Tamar Yehoshua: evaluation

Transcript context

…And at Google. Wow. Okay. So I asked him what to ask you, and he said that you're amazing at building strong cross-functional relationships, especially with engineers. I know you used to be an engineer, so I get where that skill come from. What can you teach people about building stronger cross-functional relationships, especially PMs to build better relationships with their engineers, designers, other folks on their team? Probably the most important thing that a product leader does because if you have great ideas of what to build, but you can't get them built, then you go nowhere. So one, make sure somewhere where you have a good engineering partner. So Henderson was the co-founder and CTO of Slack, and I couldn't have asked for a better engineering partner. He's just awesome. And that has to be part of your evaluation criteria that you meet and value your engineering partner before you join or you know that it's not the right one and the organization is willing to make a change. So that can happen too. You can go in and understand that something has to change, but that is a very, very important thing of what you're doing and what you're assessing when you go in. And then I think what's really important is that you're aligned. You understand your roles and responsibilities and where you're going to divide and conquer and where you're going to be aligned. You don't want any of this ... People in the organization, they asked Mom, they asked dad and they got different opinions and playing one against the other, that doesn't work. So one, you have to know that you're not going to do that. So if somebody would ask me something that it was in Cal's domain, I'd be like, "Did you talk to Cal?" I would never try and go around him. So we were very clear on, you're going to drive this, I'm going to drive this. And if it was unclear, we'd talk and we would say, "Okay. Who's going to take this one?" And we would do all our reviews together. And so all of the OKR reviews, we had weekly exec reviews, we had the updates on our OKRs, so we did them all together, but I knew here's the things that he was going to ask the questions on and dig deep. And then when I was, he would take a back seat, but of course we could ask questions in each other things, but I knew that he was taking ownership and he knew what I was taking ownership of. But I think the bottom line was respect. Is that you have to respect and trust that they actually will follow up on what they say they will. In Cal and Fuzzy were amazing at that. I would go to Fuzzy and be like, "Hey, we need more mobile engineers because this one product is not going to ship." And he's like, "I'm on it. Got it." And that was all I needed to do. And obviously if he couldn't do it, he'd come back to me and, "Hey, there's going to be a problem." But it was like just things got done. That's the best part of it. You talked about being aligned, which I love and I fully have seen that power of that of you and your engine manager, design manager being aligned on ... And you tell me if I'm wrong, but specifically on what goals you're trying to achieve, what success looks like, things like that. Are there any tactics you found to create that alignment? And also if there's anything else you want to add to the point I just made about what it is you're specifically aligned on, that'd be great.…

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