Julia Schottenstein: evaluation

Transcript context

…That's a good segue to my last question. So weren't a PM before this role. You have strong experience in investing, investment banking business in general. I'm curious what you think product managers should maybe focus on more or learn more or lean into to become stronger product leaders based on the experience you've had moving into product. So I pull a lot on my experience or some of the things that I did was as an investor in my current role in product. And maybe I'll touch on what is the scale of a venture capitalist might be a little bit foreign for people, but venture capitalists, they spend all their day meeting lots of different companies, context switching. They have to know a little bit about quite a lot of different things. And they do this to refine their investment tastes or find their investor judgment. And they're also investing a lot in their network and connecting people, supporting people, and mining people for ideas that are way smarter than they are. So you do that all the time in Venture and I've brought a lot of those skills with me into product and it translates really well. The first is I still spend a lot of time investing in my network and I think it's an underrated way for a PM to spend their time. And I try to build a network of operators at other companies that are like dbt Labs that are growing nicely, maybe a little bit ahead of where we are. And I ask them questions, how did you navigate open source? How did you navigate pricing? How did you navigate acquisitions? And then I take the best ideas, figure out which ones I can apply and bring it back to dbt Labs. The second thing is I really think my special T or my superpower is that I'm a T-shaped generalist. So I know a little about a lot of things from finance to business to product. I have to go a lot deeper in product in the areas that I specialize in. That's where the tail of the tea comes in. But it's precisely because I've had a diverse background that makes me more effective when I'm trying to get things done within the organization. Because I have just more credible experiences that I can pull from. And then the last thing that I think maybe doesn't show up day to day in my product work, but in investing, you're constantly thinking about risk and the power laws, and we touched on this before, but most investments don't work out. You lose the dollars that you put in, but all the returns come from these rare events that make up for all the losses. You have to think about what are the uncapped upside opportunities in investing. And I think in product, you still have to do the same thing. If 50% of the things I worked on went to zero, we'd have a problem. But it encourages me to continue to make bets for the company that has the chance of bending the trajectory of our business. We've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got six questions for you. Are you ready?…

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