Jiaona Zhang: preference

Transcript context

…I like the idea of that, but imagine what often happens is you sign up for an ambitious OKR, you don't wait till the last second to commit to it and then ends up being red, and then you go into performance reviews and like, "Oh, Lenny didn't hit his OKRs. Look at this guy. His team is not doing great." How do you think about that as a product leader understanding if the team actually did well and the PM is performing well when they sign up for these really ambitious OKRs and their story's great and they're doing the right thing, but they fail? First of all, I think it's creating a culture where you are not punished for that. Because I definitely don't want a culture where it's like you took a risk and you failed and therefore your performance is impacted. I'd much rather people take risks than to be safe. So I think that's the first thing. That being said, you're also not doing a good job as a PM if you're like, "This is my super, super ambitious thing," and you're like, "I have no idea how to achieve it." Your job is to dream big and also have a plan to go tackle it. And so what I would expect the PM to be able to say is, "This is my North Star. I'm not going to be able to do that in a quarter, that just is unreasonable, but here are the five milestones," whatever number, some number of milestones "That it's going to take me to do quarter over quarter to achieve this really, really ambitious thing. And let me draw you that path. Here's the milestone all the way across, and this is the first one. This is why it's so meaningful." So I expect that combination where you're like, "I know where I'm going. It's really, really ambitious." And then you can then break it down. But again, I would much rather have someone shoot for the moon, even for someone to say like "This is the thing I really want to do. I don't know my path yet" than to be really, really safe. Because when you're safe, you're always going to be building something suboptimal. It's going to be suboptimal use of your resources as opposed to actually trying to figure out what the best swing that you can take is. So it sounds like it comes back to the story of the roadmap and what they're trying to accomplish, and just as long as it feels like the story made sense, there's a path there. The team did their best, I think we know it was really ambitious. We kind of knew maybe they wouldn't get there. It sounds like that's kind of the thing you look for in a performance of the PM.…

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