Noam Lovinsky: preference

Transcript context

…These stories are amazing. It connects to your point that you're kind of an, I see, an inner child I see, where you keep trying to kill your career by accident. Like, "Now, let's kill this project I'm working on. I'm going to demote myself a little bit." But clearly it's worked out. Is there anything that you saw that gave you that confidence that, "This is actually going to be okay"? Because again, people don't normally think this is how you get ahead in your career, is you kill your team and you layer yourself. Yeah, I mean I think having a broader view of the company strategy, having an instinct for what we should be doing and why and how I might prioritize all of these investments if I were given the opportunity to do that, I think internalizing that and understanding that and then trying to align whatever is under your influence towards that overall goal is very helpful and made me feel like, "I'm pretty confident this is going to be okay because it will lead to better results for the organization given what we're trying to do. And so as long as I'm trying to push decisions or actions that actually lead to better results, if it's a healthy culture and organization, I should be okay." I think that the other thing is, just over the years, I got extremely lucky. The first job that I got out of school was an incredible group of people and it gave me a nose for talent. It gave me a nose for what great feels like and what a high functioning team feels like. It's hard to know that without experiencing that. And so in the moments, YouTube was also one of those teams, Grammarly is one of those teams, Thumbtack was one of those teams. Being able to sniff that out when you're trying to choose the next team is very important. But I think that's another thing that gave me confidence. I learned these people well enough, Hunter, Shishir, et cetera, to have the instinct that the right thing will happen, like this will be better for me and the broader team. Got it. So the key there is just you have to trust that the team around you is good enough, that you're not going to be pushed off into a corner. I think you made a really profound point here that a lot of people don't get about the job of a product leader and a product manager, that a big part of your job is to think about what is best for the business and work backwards from that. Not necessarily what's the best thing for the user is the highest priority, not necessarily what's the best thing for my team and how do I hit the goals that I'm obsessed with. It's what is going to be best for the business broadly and then make decisions there. Is there anything more you can say there about just how powerful that is as a way of thinking about prioritization and decisions as a product manager?…

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