Gokul Rajaram: belief

Transcript context

…So say that you hire or you transition someone from PM into being the first PM. What are some signs that maybe they're not doing too well and things aren't going well and maybe you should go in a different direction? I think the biggest one is I always feel with PMs, it's actually two or three things you can look at. One is You can actually just ask the engineers themselves. Engineers are fairly blunt. And when I manage PMs, I've seen that they always tell me, engineering managers in particular, they are very, very quick to tell you, look, This person is not working. They're not being effective. What value are they adding? And I think just number one thing you have to do is you have to, just because you hired a PM doesn't, you can't abdicate that responsibility of understanding how the team is doing. It's not gone. You've got to talk to the engineers and designers constantly to see, is the product manager adding value? Second, If you see the PM, the newly anointed PM, still get too much into the how to build the product, which is really the domain of the engineers and designers, that's the other failure case where you've got to, and this is something through coaching comes. Obviously, they just were an engineer or designer two weeks ago, and now they're a PM. There's an immediate impulse to start going back into their comfort zone. And the key is to really push them to, go more strongly biased towards customers and push them more towards talking to customers, understanding customer problems. And I think every PM, we all know this, all of us as PMs, there was no class to be a PM. So there are some people who joined APM programs directly out of school, but most of us are engineers, marketers, analysts, designers, and we became PMs after that. So we all come with inherent biases and ways of doing things. And it's only a function of how long it takes us to shed or at least to not be that persona, but to actually take on a PM persona. And so I personally believe in the growth mindset a lot. The reason that hopefully this person was chosen to be the PM is A, the founder saw that this person has the characteristics traits, which is curiosity, customer centricity, communication skills. being able to facilitate discussion, all of those things that a PM should have, problem-solving skills. And so hopefully those are things. They didn't just pick a random engineer out of the 10, but they picked the right engineer, the right designer. And I think if you do that and you surround them with some good mentors, I think in six months, they'll make good PMs. I love that. Maybe just try randomly. You never know. Good work. Just to close the loop on the idea of when it's time to hire a PM, somebody may be listening to this and feeling like, oh, shit, we got to get a PM in ASAP. What are some signs or reasons to wait a little bit longer before you hire your first PM?…

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