Lenny Rachitsky: recommendation

Transcript context

…And there is another aspect to it. A lot of product leads try to create their compass. And while they do so, they think about, "Maybe I should have an aligned version with my peers." So the other product leads in the company. And then we're talking about the career levels and all these things and often takes ages until something is coming back from HR or you have a unified version. So that is something where I usually say, "No, start with your own personal team because the folks in your team usually just have you as a line manager. So grade your compass and encourage your peers to grade their compass and, a bit down the line, it might make sense to harmonize some of that, but it's better to start helping your product folks and giving them some orientation than being totally paralyzed by the fact that it's not a compass that is used in the whole company." I want to talk about this compass and how to figure out what a competent PM is. And I know you have a framework around this and I have some stuff I'll actually share, too. But on this latter piece of checking in the development plan, I wrote about this once, but I'll share it here briefly. Something that I did with my PMs that was so effective was every time we did a performance review, every six months, we had a performance review, we put together a Google Doc with all of the things that we agree they should be working on and we pick, say, five themes or three themes, and then we pick very concrete things they should do over the next six months that will help them develop these things. And then more importantly to your last point is we did a monthly coaching session where we looked at the status of each of these things. So there's a color code for each of these 10 things that we all agreed you should be doing these things over the next six months and we checked in how they're going, so that the next performance review, it's not like, "Oh, I forgot all these things." Yeah.…

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