Nikita Miller: evaluation

Transcript context

…And it comes back to your approach of just focus on the output, not what they're planning to do, what they've actually done. This episode is brought to you by Ahrefs. You probably know Ahrefs as one of the leading all-in-one SEO tools used by companies like Facebook, Uber, Shopify, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and thousands more, but Ahrefs is not just for big companies. With their new Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, you can optimize your personal website like a professional for free. You can scan your website for over 100 common SEO issues that might be hurting your performance and search engines plus get advice on how to fix those errors. You can have it automatically browse your website's internal and external links and get actionable insights from your backlink profiles, and you can learn what keywords your website ranks for and see how you stack up against your competitors. Visit ahrefs.com/awt and start improving your website's visibility. That's ahrefs.com/awt. Shifting a little bit, you've been a PM for a long time, since 2010 I believe, and a lot of people move out of pm and so it's really cool to talk to someone that's been in the field for a while. What have you seen in terms of how product maybe has changed? The role of product management, the role of product leadership, and also maybe other functions like designer engineering? I think the biggest change for product at macro is how mainstream it is. I still find fascinating getting degrees in product management and going to business school to transition into product management and the whole discipline. And there's a whole business, honestly, around the business of product management, which I find really fascinating and it didn't exist. And I think for better or worse, that comes with a lot of good and in some ways might have removed some of the quirkiness and creativity that probably is required of product, but that's probably a different podcast. So that's one, just macro. In terms of the roles, I think that what we were talking before about roles and responsibilities and defining those for product managers, I think product managers are increasingly I think a bit more technical or expected to be. I think there was a moment where they were technical and then it was, "No, no, we're all generalists," and now I think we're going back to PMs need to be more technical. I think designers, the expectation is that they'll be more business-oriented, design as a means, honestly, to an end. I think that's trending and probably for the better. I think the best designers I've ever worked with are also exceptionally savvy business people. And I think engineers are increasingly becoming what more product-focused, more user-focused. So product engineers is something Trello I think did really well. This idea that great ideas can come from anywhere in the org at any function I think is really magical. So as you're seeing PM's becoming more technical, I think designers becoming more business-oriented, engineers are becoming a lot more product/user-focused, to me that's amazing because it means that we're getting closer to what I'd consider really deep collaboration. And it's not to say that we're not experts. There are expertise within that that we expect of folks, but that care for other disciplines I think is where a lot of magic happens. That's really interesting. When you say PMs getting more technical, when you're hiring, interviewing, what are you looking for? Do PMs need to learn to code? How technical do you find they need to be?…

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