Lenny's Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
22 published records
01 / evaluation
“Well, I think the biggest thing I learned from that entire experience is that people are people, but they respond to the process and respond to culture in different ways.”
02 / evaluation
“And so thus, you end up in a case where you end up fighting over prioritization, and in the end, when you're starving, what you're focused on is what you need to get done on your side. And so really I think instead you either fund something like that, fully get it done quickly, or when you elongate it like this where things are just, you're just creating hostility between the teams.”
03 / belief
“I definitely want to get to Facebook Marketplace questions, but one last question while we're on this topic is Women in Product, which is an organization that I believe you co-founded and you're on the board and you run.”
04 / belief
“I think PayPal is such a small scrappy company trying to do so many amazing things with a few hundred employees and it was just the adventure of a lifetime, but it was really different being bought by a company that was run in such a corporate way.”
05 / uncertainty
“Something that I don't know if people know is that you joined PayPal when you were very young and it was maybe your first PM role and you ended up taking on some significant responsibility super quickly.”
06 / belief
“" I think we overthink the downside risk and we actually underweight the upside risk.”
07 / uncertainty
“Do you have a general mental model of, "Hey, I want to improve it," say design, I don't know.”
08 / belief
“I noticed this as I got further and further in my career, I didn't realize how important this was. And then I realized that anyone who can go into a room and speak about almost anything intelligently without any preparation has a huge advantage in our industry.”
09 / belief
“I think that's what's really great about a career in tech is if you're in a high growth company, they give you so much responsibility that you have no business deserving the right to do, and yet you have this opportunity to shape a product that's touched by millions and millions of people, and you can grow your career so quickly because you can have such impact in such a short time.”
10 / belief
“I think that's one of the things that I see, which is if you are going to do anything, make sure that it's worth your time.”
11 / belief
“Instead, we worked on a new plan, but I think a lot of PMs are like her, not because, and she's an incredible PM, but she put so much more care into her product than she really thought about her career.”
12 / belief
“Deb, this was so much fun. I learned a ton. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much for listening.”
13 / evaluation
“We started it because we wanted women to be able to connect and build community, but the ultimate goal is to have more women in product management, because what happens was the reason that companies like Facebook and a lot of other tech companies didn't have a lot of women and that we lost so many women was that a decision was made 2004 to require a computer science degree to become a product manager.”
14 / preference
“I wrote it because I always had an open door policy, and for many years at Facebook I had an open door policy where anybody could reach out to me, and I would just spend 15 minutes coaching them, venturing them, whatever they wanted.”
15 / recommendation
“If you can find a coaching circle or mentoring circle of other PMs, they will actually help you see your blind spots, because I think seeing your blind spots helps you to work on them.”
16 / recommendation
“The second thing, I do think that for your career, I should work on a template for this, I actually have a pre-mortem I wrote when I first joined Ancestry for example, of what I hope to accomplish in 10 years here.”
17 / evaluation
“You have been 50,000 subscribers, you showed up to meet up at events, I think that's not our natural inclination, but I also think that you and I have one thing in common and I hope that our listeners will know this, which is we also are people, who when the occasion comes, we will rise to the occasion because that's what needs to get done.”
18 / evaluation
“Let's talk." And that kind of support is something that's really invaluable, and I think we don't use that enough in our industry honestly.”
19 / evaluation
“I would say for both actually, one of the most important things that I think we lack is communication skills because I don't know if you, the communication is the job.”
20 / evaluation
“Now, I don't know how to solve that problem, because the actual work matters way more in the day-to-day, but you're being judged on the 5%, which is your presentation or your ability to answer questions on the spot.”
21 / evaluation
“I definitely think the growth mindset is absolutely the most important thing because someone who's constantly growing is going to listen to feedback.”
22 / evaluation
“" And I realized that so much is not just, if a great strategy falls in the forest and no one knew about it, it doesn't even matter, right? And so I learned that I was failing at the part that was the most important part of consulting, wasn't just getting to the answer, but it was making sure you could convince people of the answer.”