Varun Parmar: evaluation

Transcript context

…You're talking about urgency. I've never met a founder or a product leader who doesn't want their team to move faster. They're always encouraging their team, "How do we move faster?" I'm curious if there's something you've learned tactically about helping your team move more quickly. You mentioned Frank Slootman's book. Amp It Up is what it's called, by the way, in case folks want to check it out and he's big on just like creating a sense of urgency, constant urgency, and we'll link to that and share notes. But yeah, what have you found helps create urgency and generally helps your teams move faster other than just like, "Move faster, everyone"? My fundamental belief here, Lenny, is that every product manager... I can talk to product managers because there is reason certain ones, someone wants to be a product manager, because in my view it's one of the most thankless jobs, like you get to do a lot of [inaudible 00:35:10] and it's like, "Why you have to do this?" But it attracts a certain personality and that personality is driven by challenge and that personality wants to prove that they can solve this challenge and do something amazing. I think fundamentally the product persona actually wants to move fast. I think the reason why in some cases we are not able to move fast is because of roadblocks that we run into and those roadblocks can manifest themselves into technical challenges, they can manifest them in cells of organizational challenges, they could be priority challenges and so on and so forth. My fundamental approach to solving that is to ensure that the product leads who are working on these capabilities can instantly raise their hand and call out that there are challenges that they are running into. Then the job of the leadership team, the product management team, is to essentially go and quickly resolve those issues. I think if you are able to resolve those issues, then what it does is it actually starts a virtuous cycle where you can actually start to see those wins. Once you see those wins, you actually create that courage to do more things. Maybe because you've seen how that specific roadblock was solved and you have a pattern matching that you've developed now, you can solve a lot of those things on your own and it's the next level of challenge that you now going to raise your hand. What that does is it starts to build this organizational competency in terms of how you can figure out what to build. We all find these people in our organizations where there's someone somehow is able to do certain things in one-tenth the time that it would take a normal person. It's not that they are 10 times faster, it's just that in my observation that they've figured out which part of the core base they should build in versus not, who should be part of their team and who should not be, how they need to define that from a scope perspective, what does success look like, and it's the architecture of bringing all of these things together that actually brings that magic formula line in terms of "Hey, we are able to deliver faster." I really like this topic. What I'm hearing is one of the biggest roots of slowdown in a company and product development is blockers not being unblocked, and I always feel the same thing. I feel like a PM's number one job is to unblock their team because their job is basically make the most out of their team that they're marshaling towards some outcome. The way you do that is just figure out what's slowing them down. You just talked about this idea of a PM raises their hand to leadership, "Hey, we're blocked by this thing." Is there a process you've come up with there that helps you do that, it's connected to-…

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