Anuj Rathi: evaluation

Transcript context

…One thread I'm pulling out of a few of your stories so far is you often come back to this full-stack approach to many models. So you talked about how PM is like an influencer, but also, they're influencing users. That's a cool way of thinking about it. With this working backwards process, you can use it to think about the full stack of launch, not just what features you're going to build. I know you also have some strong opinions about product managers, and they should be much more full-stack than most PMs. Does that ring a bell, and if so, can you talk about that? Yes. No, I think it is the same thread that is connecting the first and the second. I think product managers have to own outcomes and not only features and parts of the problem. Well, they will own some parts of the problem fully, but if they need to work with everybody to make sure that eventual product that they launch is successful and not only successful from the point of view of, "Hey, we launched something that works for users," et cetera, that's not the definition of success. Did it work in the way that it really changed the behavior of the kind of user that we wanted to achieve a business outcome that will build a capability that is important for us? All of those things combined will not happen if the product manager is only thinking about their part. So they have to think about external users, they have to think about competition, they have to think about other product managers and product leaders about engineering, about marketing, and so on because it's such a diverse field. Unless you really... and I'm not saying you need to be an authority of that. Either you are very, very good at that, or you have built partnerships, and have run your ideas or product through those people and gotten weighted from them, and finally made a decision around that part, I don't think you'll be very successful. So, in my opinion, the full-stack product managers are the ones who are going to be more successful rather than product managers who are doing very good at one particular area only. So there's one book which is Range, right? I'm sure you may have heard about it, right? Even the first chapter, what they talk about is... They take two examples. One is the example of Federer, Roger Federer. So, with Roger Federer, for example, I think I'll just continue that, that till 18, he played a bunch of racket sports, and this wasn't even tennis. But then, you bring in ideas from one racket sport to the other, and second to the third, and so on, and so forth, and now you have such a range of ideas that you can connect a lot more dots and actually ship it. I think that's a better playbook for being more successful in product. I was just watching a documentary on... I think it was called Greatness and had Wayne Gretzky. He had exactly the same experience actually. When he was young, he played hockey just during the winter times, and during summer, he played other sports. Hockey was just like one sport he played, and then eventually started to focus on it, and they talked about how people that played different sports in their childhood actually ended up being much better at that one sport that they chose. So a lot of parallels. I know you also have a lot of interesting ways of thinking about coming up with a roadmap ideas, and ideating and building a roadmap backlog. So you already talked about this idea of going in very divergent directions and seeing if that leads anywhere. There's a couple more someone shared. One is you have this idea of show don't tell. What is that?…

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