Deb Liu: evaluation

Transcript context

…If a feature ships, but no one knows about it, did it really ship? Keeping customers and internal teams like sales support and marketing in the loop on what's changing across your product is surprisingly hard. First, you have to dig through tickets and pull requests just to see what's been done. Then you have to figure out what's relevant to each person, craft updates, and then share them across all of your channels. Multiply this by the number of things that ship every week, and that's basically a full-time job just to keep everyone updated on what's changing. That's why high velocity product teams like Monte Carlo, Armory, and Popsicle use Makelog. Makelog makes it easy to see what's happening across tools like Jira, Linear, Asana, and GitHub. And then to write bite-sized updates, which you can immediately share with your audience wherever they are, including within your app on Slack, over email and even on Twitter. No more long boring log style change log posts that slow you down. Just quick and easy updates that keep your users informed and happy. Try make log for free today. Just visit makelog.com/lenny to get started. One more question before we get to Facebook Marketplace stuff, which I'm excited to dig into a bit. If you had to pick one skill for an early stage PM to focus on to help them in their career, and then same question for mid-stage PM, what would you suggest they focus on most? I would say for both actually, one of the most important things that I think we lack is communication skills because I don't know if you, the communication is the job. You can't do anything alone. You're not coding the product, you are not designing the product, you are not doing the research, you're not doing the data analysis. Your job is purely communication, and how good you are at communication is really, really critical. I think we underestimate that. We think our job is something else, but actually most PMs, the job is communication. Actually many jobs, your job is literally communication, and I think we underestimate how important that is. Having clear and good written communication skills, but also communication skills around broad communication. Can you get up and actually convince a group of people that your strategy is the right one? Can you write a six pager that seems so obvious that everyone's like, "Yes, we should do that?" Can you communicate the need for additional resources to get your team what they need? Those are all communication skills. One of the biggest challenges I see is, it's actually not just the communication skills, but the lack of courage to actually communicate. I get emails that say, "I don't want to bother you, but." Or, "I'm sorry to waste your time." And I'm thinking, no, don't say that. And I've coached a lot of people on this. Don't say just. Don't devalue yourself before you pitch your idea. And so I do think that it's small things, but it's also the big things being really comfortable in a room. One of the biggest biases we have in our industry is that we have a bias towards people who can speak intelligently about almost anything on the spot. We don't talk about this by the way, but if you look at the very senior people who rise faster in organizations, the senior executives, they have this skill. And I noticed this as I got further and further in my career, I didn't realize how important this was. And then I realized that anyone who can go into a room and speak about almost anything intelligently without any preparation has a huge advantage in our industry. Is that fair? Absolutely not. There are a lot of people who are quiet and are very thoughtful or need time to process, and it is a huge bias against those people. And it's also a bias against people who English is not their first language or they're extremely introverted or they have other abilities, I think. But I just want to acknowledge that here because if you have that skill, it will be rocket fuel. It will be so powerful for your career, and if you don't, it'll hold you back. I don't think it's fair exactly, but at the same time, when you go to an executive review, and I've done these product reviews where we have multiple teams, maybe 10, 15, 20 teams come in and there's a huge bias from the people who can actually answer the questions on the spot, and a huge bias towards those who could riff with the leaders. multiple teams, maybe 10, 15, 20 teams come in and there's a huge bias from the people who can actually answer the questions on the spot, and a huge bias towards those who could riff with the leaders. And it is just something that's systemic. Now, I don't know how to solve that problem, because the actual work matters way more in the day-to-day, but you're being judged on the 5%, which is your presentation or your ability to answer questions on the spot. I think it is something that we need to wrestle with, and I do think it's something which will play our industry. We might not have the best people at the helm because we have this bias, but it is real.…

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