Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…ven by impact, not promotion. Ultimately that's what you want to wake up every day thinking about how to have an impact for your business and that will be an indicator on your likelihood of promotion. So do that instead of just focusing on how to get promoted and having that guide your day. Awesome. So it's a long list. There's a lot that a PM needs to be good at, which I think if you're a PM you already know. It's a wild, crazy, impossible job to have everything nailed down. And at the end of this post even mention you've never met a 1% PM that does all these things. And I think that's important. No one's going to be the best at all these things. And so just to drill down a little bit and get a little more focused. Say you're a new product manager. Of these, I forget how many there, maybe 10, 12, what are the top three that you think new PMs should get most good at and focus on? Probably communicate, prioritize, and execute. I think those are just the core building blocks. Other ones will be more important as you grow and become more senior, but those ones, no matter where you are in your product career I think are super important. Being a better communicator is something I've been working on my entire product career and I'll be working on until the day I stop. And I remember years ago I was at Microsoft, my first effectively product manager role and my product unit manager, Thomas, came by the office and I think he asked me, "When is this going to ship?" And I was like, "Well, this thing is taking a little bit longer here and this other thing and yada yada." And I gave a bunch of background, but I didn't really answer the question. And I got a little feedback from him like, that's not really the ... Ultimately he's waiting for a date. And so I just reflected on that and that was, as I remember, my journey to try to be a better communicator over time and I'm still on it. When I went to Amazon, I worked for Kim Rackmiller who was our, I think at the time, SVP for Worldwide Discovery. And I think she was Amazon's first TPM. And she was tough but super smart. And so that was also an early experience to learn from her. And sometimes you get some feedback when you didn't really answer the question. And my first boss, Russell and I organized and started to gather this thing called the Book of Kim. And so we would gather these best practices that we learned from her elsewhere. Avoid weasel words, answer first and then explain, own your problems. And started building this. And then I extended that over time and added a bunch more and wrote a post called the Operators Manual. I tried to gather all these things together. But it's such an important thing and the stakes get higher as you work with more and more senior people. But if you can get in the habit early of answering a when question with a date, knowing how to use numbers to answer questions and honestly just learning from feedback and grade yourself after you get feedback on a doc or after a meeting or after answering a question in an elevator. And if you try to say, "Gosh, how could I have done that better?," and then try to get better, you can. And you can go far if you just focus on that and all the other 150 skills of a product manager, but if you don't have that, it's unlikely that you're going to really go too far in your product career. So that was communicate. I guess prioritize as the next one. And so I think this is the number one key tool of a product manager is prioritization. Because so many things come from being good at prioritizing. And it's not just what project do you do next or do you do this project or that project. There's so many different dimensions to prioritization.…

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