Tal Raviv: evaluation

Transcript context

…I love these tips. I love product scrapbooking as a term. It makes so much sense and 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 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 having a lot more leverage as an IC, being able to manage multiple teams if needed on much bigger areas of the product. I 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 Ebi Atawodi 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, product 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 am on. 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, let's talk about language. 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, both design was involved, engineering was super involved. Yes, I was there and it, 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, that language, that culture, that it's not like this hub and spoke model and the PM is at the center and making all those 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 leveraged as an IC. The second thing is personally to seek to not be needed, but be valuable. The difference is like if you think about your day as a product manager, 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 a lot of communication is happening, 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? Not too many either. All of those are 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 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? 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? I'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 there's a few other people who should probably chime in if they want to. And this could be at the team level. I worked at a company that had a really, really big customer success organization. They'd constantly find you as a PM and just DM you these questions. And I'd say, "Great question. Put it in this really big channel." And I give a reason, so that way other people on the customer success team can search the channel and find the answer later. It 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.…

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