Scott Belsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Something that comes up on this podcast a number of times is how CPOs rarely last at a company. They stay. Like Casey mentioned this and a few other people, they stay around for a couple years, and the best they can do is just take a few swings at how things work, improve a few things and then, the CEO's like, "No, this isn't great," and then find someone else. What do you think has contributed to you surviving and lasting and thriving and taking on more and more responsibility at Adobe? Well, in the chief product officer role, I oversaw design, product, and engineering. And I think part of the reason I was even interested in coming into the company and taking this role is that I felt like these boundaries between these functions are at best artificial, at worst really constraining. And I always have felt like a lot of products win not because of the technology but the user's experience of the technology. And so, if you have an aligned team that gets that and makes decisions accordingly, I think you can ship better experiences. So a lot of the work I had to do was breaking some of these boundaries down over the years. And I think that a lot of chief product officer roles traditionally don't oversee engineering and sometimes don't even oversee design. And for me, that wouldn't be interesting. Zooming into product, if there's a Mount Rushmore of insightful product thinkers, I feel like you'd be on it. And part of the reason is that you have this incredible product sense, whatever that means. It's clear that you have strong product sense. And PMs often talk about the importance of product sense and how to build product sense. And I'm curious, how do you feel like you built your product sense. And what advice would you give to younger PMs looking to build product sense?…

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