about the premise of the show. It's this guy who's been given an impossible task. And he's surrounded by the worst human beings in the world. In terms of, you know, they're just the worst human beings and behaviors. And the way he gets through that, right, is it's hard to describe. You have to watch it. I think any attempt to summarize it. The show, just watching it, how this character behaves and gets through this stuff is is incredible when you watch it from that point of view.

1:22:45And for me, when I, I think it definitely affected how I work. Definitely influenced me, but not just work. Like just also how I deal with, you know, aggressive, Middle Eastern urban life, situations, how I deal with, I've applied this dealing with really tough locals, surf breaks, you know, in South America. Like, it's incredible. I, I, I, I, I, I give a story of the surf break. I was in Chile and I was surfing and it was an hour of the day where a lot of people were local would be surfing and a bunch came out and they started giving me these like, looks, you know, this happens in every one of the world, every surf break.

1:23:34And just like, really uncomfortable. And I'm one of the guys especially. And after a while, I was realizing like, I'm not going to get the surf if I, if this, this keeps up. And, you know, I'm not, there's no conflict way to get out of this. And I swam up to him and I asked him, I was like, hey, are you from like peachy lemon? Are you from here? And he's like, yeah, why? I was like, you're one of the luckiest people in the world. And he didn't, you know, he was totally caught off guard. He started smiling. And like, you know, they just changed the whole life. I got to a point where, you know, he was telling other people like, you know, let me have this wave.

1:24:21And that's not my experience, you know, in a lot of surf breaks. And I, you know, my friend calls it Ted Lasso, the Ted Lasso somebody, which is also very genuine. Like, you really have to believe it. Okay. Next question. Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love? So this morning, I spent half the day surfing. And I think the products I've really come to appreciate. There's not a lot of products used in surfing. It's like a wetsuit, like warchwords, you know, maybe a hat. But you can really feel like I surf with O 'Neil wetsuit, hyperfreak wetsuit, but that doesn't matter.

1:25:01It's like when a piece of gear is like really well constructed, you can feel that a person behind this also surfs or spends a lot of time with surfers. And really gets you, probably gets you more than you understand on face value. And you start to notice all these details over time. It takes a long time to notice all these details. And you can really feel that there's a person behind this product that gets you. And that's like, it's kind of like art almost. You know, when you feel a piece of art or music really resonates with you, you feel that the artist is like communicating with you directly.

1:25:38Letting you feel something that they were feeling, it's almost like that. So I think like, for me, it's outdoor equipment that you can feel that the person behind this is like using it along there with you. First time a wetsuit has been recommended on a podcast. A great milestone. Two more questions. Do you have favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful and worker in life, share with friends or anyone? I think I'm doing three surf stories in a row, but my, this is a life motto that's just stuck in my head for almost a day, yeah, for more than a decade now, which it comes from a piece of plywood outside of surf shop in Mexico that was painted on it.

1:26:21You can't stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf.

1:26:28And yeah, there's a lot to that. Over time, I've really tried to apply that in a lot of ways, emotionally, organizationally, at every level. You think about that. All in those lines, final question. So at the beginning of this podcast, you mentioned that this podcast has been a long time coming. And the reason that's the cases we had this scheduled for sometime in early October, you live in Israel or broke out. You've been living through that being in Israel this entire time. I saw this vent diagram that you put out that I think summarizes your life right now, which is, I forget one side of it, but just like apocalypse apocalypse, one circle, the other is gotta get to work.

1:27:14Go to wake up and make Israel's in the middle. That's what, and you've been for real that for the past year. So I'd like to just briefly just hear how that's been for you in the past year. How are you doing? How is life for you? Here at Riverside, we've had a bunch of people out for reserve duty. I think all of them are back now. I have a team lead. Well, people are still going in and out of reserve duty while working here. I have a team lead who leaves on some days around, you know, 4 p .m. goes to the base. Won't say what he, what he has to do, but it's super intense and shows up the next morning, all tired, but back at work.

1:28:00And, and general, we have, it's not just in Israel, we have teammates in Ukraine. All along at the same time. Yeah, like one of my teams is almost entirely in Ukraine. So you'll have, we've had moments where, you know, we'll all be on a call and then they'll be, you know, missile siren here in Israel, here in Tel Aviv. And we'll say, hey, sorry, we gotta go. Go down to the shelter, here are the explosions overhead, come back, sit back down. Later that day, we'll have another meeting. And on the Ukraine side, you know, you'll hear like, hey, that beeping, isn't that the the missile alert, you know, on your end?

1:28:42And Andre, like, isn't that the, that the critical alert on your iPhone? Maybe he looks at his phone, he'll be like, yeah, but I got 10 minutes. Like, let's just finish the meeting. Right? Like, oh, he's like surreal moments where you just, at the same time where everything's not normal, people have this really strong desire for normalcy. It's, you know, work and everything around us and our routines like become more important than ever. And it's just these, you know, you have, oh, you know, where's Vlad? Oh, you know, the power grid was attacked in this town. So he's working on it, get me the generator back out.

1:29:17Okay. But, you know, I don't know if it's like a no -excuses mindset or bad asseries, so much as, I know, am I honest, just that, like, I think we're creating a definitely for, am I honest, just like, really, really crave the routine and the sense of normalcy when you can get those moments. And like I said, I, you know, I think during this podcast, working on this course, all these things, I'm not doing them because things are normal. I'm doing them because they're not. So, yeah. And I'll use this opportunity to say that, you know, biggest thing in all of our minds is this 107 hostages that have been held for 320 days by Hamas.

1:30:00Yeah, you need to bring them home now. Yeah. Well, it's also just come home. Let's help things and soon. I'm really impressed with how much you've been able to get done in the middle of all of that. And thanks for making time for this. I know that this isn't the most important thing in the world right now. But I think this conversation is going to help a lot of people. And if so much was them to share. Thanks for being here, Tull. Thank you. On the course real quick, just to make sure people check it out, how do people find it? Just throw that out there as a final step. It's on maven .com. In the product catalog.

1:30:39And I'll have it. I'll probably post links to my LinkedIn as well.

1:30:49You can see the first cohort. Amazing. And we'll link to it in the show notes. Tull. Thank you so much for being here. Howdy. Thank you. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com. See you in the next episode.