Vikrama Dhiman: belief

Transcript context

…This episode is brought to you by Coda, and I mean that literally. I use Coda every day to help me plan each episode of this very podcast. It's where I keep my content calendar, my guest research, and also the questions that I plan to ask each guest. Also, during the recording itself, I have a Coda page up to remind myself what I want to talk about. Coda is an all-in-one platform that combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps to help you and your team get more done. Now is the perfect time to get started with Coda, especially its extensive planning capabilities. With Coda, you can stay aligned and ship faster by managing your planning cycles in one location. You can set and measure OKRs with full visibility across teams and stakeholders. You can map dependencies, create progress visualizations, and identify risk areas. Plus, you can access hundreds of pressure-tested templates for everything from roadmap strategy to final decision-making to PRDs. If you want a platform that empowers your team to strategize, plan and track goals together, you can get started with Coda today for free. And if you want to see for yourself why product teams at high-growth companies like Pinterest, Figma and Qualtrics run on Coda, take advantage of the special limited-time offer just for startups. Head over to coda.io/lenny to sign up and get $1,000 in credit. That's C-O-D-A.io/lenny to sign up and get $1,000 in credit. Coda.io/lenny. Something that you mentioned earlier that I wanted to come back to is this confusion about what the PM role is and how that trips people up in being successful in the role and continuing to thrive in the role. You mentioned this to me offline too, that this is just something you deal with a lot, just this frustration of what the hell is this job? What am I actually responsible for? What am I not? What do you find is helpful in helping people work through that, get past that, not make that a big blocker in their career, not knowing exactly what the PM role is? I think we've been in technology product for several decades now, but we are still figuring out what an exact definition of product management is. And even the strongest definitions are slightly principled and philosophical in nature, they're not very concrete, and that also means that every and different technology companies have gone through different journeys and they've defined the roles very, very differently. And even within a very large company, you will see that different teams, different divisions are approaching the roles very, very differently as well. And on top of that, what that does is that not only internally the product managers are figuring this out, their managers, their leaders are figuring these things out for them, but the other stakeholders who have to work with these product managers are also confused and they don't know what to expect. And the number one question I get from stakeholders is, is a product manager expected to do this? Because they also don't know, okay, is this expected from a product manager or not? And my general answer to that is, if this is something which is blocking the progress on the product, then yes, the product manager should work on that. Love that.…

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