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16 Jun 2022 Lenny's Podcast Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more

“If I'm willing to tell it to a friend of a friend, I have to be willing to like put that out on the internet and share that with everyone because we really want to level the playing field and we don't want to make things more unfair.”

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Speaker unverified
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preference
Recorded
16 Jun 2022
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Lenny's Podcast

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…Yeah. And then also you've written a bunch of classic PM posts on Medium that I reference often and share with people. And also you were the first PM at Asana, ended up being the head of product management at Asana. And that's actually where I left to start. Could you just kind of share how you got into product very early on and then how you worked your way up to the head of product management at Asana? Yeah. So I was just really lucky in finding product management is I went to Cornell, studied computer science and economics, and I'd never heard of the job. And one of my friends who'd been a PM intern the summer before, I was like, Jackie, you have to apply for this internship. And I said, I'm like a sophomore. I can't be a manager. And they're like, no, you manage the product, not the people. And like, just go apply. So I applied having no idea at all what the job was. And through the interviews, I tried to figure it out. And I loved the interview questions. I thought they were a lot of fun. And got the job, became an intern on Microsoft SharePoint services and stayed with the team. Loved that team. Went there full time. When I moved to New York, I started to think about changing companies. So Microsoft didn't have any product management in New York. So I applied to Google and I was like, yes, I'm a good product manager. I'm sure I'll get this job. And I got rejected and I was like, I was shocked. I really had thought that I would pass the interview. So a year later I applied again and that's when I got into the Google APM program. And of course at the time I thought this was like one of the biggest mistakes in my whole career. But looking back, it certainly is what kind of gave me the impetus to write these books and say like, you know what, even good PMs don't know how to answer these questions. There's a lot we can do to help. And beyond that also, then when I joined Google, I very quickly got sent into being an interviewer. And immediately I noticed there was this real difference in how people would answer the questions. And some people like didn't seem to understand what the question was trying to get at. And some people sounded really good because they'd say, well, I'll tell you three things, you know, number one, number two, number three. And then when I paid attention to my notes, I'd be like, wait, their three ideas weren't actually good ideas. They just sounded like they knew what they were doing. So those really drove me to want to like share more about how to do well in these interviews. And at the same time, I constantly had people saying, you know, Jackie, my friend's applying to Google. Can you talk to them? And I was like, sure, of course. I'll like tell them what we're looking for and I'll like help them understand the interview process. And after doing this like three times, I was like, wait a second. If it's only like my friends of a friend who like are people who work at Stanford and are already very privileged and I'm telling them how to pass these interviews, like that's not fair. If I'm willing to tell it to a friend of a friend, I have to be willing to like put that out on the internet and share that with everyone because we really want to level the playing field and we don't want to make things more unfair. So while I was at Google, one day I get an email from a friend from an engineer I'd worked with at Microsoft. se we really want to level the playing field and we don't want to make things more unfair. So while I was at Google, one day I get an email from a friend from an engineer I'd worked with at Microsoft. And he's like, hey, you want to grab coffee? And I was like, oh, cool. Sure, I'll be friendly. And at the time, I did not realize that that's how like all these recruiting chats start. So I like honestly did not realize that this was like I'm being recruited. I thought it was like, let's just catch up. But I said yes. And then he told me about this company. He's like, hey, it's kind of like imagine if SharePoint was really fast. And I was like, oh, cool. Like I loved SharePoint and I would love to work on a fast version of that. And that's how I ended up moving over and becoming the first product manager at Asana to achieve.…

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