Lane Shackleton: belief

Transcript context

…I think that's a good example of it's not going to happen overnight. Coming back to your two lessons, I think they're really interesting and I'm curious if there's anything else that comes to mind of what you found was essential to you succeeding in this path? So the first lesson you shared as being customer facing. And in this case being in retail as customer facing, is your advice get in a tech company and work on something customers use or is even working at Starbucks or Abercrombie, does that count? Yeah. I think maybe to relate it to what you just said, if I were to give advice to someone who really aspires to be a PM or trying to get into PM, I think in many cases if you're in a customer facing role, you are the expert on the customer and that is really, really valuable in tech organizations. And oftentimes it's undervalued. And so I think people who want to move into PM roles who are not currently in PM roles can often lever that experience and that knowledge of the customer in ways that are pretty profound for the organization and pretty insightful for the organization if they really are creative about it. And then I think the other thing is, regardless of where you are in the organization, you're always serving a customer. You can't just talk to one big enterprise customer and you can't just talk to the smallest customer. You have to have a diverse and continuous stream of customer interactions in order to have good intuitions about what to do next. And your engineers aren't going to really trust you unless you have good intuitions about where the customer's headed and what they want and stuff like that. And so the stakes I think are pretty high. The good news is it's easier than ever with all these tools to really get into the mindset of a customer. My lesson touches on something a previous guest talked about, Paige Costello, where she was often the youngest person in the room and built a lot of respect and people really trusted her over time. And her lesson was know thy customer. If you know the most about what they need, and you can show, here's what I've heard again and again and again, people will just like, "Oh Lane, tell us more." And they bring you into conversation because providing value, you're not just there sharing opinions. Everyone's got opinions.…

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