Tom Verrilli: commitment

Transcript context

…Something else you said that is changing in how PMs operate that you're very excited about is this move to IC work, PMs moving away from this kind of big org management world to actually doing the work. Talk about that and what that means for the role of product management. I mentioned a little bit earlier, but there was this thing in the ratio land where what you did if you were really successful as a PM is you got promoted into being a director. And then all of a sudden it was like, don't be hands-on anymore. Your goal is just to coach and guide. And so we took all of our A players and then promoted them out of doing things. And they spent all of their time in alignment and they spent all of their time coaching and tweaking what their team was doing. And you get this really yo-yo development process where somebody does all this work, it goes to review, it gets told no, and you're just going back and forward in reviews. You can see my scar tissue coming through. On our team, everybody is, there are managers, there's I think four or five people across the team who manage other PMs, all of them would spend 90 plus percent of their time doing IC work. I'm still probably 50% of my time doing IC work personally. And I think there's a couple real advantages of it. The first is if you are a kind of VP product where you've got a decade plus, maybe 15 years of experience building things, hopefully your instincts as to what's going to work and not are fairly well honed at this point. You can just make decisions more quickly than people. You can have real impact very, very quickly. And it's really great for the organization to have somebody who can do that as opposed to the idea of working through three layers of we divide the problem up amongst a couple PMs. Those folks need to get into alignment. There's different engineering teams debating stuff. You just tend to go. So that's wonderful. I think the second thing is there's two ways that that ends up driving leverage. One is a VP in theory can handle the workload of multiple more junior PMs just because, as I said, they're more efficient. And that means that you see more of the board at any given point in time. And so you're far more likely to make the intuitively correct decision for how should we tune the discovery algorithm vis-a-vis people who ship slowly, which is an evergreen thing in e-comm. Well, if you are thinking about how we manage sellers who ship slowly, and you know about the power of discovery, you can, in either case, make the correct decision. One of the things that I remember plaguing Twitch for a long time, and I was probably one of the people more at fault of it than ever was discovery team and the ads team were always at war for impressions. Where do ads go in the feed? What's the impact to discovery metrics? What's the impact to ad dollars? One of the first things I did when I go up to Twitch was just put ads in discovery and make sure that there's the same PM who's accountable for both because they're going to make the natural trade-off that say the goal is GMV generated from the feed. One of them is through organic. One of them is through a paid substitution. Solve. ntable for both because they're going to make the natural trade-off that say the goal is GMV generated from the feed. One of them is through organic. One of them is through a paid substitution. Solve. And when you put the same person across multiple things, they tend to organically align those things and you just cut out months and months and months of back and forth and the politics that tends to take it from being company first to career first. And so having VPs mostly in IC land, having directors mostly doing IC work, even having me having to grapple with IC work keeps everybody connected to the ground floor of what's actually true as opposed to what seems true in a review. But also means that you're more likely to make the intuitively correct decision early just because why wouldn't you want Messi playing for your team rather than trying to have the academy coming along all the time?…

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