Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…Yes. Love that. And I think that's really freeing to a lot of people because they're like, "Oh, we don't know if we're going to be as perfect about this versus let's just drive some growth and get people who are good enough thinking on that. " Okay, great. You mentioned Naomi-isms, I want to segue to that. So let me first read a quote. So I asked Adam Mosseri, who is Head of Instagram, what to ask you. I know you guys work together on a bunch of stuff. Here's how he described you, "Naomi is called the conductor here at Meta. She has an incredible ability to handle the most complex projects and problems and bring the right people together to simplify and solve them. She is very firm yet kind. Her standards are extremely high, and she sets the bar." Also many other people that I messaged said very similar things about you, about how you're incredibly good at taking very complex problems and getting shit done, getting them done, simplifying them and getting them done. So I want to spend some time understanding what you've learned about how to do this well. What are the skills you've collected that allow you to take really complex problems and get to a solution, stay kind but firm and take on these really hard challenges? So maybe just broadly, I'm curious, what are some of these skills that you have built that allow you to do this? Yeah, well also that's very kind of Adam. I adore Adam obviously, he is one of the tenured people in small group and I've actually gotten the opportunity to work even more closely with him than usual. We recently launched something called Teen Accounts and Adam and I worked very closely on that. In terms of how I do the things people say that I can do, I really rely on Naomi-isms. Like I said, and actually I refer your podcast out a lot because there isn't just a PM university that I can send people to, there isn't a formal training that people can get to become a product manager, and that's where Naomi-isms came from. It was stuff that I learned on the job from other people, including from Adam, that I found myself repeating over and over again. "A good PM looks for a way to make that more efficient," for me, that was writing them down, people started calling them Naomi-isms. I started sharing them internally. And then I think two years ago, I also started sharing them externally. Adam referred to me as a conductor, that's one of the Naomi-isms, in my role as Head of Product, I want to educate the PM community about what is PM? It's the most common question I get from PMs and non-PMs, "What do PMs do? What makes a great PM?" And what I say is a PM is a conductor. It's as though the team that you are a PM on is an orchestra. There are many different functions in your team that includes legal policy, comms, data analytics, engineering, design, much like there are many different instruments in an orchestra. And as a PM, your job is to make sure everyone's playing their part correctly, every section in the orchestra is playing their part, but at the same time, they're playing together, they're unified in the music that they're producing and that they're playing at the right tempo. And a lot of times I think people use music analogies or vocabulary to describe the work, and that includes things like people being in harmony, like a good team, a good PM, a good orchestra is in harmony, they're in sync, they're at the right tempo, they have the right cadence. That's sort of how I imagine what a PM does at work. Important characteristics are the PM is not the star of the show. Indeed, conductors don't even say anything during the performance. And also, I would at the same time give PMs little metronomes and conductor wands. This was something that I used to do when we were smaller., Just to sort of take the analogy way too far.…

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