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Published · transcript-backed

Lenny Rachitsky: belief

18 Aug 2024 Lenny's Podcast Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny)

“I think people may probably think, "If I'm an okay writer, I can probably be really successful PM.”

— Lenny Rachitsky

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
18 Aug 2024
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…And I think that's just a good framing. Okay, so let's talk about another insight and piece of advice that you have, is that you think that great PMs need to be great writers. I think a lot of people don't necessarily think this. I think people may probably think, "If I'm an okay writer, I can probably be really successful PM. " Talk about why you think it's so important to be a really great writer to be a really great PM. It's actually shocking for me to hear that this isn't commonplace sort of acceptance, but the place that this comes from for me is, writing is clarity at scale, and a key component to a PM's job is creating clarity both internally and externally, but it is both sides of that that I think often get lost. A lot of times the PM job can become a little too internal, and it's about influencing my stakeholders and getting alignment and all these things. Don't get me wrong, all that's very important. You should write your PRDs, they should be super crisp, they should articulate things really well, but I'm not saying that every PM needs to be a marketer or a world-class copywriter, but you should be able to write really compelling messaging in the voice of the person that you're trying to serve. And I'm working backwards from the beliefs that, if you can't sell or support your own product, I don't trust you to build the product. And so that's where I think writing is the foundational component there.…

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