Lenny Rachitsky: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yeah. So a lot of it is misunderstanding what the role is at different stages in the career and sort of misunderstanding what success looks like. So this can show up in a lot of different ways. Like one of them is there's lots of APMs who want to become people managers right away. And they sort of poo-poo all the like regular everyday work you need to do to be a good PM. And that comes across to a manager as like, Kind of like immature, certainly, but also just like you don't seem to understand or value what good PMing is. So I certainly wouldn't make you a manager. But also now it's a little hard to convince you to do your day-to-day job, which makes you a little hard to manage, which might mean put a little bit less of my energy into managing you. It ends up being a bad situation for people. It's a lot better to sort of show some enthusiasm for the job you're supposed to be doing right now. Other ways that can work is just people sort of optimizing for the wrong things, like leaning in too much or too little, right? So one, some PMs I see get paired with a really strong designer. You sort of let your designer take the lead on everything. And now you just sit back and you're a note taker. Right. And you're not contributing anything. You're not really driving anything. You're not adding your own ideas and making the team better. So that person needs to sort of step up more to have to be somebody who's really contributing and adding and being a multiplier on the work of everybody else on their team. And then some people step in too much. They're trying to lead everything and they're crowding people out and they're not giving their engineers a chance to present at all hands. And they're burning bridges with their coworkers. And almost every company peer reviews is a huge part of your review cycle. And as a product manager, you need to get along well with the other people in your team. You'll be pushing them and encouraging them to get more done than they would have otherwise. But you don't want to do this by having everybody say like, I never want to work with her again. So much of advice I find for early careers, just like it should done, make impact, just do your job. Don't like, don't overthink it. If you're going to earn your right to move up and take on more responsibility, get promoted on all kinds of stuff. And so I love that so much of it is just like, just do the work, just like be quiet, do the work. It's going to go great. A couple more questions before we get to our lightning round. So you've exited the PM career path at this point. And so I'm curious, what made you kind of decide to kind of go in a different direction? And then just like, what's next? What's next for Jackie Bavaro? Yeah, I'm not sure that I've exited the KPM career path. I really like working in offices with people. So I've been sort of waiting for an end to the remote work era. And once I find companies that are, you know, in person again, I definitely have some curiosity about that. I might go back to in-person work.…

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