Nickey Skarstad: recommendation

Transcript context

…Is there a default approach you'd suggest, just like most often you should go to the GM model, or most often you should just go with this cross-functional team? Yeah. I mean, I think especially if your business is new, going functional makes sense because you don't necessarily have a lot of organizational complexity. Airbnb at the time we were there, Lenny, was a huge company, right? It had tons of different teams that were trying to tackle many different problems. So that GM model made a lot of sense because it again was able to take a specific business opportunity, give it the resources that it need, and give it space to run. When your company's smaller stage, I think that matters less. Typically, especially if you're working on solving similar problems as an organization, functional makes a ton of sense. Because then you're also thinking more holistically about, all right, how do we build the right product development process across different functions to make sure that we are, to use a bad metaphor, it's like the symphony metaphor. You have all these different instruments that need to figure out how do we play together at the right times? And I think that functional way of working actually allows you to do that really well. This episode is brought to you by Unit. What did Gusto, Uber, Shopify, and AngelList all have in common? They've all decided to build banking into their product. According to AngelList's head of product, "Banking makes every single feature more interesting. With it, our platform functions as financial mission control for our customers. Without it, we're just another software tool in a big messy stack." Embedding banking into your product, not only adds differentiation, but also helps you acquire, retain and monetize your customers. Unit is the market leader in banking as a service, combining multiple bank partners with a developer friendly API to empower companies of all sizes to launch accounts, cards, payments, and lending in just a few weeks. Unit is trusted by leading brands, such as AngelList, ID, Invoice2go, and Roofstock. To hear more about how Unit enables companies like yours to build banking, visit unit.co/lenny to request a demo or to try their free sandbox. That's unit.co/lenny. Something I learned at Airbnb and from many other companies at this point is there's never going to be the one right way to structure, and companies bounce back and forth between them. Like Airbnb, for example, has moved from GM model to functional reporting lines back to GM. And so things change and you try some, see how it goes, adjust, optimize for the biggest opportunity. And then you'll probably change it six months later. I asked a few people that know you and that worked with you questions that they think I should ask you. And one of the questions that came up most often is around how you set vision, translate that into goals, and then execute on those goals. And I know that's something a lot of PMs want to get better at and something that a lot of PMs aren't great at. And so can you just share any thoughts, advice, stories around that and how you do that well?…

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