Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 14evaluation 5commitment 2recommendation 2preference 2
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
25 published records
“I've seen whether it's Brian caring about the full bleed image on the homepage, whether it's Jeff Bezos who famously would receive customer emails, read many of them, forward them, and he's famous for question mark emails where for his time's sake he would just forward an email to a leader with a question mark and you would just have to figure it out and then report back in 24 hours with the resolution thereof. But nothing's above them, and a lot of founders or a lot of CEOs or even CPOs and leaders think you get to a certain point and then I'm above a product spec, I'm above looking at the data running a sequel query, and I think that that is a mistake in a lot of ways, especially from a standpoint of who people come to respect as well as efficacy at one's job.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“What's really cool about that analogy, ladder versus map, is a lot of times you think you're climbing a ladder and you think it's innately going to be great, and sometimes that ladder falls over and the company doesn't go anywhere and/or the job sucks, your ladder's heading to some terrible place. And what I find in my experience is anytime I try something totally new and take a risk, especially following things that give me energy, and I'm just like, "Let's just take a leap on this thing," in my experience at least, it's always led to better opportunities and much more interesting work.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“You could do five, 10 year rounds, right? And so, I think that in terms of sticking it out, maybe I'm biased, I think that some of the absolute sort gems, if you will, in Silicon Valley and tech are the teammates that are willing to stay around for 4, 5, 6, 7 years, and they have institutional knowledge that nobody has.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think about a little bit is going through this shift in excitement about Web3 as a PM within a company working in this space, I imagine it tests some of the core skills of a PM, like keeping people focused, prioritizing effectively, keeping morale up.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I mean, I think that the biggest surprise to me, despite what we were just talking about, was how big some products have gotten without kind of the traditional either product manager role or without the playbooks that we're so used to from the last 20 years of the internet.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I mean, I think you're totally right, and the only brief thing I would add to the way that you put it which I think captures the essence here is I think we all have a lot of false precision about what we think a given career move is going to lead to or what it's going to be like, and we forget that a lot of career decisions are made out of maybe 10 hours cumulatively talking to a team and getting signals.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I mean, if great is one of your favorite words, maybe you could stretch it, but I think if you were in a room with your peers at Amazon, they might put some red pen through any greats that are used there. So, I found that really helpful, and it also helps force out of this box that product managers, product leaders tend to get into of thinking that they are always the customer and being a little sort of intellectually lazy, where I'm like, "Yeah, I would like Prime, so let me write the quote for what I would like," but maybe I'm only a small segment within our total customer addressable market.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think that combination of having a direct need for something that emerges as well as if somebody's had either a bad experience or not even had any experience with somebody who can play this role which is quite common in Web3, especially because a lot of folks are relatively early in their career, given the kind of accessibility of the space, and I think frankly the more adept understanding of the space naturally that a lot of people have when they're early in their career and less set in their ways.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“" Again, a reframing in this case around, yeah, we might disagree or squabble about certain things at a detail level, but I understand what we all came here to do and let's focus on that and how this is a part of that versus just focusing on maybe the means to an end versus the end itself, and the end always brings a lot of clarity in my experience.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think people tend to, when they see that both companies have some sort of working backwards process of thought, I would say working backwards on one hand and then 11-star experience on the other.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“You're a company that's hiring, Alchemy, and I was looking at the stats recently, and you're one of the most successful companies at getting candidates to talk to you, and generally I think you're just really good at hiring.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Founders are too smart, especially at all these companies we've talked about, to be fooled with a simple renaming of something. But I think the combination of a bigger idea, more exciting idea that was at the heart of what we were all going after together, combined with a simple way of communicating it because I've also seen big ideas that are poorly communicated fall flat on their face and not achieve the intended outcome.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Yeah, it's a great question. It's really important, right, because we've seen in this space that there are these cycles, and I think that morale and ability to keep building are the determinants of long-term success, and if everybody kind of takes the ball and goes home, that uncertain future won't necessarily materialize.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“First it was an engineer, then it was a founder, then a product manager when I got to Airbnb, and now this weird thing that I do, and there's so much time to explore and try new things. I will say though, I feel like the early things you do seem really important.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think the biggest thing I look for is a growth mindset, to be able to reflect on an experience like that and be vocally self-critical without unproductively being hard on one's self, and I think that the dimension of asking about risk gets at their psychology and how do they think about not only their career, but if they were to work with me, how would they approach problem solving and taking bets on the business.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I mean, I think one that Amazon is well-known for is the working backwards process, and for those that don't know, the idea is try to define effectively an ideal end state which funnily enough is very similar to some of what we both experienced at Airbnb and took away, and usually the mechanism for doing this is what's called a PRFAQ, and that's a press release and frequently asked questions, and it forces a certain degree of clarity to have to actually write a press release about the product that you're going to eventually launch.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I know we're like we're PM people talking about the value of PM, but something I find is that people that are kind of anti having a PM or don't see why they need a PM in my experience just haven't worked with a great product manager because my experience, you find a great PM, they just make everything better, and so, it's not surprising to hear what you're sharing which is people are kind of discovering that value of bringing on a product manager, even if it's mostly engineering work.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Cut, cut, cut, and just remove. And so, I think I found that really useful in emails I write or documents I write to this day is just going over, not because you're saving ink by cutting words, but because it forces clarity of thought.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Whether it's kind of product manager, senior product manager, director, VP or CPO, you're seeing it across the board. And so, I think that's partially happening because you're seeing a maturation of products, right, and so, maybe you can start early with a few engineers, a community manager, get the ball rolling, but eventually the product is more mature, the complexity has grown, the role of the product manager is far more useful than they can differentiate.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Are they even willing to interview based on what they know about the company? And so, I think that the marketing aspect in it, and I mean it's sort of lower case marketing in this sense of course because I think a hard sell of any sort or anything that's not authentic is probably going to fail ultimately, but it's about developing a really positive kind of brand and reputation for a company but also as an individual.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“That's to me the things that I'll remember the most. And so, when I think about product and I'm on my deathbed, I'm going to care about the products I built and how they affected people.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“You couldn't be a product manager without thinking about revenue growth, without thinking about go to market, and I really like that because as a startup founder doing product in a bigger company, it gave me the chance to exercise a lot of those skills.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I actually think it's one of the most misunderstood terms in a sense because I think language like we were talking about earlier is so important, and yet what you call something ends up defining I think 90% of what people understand about a concept, right?”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I started my first company, much like a lot of teenagers, it was around test prep and getting people ready for college, and it was my first exposure to using technology at scale to help people, and I just found it addictive ever since.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“They brought in the prototypes for each of those reviews and things like how to do typing on a tiny screen and those early keyboards and how to do auto complete, and Jobs was totally in those details from Ken's telling in this book. So, I couldn't agree with you more, and it's something that people miss because most of their exposure to leaders is on a YouTube video or at all hands, and so, they don't really get to see that side of leaders I think, and it's also not what I think from an ego perspective is kind of what people want it to be about.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast