Lenny's Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
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Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
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25 published records
01 / recommendation
“These are not product books. I recommend Anna Akhmatova's You Will Hear Thunder, a book of poetry that is excellent. I recommend almost anything by James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time I most recently reread, and back to software, High Output Management.”
02 / recommendation
“I recommend almost anything by James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time I most recently reread, and back to software, High Output Management.”
03 / belief
“You need to manage multiple vendors, and the time horizon for a wedding once you're engaged is anywhere from 12 to 18 months, so it is a longtime project. I think there's a lot of similarities there.”
04 / belief
“From my experience as a product manager, it was always a blocker. Getting your hands on the data, maybe having someone to troubleshoot with if as a PM you couldn't kind of understand or figure it out yourself, it was just always a blocker.”
05 / belief
“For product managers, we think about product in the context of artist, scientist, general manager.”
06 / belief
“What was the cycle time?" So these questions that are really just I think seeking to understand because I understand complexity and so that exists everywhere, but maybe helping folks see that as they're reviewing their own work or their team's work goes a long way.”
07 / belief
“Makes me think of I think Frank Slootman is his name, the Snowflake CEO. He wrote this book called Amp It Up, where he talks about how to build thriving software companies and businesses in general.”
08 / belief
“I think we're leaning on the world needs a lot more celebration right now, so helping folks do that.”
09 / belief
“You write your own. So I as a product manager, I write what I think my role is and also what I think what my expectations of my counterparts are and they do the same, and then we review it together.”
10 / belief
“For any new person to an organization, I think how we work culturally, having a contact that you can reach out to, all of that I think is really crucial.”
11 / belief
“I think 48 hours, two nights, and that's important to me because it tends to still just be hours in a conference room or a meeting room during the day, but you do need to build in the, "And let's go have dinner since we're all in person anyway, or let's have an extended lunch and maybe an extended day.”
12 / belief
“For me, it usually starts with individuals identifying very clearly early on roles and responsibilities, like what are the expectations of a role? So in software, for most of us one of the things that I think I've seen done well or contributed to and multiple companies is the triad, product, design, engineering, data.”
13 / belief
“I believe most of your career, you were remote or you worked with remote teams and distributed teams and that's such a on-trend thing now where a lot of teams are working hybrid, working remotely, working with distributed teams.”
14 / belief
“I think that smaller teams, especially folks that are ideating, when you haven't landed on what you're going to build yet, I think Trello's a great product for that.”
15 / belief
“I think the biggest that people probably know about but are often underutilized are Power-Ups, which is basically our integrations.”
16 / evaluation
“This idea that great ideas can come from anywhere in the org at any function I think is really magical. So as you're seeing PM's becoming more technical, I think designers becoming more business-oriented, engineers are becoming a lot more product/user-focused, to me that's amazing because it means that we're getting closer to what I'd consider really deep collaboration.”
17 / evaluation
“The competition side is interesting to me because I've worked at a few companies where I've worked with founders who are like, "We don't have competition, we're the only ones doing this," and then fast forward a few years and you're like, "Here are all the companies that were your competition that you didn't recognize then that are shipping great product now.”
18 / preference
“I'll check that out. But I think product managers, I consider product to be the ones that really need to drive urgency.”
19 / evaluation
“The actual execution of it, the development tends to fall on both PM and engineering. So in engineering I find that depending on the org, some folks understand breaking up tickets into small pieces and why that's valuable and how to do it, and that's something that I think everyone in industry probably needs a refresher on, why that's valuable and how it works.”
20 / recommendation
“I think if they were really great at it, I'd say every three months or every six months, let's have a look and see how this is going. But often it happens because there's some conflict or tension or something was missed and someone thought it was theirs or not and we have to do a quick retro.”
21 / evaluation
“" Doing a lot of that work. And I think PMs are still responsible to keep track of that, but engineering managers are increasingly expected to be the ones that are actively making sure that sprint goals, for instance, are met.”
22 / preference
“On work-life balance, as I mentioned to you I think about this a lot, I'm currently a mom and as you can imagine, that's a lot to manage at any given time. And so recently, when I think about work-life balance, I don't use the word balance, I use optimization.”
23 / evaluation
“I think a lot of people end up putting a lot on the PM's plate because of that misunderstanding.”
24 / evaluation
“I think that couples, it's such an emotional thing for people, for individuals and their families and their friends, so I personally feel like I empathize with that in a way that I don't do the same for product even though I'm a product manager, because there are many projects and there're always things that we need to manage and that's just part of the gig.”
25 / recommendation
“I recommend Anna Akhmatova's You Will Hear Thunder, a book of poetry that is excellent. I recommend almost anything by James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time I most recently reread, and back to software, High Output Management.”