Naomi Gleit: belief

Transcript context

…Because as you said, the PM's not making the thing. They're just helping each of the people who are the most talented at their very specific skill do the best possible work and their back is to the audience. They're trying to stay out of the way even though they come in, everyone claps for them, the outstanding event, and then in theory they could step in a little bit to help out when they can pinch it on design here and there and research here and there, probably not engineering. So those are the reasons and they're not in charge. The chair wind violinist is the actual person that's making the music and the best at this thing. It's so great to hear somebody else talk about this too. Thank you. And I think that that is really how I view my role and what I do and I think maybe just hearing you talk about it reminded me why I think I put so much emphasis on just elevating the people on my team and the people around me and candidly, one of the development areas for me, and it could be downstream because I do have this analogy of how to be a PM, is that the growth feedback or the constructive feedback for me is really learning when to lead from the front more. Maybe when to be less of a quiet conductor that's really elevating the first chair violinist and be more front facing. I think a lot of my approach and my leadership style is really leading through the people on my team and helping grow them. And a lot of times I think that they're dedicated, they're experts, they know particular areas. Obviously as a head of product, I manage a portfolio of different projects of which each of them has the incredible leader on it. And so oftentimes I'm just really trying to lead from behind and help them be as successful as possible. But there is a time and a place when maybe that silent conductor needs to take more of a vocal and front facing role. I know exactly what you mean. I had the same problem when I was a PM because there's always this fear that PMs in charge and telling everyone to do. And so I had the opposite of like, "Okay, and that's not me. I'm going to just let you do the things you think are best and I'll just make sure the best ideas come to the surface," and I have to learn exactly the same thing. Sometimes people just want you to point them in the right direction and make the decision in the end. And the best PMs are people that have the best opinions about what is going to work, how intuition of what users need, have strong product sense and all that stuff. I've had this post that I'm trying to work on along these lines where there's this reaction to PMs aren't the CEO of the product. They're just like... No, don't call yourselves that. I think it's the opposite. I think PMs actually should think of themselves as the CEO of the product, not in terms of they are in charge and can fire people and manage people, but they're the closest heuristic for what the CEO and the founder wants. They think of what does the business need, what is going to help the customers, what's going to help us grow? And I think the PM is the closest to that role and so I think it's important to think of that role as that even though you're not technically in charge.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.