Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Crystal. And level zero is someone who cannot even basically define the basic metrics for this particular product and won't be able to figure out is this particular thing impacting orders or users or revenue. And so you'll really not be able to figure even that piece out. Similarly, on design and research, for product managers, we focus a lot more on problems and are you able to identify problems from a user's perspective. That's at level zero. And level five will be somebody who's able to define the user problems but is also able to tie them to business roles as well. So that makes it the holistic. Similarly, on technology, it's one of the skills which is relatively easier to define where you don't have any tech understanding. If somebody asked you what is HTTP or API or internet and you'll be like, "Okay, I don't know what it is." And while on the other end, you are able to have deep debates and could probably write technology design documents yourself as well. I think sometimes people get confused between data science. And in different organizations, I see data science bucketed either in data or in technology. Either is fine as long as you are clear on what your organization's framework is. Similarly then, there is strategy. Strategy is I think another area in product management which gets very confusing because there is obviously corporate strategy, there is business strategy, there's pricing strategy, there's strategy everywhere. Product strategy for me is where you are able to define that while somebody defines that this is the mountain that you're going to climb, but okay, how are you going to climb that mountain is basically the product strategy piece. So you are not in charge of okay, are you focused on growth? Are you focused on revenue? Are you focused on profitability? That's someone's choice. Are you going to pick this country? Are you going to pick that country? But once that is picked, what are the user segments that you're going to focus on? What are the needs of those user segments? How are we going to figure out what the right product for them will be? What is the order in which we are going to work on that? That whole piece of product strategy is with the product managers. And again, in the first case, you are basically going to rely on everyone to tell you, do this, do this, do this. In second and in the level five cases, you are able to articulate a very coherent product strategy at a broad level as well. Amazing, thanks for sharing that. I think for people that are trying to craft career ladder for product managers, this could help inform the way they think about this. By the way, when we mentioned Crystal, for folks that have no idea who we're talking about, she was a early head of growth at Gojek back in the day. She was a previous guest on the podcast. I always forget how to pronounce her last name exactly, but I think it's Widjaja, Crystal Widjaja. Widjaja.…

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