Ravi Mehta: evaluation

Transcript context

…Oh man. I wanted to move on to a different topic, but I want to dig into this a little bit because it's really interesting. So a lot of people work at companies where their product manager, leader is not going to be like, "Cool, let's spend a quarter understanding if we can move this metric." That seems like you have to be a really evolved leader to be okay with that, or is that even not a good idea to spend a quarter doing that? How do you think about not actually having a goal that is moving a metric that people care about and focusing on understanding and kind of pushing this frontier of understanding further versus just moving a metric that people actually want you to move? It might be that for the quarter, the way that the company works, the things that it's focused on. You need to actually commit to a goal to move retention or a goal to move your follower count or something like that. There's two ways to do that. One is you can commit to that goal and then in three months kind of hope for the best and just do a lot of work that you think might actually move the lever. The other thing is to say actually that journey towards hitting that particular goal, we can break into. Initially let's spend a couple of weeks understanding. We'll talk to customers. We'll do some analysis. We'll form some really good hypotheses. And then based on those hypotheses we'll start to figure out what do we need to execute on in order to start to validate those hypotheses. And then we can execute on those things and validate those hypotheses. And depending on where in the quarter things start to go off the rails, you'll have a feeling for where that frontier is. And when you miss the goal, you can then go back to the team or the leadership and say, "We missed our goal, but I think I know why. Here's the things that we did within the quarter and here's where things started to go off the rails. Here's what I'd suggest that we commit to for the next quarter so that we can be much more sure that we're going to hit our goal." And leadership is always going to be outcome driven, but they also want to have a lot of confidence that we're going to be able to hit those outcomes. And so if you can clearly convey the learning and provide a really clear path that will get them that confidence, they're often going to be much more [inaudible 00:53:07] than you anticipate. I think the desire to always set outcome-based goals is just shorthand for we want you to move the needle and we want you to be thinking about that. That doesn't mean that you do that in the absence of really detailed understanding and really honing your execution process so that you can execute flawlessly. So approaching things in that way can help you change the conversation and make it much more specific. And you also have a post about this exact topic, right?…

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