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Ravi Mehta

Published podcast speaker

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23
Episodes
1
Shows
1
Named items
1

Books, apps, and tools

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book / likes

Hooked

“I really like Hooked. That's a book that I know came out a few years ago, but I find that that model is just such an effective model for thinking about how to create products that are engaging.”

Lenny's Podcast · 19 Jan 2023

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What Ravi said.

23 transcript-backed records

01 / recommendation

Likes Hooked.

“I really like Hooked. That's a book that I know came out a few years ago, but I find that that model is just such an effective model for thinking about how to create products that are engaging. I also really like Working Backwards. I think Amazon has such a unique way of going about building product, and they've been so opinionated about what matters within that process. It's great to get a really detailed window into that. I was always curious about how it worked, and Working Backwards was a great way too to understand that a lot better.”
Speaker
Ravi Mehta
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

04 / belief

Then the next thing is dependency risk, which is we understand what we think the levers are, but we may or may not have the tools that we need in order to make progress.

“Then the next thing is dependency risk, which is we understand what we think the levers are, but we may or may not have the tools that we need in order to make progress.”
Speaker
Ravi Mehta
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

05 / belief

I think oftentimes people don't spend enough time just picking up the phone and having a conversation one-on-one with the user of a product and getting into understanding their psychology, what value they're getting and how to really optimize for that.

“I think oftentimes people don't spend enough time just picking up the phone and having a conversation one-on-one with the user of a product and getting into understanding their psychology, what value they're getting and how to really optimize for that.”
Speaker
Ravi Mehta
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

06 / belief

Another really interesting, I think, difference is the way that you market and grow for an early stage company is very different than how you might market or grow for a later stage company where you have much larger budgets.

“Another really interesting, I think, difference is the way that you market and grow for an early stage company is very different than how you might market or grow for a later stage company where you have much larger budgets.”
Speaker
Ravi Mehta
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

07 / belief

I think about velocity is sort of the quantity of work and latency is how quickly you can go from an idea to actually being able to test that idea and learn whether or not that idea was the right one.

“I think about velocity is sort of the quantity of work and latency is how quickly you can go from an idea to actually being able to test that idea and learn whether or not that idea was the right one.”
Speaker
Ravi Mehta
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

08 / belief

The person doesn't need to go into anything confidential, of course, but I think what's really nice about that question is it get you really deep insight into what they value.

“The person doesn't need to go into anything confidential, of course, but I think what's really nice about that question is it get you really deep insight into what they value.”
Speaker
Ravi Mehta
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

10 / belief

There's not a clear end in sight, and ultimately both the leader and the team are frustrated. So I think the two really effective functional ways of leading are scalable leadership where the team has autonomy, you have confidence or selective micromanagement where for a brief period of time you might take away some of the team's autonomy to set them on the right track, but with the goal of getting back into that scalable leadership mode.

“There's not a clear end in sight, and ultimately both the leader and the team are frustrated. So I think the two really effective functional ways of leading are scalable leadership where the team has autonomy, you have confidence or selective micromanagement where for a brief period of time you might take away some of the team's autonomy to set them on the right track, but with the goal of getting back into that scalable leadership mode.”
Speaker
Ravi Mehta
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

11 / belief

Often what I've heard of as the distinction is the vision is sort of the vision that the company sees for the future, and then the mission is the mission that the company has in light of that vision. And I think you can really bring those two together and you can both describe that world and the role that the company plays in a single statement.

“Often what I've heard of as the distinction is the vision is sort of the vision that the company sees for the future, and then the mission is the mission that the company has in light of that vision. And I think you can really bring those two together and you can both describe that world and the role that the company plays in a single statement.”
Speaker
Ravi Mehta
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

15 / evaluation

These competencies I think are the same for APMs as they are for CPOs, and I can talk a little bit about how they change as a person gets more senior.

“These competencies I think are the same for APMs as they are for CPOs, and I can talk a little bit about how they change as a person gets more senior.”
Speaker
Ravi Mehta
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

16 / evaluation

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Ravi Mehta
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

17 / evaluation

I think a fundamental part of being a really good product manager is the ability to think about the user experience in a very detailed way to make sure that you're not just defining functionality, but you're really clearly understanding how that functionality turns into user experience.

“I think a fundamental part of being a really good product manager is the ability to think about the user experience in a very detailed way to make sure that you're not just defining functionality, but you're really clearly understanding how that functionality turns into user experience.”
Speaker
Ravi Mehta
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

18 / recommendation

Because too often in a startup you can spend a lot of time in paralysis around analyzing market research or going through all of the different things you could do strategically, thinking about all the different potential variants that you could build, all the different pricing strategies, whereas instead, a startup just makes sense to kind of get to a point where you have conviction, execute on that, and then move on to whether or not that felt like the right thing, in which case you can double down, or that was the wrong thing, in which case you can shift direction and do that pretty quickly.

“Because too often in a startup you can spend a lot of time in paralysis around analyzing market research or going through all of the different things you could do strategically, thinking about all the different potential variants that you could build, all the different pricing strategies, whereas instead, a startup just makes sense to kind of get to a point where you have conviction, execute on that, and then move on to whether or not that felt like the right thing, in which case you can double down, or that was the wrong thing, in which case you can shift direction and do that pretty quickly.”
Speaker
Ravi Mehta
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

19 / evaluation

If you ask me to remove retention, I can brainstorm 10 experiments, but I don't actually know why people are continuing to use our product. And so then it doesn't make sense to commit to a retention goal because you're going to sort of throw a spaghetti against the wall, have a bunch of experiments, [inaudible 00:49:16] will stick, and maybe you'll be able to move the metric, but you won't have understood exactly why, or you might move the metric in a way that is not tied to the strategy that you have as a business.

“If you ask me to remove retention, I can brainstorm 10 experiments, but I don't actually know why people are continuing to use our product. And so then it doesn't make sense to commit to a retention goal because you're going to sort of throw a spaghetti against the wall, have a bunch of experiments, [inaudible 00:49:16] will stick, and maybe you'll be able to move the metric, but you won't have understood exactly why, or you might move the metric in a way that is not tied to the strategy that you have as a business.”
Speaker
Ravi Mehta
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

20 / evaluation

The second thing is that rate limits the size of the team that you can manage because you can only do that for a finite set of people before you yourself are tapped out on bandwidth.

“The second thing is that rate limits the size of the team that you can manage because you can only do that for a finite set of people before you yourself are tapped out on bandwidth.”
Speaker
Ravi Mehta
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

21 / preference

Your ideal goal is to lead in a scalable way, which means you feel really confident about the direction of your team and your team has the autonomy to move in that direction.

“Your ideal goal is to lead in a scalable way, which means you feel really confident about the direction of your team and your team has the autonomy to move in that direction.”
Speaker
Ravi Mehta
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

22 / preference

If you can think about a spectrum of you have a larger company, somewhere in the middle, you have VC-backed startups where you can take some of the ways of thinking about things that you learn at a bigger company and apply it because you have the ability to invest a significant amount of resources.

“If you can think about a spectrum of you have a larger company, somewhere in the middle, you have VC-backed startups where you can take some of the ways of thinking about things that you learn at a bigger company and apply it because you have the ability to invest a significant amount of resources.”
Speaker
Ravi Mehta
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

23 / evaluation

You would never work with an architect that didn't provide you a blueprint of the house that they want to build for you because being able to describe a house in words alone is not enough.

“You would never work with an architect that didn't provide you a blueprint of the house that they want to build for you because being able to describe a house in words alone is not enough.”
Speaker
Ravi Mehta
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast
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