LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn)

21:52And I have a feeling and sometimes we like to think five, 10 years out, I think it's going to go on the same journey. I that's kind of one hunch I have that it'll also be an employment driven kind of way internally for people to find their next play and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out but already it's you can feel a little bit of that tension right when we launch it and kind of know and I hope that let's see how this goes. You're talking about how hiring is changing. I'm curious how PM hiring specifically is changing. A lot of people listening to this podcast or product managers, is there anything you need to be noticing there?

22:22Maybe a couple of stats that could be very helpful. If you're having a hard time finding a PM role and start with this, you're probably not alone. We publish it, you can go to our economic graph data. This is all public, we publish this. But if you look at tech, it's bound about 50 % year over year and we look at kind of hires over total population all linked and you can go to our economic graph sign you can see the how it compares the trends industry. And we don't look at the functional data as much but as you get, the PM data seems to be trending just slightly even maybe below software engineers and that as well, which is maybe a cop for this.

22:50And I know not everything is perfect industry to function kind of cuts. So it is a difficult, it is a difficult place but I'll give you a couple tips because I imagine that may be helpful for a couple of the listeners and I'm certainly one of the larger in bounds of things I get. The first is in those kind of markets, you do wanna make sure that the more you can do to kind of form relationships and kind of say that this is, which is always helpful. Now I know that not everyone has relationships but you can always try to develop those at different places in across LinkedIn as well but that's one thing I would really, really start to look for.

23:23The second thing I would really do is we have launched the way now to come in and kind of signal obviously that you're interested in a role we have those open of work capabilities but then each of job has a set of skills that they're looking for under it. Like we talked about in skills first hiring and against each skill you can actually add different kinds of credentials and I would really encourage people to add work products if that's something that are actually building if you add different kinds of recommendations or other things that can associate with that skill and those credentials against it I think are becoming much more interesting for people to say, oh this is someone I'm actually looking for.

23:55And then the third thing I would really encourage kind of PMs to start looking through is I think in every, this is probably more personal than anything in kind of data. But every PM job is different and if you have experience in that industry and you're able to kind of show that you have experience in an industry or some kind of understanding of it, I think that's a way to separate and so I'd really start zoning in on roles where you might see that kind of, if you don't have the functional experience kind of the industry experience and I think that that would kind of go a long ways how to help you differentiate from, yes, what's probably more candidates or more applications going into each role.

24:29And when you say industry experience, what's the example that? Imagine that you were applying for a PM role but that particular software is in, I don't know, automotive tech. If you happen to have worked in automotive and I've motored before, have a knowledge about cars, that's a very helpful way to get in. And I think if you were able to show that, you can show an industry knowledge and an understanding of it. I think it's a real nice way to think about how to position yourself against some of the other candidates. What else can that a person looking for a job do to improve their chances of a recruiter basically finding that might feel like that's probably the best tactical thing that can do because a lot of like did his recruiters reaching out and finding you?

25:08There's two things that anyone who's hiring is always going to look for. They're going to look for your skills and capabilities and they're going to look for your intent and interest in the role. And a lot of our products and the pathways we try to do are making those things simpler. So maybe we'll just start with interest and interest and we'll move back to skills in a minute. A couple of things we've launched recently and I think there are symbolic of other ways you can connect. If you go to a company page and you looking at the company and they've, I think they have to opt into this in some degree and you say, look, you can see you're interested in that company.

25:36Even though they don't have roles. And when the next role comes up, they'll have a signal that this person is actually very interested in this role. And that's an easy way to kind of signify from the early stage that you have interested in them. And that way when they open up a role as you can imagine, they start looking through, they'll have a spotlight and recruit and they can click on a come -turve. Certainly you can go into open work and say that this is something that I'm open to work right now and you can signify to the whole population that this is an area that you want to go for as well.

26:02And I would encourage both of those in some ways. If you're looking for a role, be open about it and tell the companies that you're looking for there, those are really high signals of intent. The other thing you can do on LinkedIn is you can actually go through when you say open a work and you can specify like particular kinds of jobs and things you're looking for. And I think that more detailed intent helps make sure you're showing it to the right place. On the skill side, we kind of talked about a little bit, but I do think there's a big change. When you're just looking at title, I think you only had one way to really prove that you had the skills.

26:30You had to have that title, which is very hard to break in. In a world where you're looking at skills, you can go through and say, look, I can do these things and you could put evidence behind it. And I'd really encourage people to do that. If you just go to account of any job post, you can see the skills, you can say add and you can see all the evidence and how you can add it. And I would really encourage people to do that because when people in Recruiter and they're looking for skills, profiles pop up and you can scroll over a skill and you can actually see all those evidence and you can basically a Recruiter can say, oh, this is why I'd recommend you to this hiring manager.

27:00And I think you will find that that's a, hopefully a very useful way of doing it. I'm gonna love this question, like a fishing line to see if there's catches anything. And we'll see if not move on. Are there any stats that you've seen of just like, if you do XYZ, your chances of getting hired or getting people reaching out or just go significantly higher? Open of work certainly has a high signal to noise and it's, as you can imagine, someone's looking to fill a role, that's one they want. We are early in company commitments, but we are seeing some signal there that we kind of move through. Skills has a pretty high signal as well.

27:34When you're able to come through and show and demonstrate your skills, we're seeing some correlation to basically people getting a role. And then the final one that is harder for us to look through, but it's certainly important. I do think we show the hiring manager on a lot of the roles we show these people through. And it's harder for us to kind of trace that because of the way the outcomes kind of work, but I would really encourage people to look through that and see if you can get in front of those people. Is there a max seniority that you find works effectively on LinkedIn to find a job? Like, I imagine like CPO's aren't finding jobs in LinkedIn.

28:07Is there just like, if I'm looking for a job, is you have like a rule of thumb of like, if you're at this level, maybe you're not gonna have a lot of luck if you're below the level. You certainly have CPO jobs that are posted, but the difference often is job posts versus recruiting. And more senior roles are often recruited. And so we find that people will use LinkedIn in order to connect to CPO and many people who are senior will say, oh, I got a message on LinkedIn on that lead to this or they made a long -term recruiting contact. But it may not happen through you finding a job and hitting the application button.

28:38Let's talk about LinkedIn as a company to work in. Culture may be for a bit. You told me that you have a story about your first product review when you joined LinkedIn and how that was wild. Can you just tell that story? I haven't heard this yet. Yeah, so I came through a small acquisition that they made of our company and I thought it was such a telling moment in this first product review. I wanted to, and as you can imagine, when you join a company, there's a lot of advice on how you should make that product work. And I know anything I've never been a PM. And I remember kind of taking a lot of that advice and putting together a presentation and just getting destroyed during that review.

29:15I think Jeff was the head of product and CEO at that point. And in a very kind way, it was basically like, this doesn't make any sense. And I just remember driving home and kind of calling my wife and I think I might be fired. I'm not sure if I was fired, but he was very kind about it. And it's like, just come back and exit, I think, like four weeks. And I remember at that point, I was like, if you're gonna go in and you know, you only have one more shot, just do something you believe in, right? And kind of make sure it kind of works. And we started from that point and we worked backwards from there and this concept, okay, I do believe that the most important things connect an opportunity and we should really understand how to do that and let's just start from there.

29:48And it went very well. And to me, it was another way of you, you're in these large systems, you're in these large companies, you're in these large, you, I think LinkedIn is very special because no matter what it is, it's got a very good North Star. And it was a moment for me to kind of really hammer that home that like as long as you get that North Star in, you know, ahead of you, you're gonna be just fine. And I think it's, you know, I'd never worked at a place like that before. And I think a lot of times people wonder, we have, I mean, you imagine, we have the way we're talking about, we certainly have an engagement ecosystem, we have the hiring business and we have a marketing solutions business and we have a big premium business.

30:24You can imagine when you're trying to make decisions across that, it could get very, very complicated. And I think when people ask me to describe LinkedIn, I often start with that story because I feel like it, you know, it helps cut through how decisions they're made and kind of what it's seen as successful. And just to clarify, so that North Star is that phrase that used of just connecting people to economic opportunity, right? That's it, that's it. And it sounds, I know it sounds bigger than it seems, but I can probably, you know, time example again, you can understand when someone's driving and I haven't been here for a little bit now.

30:54You're gonna understand when someone knows that when someone's doesn't. It's a hard thing to lose track of. Yeah, it does sound vague in like a nice fuzzy, warm thing that people can say. What you're saying is it's actually like, it's brought up in meetings constantly in product reviews, like you're saying in this product review, everything changed when you came at it from that one perspective. Yeah, I mean, this was my first product here was the profile. You can make a profile that does a lot of different things as you can imagine. You could, you know, you could think about how identity could be used in many different phases and what you should prioritize and not.

31:31But if you can explain why this is the thing that you should do that would help someone, you know, really do what they wanna do. Maybe it's, you know, have an incredible podcast and send that out there. Maybe it's helping them connect to a job, but if you can understand and understand how this sounds like and why you wanna prioritize that item, all of a sudden the world gets a lot simpler. How does that actually get operationalized that a company? Is it just the leaders remind people of that? It's like painted on the walls. How is that a thing that people come back to over and over? I do think it's a lot of repeat, repeat, repeat.

32:03I do think that's it. I do think the culture has a pretty high immune system now in the sense that when you aren't operating by that, people can see it and they operate against it. But I also think it's probably the, I think when, you know, in Jefrazy and Ryan they are just exceptional at continuously repeating that. And it's been so consistent for so long that I think it's just kind of the DNA now. And I do think it's exceptional. I think it's exceptional leadership and I've learned so much from kind of watching it and how it gets operated. Is there a metric associated with that when people use it in a way of like, nah, that's not actually what we mean.

32:40Is there some way of making it even more concrete in goals, metrics, ways to understand people are actually achieving that? Yeah, totally. So I think at the next level of operation, what we think about is, you know, when we run these marketplaces throughout the ecosystem, the connect people out to me, what are the outputs that they matter? So I'll just give you mine, for example, we think a lot about number of hires, convert and hires, how many people did we match, which is a real tangible way of looking at Virginia. And then number of people who learned a skill, which is usually in this world measured more by time than anything if you learn.

33:09It's been time for X amount of minutes, we kind of did that skill because oftentimes skills don't have a direct outcome as you can measure it's good. And so we basically look at those things more than any other to say, how successful that we are operating that marketplace. God, that does make a total sense to me. Yeah. Are there other core values that blinked in that are public that you can share? I mean, you can Google them too. And so they're very, very public, but the public, the one that I think is most important to talk about is in this world is, you know, there's this concept of members first.

33:40And I think anytime you run an ecosystem as complex as we do, and you think about it, even if you're trying to connect people opportunity, there's two people. How are you going to decide right now who needs it? I think having clarity on which piece of the ecosystem is going to be where the focus is. It helps us make sure we establish a relationship, a trust first, make sure to understand who's getting, you know, access to data, make sure we understand our decisions that we made. And I was love that as a principle that we've stuck by. Yeah, I see it on the picture. We put members first. So. Great checks out.

34:10That's what you tell me. Check out. What's interesting is the connecting people to opportunity, economic opportunity is not one of these values. It seems like it's even broader. They should have the company basically got it. Okay, I love that. This episode is brought to you by Epo. Epo is a next generation A B testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like DraftKings, Zapier, ClickUp, Twitch, and Cameo rely on Epo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential. But there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern growth team stack.

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35:19Epo supports tests on the front end, on the backend, email marketing, even machine learning claims. Check out Epo at getepio .com. That's getepo .com and 10X your experiment velocity. You've kind of touched on this idea of a complex system and I want to spend a little bit more time there. LinkedIn is, as you said, very complicated. There's all these marketplaces within marketplaces. There's so many customers you got to make happy. They all have to work together. I'm just curious what you've learned about building and maintaining a complex ecosystem like that. It's a fantastic question and it's, first of all, I just hope I think, I first of all just career wise always been drawn to that.

36:02I think, as many, we talk about product as a whole. We always talk about it as a whole, but there's many different things you can build, many different types of things. Then we kind of go, maybe there's hardware and software, consumer goods. I actually try to kind of think about products by their complexity curve a lot. I think that the skills you need to manage a complicated ecosystem versus maybe the skills you need to design, something that's less interconnected or quite different. I will get to the details maybe of what I mean in a minute. But I do think LinkedIn is a particularly complicated place and I do think that the skill sets that you think through and you try to manage are in a complicated ecosystem or what different.

36:37So maybe some tactics that can help if it's something. Yeah, let's do it. You know, one of the things that I often think about is this concept of cause and effect. Like if you have non -interconnected things, it's actually quite easy not to have to think about that. You made something people love and I wrote a children's book not too long ago and it was fun. It was awesome to write. Once it was done, it was kind of done and it was out there and it was able to go. And that's a little bit different than here, right? If you kind of make a change like open to work, all of a sudden you're thinking through the perception of someone on the other side, what is that gonna do?

37:13Are they gonna use the platform less or more? You're thinking about customers. What are they gonna do with that data? Are they gonna to your point perceive someone in a different way or not? You have to think through third and second and third and maybe even fourth or third or effects and kind of manage that as you go through. And I think that is something we really pride ourselves on is how do we start thinking through these different things and how do we start measuring them as we go. And that is one. The second thing I actually think is it does lead to your point a lot. You need a different kind of decision making mechanism because there's a lot more ties in the ecosystem.

37:42A lot of people who just need way to break it and we've kind of put in things like we have something called rapid which is a really easy way to know who the decision maker is. Just you know, you line up who's a recommender who has to agree who's a decision maker. We have one thing called a five day escalation rule which makes sure that those items are in. And I think you lead a lot more of those views, I don't know what they're called, so it's just systems in place and where it manners that complexity so that things get done. And I think that those processes are actually really, really important to make sure that the ecosystem can run.

38:10Let's talk about these two processes. Rapid and what was the other one? Five day. Yeah, five day alignment. And they've both been around LinkedIn for a little bit but they're great. The rapid is just a question of, you know, oftentimes to your point, if you're running two, three market places, several different business models here, there's a question who has the decision, right? Who can make the decision in this situation? And so making sure that you have a single person's name with a decision and that person is, you know, you know, that is really, really important because it gets a clarity real fast.

38:36I mean, it's more of a personal rule but kind of one thing I love to say is, you know, if you had three back and force them an email, you got to pick up the phone. And if you've been on the phone for 20 minutes it's time to just write that decision maker and go. And that way you can make sure, the concept of an hour you should be able to get a decision. It doesn't always operate like that. I'm sure there's many PMs who, LinkedIn who are operating who maybe who may have some feedback from me on that. But that's kind of the intent behind it. And then a five day alignment is, you know, you should hold your managers accountable that in five days if someone has something that they haven't been able to escalate and solve.

39:06That's probably then on the next level of person. But as you run that ecosystem with a so much complexity around it, I think you need some of those processes in place in order to start answering some of those type rakers, if you will. I like that five day rule. Basically puts the clock on a manager to get done block basically. Yeah, yeah. And with rapid, I don't know if I totally understand is that an acronym for something? Or is it just it makes decisions? Seriously, no, it's a great question. The D stands for decisions, but the R is for who's recommending it, the A and Permanence degree, the I's for other people who may be able to be putting in an input.

39:41And so it's basically a list of people who need to be in the decision chain. Got it. I would argue the most important things that have a single name on that decision line because that usually makes sure that you can get a decision very quickly. Are there any other really common frameworks or processes along these lines at LinkedIn that you find really helpful? The third thing is just in how we think about talent, especially in the product organization. And I often really do try to sus out during interviews or how we prove it, people adjust their ability to see systems. Because I do think it's again, I do think it's a different skill set and a different capability of how we kind of map those things out and complexing here.

40:16And so oftentimes, I think those talent systems will, those who are able to see the whole make decisions of the whole, that's kind of rare actually. I think most talent systems are hate. How did your division grow or your product grow, your error grow? And we've tried our best to understand if it's not just about that. I mean, you want accountability in the ecosystem, of course, but how well does this person work across? And I think it's how we've created telemetry around that or organizational understanding of that. How we've understood ourselves kind of just, hey, this is the skill set that's really important here.

40:48I think that's quite rare in driving that kind of complex system as well. One more question along these lines. You've been a LinkedIn for a long time. It feels like historically LinkedIn, like as a product team, the external impression was it's very optimizy oriented and everyone there is just micro optimizing all the little features of LinkedIn. Like everyone I've worked with from LinkedIn, they're just really good at just optimizing things. And it feels like a lot of new stuff is happening with LinkedIn these days. I'm curious if that's been like a real intentional shift of like let's not focus so much on making emails work better and like I'll click through rates of everything.

41:30And more just let's just, let's innovate more. Let's do some bigger bets. I do think there's two things that to kind of acknowledge. First, it's an incredible growth team. And I think a lot of people that go on from LinkedIn and incredible roles are growth. So I think there's an influencer chain that a lot of people you meet might be growth -oriented. The second thing is especially when LinkedIn started, I'm not like you said, I've been here a little bit of time. But growing the network is probably a very, very important thing to get the scale out. So I think a lot of things people interacted with at first were maybe more growth mechanisms than other systems.

42:02I do think there's always been, at least for the last, you know, several years, an underlying line that values what's gonna carry this ecosystem and values ultimately what makes the day. And to your point, I like to think that, you know, they may not be the most, I don't know, but the glittery items, right? But I'm really proud of what we've done with skills. I think that's like one of those invisible systems that no one really knows, like, oh my gosh, that's a huge disruption that people can now get, that's a huge language that people have created. That's a huge way that people have changed. We're really proud of what we've done with kind of values, even open to work and commitments.

42:36These are major social systems that we've kind of wired through. I'm really proud of what we've done in LinkedIn learning. I would argue it's one of the bigger creator systems in the world. These incredible instructors and the ability to take someone who teaches maybe is not great kind of on camera and move them to studio and give them that capability and take their voice out there. And I think there's a lot of different things we've done that maybe because they're more invisible, if you will, or they're hidden in a marketplace that necessarily, you know, maybe a lot of the influencer voices may not actually need an access every day.

43:10I don't know if they get as much visibility, but I like to think that's been part of the DNA for a while and we've been really thinking through. It's actually talk about LinkedIn learning. So I know this is a big passion of yours. You have your own course within this that I want to talk about, but broadly, just put his LinkedIn learning just so people understand because I don't know if a lot of people know this exists within LinkedIn. Great question. LinkedIn learning is basically a way to learn professional skills. And so we enter the business in 2015. And the thesis was it's kind of we think about as a marketplace again, you have seekers and job and oftentimes, seekers may not have all the skills in order to get the job.

43:45You have this long kind of moving now towards the skills model, but without question, you know, this is our second order impact. I don't think any of us wanted to kind of, if you will, like, Uberize the world. Like I don't think any of us wanted to make it over there. We wanted to make sure everyone had the skills in order to learn the skills in order to get there. And so getting the learning business is really really important for the vision and the mission. And basically the idea was that we'd have ways to teach people skills that was very much tailored to professionals. Now, that was kind of the vision.

44:13The way the mechanism works is we go and get the best instructors in the world. We will bring them into a film studio, and we'll do it at home, or in a way that makes the content extremely, we help write the scripts. We obviously have incredible graphics. I just, in a way that makes a teacher and someone who's an expert who may not always have the capability in the sense that they're the time to go and make their own online course and get them in the studio and go from there. And then the vast majority of people will probably have access through their company. The vast majority of the usage and kind of the business runs through enterprise and is a large enterprise learning problem.

44:47Awesome. Like you have just as a quarter, I don't know, armchair, quarterback strategy person, I could see where this came from. We're trying to help people connect to economic and opportunity find jobs. How do we help them? Oh, they don't have the skills. Let's help them build the skills. Makes a lot of sense. Okay. And so within this, you have your own course on product management. Well, it's funny. So I mean, opening up, I've been thinking about a course for a while, but largely it was this concept of I wanted to make sure I tried our own product and I understood the instructor pain point. But it's a very scary experience.

45:18It's like, first, I don't know if I find anything to teach. I own concerns about that. But about four or five years ago, one of the things we started at PM internally was product university. We had our own internal university, which was basically we got some survey, I'd we sent it down. I think everyone told us, well, you know, like literally, like the most negative one was we didn't, people said, I don't have the skills to do my job. And I remember looking around, I'm like, oh, that's pretty obvious. We hired a bunch of people. There's no PM degree and we've done nothing. And so what we started doing is internally creating a product university.

45:48It was a boot camp coming in. You know, we tried a different different models and one of the things we really learned was, you can't teach this just through frameworks, right? You needed to have a series of case studies, you need to have a real serious example. But luckily, we had a bunch of things we'd done all LinkedIn. So we started putting a curriculum against that. And then just recently, a few of us got together and we filmed the actual course for it. So it's basically taking our product university boot camp and kind of opening up to the world. And you opened up some of your internal use cases as a part of the course?

46:17We do. Yeah, that's awesome. I always say that when the things you don't realize, you have as an advantage working at a bigger company is access to tons of strategy documents and vision documents and like stories of this. Because once you're out, no one's gonna be able to share those with you because they're so private. Like I don't have access to any of these anymore. So that's a really cool perk if it were a kid -a -company like LinkedIn. Well, question about your course. What are some of your biggest lessons that you teach? Can you just give it a preview of some of the tidbits that you might learn in this course of years?

46:48Well, again, a lot of it is case studies and use cases and the same way we teach it here. But a couple of things that we do talk through, you know, when we started doing kind of our own product university, we realized a couple of big pain points that we people had. The first was, it's actually really hard to know how to validate and what the bar is for a new idea in any organization. I think it's really hard to kind of say that. So we provide a lot of framework except kind of simple things from, hey, you know, you got to prove to the world why there's duct tape in here, right? There's someone actually physically going out and trying to do it.

47:19How you can prioritize a list of ideas against a pain point like how to kind of make a simple expression and how to kind of look through, you know, what's an acute pain point and what's a wide range of people use. How we'd expect data in order to be used in order to validate this. So kind of tools you could use to kind of say, if this is a good idea or a bad idea, more importantly tools to make sure you've went through the process on how you can make it. That's kind of one in framework set that we kind of talk to. The other is, you know, a lot about Damien who these are growth incomes and he starts talking a lot about leading, kind of thinking in loops.

47:49And so how do you make sure that when you're building something you can have the fuel and early cascade and grow? And I think just the framework of doing that, how you measure that, how you monitor that is also something that, at least when I was starting and doing my startup, it was quite something I wish I had access to. And so those are maybe two good examples of frameworks and tools that we come through. And then of course, trying to overlay that with real cases, not always successful ones, of course, too. We talk about a lot of the failures we've had and where we probably went wrong if we had to diagnose and post -mortem.

48:19A lot of people listening to this are people that want to get into product management at R &PM's yet. I imagine you get us this a lot. How do I get into product management? What is your advice that you often give? Yeah. Well, let's start with kind of how we looked at the world, which is this idea of skills. You know, we had a, kind of we have a diagram that I think about which the skills are kind of on a triangle. You might have heard this one before, I don't know if you. The skills are on a triangle. I think you need three different skills to be a great PM. You need to be, kind of a human Spielberg type creator.

48:48You, something around data science and the ability to really look at data and see patterns and kind of see the future. And then, you know, especially again, we're seeing your, I think it's a lot of general management, right? You have to basically be able to send that in, and then you have to cross the team, understand that. But you're going to understand our companies. It's going to work. 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 someone who's so creative who can lead a team in a different way.

49:18And I think that one thing I would really, really encourage people to do is understand where they fit on that graph and gravitate towards those kinds of roles. Because a lot of times I think what people do is they think they have to make up for the other pieces of that graph and it leads them to a path where maybe they're not playing to their strengths. That's one thing I was encouraged me. The other thing I would say, and I know it's a little bit of luck in how this works, but I think about my journey. One thing I've really found was really helpful. I was lucky to have, I was on the first team that did a hybrid, kind of SUV in the US.

49:50At the time it was a hybrid escape and Ford. And I came from the Midwest and it was one of those products where people would really drive out for hundreds of miles and see and really kind of a community kind of gravitate around because it was a very special product. And being able to work on something that people loved, I really loved early on and see what that felt like and look like and that success was, it kind of created a bar for what I would hope my products could do. Right, it would. And if you're able to get into something that people really love and feel that and experience that and really understand what that looks like and what it takes to get there, I think that's actually been a really valuable lesson throughout my career because you can understand the whole path on the way up.

50:29And I look back at that as really something that I would hope other people they can do it. You know, you're making role decisions on many different criteria but try to find something people love and really experience it with that feels like. It's kind of built on that with PMs that work for you and work with you. When they're looking to get better and build their skills, other than go take some courses on LinkedIn learning, what do you often recommend they do to help become stronger and better at their job? So first, it is that feeling of you got to own your product and you got to speak up and say, this is where I want to drive it.

51:02Because a lot of times I think people are scared to do that or worried about doing that or don't feel that's their actual role. So when it's like, extremely clear to you on, hey, this is your role is to own this and take this to the next level. You know, when you start kind of molding the clay people want to come and help when you start building something cool people are like, oh, you did kind of gravitate into it. But until you can start doing that, that's really tough. So one, it's letting people know that's kind of what's expected them. And then two, I would tell people to just build. As crazy as it sounds like, I spend a lot of my time kind of on the side just trying to build different things, try to mean they try different clay, think through different ideas.

51:37And I think that is a really important skill to have to just being able to say, okay, I'm going to start with the blank sheet and make some art or whatever it is you want to do. And I encourage people to do that because it's also like anything else, right? You can get an atrophy. And I really do think no matter what people, kind of the heart of PM and is that ability to be a builder and you do have to make sure you can keep doing it. Yeah, that's actually a great site way to where I was going to go next, which is you say you build and you like to build stuff, but you're like legitimately building a lot of stuff.

52:06So you have the site mindofhari .com where you share all these site projects. So can you just talk about what's going on there and some of the stuff that you've built? You know, I'm the only thing I've ever been good in my life is just building things and creating things. And I get a lot of energy from it. And yeah, I have a site, it's called mindofhari because it is really whatever is top of mind. I try to do my best to completely separate it from business. I know there's always a draw as a good PM to kind of say there are business here, but I try to keep it as art just like it's completely art and it's what I want to build.

52:35And I take on new subjects and I have two little kids and it's fun to kind of one of them was a book me in my oldest route. And it was kind of a set of bedtime stories we did. And then one day I was like, hey, we should just make this a notebook and we didn't. I think it's got about half a million readers now. So it's been fun to kind of see it, take some life and go through. We made a board game recently that I noticed for design scores and professors there have been using. And it was called parallel universe. And it's how do you kind of have a card and then be able to see like maybe the card says there's no windows in this world anymore.

53:10And then what would happen in that world and you got a list 10 different things that would happen. So kind of that ability to kind of think ahead and kind of fund sci -fi. I make kind of healthy gummy bears. I just try to take something completely new and have that, I don't know, it's probably one of the more fun moments in this world where you can sit there and just create something and have some new clay. And yeah, that is what that website is about. Wait, so you made actual gummy bears? Yeah, we are doing some with gummy bears. So Lenny, I know you're expecting a new additional a bit in graduations again.

53:41Well, one of the things I found when I had kids is no matter what I was trying to do, there was like candy and sugar everywhere, like any Halloween and birthday party, et cetera. So I wanted to create, you can't get rid of it because it was just hard to do. So we were like, hey, we're gonna sit down and make our own gummy bear. And what I found is this is just a fun tidbit for your readers. If you open like a twizzler or one of those about 80 % of what's in there is sugar because they're optimizing for shelf life, right? They're optimizing what's in the store. And so what we were able to do is basically create a gummy bear about 40 % of its sugar.

54:11It's just got five ingredients, honey is the sweetener because I don't want to give my kids some alternative sweeteners. But yeah, we have a small commercial kitchen and we produce some gummy bears. And if you ever want to try them to any of your followers, I'm happy to send some gummy bears. And hopefully you can check them out. Wait, how do people, is there a way to buy them somewhere? We can go to Mind of Hari. We stock them seasonally. And there is one of the things that we found out is there is different kind of laws on how you can be shipped and obviously we're not optimizing for long storage.

54:40So, but they'll be on Mind of Hari and you can always reach out to me and I'll find you and tell you where, which farmers market we're at or whatever and you can come swimming by. Well, I don't see it on Mind of Hari. So maybe by the time this comes out, put it on your or if you're trying it. Put it out there. Yeah, it's under, it's on the homepage and then when they're stock, we put them in the shower. Okay, so that means they're the stock. All right, we're gonna sell you out. Let's get all your gummy bears. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? Yeah, let's do it.

55:07What are two or three books you've recommended most to other people? The first one is called Thinking and Systems. It's the one I give kind of the team every now and then. It's just a really good book about how I think because I know the people say systems or we kind of talk about it can be abstract. I think it goes into real detail on how people can, you know, intervene at various parts and how to take actions at different systems. I really enjoyed that book. To record maybe a book I recommend, but a book that I just read, I thought was phenomenal just to give it readers want something good. It's called Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow.

55:39I was recommending it for my friend. Have you read it? You read it? Yeah, I honestly didn't love it, but I liked it a lot. I really, for some reason I've been, I thought it was very well done and there's a couple chapters I've reflected on. I just finished on, I thought it was well done. So that's one that I'll throw out there. Yeah, it was very sweet. I feel like I got hyped too much for me. I'm like, okay. Oh, I didn't know, I didn't actually know it, God. I got the key. That's publicity, okay. That's it. The third one that I just downloaded, because I finished, I'm actually gonna open up my, my audiobook and tell you, because I'm about, I don't know, an hour into and I'm really enjoying it, it is an immense world.

56:14I don't know if you read that one yet. It is about animals and how animals have different senses out there and it goes kind of through a set of different animals and kind of how they see the world. And just one of those reminders that, you know, we're so limited sometimes in our own it's perception and kind of how dogs, for instance, you know, they can breathe in and take in sense even when they're breathing out. And so they're constantly, it's like vision almost and it's just phenomenal to me just kind of think about all the things they're probably sensing as we're going out of my dog and I are going on our walk.

56:42I've learned dogs like shoot or out of their nose first before they smell to kind of clear things out. And so they're, I mean, it's not wild, they kind of, they can probably see so much more of what happened in the history of like a little walk than we're able to just because of that. Incredible. Next question, what is a favorite recent movie or TV show? So one thing we try to do is watch TV as a family kind of brings us together a little bit. So we are doing Star Wars with the kids, which is for the first time, which has been a really enjoyable experience just being able to witness it to them.

57:14And then we've been going a little bit back in time. So we watch ET, which is, you know, it's fun, a joysy memory. These are phenomenal movies that we go through. I think your question is on recent TV shows that probably came up or recently. Those are just as well. Yeah, I am. The other one I did like, it's not a TV show, but I was called Case Not, it was that podcast that came out, Case 63, I think it was called. And it was a part, I hope that's the right name with a bit, but it was like a, it was a sci -fi podcast. It was like 10 -minute shorts. And the premise of it is someone comes from the future and there's a little bit of speculative fiction and is at a psychologist.

57:51And it was, it's just a phenomenal piece. I'll get you the real name, maybe I can get it if you have for the show, Nars. Yeah, well, edit your words and add those. Yeah, exactly. Whenever's in the show, Nars, that's the one we meant. What is a favorite interview question you like to ask? I do like to ask people what kind of the most complex thing they ever built was, right? I just love to understand mostly kind of what, what do they gravitate to? Like is that something you're up to then? Two, are they able to simplify it? And I think those are two really important skills. What is it that you look for in their answer that tells you it was a good answer?

58:23Both of those things. So first of all, they take on something that was super complex, like really, really hard because I think there's only a particular group who gravitate to those kinds of realm. And I do think more and more, I mean, hopefully I think that's a lot of kind of the, a lot of the, in my opinion, the ways the world is gonna get better by the things that are really, really hard to solve. You can think about kind of the intimacy doesn't scale, right? So when you think about how people are gonna feel more connected, it's gonna be kind of a lot more difficult to solve. And you think of healthcare, it's gonna be very, very difficult to solve.

58:52Education is a very difficult interconnected space. And so I think people who gravitate to them know those problems are hard, have a very special kind of gift and kind of a, it's hard to replicate that passion. So one, to do that. And then two, I think people who really kind of understand systems are able to somehow, this is truly especially probably, waste more than the me, they're able to simplify it. And they're able to explain it and say, this is how I looked it up, but here's how I modeled it, and here's kind of the levers and how I went after it. And even if it's non -linear, they're able to say, this is how the cause and effects works.

59:24And I'm really looking for, once you did it, did you really understand them, were you able to crack it, or at least did you understand why you weren't able to crack it? And I usually find this to be also the most kind of rewarding conversations. Awesome, thanks for sharing all that. Next question, what is a favorite recent product that you've discovered that you love? I'll give you one more dad one. So my youngest just hates brushing his teeth, just was like, it was always thing. And there is, I should actually find the name of the toothbrush, but you can just Google, or Amazon this, and you'll figure it out.

59:52It was basically, it was this baby shark toothbrush, but it's a game, and you play that game for two minutes, and you can try to pick up different prizes you brush your teeth and turn. What I loved about it, because I think it's what all great products do, it turns a moment of annoyance to a moment of joy. It went not even just like you saw the pain point, it was an unreasonable experience of like, now he loves it, and it was just so well done. It's like 10 bucks, and it was 10 bucks extremely well -spinned, so much light. So whoever made that toothbrush, thank you. Damn, and is it playing baby shark?

1:00:25I hope not. Well, it can, it has that feature, it has that capability, but it is a small price to pay for me to get out to enjoy. Good times. What's something relatively minor that you've changed in your product development process that has had a big impact on your team's ability to execute? I do like to change things relatively, like every quarter or six months kind of sit down and kind of say, what can we get better at? And the two areas I find myself innovating, if you will, innovating or tweaking the most is, when is around planning, right? I think every company starts struggles with this, and you get bigger, it probably becomes a more kind of diff, especially talked about the complexity of the ecosystem.

1:01:05And we started this thing, we're basically, we call it like orange and red priorities, which is, like a lot of times what people do, teams will plan bottom up, will come into a manager, a leader, and then the leader may shift things around, or say this what, I think we've really started shifting in a different way. We said, these are the big rocks we gotta get done. We're gonna get those things done first, we're gonna be upfront and honest with you, and these are the things and these are priorities, and then you can kind of plan from there. And that's been, I think it's relieved a lot of the progress, so I think there's an honesty that comes within and that's been a big change.

1:01:34The others just are kind of the way we review products, that's always been a kind of thing. And my reason is when we keep our product review process live too long, it gets a little institutionalized and people start making, like long documents and stuff, right? It's you always have to change that every quarter. And basically, I think it always comes out on the same thing, which is how do you get their problem statement quickly, and then how do you kind of sign from there? But the lever that we basically put in place for that was really short in the time. So like I'm trying this thing, I don't know if it's gonna work, but could we get to like 15 minute reviews, basically instead of an hour, and see if that kind of alleviates some of this.

1:02:09So I'll let you know how it goes, and we chat up next, but I'm very curious to see if this is gonna be a different kind of system where we might be able to get to clarity quicker or realize we're not in a clarity and then break and come back. It reminds me of a tweet I think I just saw, maybe it was Instagram post of teams that do standups while doing a plank to keep the meeting really short. That's interesting. I haven't tried that when yet, but mine be nothing we try next. Last question, you've been at LinkedIn for a long time. I imagine you use LinkedIn a lot, is there just a pro tip that you can share of how to be more successful with LinkedIn, find more value LinkedIn, enjoy it more?

1:02:46The first is I do think, certainly there's ways and the majority of ways that skills work is we infer skills, but I wouldn't, I think that there is a skills section on the profile. I think a lot of people ignore it because they don't realize that there's value in it, and that's changing, but I'm not sure if it's changing for everybody, and I would pay more attention to skills as we kind of get in more in the skills for stuff. The second thing I would probably do, I don't know if it's that hidden, but I would check out LinkedIn Learning. I do think LinkedIn Learning is a gem, and I think because it's so largely through enterprise, a lot of people miss it, and I would hope you check it out, but more importantly, tell me areas that we could get better on there as well, and I hope that people will find value there.

1:03:22What's the best way to find out about LinkedIn Learning, which is Google LinkedIn Learning, and we'll find the, or go to LinkedIn next -lash learning. LinkedIn .com slash learning, okay, great. Hari, I feel like we've opened the mind of Hari up on this podcast. I appreciate you being here. Two final questions, where can folks find you a line if they want to reach out, and how can listeners be useful to you? Find me on LinkedIn, that's an easy one. And the, you know, I do really, really, really appreciate product feedback. Like I promise you, I take it well for those listening, and two, it is, you know, going back to the kind of the heart of this conversation around complexity, it is really hard to know sometimes whatever it's experience is, because you're living in a very abstracted ecosystem.

1:04:03And so the more you could just say, hey, this is working or not, and the intentions are coming from a good place. And if you, if you have a moment and you're not having a great experience, who are having great experience, you can write it, I really would appreciate to hear your perspective. Amazing. Hari, thank you so much for being here. Thanks Lenny, it's great meeting you. You too, 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.

1:04:37You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'spodcast .com. See you in the next episode.