Casey Winters: preference

Transcript context

…I'd love to hear your take on how you think about the spectrum and around up-scaling PMs to move along that spectrum? The idea is, and this is something I was inspired from talking with Omar who runs product at Cambly. He used to run core product at Pinterest. It's this idea of any product team is like a gang of misfits, they all come from different backgrounds. Most people didn't start as a product manager, their first job, they might have been in sales, or in marketing, or analytics, or engineering, right. Everyone's bringing these different skill sets to the table. But the main spectrum that I've observed in product teams of any decent size is that you have two extreme types of product managers per se, and on perhaps the left side of the spectrum you have the crazy innovator types, they have so many different ideas, they pay attention to every single change in the industry, they all know all about the latest Apple API or Snapchat's latest product feature. Those people are going to have ideas all the time. Actually, probably most of those ideas are going to be bad, but one out of ten's going to be just a game changer and they're generally not super great at turning that idea into action. And then on the extreme right side of the spectrum will be your typical executional focused PM, and they can do a really good job of taking a strong strategy and turning it into action that creates value for the customer, but they generally don't know what's going on in the industry. They can't think of a totally new product idea themselves. They're going to need support from above to be able to push them in the right direction and then they got it from there. When you think about recruiting, what we all want as CPOs in terms of people we bring into our team is we want people in the middle. We want people who are strategic, they understand what's going on in the industry, they can generate some good ideas, but they can also turn it into something real that delivers value for the customer and the company. And there just aren't a ton of those people in the world. Not as many as we would like to recruit, so as a product leader, if I'm airing on the side of which side of the spectrum I want people from, I generally will take people who are good at execution over people who are good at generating ideas, because of course there's always too many good ideas that a company need to focus and execute well on the best ones. Whereas if I were a VC, I would probably bias to the people on the left because I don't need every company to work. If I invest in 10 different entrepreneurs who have crazy ideas and one of them works and becomes the next Airbnb, turns out I've done incredibly well as a venture capitalist. The challenge you practically deal with as a product leader is you end up recruiting, and managing, and growing a lot of executional people who can get stuff done, but if they want to get to the director level or if they want to get to my level, they need to get more strategic. uiting, and managing, and growing a lot of executional people who can get stuff done, but if they want to get to the director level or if they want to get to my level, they need to get more strategic. And we don't have good ways to turn great executors into great strategists as in general, like a product function, so I've started investing in a lot of different things here. Obviously I've built some programs for Reforge around product strategy. A lot of my team goes to those to try to learn. I've also been doing a lot of mentorship with the team to try to teach them what it looks like to do that well. I've had people come in to speak with the team like you and many other great product folks to show my team what great looks like and how people like you developed your skills. And I'm trying lots of different things to try to move more of the team to the middle, where they can be that optimal strategist that still retains that ability to deliver great value on top of the strategy versus just have ideas that can't be executed on. And it's definitely a work in progress, it's a lot of different tactics to try to build that skill set inside the team and scale it. And definitely something I feel like I'm still working on.…

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