Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Riverside)

Tal Raviv is a PM at Riverside where he joined as its first PM. Over his 12-year career as an individual contributor, Tal has been an early PM at Patreon, AppsFlyer, and Wix, managing teams in consumer growth, developer API platforms, and pricing. He started his career by co-founding a profitable SaaS company and also volunteers as a surf instructor for people with disabilities. In our conversation, Tal shares: • Why he has chosen to stay an individual contributor rather than moving into management • The rise of “super ICs” and how companies can support this career path • Advice for succeeding as a long-term IC product manager • How he uses AI to enhance his productivity • How to build self-reliant teams and make yourself redundant • Lessons from failures • Much more — Brought to you by: • Gamma — A new way to present, powered by AI: https://gamma.app/ • WorkOS — Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: https://workos.com/lenny • Eppo — Run reliable, impactful experiments: https://www.geteppo.com/ Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-super-ic-pm-tal-raviv Where to find Tal Raviv: • X: https://x.com/talraviv • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/talsraviv/ • Maven Course: https://maven.com/tal-raviv/product-manager-productivity-system/ Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Tal’s background (02:24) Choosing to stay an IC product manager (07:05) The value of IC roles (08:31) Compensation and career path (12:36) Advice for companies on creating space for ICs (14:33) Leveraging AI for productivity (22:44) Managing your time (26:01) Product scrapbooking (27:52) Cultivating self-reliant teams (36:32) Tal's Maven course: Build Your Personal PM Productivity System (37:39) Contrarian opinions and insights (44:32) Book smart vs. street smart decision-making (52:51) There's no right way to get things done (57:03) Failure corner (01:19:04) Lightning round (01:26:50) Living through conflict Referenced: • Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us: https://www.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates/dp/1594484805 • Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/product-management-theater-marty • Riverside: https://riverside.fm/ • iMovie: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/imovie/id377298193 • Canva: https://www.canva.com/ • Lego Mindstorms: https://www.lego.com/en-us/themes/mindstorms • Building a long and meaningful career | Nikhyl Singhal (Meta, Google): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-a-long-and-meaningful-career • Notion: https://www.notion.so/ • Gong: https://www.gong.io/ • Loom: https://www.loom.com/ • Mixpanel: https://mixpanel.com/ • Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/ • Calendly: https://calendly.com/ • Fullstory: https://www.fullstory.com/ • Scrum Master: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/scrum/scrum-master • Jira: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira • Whisper: https://openai.com/index/whisper/ • Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/crafting-a-compelling-product-vision • Reforge: https://www.reforge.com/ • Guy Peled on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peledg/ • Please, Please Don’t A/B Test That: https://medium.com/@talraviv/please-please-dont-a-b-test-that-980a9630e4fb • The Secret to a Great Planning Process — Lessons from Airbnb and Eventbrite: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-secret-to-a-great-planning-process • Inside the 6 Hypotheses that Doubled Patreon’s Activation Success: https://brianbalfour.com/essays/patreon-onboarding-growth • How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk: https://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Kids-Will-Listen/dp/1451663889/ • Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It: https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-Depended/dp/0062407805 • Listen: Five Simple Tools to Meet Your Everyday Parenting Challenges: https://www.amazon.com/Listen-Simple-Everyday-Parenting-Challenges/dp/0997459301 • How embracing emotions will accelerate your career | Joe Hudson (executive coach, Art of Accomplishment): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/embracing-your-emotions-joe-hudson • Ted Lasso on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/ted-lasso • Pichilemu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pichilemu • O'Neill Hyperfreak wetsuits: https://us.oneill.com/pages/mens-hyperfreak-series • Venn diagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/C-QeXhPNPkx/ Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]. Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I've had thousands of people tag my CEO on Twitter, calling on him to fire me. I was actually on vacation and I got bored and I was like, I haven't logged into Twitter. I haven't posted anything on Twitter for a while. What's going on on Twitter? And I see that the notifications number is like maxed out. It's like 999 plus or whatever. And I was like, wait, what? And I clicked the notifications tab and I see the first tweet is, has at CEO handle fired at Tal Raviv. And I saw that that has like a ton of retweets and I just keep scrolling down and I start to piece together the story.

• 0:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  Today, my guest is Tal Raviv. This is a very special episode for me because Tal was one of the first and most active community members when I was just starting my newsletter Slack community. And as a PM I've admired from afar for a very long time. He's got some really unique and insightful takes on how to be a great product leader. And interestingly, he's decided to stay an IC product manager throughout his entire career up to this point, which is over 12 years as an ICPM. I've never met anyone that's stayed in IC for this long. He's been a PM at Patreon, at Wix, at AppsFlyer, and most recently joined Riverside as their first ever product manager. Riverside, by the way, is the platform that I use to record my podcast. So this was kind of a meta experience for both of us.

• 1:17Lenny Rachitsky?

  He's also a former founder and outside of tech, he volunteers as a surf instructor for people with disabilities. In our conversation, we talk in depth about the IC career path, a bunch of tactical advice on how to be more productive as a PM, including a killer example of how he uses ChatGPT to scale himself. Tal also explains why every tech company has just two departments that matter, the difference between book smart decisions and street smart decisions. We also spend the most time I've ever spent in Failure Corner, where Tal shares all of the times that he's failed in his career and how those experiences made him stronger. And it was really important for him to share these things because he wants people to understand that successful people fail a lot and those failures make you better.

• 2:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  If you want to learn more from Tal, he's actually about to launch a course on Maven that's called Build Your PM Productivity System, which, based on the conversation that we had, I am confident is going to be awesome. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to follow it and subscribe in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Tal Raviv.

• 2:27Lenny Rachitsky?

  Tal, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  Thank you. It's great to be here. This is a long time in the making.

• 2:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  It has been a long time in the making. You're interesting in so many ways. We're going to talk about a lot of different things. One of the things that makes you most unique and interesting as a PM is that you've stayed in IC product manager for your entire career for 12 years. I don't think I've ever met a PM that's been in IC for 12 years. I imagine you've had many opportunities to be promoted. I imagine this has been very intentional. And I also know a lot of people actually think about this a lot. Should I move into management? Can I stay in IC and be successful? So I want to spend some time here to start. And my first question is why? Why have you decided to stay in IC? Why have you not moved into management?

• 3:11Speaker 00

  I don't really have a strategy for my career. Like my strategy is not to have a strategy. For the longest time I've gone by, am I excited to wake up in the morning and what's going to make me excited to wake up in the morning, right? Not every single day, not all the time, but for most of my, you know, days that I work, what's going to make me, you know, hop out of bed? And just kind of follow that. And over time, as I got to, you know, have different managers and different product leaders that I've worked with, I've never looked at their schedule or their days or how they spend the highest, you know, high percentage of their time.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  And said, wow, that's what I want to be doing. If I compare their days with mine and the stuff they're, you know, they're busy with and focused on. And at the same time, over the years, I've also noticed that the colleagues that I identify with the most, like the ones where I just feel I most relate to them. Many of them have that same pattern where they've gone to, you know, team lead or director and so on. And their next role, they request to be in IC, like they insist on being in IC. And Yeah, so that's that's from the, you know, from the tech world. That's one informs that and the values I had growing up just watching my dad. He's a researcher, he's a professor, and he just has a blast every day. Like, he refuses to retire.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  He's just so enthusiastic about what he does. And he, you know, he's never like aspired to be like a chairman, provost like that. Like, he just loves what he does and he's stayed there. And I just see the joy, like the fun.

• 4:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  This episode is brought to you by Gamma, an entirely new way to present your ideas powered by AI. If you hate designing slides and dread that feeling of staring at a blank slide, Gamma is here to help. Just upload your PRD and turn it into a beautiful, ready to present presentation in seconds. Gamma works with all types of formats, from Google Docs, PDFs to PowerPoint. You can even drop in a link to your favorite Lenny's newsletter post and turn it into a presentation for your team. Gamma has become one of the fastest growing AI web products in the world, adding 20 million new users just this past year and is setting its sights on becoming the modern alternative to PowerPoint. Whether you have design skills or not,

• 5:32Lenny Rachitsky?

  Gamma can save you hours of time synthesizing your ideas and shaping your content. Visit gamma.app and use promo code LENNY to get a free month of Gamma Pro. That's G A M M A dot app.

• 5:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine-grained authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking Authorization system called Zanzibar,

• 6:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale, while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, SCIM, or user management, you should consider WorkOS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com.

• 7:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  So much of that resonates with me. There's actually a period in my career where I was, I was not an IC. No, I wasn't IC and I was just like, I don't want to be promoted any higher. Everyone I look at above me is just so stressed and I just don't need this. And things are great. Why would I want to change that? And I love that you stayed close to that. I know a lot of things pull people towards management, compensation, their status, more impacts, trying to, you know, like learning to be a manager. Is there anything there that's just like pulled you and you've been just like, I'm going to give that up and I don't need that? Or is it, or life just as good as an IC for you?

• 7:40Speaker 00

  I won't lie, um, over the years, despite like everything I've said, if somebody who is my, you know, same amount of experience or same cohort and gets promoted and becomes a team lead and makes that decision and rises up, it does, you know, like twang in my stomach and like gets on my ego. I have that moment where I'm like, wait a minute, like, what about me? And should I be doing that? And it makes me question everything. And then I say to myself, okay, so, you know, go for it. You know, tell, you know, tell your manager you changed your mind or whatever it is needs to happen. And then I'm like, well, like, like, do I actually want? I kind of get back to the same logic of like, what, I don't, I don't actually want that.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  Like, so if I could push a button and, and switch with them, I wouldn't. So, but definitely, definitely, you know.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Very human at the same time.

• 8:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  For someone that's trying to pursue this path, trying to avoid these sorts of things and say just trying to be successful as an IC, looking back, is there anything that you've learned that has helped you be successful and pursue the thing that makes you happy?

• 8:45Speaker 00

  I think the big elephant in the room is compensation. I think that's like, you know, whenever I have this discussion with friends and colleagues, like that's always like the, well, there's two things. There's compensation and there's like, can it be interesting? Like, don't you get sick of it, right? So I think, you know, that classic book drive, you know, motivation comes from autonomy, mastery and purpose. And I think for me, the IC role, it's definitely very autonomous. It's one of the, being a product manager is one of the most autonomous roles and most amount of agency you can ask for. I think mastery, I once heard Marty Kagan say in a workshop, you know, product manager role is just one of those roles where you can just keep

• 9:28Speaker 00

  doing it, you know, for a really long time because it just gets, it just keeps changing and you can change industries, right? Without having background in it, the situation changes every time you do it in every different context. It's just so, so different and interesting. And purpose is one that I, I took for granted in the past and I learned how important it is. I think if you feel that you're building something that you really want to see happen in the world and you really want to make sure it's done well, you're like, you don't, you're like, don't trust anybody else to do it. Like you want to be the one to work on it and make sure that this gets done well in the world because it matters to you, then I think you're, you know, you're in a really strong place from that point of view. Like that really gets you motivated and you want to be hands on and it

• 10:13Speaker 00

  keeps you really focused.

• 10:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  I want to drill into something you said around compensation and just generally what you've done to be, to stay down this path. Cause I know the compensation, that's a real thing. Is there anything you've seen or done that has helped you be more comfortable with that in terms of getting the comp you think you deserve being an IC this long, being like basically a super IC?

• 10:31Speaker 00

  I think first of all, you have to believe your worth. Like you have to genuinely believe and understand that An individual contributor in product management is worth, can have a really big scope, really big ownership, really big impact and matters a lot. And I think the industry is coming around to that, right? We'll talk a little bit more about this, but the great flattening of the last few years. And I've seen, like, talking to friends who are founders and the founders here at Riverside are really looking for people really experienced who are really hands-on. Like, that's, first of all, we just need people who get stuff done. And just recognizing that in yourself, believing that and recognizing that in the industry and remembering, there's

• 11:14Speaker 00

  a really good analogy here in engineering, right, where it really makes sense to all of us that, like, you shouldn't have to rise into management in order to increase your compensation. You're equally, or just as valuable, right? Not as a manager, as like a domain expert. And that's step one, like, really understand that you are, you know, really, really, really valuable as an IC. I think tactically speaking, one thing that I've done a few times, different interview rounds, is when it comes to compensation, you've probably heard the line, "Well, you know, that's a really high number, but, you know, we can't reach it, but don't worry. We're growing a lot. The product door is going to grow a lot. There's going to be a lot of opportunities to rise into management. So, you know, there's going to be a lot of opportunities to increase

• 11:57Speaker 00

  compensation over time." And that's a good classic line you might hear from a recruiter or hiring manager. And in those moments, it's kind of like puts you in a weird position where it's like, well, you know, you don't think you're going to rise up. You can't like debate that so well. And what I say in those moments is, you know, I'm glad you mentioned that. I actually have no intention of going into management or rising up, you know, in those ranks. And I know that, you know, you and I know that the industry traditionally undervalues the IC role. So it's really important for me to, you know, have that number now. And that works.

• 12:32Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow. Okay. Very straightforward. So maybe along those lines, just a final question down this track is just for people that are trying to create a space for an IC path at a company, or as a company trying to do this, anything you suggest they do to make this a thing for people that actually want to stay ICs to set this up as a real career path?

• 12:57Speaker 00

  Have the titles. I think having, you know, good, you know, titles that are clear that you can move up into. First of all, just like creates it as an idea that there is progress. Creating clear levels and rubric, just like you would for, you know, within any level or within any title. I think saying it out loud, recognizing it. I think, I think it's just, um, like at the end of the day, you know, we all want respect. We all want to feel that we're growing. We want to feel that that's recognized. So I think putting it in words goes a really long way.

• 13:32Lenny Rachitsky?

  So in terms of titles, what are the titles you find as a principal product manager? Is there other titles you've found helpful? And how many levels of IC do you find you need?

• 13:42Speaker 00

  The ones I've seen on like LinkedIn is there's, there's, you know, product manager, senior product manager, principal product manager. I've seen a distinguished product manager.

• 13:52Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh, yeah. I think Amazon, I think has that too.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  Amazon too. Um, yeah. Um, I think those are like the exception, not the rule.

• 14:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  Uh, but, uh, yeah, I think putting it in words really helps.

• 14:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay. So principal and distinguished. Amazing. Distinguished is the highest level you've seen of an ICPM.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  And I think you're Super IC, I guess.

• 14:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  Super IC, and we're going to talk about that. And then in terms of rubric and career ladder, basically it's just the same way you have a career ladder for managers, just have it further, go further for ICPMs.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think product is usually like the last department to really, uh, just because it's smaller, I think.

• 14:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:32Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay. Amazing. Really helpful. We've talked about this idea of super ICs and as you mentioned, there's kind of this been rise of and shift of flattening of orgs, as you said, of people hiring more senior product managers is there's a sense of that and their companies are expecting more of. PMs just doing the work, not managing their PMs. And I feel like you're such an interesting prototypical example of the PMs people want to hire. And with AI, it's unlocking a whole new lever and opportunity for a lot of PMs where they, in theory, can actually achieve this thing that companies are looking for them to achieve, which is just get more done. So any just thoughts along that track of just like more is expected of ICPMs? There's more need for ICPMs and AI making it easier. What have you seen there? Where do you think things might be going?

• 15:17Speaker 00

  We've seen the last couple of years, you know, I think it was you had on here Nikhil Singal talking about when Facebook had those really big layoffs that they were biased towards keeping individual contributor product managers. Zuckerberg, you know, talked about the flattening. And I've seen, you know, here at Riverside during that same time, founders talking about how they're just really looking for, you know, can we just find some really, really senior experienced people who want to stay hands on? Like that would be the dream, right? You know, I also have heard from friends in, you know, in the market that the hiring market, that there's just a lot more experienced people competing for the same IC roles as a result of all that.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  So I do think that the result of that is, you know, a lot of, I think the result of that is like being a 10x PM, for example, is becoming more and more table stakes, especially like you mentioned with AI, that's just the tailwind for all of that.

• 16:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  And we don't have to go too far down this track, but have you actually experienced this yourself? Have you found really interesting ways to leverage AI and become more effective?

• 16:21Speaker 00

  Just this week, I have an example. My team, I have one team that's trying to introduce much more rigorous scrum as it hires a lot more developers. Part of that is a lot more paperwork as a product manager. In some companies, it's a whole like role that they hire just to do that. And what we did is basically took chat GPT, told it the format, you know, the stories and epics and so on, and tried something where I just dictated and spoke as if I was doing a kickoff. And I just talked naturally and, you know, out it just put out all this. Really, really, really amazing detailed stories and so on. And you know, just had to edit it a little bit, but um.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  So that was, that was like a, you know, aha moment for me, like, okay, that would have taken either dividing the team into smaller pieces or multiple product managers to be able to keep up. And you know, obviously, the next step is like, we just take the actual kickoff, record that, transcribe that and like feed that in. We're playing around with that as well. You can imagine what might have taken, you know, 10 years ago, five years ago, a director, organization, like a director level organization and everybody reporting to that director. To achieve something could probably be achieved with an IC now. And I think the, you know, this ties in because like the product career path is going to be even less about people management and just more and more about like leadership, right? And like the, the core, uh, core product manager skills.

• 17:47Lenny Rachitsky?

  Uh, this is a really interesting example of how you're using AI. I want to definitely spend more time here. It helped me understand exactly what you did. So you had a, a bunch of projects that you were kicking off with a bunch of different teams with a PM, leading each one or Scrum Master.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  This is actually, we tried this on, on one team, but it was like a really big project.

• 18:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  Like a ton of, yeah, a ton of stories. Yeah.

• 18:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  Can you explain what the project is briefly or?

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 18:09Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  Um, it's a, I'll say it's like a pretty fundamental change to the user experience. Uh, so it touches on like everything.

• 18:17Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh shit. Ever Riverside. Okay. Oh, man. Here we go. I'm excited. Okay. So you have this big, uh, project you're kicking off to rethink the experience of Riverside. And normally you're saying you would have had to write all these one pagers and specs of the components of this project, like the different features and products. Is that right?

• 18:37Speaker 00

  So the like high level, why we're doing this, you know, usability studies, the, the design, the vision, all that stuff we did without AI. That was, you know, me, director of design and our founder. But then it came time for, you know, the rubber meets the road. Uh, we did a kickoff and engineers, you know, everybody's bought in, everybody's excited. And now we need to like really make sure that things are really, really well defined and very, very clear and easy for, you know, testing afterwards and just like, make all that stuff, the high level stuff really, really specific. Uh, and so that means user stories in Jira, in this case, right, for this team, that's how they prefer to work. And a specific format like. You know, they they've asked for, and so it's like a story and there's, uh, it's called like Gherkin.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  I'm learning this too. This is new to me, you know, given this, when that, then that. It's it's really tedious. Uh, when it's small, it's actually really fun to write because it makes you think. But when you have, you know, so many things I need to change, uh, it's overwhelming. And would either delay the team, I would be the bottleneck, or we just have to split it up. And what we did is we took that template. My team lead said, hey, this is the template I would love. I gave it to chat G P T. I said, you know, you're an expert P M, product owner, scrum master, whatever. This is the template. Do you understand? It's like, yeah, let's go. And then I said, well, actually, before we get going, um, I want to tell you, I'm like, you know, holding down like the dictation button. Um, use Whisper, uh, Whisper A I to dictate. And I was like, you know, let me just tell you a little bit more background.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  I just like started talking to it like I would for a developer, you know, joining the team. And I just started to talk about like why we're doing it and so on. I was like, so do you understand that? I was like, yeah, cool. Let's go. And then I said, okay, well, the first thing is we're going to change this area and it's going to work like this. And it's really important that this and this happens. And I just talked supernaturally to it, like just, just like I would to a person. And, uh, when I was done, I hit enter and it created that, you know, that user story in that format. Uh, with all those cases, that would have taken me so long to write. And I would say the thing that we still really needed a person for was deciding how to break up this really, really big change into those stories, like what is the logical way to split it up? Uh, engineering wise, which my, uh, team lead did.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  But once you have that, like each one individually worked really, really well. So I'm now experimenting with taking the transcript, I tried this actually, experimenting with taking the transcript of the actual kickoff that we did. And that we, well, we recorded, uh, on Riverside and had it transcribed and I copied it and put it into chat G P T. It didn't work as well. Um, so I'm experimenting tweaking it to see like, how far, how far can we push this?

• 21:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  This was awesome. I love that you're sharing this. So you had basically described the project and all the different components, all the different features and user stories in words using Whisper. And to use Whisper, is it an app? Or is it within ChatGPT? Where do you actually access this?

• 21:32Speaker 00

  It's built into ChatGPT's desktop app and mobile apps. Like if you dictate that way. I also have like a desktop app on my own that I use because it's just such a great, you know, transcription model. But it's open source, free, provided by OpenAI.

• 21:47Lenny Rachitsky?

  Right. It's there. It's OpenAI's speech to text system. And then they're adding voice mode soon. Like it's coming out to people. So this is going to be built into ChatGPT soon. Amazing. Okay. So you talk about here's all the things we're going to be changing in the product. You give it a template. Where do you give the template? Is it you put the transcript into ChatGPT with a prompt of here is the template? Or are you just even still describing that in the recording?

• 22:12Speaker 00

  No, the template is something that my team is like, this is how I'd love to have these written.

• 22:17Lenny Rachitsky?

  He just says it as part of the transcript.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  He sent it to me, he sent it to me on Slack. He's like, this is how I want it written. So the first thing I did, I opened a new thread in ChatGPT and I said, you know, you're an expert, you know, product manager, product owner. This is the template that we want to use for user stories. Do you understand? Hit enter. So like, it's like, cool, I get it. And then I start to talk about the changes we want to make.

• 22:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, this is amazing. I could go down this track all day, but let's shift a little bit. Is there anything else you found to be really helpful in having leverage as an ICPM? Kind of along these lines, whether it's A or not, just being that super IC essentially, getting more done as an IC?

• 22:56Speaker 00

  So the way I think about this is how you manage your own time, how you design your days, your energy, your focus, and then your team and how you build that culture and those habits to just give you a lot of leverage as an IC. So that, you know, still as one person, you can, you know, own a lot of scope, you can influence a lot, you can manage a lot. So personally, for my time, I really believe, and I think you've written about this as well, in actively designing your days. And for me, I really strictly split my days between deep work and what I call ping pong. Or you know ping pong, you can imagine it's like when you're you've opened Slack and it's

• 23:40Speaker 00

  just constant, you know, hitting the bell back and forth. It makes your brain feel like scrambled eggs. You're not going to be doing any deep thinking or reading or strategy. So for me, I'm a morning person and I I block off my morning for meetings. You know, a lot of people give that tip. I go even further and I don't open Slack before noon. I've been doing this for eight years. I don't open Slack at all. To the it gets really extreme to the point where like, if I need to send a message, like it's usually fails, I usually open Slack before noon because I need to send a message. And then I realized like, all these messages don't need to be sent before noon. Right? Just because I thought it at 11am, doesn't mean I need to send it at 11am. There's no urgency at that level. So I actually keep a section of my to do list, which is when I

• 24:25Speaker 00

  open Slack, here are the messages I'm going to send. And I write them as if I'm about to hit enter in Slack, but they're in my to do list. And sometimes if I like, really, really, really rare moments, I'll need to check something. I'll ask the person next to me like, hey, can you go into this channel and just show me that thing? Because like, you know, all their notifications don't like, you know, trigger my brain into scrambled eggs again. So

• 24:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's an awesome tip.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:47Lenny Rachitsky?

  And I know people will hear this and be like, there's no way I can do this. Is your insight as you can?

• 24:53Speaker 00

  Yes. Usually when I share this, people are like, well, what if something urgent happens and people are looking for you? This has happened like twice a year. Like you realize how not urgently needed the PM role ever is like. And first of all, over time, people really respect it. They like, they learn that this is how you work and they they come to really respect this.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  And second, the key people that I work with have my phone number. And I tell them, you know, feel free to call me at any time. If I'm not on Slack, if you really need a response, just call me WhatsApp me, whatever it takes. And first of all, it's like a barrier, right? It's not like a quick message. So it really is only for urgent stuff. And, you know, all I have like, you know, for twice a year, I'll get like a WhatsApp message from my manager, from my team lead, hey, something urgent is happening in Slack, like we really need you. And then I'll open Slack, you know, I'll violate my rule. It's totally fine. But that's like, it's so rare that The system works for me.

• 25:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing. Okay. Anything else along those lines? This is an awesome little tip.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  I personally keep a weird habit. I realize it's a weird habit. I call it product scrapbooking, where I have this like massive Notion database of every opportunity, big or small, that's ever come up. And when a like a piece of evidence, you know, out in the world comes in, it could be like a support ticket or like a CSM sends a gong call, or like there's a really great Slack thread with like an amazing brainstorm happening and ideas, a piece of data, whatever it is, right? I'll file it. I like I actively take a screenshot or whatever as I file it. And I start to like cluster these in this like really messy notion. And the reason I do this is that I've learned that, you know, we have these like roadmaps and strategies

• 26:46Speaker 00

  that like seem linear, but like life and customers and, you know, insights are not. So when the time does come around to work on that thing and that opportunity comes up, I can pull up that notion and I already have a bunch of like really, you know, in the weeds, real world clues to start with and even persuade people that we should dig deeper into this. Or for example, another advantage is that if I'm on a conversation with a person from sales or CSM from customer success and they'll mention a request, you know, I can open that up. And I'm like, yeah, this is actually this client and that client and that client also mentioned that. And, uh, you know, you see like in their face that they they feel heard, like you've been listening all this time.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  Like you've been writing this down. Um, it's a really, I think that's really important as well.

• 27:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love these tips. I love product scrapbooking as a term. It makes so much sense. And it's just immediately clear what you're going to be doing. And I love how simple the approach there is. Is there anything else along those lines or is there something you want to share around the kind of this other bucket that I think you hinted at of helping your team set you up for success and get more done?

• 27:53Speaker 00

  I believe in. Cultivating very self-reliant teams. And I think that's really key to being having a lot more leverage as an IC. Being able to manage multiple teams if needed on much bigger areas of the product. I think the key of that is having this mindset that product isn't a role. It's a team. And I read a quote once by Ebbi Atawari. And she's worked on Netflix and Uber and she's super experienced. And she said something like, it's not about waiting for products. You know, product said this or that or waiting for product like we're all product.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  And I really try to like, have that that as the cornerstone of a culture of any team that I I'm on. That, you know, I had a new teammate come up to me recently. He just joined and he was on engineering and he's he came up to me excitedly. And he's like, I found a case that you didn't think about. And I was like, okay, awesome. But hold on, let's talk about language. Like product is a is not a role, it's a team. And whatever it is, I don't even know what it is. But everything that we own, like it's both design was involved. Engineering was super involved. You know, yes, I was there. And it's, let's call it, hey, I found a way to improve the product.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  Or hey, I found something that we didn't think about. It's really, really important. So first of all, like that language, that culture that, you know, it's not like this hub and spoke model. And like the PM is at the center and making all these decisions and, you know, passing things through. So first of all, that's like, that's like a fundamental mindset. It's really important for each team to have to to be more high leverages and IC. The second thing is personally to seek to not be needed, but be valuable.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  And the difference is, like, if you think about your day as a product manager, like, look for situations where is there a game of telephone that's constantly passing through me? Are there a lot of situations where clearly you're the bottleneck? Like, your attention, your ability to get to something is the bottleneck, and a lot of people are waiting on you? Do you find like, a lot of communication is happening in direct messages with you instead of public channels for the team? Are a lot of working meetings just like you and one other person on the team, instead of maybe two or three? You know, not too many either.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  So, all those are like opportunities where you can create a different situation, where a culture on the team where people are figuring things out between themselves, and maybe involving you at the very end. So, one of the things that I really put a lot of energy into is really encouraging people to get conversations out of direct messages and into channels. This is like a really important way to cultivate people who are just working together and figuring things out and between one another. And anytime somebody sends me a direct message, I say, "This is a great question. Can you please put it in this channel with the team? I'll answer there." But it's really important for me that any decisions we make are transparent,

• 31:09Speaker 00

  that it's easy to find it later, that, you know, there's a few other people who should probably chime in if they want to. And this could be at the team level. I worked at a company that had a really, really big customer success organization. They'd constantly like, find you as a PM and just DM you these questions. And I'd say, "Great question. Put it in like, this really big channel." That way, and I give a reason. So, that way, other people on the customer success team can search the channel and find the answer later, right? It can help other people. And if you do this enough, it becomes a snowball effect, because other people on the team will see that other people are posting in public channels and feel more comfortable with it. And that just becomes a chain reaction.

• 31:51Lenny Rachitsky?

  Such awesome advice. There's like it's so counterintuitive also, I think, to a lot of product managers where you're basically saying like, remove yourself as a dependency, delegate more, empower everyone in your team, have engineers come up with ideas, have them write things like one page respects, things like that, like become less valuable almost, which I think is not the natural tendency.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Become obsolete.

• 32:17Lenny Rachitsky?

  Become obsolete. And

• 32:19Speaker 00

  That's the dream, no? That's my dream.

• 32:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love that. But I think they're like, if I thought of, if I think about trying to do this, I think you need like a real confidence as a PM and be in comfort with chaos. A lot of times PMs, they want to be the hub because the more they can control the narrative, the more they can control what people see. CX pinging an engineer like, oh my God, they're just gonna start working on this thing. And we have this roadmap, we have priorities. How do you manage that challenge?

• 32:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a great phrase I heard a mentor once say, which is culture over process.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  You know, process is important and some things you need process to scaffold till you build the culture, but I think it's, it's like you've you got to view the team as like this asset you're building, right? This culture is an asset that you're building and you're investing in it and you're, you know, cultivating it and you want to build something that's stronger than, that's a great example, a CX person or a salesperson just directly messaging an engineer or just asking for something. You want to build something that's resilient to that. Like, that's the real product that you're building as a PM, I think, is the team that builds the product. And is resilient to all this thing. It doesn't happen overnight. It's not going to happen in the first quarter that the team is formed. But it happens, you know, over time gradually with

• 33:36Speaker 00

  little messages and little interactions and positive feedback and, you know, asking people to work a little bit differently and giving them a reason why and building trust. And you know, I, I think that success in my job is to build a very self-reliant team that's very resilient to all those things I, I would otherwise, you know, like you said, to keep me up at night, like really make me worried.

• 33:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  You shared an example of how you do that, these little mic, I call these micro interactions, like so much of a PM has these micro interactions with team members, which is so much harder now in a remote world, where you can't just walk by and just like do a little, little chat. The, the chat you shared, I think, is an awesome example where the language was a really powerful shift in how this person thought. Is there anything else along those lines you could share of how to create this sort of culture?

• 34:23Speaker 00

  One thing that I try to do is when somebody takes something that would be my job, right? And does that like, uh, whether it's on the design side, they like, you know, lean in more or on the engineering side, they lean in more. People bring ideas or they say, hey, I took the liberty of doing this. It could be as small as, you know, something bureaucratic or like as big as like an idea or suggestion. I just shower them with positivity. I just show them just, you know, how excited I am that they did that. That, you know, I just want that to happen again and then to feel even more bold. And just like when somebody takes something off your plate, when somebody, you know, thing does kind of the PM, what you think is like, that's PM thinking. What are you doing? Right?

• 35:08Speaker 00

  Just really want them to feel that that is extremely welcome.

• 35:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  And imagine there's a bunch of coaching you do to like help engineers, designers, researchers, data. People think the way you think almost to kind of become more PME. Is that a part of this too?

• 35:21Speaker 00

  I don't know if I would call it coaching. It's, um, it's like a lot, like I said, just a lot of little behaviors. So one thing I try to do along those lines is when there's something that's, you know, on me to do, uh, for someone or like the next logical step.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  I try to do that live with them. So if, uh, somebody asks me a question about, hey, what does the data show about this? If we went that direction, I'm like, I don't know, let's find out. Instead of saying, hey, I'll get back to you, let's open, you know, mix panel. Let's play around with this and I don't tell them, hey, it'd be great if you, I just show them how easy it was like, hey, if I could figure this out, like, you know, this Fisher Price data for PMs, like this, you could totally figure this out. That's the, that's what I'm trying to imply by showing it. Or, uh, you know, if it's a right to create a JIRA ticket, just to make something happen quickly and document it. Uh, I like, hey, let's just do this together on the call right now and make sure I get it right. And what you see is over time, you know, some people more than others, but they start to just naturally want to do that themselves.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Ask you for that access, uh, start to do those things. Hey, you know, um, you know, I did this and I wrote the JIRA ticket for it. I did this and I did the data analysis and you know, that grows over time.

• 36:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  You actually have a course that you're, uh, launching or is out now or about to launch that teaches a lot of these things. Talk about that.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  This is a passion project I'm working on with Maven, the learning platform. It's a course called Build Your Personal PM Productivity System. And it really goes super deep and super practical into these topics exactly. Like how to design your time, how to manage yourself, how to manage your emotions, how to cultivate self-reliant teams, how to give feedback and create a product org, you know, that puts less overhead on you as a PM. And yeah, it's the idea is to just take all these topics and just make this like really, really, really hands-on.

• 37:16Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. I feel like I wish I had this. And I feel like you're such a great person to teach this because as an IC, this is, this is how you succeed. This is the thing that makes it hard to stay as an IC. And again, with the rise of AI, almost creating a space for super ICs as we talked about, feels like this kind of stuff is going to be more and more important. So, so I'll definitely link to that in the show notes. I want to shift to a different topic. I think you've, you've kind of shown people this already, but you have a lot of very contrarian opinions about a lot of things. You see things a little differently. And there's a few other things that I've seen you talk about that I want to spend a little time on. So I'm just going to go through a few of them and just share whatever you want to share on this. Sound good?

• 37:59Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 37:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, okay, cool. The first is you have this phrase that, or this concept that every tech company basically has just two departments that matter.

• 38:07Speaker 00

  So yeah, over time, working at a bunch of hypergrowth companies, I've started to notice that there's some departments that are the reason that company won the market. And also started to realize that, and this is sometimes true of the department, you know, that I'm in, product, that even if, you know, product did a 10x job, you know, it wouldn't be a 10x outcome for the company over the decade. But for example, it could be if marketing did a 10x job, the company would have a 10x outcome over the decade.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  And I started to observe this over the years and I noticed it's roughly usually like two things, two companies, sorry, two departments. It's roughly like two departments that this boils down to in each company. So I'll just make this really concrete without naming names. The companies that I worked at. The two departments at one company was product design and support. Like those are the, like, if those two departments were 10x, then the company would win. Another company was data accuracy and customer success. Another company was, the thing that made them win in the market was trust slash brand, like trusted brand and payments.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  And another company that I worked at, looking back, what made them win in the market was marketing and engineering, like scalability.

• 39:43Speaker 00

  So product sometimes is on this list. So one of the companies I worked at, like I mentioned, in product design, product, if that department does 10x impact, then the company will succeed 10x in the market. But it's, in my career, it mostly hasn't been product. Product has to do a good job, but it's not the, you know, not the biggest lever for that company, even though it's a tech product company. And I think this really crystallized for me when I finally worked in a company where product is that department. You feel that.

• 40:19Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, so the $64,000 question, whatever, billion dollar question is, how do you know which of these, how do you know which two departments matter most?

• 40:27Speaker 00

  First of all, look at what really drives the growth. Like, what's the growth model? And what are the levers? Ask those questions. How does it work? Ask officially and ask as part of your backchanneling and, you know, reference checking. And the second thing is, if you're really seriously, you know, checking out a company, evaluating a company, truly understand that customer and like, what are they actually paying for in this industry? You know, what is the thing that, what is the real product? What's the real value that they're getting? Clearly, they're paying for a product or a service, but like, what is, beyond that, what are they actually paying for? Ask those questions and I think that'll make it clear.

• 41:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  I think maybe one trick here is just see what team drives growth. Oftentimes it's going to be sales, oftentimes it's going to be product experiments they're running, could be marketing.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  Exactly. And that department, if you're, whatever role you have, if you're in that department for that company, that's going to be your career defining work. Like, that's why it's so worth it. That's kind of, you're going to attract like, you know, the best colleagues, your careers are going to, you know, have a step function jump. Like, it's, it's, it's a totally different experience.

• 41:36Lenny Rachitsky?

  And this is when people say a company is engineering driven, product driven, marketing driven, sales driven. This is exactly what they mean, which team matters most to the company because they are driving most growth. So if you're a salesperson on a sales driven company, you will be valued more highly than being a product person at a sales driven company.

• 41:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. When I graduated from college, I had a friend give me advice. He was like, don't be a finance guy at a tech company and don't be a tech guy at a finance company. This was 2009, so like, yeah, anyways.

• 42:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. And I think this is where a lot of people struggle where their PM at a company that is very not product driven and they, you read all these books about being empowered and having agency and autonomy and, and instead they're just the team that people, they're just feature factories because other teams are in the show and we don't need your opinions. We know, we know how to grow this thing. Just build this thing for us.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  And here's the thing, that's okay. Like, that's what that company needs, you know, to succeed in the market. You know, you think about the Olympics, this is analogy that came to mind recently. It's like, if you, let's say, you can think like how a marathon runner looks and how a swimmer looks, right? They're very different. They look very different. You can, you can spot them, you know, in, in the row of athletes. And if you imagine, you know, product being a lat muscle, that's product department. You know, you can be a lat muscle for a marathon runner, you can be one for a swimmer. And a marathon runner needs one and it needs to work, uh, but, right, it's, you want, where do you want to be that lat muscle? On the swimmer or on the, on the marathon runner?

• 43:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love that analogy. This episode is brought to you by EPO. EPO is a next-generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on EPO to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. And EPO helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous, deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own.

• 43:54Lenny Rachitsky?

  EPO does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks of experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying, prolonged analytics cycles. EPO also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. EPO powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out EPO at geteppo.com/leni and 10x your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/leni.

• 44:33Lenny Rachitsky?

  Let's move on to another, let's say, hot take that you have. You have this kind of phrase that there's a big difference between book smart decision-making and street smart decision-making. What's that about?

• 44:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, this one comes out of a lot of mistakes I've made myself and seen around me as well, so I'm so guilty of this. Book smart decision-making as a PM is all the stuff we talk about all the time. That's data, you know, design, technology, strategy, frameworks, all that stuff. And it's really important, and you know, it's why we're strong at it. Street smart decision-making is taking all of that and then...

• 45:12Speaker 00

  Seeing something from somebody else's point of view. This goes beyond empathy. Alex, what do I mean? It's like, like giving the customer's perception just as much weight as you would to logic.

• 45:28Speaker 00

  A really big example of this, and I won't name the company. I was at this company that changed the structure of the pricing. And the change was actually not meant to make more money. It was meant to unblock a payments roadmap and like enable all these feature requests that were stuck behind this fundamental change. And in preparing for this, the company did a lot of analyses and just made sure that, you know, this was really, actually really good for customers and that this would, this would only, like the numbers and the predictions and the models were like, this is a positive thing.

• 46:07Speaker 00

  And I know all the people that were involved were the most empathetic, really did this because they really cared about this customer. Genuinely, I've never seen people that are, you know, at the executive level, at the product level, at the data level. Like, these are the people who really genuinely wanted the best for this customer. And they rolled out the change. And in reality, what, well, bottom line, there was a big, you know, revolt on the internet. It was a big deal and it was rolled back. And the bottom line, why there was such a gap between, you know, everything. Actually, by the way, all the analyses proved out to be, to be correct. All the models, all the predictions, like everything played out.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  The numbers as, as predicted, the problem was the perception, the narrative behind it, what it looked like when you've logged into the product. And you saw only the negative, but you didn't see all the positive because the positive was, you know, would happen 30 days later. And you saw the negative immediately, you know, a lot of things like that. And I would have made exactly the same mistake. I would, you know, I not a criticism. I would have probably made more mistakes. But that that's like what opened my mind to, oh, my God, you have to really think more than just logical, more than just like, you know, utilitarian. Another example of this is there's a company I worked at where all the features that were on a higher plan

• 47:32Speaker 00

  were invisible to the lower plans just because everything was built really fast and it was just, uh, it was time to to make them visible so people could upgrade. So we got that ready. And and we did this and we're about to release it and we realized, you know, tomorrow morning, a bunch of customers are gonna log into the product. And there's all these features that they've been asking us for because they didn't know that we have them because they were locked and only on the higher plan. Suddenly, from their point of view, the company built everything they'd asked for.

• 48:06Speaker 00

  And all of it requires paying more money. How are they gonna feel?

• 48:13Speaker 00

  And so we didn't roll it out that way. We rolled it out in smaller pieces and, you know, different ways. Because we realized like that's gonna feel really shitty.

• 48:24Speaker 00

  If you think about it, you know, but practically speaking, or theoretically speaking, we didn't, we didn't upsell every anything. We didn't start to, you know, these are all things we already had built. Everything is above board. That's the perception that was gonna happen.

• 48:38Lenny Rachitsky?

  And that second example, is there anything that triggered that recognition or is it just people sitting around being like, oh, what about this? Or was it because the first example you had a great point where you customers were telling you this isn't necessarily what they want. And you're like, no, no, no, you're gonna do great. Trust us. It's gonna be really good for you. But there's feedback, at least in the second examples, or something that's like, and what I'm asking about is like, how how can people develop the skill? Because I love this advice.

• 49:04Speaker 00

  I think that intuition came from

• 49:08Speaker 00

  spending time in the customer community and support tickets and just noticing smaller versions of that that people had feedback on. And you kind of start to see. You know what our customers, you know, at the time with like what they would tend to like what their suspicions always were and like they're very like, you know, trigger happy to blame the company for XYZ. And if you see enough, you know, raw data from customers, or if you get on a customer call and they mention nickel and diming and all these things, right? Like you start to understand like this is, this is the target persona. This is, this is how they think this is what they're sensitive to.

• 49:47Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's interesting because at Airbnb, there was a lot of that, a lot of hosts being really upset about changes like constantly. Everything that changed there. And usually the changes are to help the business in some way, help the guest in many ways. And it's always this balance of we're just gonna, we gotta do this. This is just the future. Is there anything there? Just real quick of just like learning when we gotta do this anyway, even though they're gonna be pissed versus like, oh shit.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 50:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  Let's roll this back. Okay.

• 50:13Speaker 00

  Yes, for sure. Um, this is just, this is just like what I'm talking about is to recognize it. What you do with it, right? Is a different thing. But you know, I joke when we, when we do changes to, like redesigns or changes to UX and we're gonna get inevitable, you know, complaints. I just tell my team, we're gonna deploy this and we're all gonna log out of social media for two weeks. And that's the strategy. Okay, that's extreme. We don't actually do that. And of course, but that's what we, uh, we wish we could do sometimes.

• 50:42Lenny Rachitsky?

  And the insight there is just social media will amplify one person's loud voice versus like how many people actually are upset about this? How important are they to the business, right? It's like, don't pay attention to the loudest person.

• 50:55Speaker 00

  Or also, um, the, I think the key there is the two weeks. Because if people are still complaining after two weeks, okay, then there's something here. But in those two weeks, there's gonna be a lot of feedback that comes from a resistance to change that they're gonna, you know, adapt to and we can't, won't, won't be able to remember what was before. But you know, sometimes you, you make mistakes and people will, you know, if there's a real mistake, you'll know about it for a long time.

• 51:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. And obviously you'll pay attention to like support tickets and all that stuff. It's just.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, obviously, yeah. And disclaimer, like during this, those two weeks, we look at every support ticket and we look at everything on social media. We, for sure.

• 51:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay.

• 51:35Speaker 00

  Uh, two more examples about the, the streets smart, books smart that are, that are really important.

• 51:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh, please, let's do it. Let's do it.

• 51:41Speaker 00

  This has happened twice to me, um, where.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  I worked on a team that made a very logical UX change and quickly found out that we ruined the sales demo. So for the users of the product, the, you know, the experience became a little bit smoother. It was an optimization, it wasn't something critical. But then for the sales demo, it communicated the value less. It was harder for people to really understand, you know, in one glance. So a lot of times, this comes from taking something that's very like visual and making it very efficient and small. So you might gain, you know, fewer clicks,

• 52:26Speaker 00

  but it'll make it harder for our, the sales team to, you know, to communicate and for that ha moment to happen on a call. To the point where we made this change and then salespeople would send me Gong link recordings, you know, in the past and in the current demos and just show me the difference. And it would pain me to watch these. And I was like, oh, we gotta fix this. Like, people aren't getting the value of how they're even gonna experience it.

• 52:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay. I know that you have a couple more hot takes that I wanted to make sure we had time for. One that I love, that I agree with, and it's kind of the thesis of this podcast almost, which is that there's no right way to get things done in a product team in a business, in spite of what you may read online. I'd love to hear your take here.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I didn't always understand this. In fact, I moved continents because I had professional FOMO. So I moved from Israel to San Francisco because I believed, and actually, a lot of people, you know, had that feeling that, you know, whatever we're doing here in Silicon Valley, they know how to work. Like, that's the big leagues. And I got to work shoulder to shoulder with people who came from Apple, YouTube, Salesforce, Facebook, Slack, Amazon, Stripe. Like, I got to work with the people who came from these companies I admired so much. And I

• 53:50Speaker 00

  came away with the conclusion that we're all just making it up as we go along in tech. We're all just improvising, as we should. That's the beauty of it.

• 54:01Speaker 00

  Every situation is different. Every market is different, right? Every company is different. What it takes to win is different. And so myself, I've had phases where I've been this like zealot of, you know, everything has to be outcomes driven. And then I've gone to like, let's just ship as much as possible and figure it out. And everything needs to be A B tested and, you know, quarterly planning has to work this way and should do scrum or don't do. And I just realized like, there is no, it's not that simple. It's about figuring out the problem at hand and optimizing for that and having an open mind and just understanding that we're all improvising.

• 54:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's really powerful. And I, I think people may hear this and be like, yeah, I think I get it. I guess for people that are just, you know, everyone's reading, reading my newsletter, reading all the newsletters, we're listening to podcasts, listening to how people work. What's your advice? Is it just like, what should people think in your mind when they read about how another company runs?

• 54:59Speaker 00

  My personal story, like one of the things that happened when I landed in San Francisco, I really felt like an imposter. I was like, okay, wow, everybody else here really knows, you know, how to work and I need to like learn from them. And

• 55:14Speaker 00

  six months later, I found myself giving talks and writing blog posts about how to work. And, you know, like blog posts that, you know, were being used and like reforge courses and all that and advising people and sharing. And that's when it hit me like, that's the beauty of this industry is that that can happen because everything is changing so fast. Like because like, how, like, how did I get there? I was just on a team doing something really difficult and interesting in a very unique way. And

• 55:47Speaker 00

  you, that's how you learn. That's like the real way to learn. My manager, Adam Fishman, at the time, told me, you know, something related to this, which is like, the best networking is just to do really good work at a successful company and like everything else will work out. So I think the same goes for like learning, right? The best learning is to just do, do really good work at a really good company with really good people and solve problems that have never been solved before in this way, which will inevitably happen, right? That's what we're all doing. And everything else will work out. Like you'll be the one writing the blog posts, not just reading them.

• 56:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  Such important advice. So kind of the takeaway here is just if you want to become much better, if you want to be the one sharing advice versus the one reading advice, easier said than done, but the advice is work at a company doing interesting, hard things, driving impact, being growing, being successful, and that's, that's how you level up.

• 56:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love that.

• 56:46Speaker 00

  It's the best way.

• 56:47Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. And again, easier said than done. Not everyone can join an awesome, you know, high-flying tech startup. Interestingly, you did this like in Israel, right? Away from the core of Silicon Valley. So you can find great places outside of, outside of Silicon Valley.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 57:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay. So I know that you wanted to spend a bunch of time in failure corner, which I love. It's this recurring segment on this podcast where folks share times they failed in their career and things they've learned from those experiences. And you may, you wanted me to carve out meaningful time here, which tells me that you've had a lot of these experiences, for better or worse. So what I'm thinking is let's just go through a few of these stories that you think might be helpful to people to hear about times you, things didn't go great and what you learned from those experiences. How does that sound?

• 57:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, it's really important for me to share this. I think during, you know, low points in my career, having someone share with me a failure story just really helped me understand that that's part of it and I'm not alone. And, you know, you browse LinkedIn, you see these incredible profiles with these incredible pedigrees and what you don't see, it gives you this like sense that everybody's just had a smooth sailing and everything's going great. And everybody has had, you know, some, everybody's been here long enough, has a ton of failure stories and ton of low points and self doubt. So it's really meaningful for me to just talk about this.

• 58:16Lenny Rachitsky?

  Let's do it. Let's get into it. Let's get real.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  So I'll say this, I've wasted twice, twice I've wasted an entire quarter of a growth team's time because of my poor use of user research.

• 58:34Speaker 00

  First time I can look back and after 12 failed A B tests. And then, you know, 12 failed A B tests set us on the right path and got us to revisit our hypothesis. But if I had only spent more time with the customer, and this was, you know, the kind of A B testing that people say, no, you can't do user research, you can't ask somebody what they're, you know, how a button's going to affect their purchasing. But if I had spent time with the customer to just understand who they are, what motivates them, how they got there, why they're paying, all that stuff, I would understand that not every checkout

• 59:14Speaker 00

  process, you know, is the same psychology as Groupon or, you know, Amazon or Booking.com. So the things that work on those sites work, not just because, you know, people are the same everywhere, but they work because people are in the same mindset, you know, for Groupon, for example, Amazon is different, Booking.com is different. And what you're working on, why people are buying, you know, in this situation that I was in, was so different. They had so much motivation over such a long period of time. You know, they, they had

• 59:54Speaker 00

  constant reminders naturally in their lives that they were happy to get. And the things that didn't work were all the things that worked, you know, that Groupon and Booking and Amazon, all these ecommerce sites did. Those were not relevant. And we tried all those things and they fell flat. The moment we realized that and it clicked for us, and all these, you know, all these A B tests that should have printed money, did nothing. Once we realized that, then it really started to, you know, increase conversion and it was a super successful team. But man, I look back, if I had just, you know, I just used more qualitative research, even though it was an area that traditionally you don't use qualitative research, I got to save so much time.

• 1:00:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's also a great reminder of just not assuming wins that work at another company will win for you, which I think everyone's like, yeah, I know that. But I think people don't know that. I think they often, oh, look at this, Amazon's killing it with this feature. We're gonna, if we add it, we're gonna, we're gonna win so hard. And so there's a great reminder, don't just take stories from others. Something Shreyas actually talks about a lot is, don't take stories from other companies as possible in your company. There's so many things that are not the same.

• 1:01:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. Yeah. What else? What else you got?

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  The second example of that is I was building a referral program and we made a user research plan and we ended up only executing half of it, which means we talked to the people who were already using it successfully. And we decided to skip talking to the people who should use it, but didn't. And we're like, yeah, we got it. It's probably the same feedback. We were in a rush for a lot of other reasons. There was a lot of pressure, just unrelated reasons and just decided that, okay, we have enough information. We don't need to spend more time. Let's start shipping. And that was a huge mistake as well. Just spent so

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  much time building something that didn't work. And yeah, I think my lesson there is the reasons that got me to hurry and, and, you know, make, make that decision with not as much data were reasons that I just kind of took people's word for stuff. I, I didn't think as first principles as I should. And I really caved in to the time pressure. So, yeah.

• 1:02:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's like tall therapy.

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  To listen to.

• 1:02:13Lenny Rachitsky?

  Just letting it all out. This is great. And so, so far, a recurring theme is spend on more time and use research, talk to more customers. Again, some we always hear, but a lot of people are like, I use a research. I don't need that. And what we're hearing here is would have saved your team months and quarters potentially.

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. Each of those, each of those wasted entire quarter.

• 1:02:32Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh, geez. All right. Cool. All right. What else? What else we got?

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  I have three times been a hair away from getting fired. And what I mean by that is a senior executive has come to me and said, you are a hair away from getting fired.

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  And one of them, you know, one of them is there were changes that had a product really wanted to make. And I, I felt strongly that shouldn't be made. And I voiced that directly, candidly, personally, and repeatedly. And then I, we had that conversation. And a colleague told me, listen, look at it this way, like, if you trust the leadership team to adapt if something's not working. I said, yeah, I trust them. Well, Like what they need from you is just to rely on you that you're gonna be with them, even if you disagree and commit, like that's what they need from you. If you're right, they'll adapt.

• 1:03:34Speaker 00

  If you're wrong, then great, you learned something, you know, product work got better. So the most important thing was, you know, there's like a song that, a lyric that goes, you gotta give in to win. Like it wasn't about being right, it was about just like being supportive and letting things fix themselves instead of, uh, so that was, that was that moment. It was really like, literally that was, that was the conversation.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  The second moment, bigger story, but I was on a group that the, uh, my manager and I,

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  we just weren't a fit. And that happens, it's really important to share that that happens, it's, it's, it's common. And I somebody I respect deeply and has done amazing things and I still respect them. And, um, we just, we didn't work well together. And the next step was, okay, well, I guess, you know, it's time to let me go. And, uh, his manager was like, hey, you know, before we let you go, I, I want you to stay at this company and let's find you another group to work in. So I was like, okay, he's like, just finish, you know, the initiatives you're on, don't start new ones. And quarterly planning is coming up, sit in all the meetings, look for opportunities and, and things will work out.

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  And I did that and I didn't find an opportunity that I was excited about. And my initiatives wound down and I didn't know, okay, well, what's gonna happen? And then, uh, there was a group where actually three PMs left at the same time. One went on maternity leave, uh, one got an offer from Fang and one had to start like an emergency tiger team out for their area of expertise. And, uh, this director, he filled two of the roles, one internal hire, one external hire, and there was one more role. And, uh, I reached out to him and he's like, yeah, great, you know, come, put your desk next to mine, we'll just, uh, just, uh, work on a few projects together, get to know each other.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  And I could tell after a few weeks that even though we'd been getting to know each other, he was still interviewing for that third role. And I realized that like something was stuck. And at the same time, Director who had reached out and said, hey, please set this company, you know, you'll find something. Called me with a very different tone. He's like, listen, you can't just float around without a role. If you don't find something, you know, soon, we're gonna have to let you go. And he was right. And

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  so I found myself in this situation and

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  I actually reached out to a friend, Guy Peled. He's a friend and a mentor. I actually met him through the Lenny community.

• 1:06:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing.

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  And yeah, he's here in Israel. We got coffee. And so, and he told me, listen, like, clearly, you have nothing to lose. Like, there's probably an elephant in the room. You know, this new director is wondering, why did you leave this old group? He's not opening. He's not broaching the topic. So it's up to you to do it. And I was like, okay, what do I say? He's like, well, what would you say to him if you didn't have to edit yourself? You didn't have to censor yourself? And I just, I told Guy, well, this is, this is what I actually have. This is what I believe. This is what I did. Could have done better. This, you know? And he's like, he's like, dude, that's totally fine to share. You should share that, like, word for word, just say that. So the next day, I took the director, you know, aside and I had this conversation. I shared

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  vulnerably, just like, here's what I think I messed up. Here's what I think I wasn't under my control. And that conversation, just like, the vibe changed. I could feel like a weight off our shoulders. It was like, we really felt like we got closer and

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  two days later, I was, you know, part of the group. I joined the group. We did some really awesome work there.

• 1:07:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's such a powerful lesson right there of just opening up and being vulnerable and just sharing what you're actually feeling. And this has come up a couple of times in the podcast, is what brings people closer. You think being vulnerable and showing weakness makes people think less of you, but almost always they think more of you because they didn't realize what they're doing. They didn't realize what you're going through. You kind of think they're reading your mind.

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, we've all been through that. Like, you know, it doesn't look like it. Doesn't when you see someone you think is successful that you admire. You look at somebody's LinkedIn profile, you look at their resume, you look at their bio, right? It doesn't look like that, but we've all been through all of it, you know?

• 1:08:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  Right. And most times folks don't know that's what you're feeling or going through. And so just sharing, here's what I, here's what I'm seeing, here's what I'm feeling, here's why things maybe aren't working for me. Goes a long way. Amazing. These are awesome stories. What else? Where else have you failed?

• 1:08:20Speaker 00

  I've single-handedly tanked new payments for a whole week for a company I worked for. It was a well-meaning change. It was super logical. It was kind of streamlined. And I violated my own framework for when do you run A B tests? I even wrote like a blog post about this and I violated that. Yeah. And I was like, oh, there's no downside here. And, you know, we didn't need to measure this. This is just going to make things way smoother. And then I get a call from marketing and they're like, why are none of our campaigns converting?

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  Listen to your own advice.

• 1:08:51Lenny Rachitsky?

  Running A B tests sometimes.

• 1:08:52Speaker 00

  Running A B tests sometimes if you're dealing with really sensitive flows that have big downsides. Even if you think, you know, logically in your mind, there's no reason there should be a downside here.

• 1:09:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  Great.

• 1:09:02Speaker 00

  If the stakes are really high, yeah.

• 1:09:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  All right. What else?

• 1:09:06Speaker 00

  I have some stories. I don't know if they're failure stories, but they're kind of like Wild West, you know?

• 1:09:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  Let's do it.

• 1:09:11Speaker 00

  That's what it feels like. It's like,

• 1:09:15Speaker 00

  one time I completed disavowed quarterly planning. I was, you know, my team was told to be, to do one thing and we just said, no, we're going to do something else. It's not as dramatic as it sounds. It was like, you know, hey, we really, really believe that this is an opportunity. And if we delay this, there's going to be like a really nonlinear cost, opportunity cost of this. And we really should do this. I'm like, no, you should still work on this. Like, okay, well, what if we, you know, made it a really small team and it was just for one quarter and then, you know, like, fine, okay. We have built that that capital to be able to do that. But, you know, I remember your W framework post, I love that. And I don't know what what letter that would be, but that's how that

• 1:09:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  You go off to the side, split it off into make it a Y. But most importantly, did it work? Was that a good idea? Did it was that a right?

• 1:09:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:02Speaker 00

  It was a right call that it's it's become a way bigger team today. And yeah, I still I still read, you know, press releases and blog posts from the company where it's clearly that team's work. Continue. So

• 1:10:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  Excellent.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  I got lucky, though.

• 1:10:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:17Lenny Rachitsky?

  All right. It sounds like.

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

  Again, this is this is just like

• 1:10:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wild West.

• 1:10:24Speaker 00

  You know, Wild West, like PM is no less wild than than life itself. I I've pulled an April Fool's prank on an executive team that resulted in my CEO seeing me like next time he saw me, just look me in the eye, said, fuck you, tell and walked away.

• 1:10:44Lenny Rachitsky?

  Can you describe the prank?

• 1:10:46Speaker 00

  So the prank was, I'll say, first of all, the best April Fool's pranks are the ones that touch just ever so gently on people's biggest fears at that time. So in a work context, like whatever somebody's biggest strategic fear is that quarter or like that March of that year. Right? Whatever people are talking about, like it's just, you just have to touch it a little bit, they'll do the rest of the work. So this company, they, there's this really big debate about internationalization. And should we do that? And it was, there's a big trade off to doing it and other things we could be doing with the same resources. And the the, this is just on everybody's minds, especially the leadership team. And it was March, so

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  my, my buddy and I also at the company, we decided what would be people's biggest fears would be that a really big company would launch the same thing in Europe. And we created not just a fake screenshot, like not just fake news, we created a fake domain name, website, publication. It was like really detailed, we really invested a lot in it. And of this like German website. And it was, we made up a tech arm of their Spiegel. We call it a Spiegel tech, we bought the domain. I'm probably incriminating myself by saying this and Then what we did is we knew that if we had sent that link on the first of April to the executive

• 1:12:13Speaker 00

  team, nobody would believe it. So what we did is every executive on the leadership team has that like senior report that they really trust. So we got all of them in on it and the link would come from them. And each of them took it further, like the senior engineer, who's like this really critical to the company, he created a fake recruiting poaching email. If I recall, I think the legal counsel created a fake cease and desist. Like, we just went all out. And then, and this was on a Saturday, so we ruined the executive team Saturday.

• 1:12:57Speaker 00

  They had like an emergency call. It was a Saturday, we ruined the executive team Saturday. And every time that we decided that, you know, a particular executive had suffered enough, like depending when they woke up and how long they had been, you know, dealing with this, we would let them in on it, let them into the private channel and, you know, ha ha. So Monday rolls around, CEO sees me, fuck you, Tal, great. I'm still employed and I hear later that day that the leadership team had their Monday meeting and somebody mentioned that, you know, even though that was a prank, it really got me thinking.

• 1:13:38Speaker 00

  And then the CTO of the company goes, wait, what do you mean prank? And it dawns on him. And he just gets up, throws down his jacket and like walks out of the room. So we forgot to tell him, he had to, you know, stew it out the whole weekend. So, yeah, sometimes you gotta, something goes too far.

• 1:13:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  That is well executed. Oh my God. It actually reminds me at Airbnb when I was, I was leading a lot of the April Fools jokes year after year. And one of the best ones we did was, we launched, it's basically, we did the opposite of what you did. We launched Air B R B, which was a desk sharing service. And we made like a whole launch video. We like announced it as like a new product, Air B R B. And the idea is like you go get lunch and you can, I'll be right back. And then your desk can be rented out for like 20 minutes.

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  For 20 minutes.

• 1:14:27Lenny Rachitsky?

  And we had a whole website and we had like, yeah, amazing video launching it. And basically it was the opposite. All the desk sharing companies got freaked out.

• 1:14:37Speaker 00

  Oh, no.

• 1:14:40Lenny Rachitsky?

  Because it's very legit.

• 1:14:42Speaker 00

  It's their, it's their greatest fear. Yeah.

• 1:14:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  You don't have to do too much. Yeah.

• 1:14:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. And the good news is we quickly, they quickly realized it was not, not, not real. But we probably led to some calls, some board calls. Okay. This is awesome. Any other stories?

• 1:14:58Speaker 00

  I've had thousands of people tag my CEO on Twitter, calling on him to fire me. This was by accident, but yeah.

• 1:15:09Speaker 00

  I, I was actually on vacation and I got bored and I was like, I haven't logged into Twitter. I haven't posted anything on Twitter for a while. What's, what's going on on Twitter? And I see that the notifications number is like maxed out. It's like 999 plus or whatever. And I was like, wait, what? And I clicked the notifications tab and I see the first tweet is, has at CEO handle fired at Tal Aviv yet? And I saw that that has like a ton of retweets and I keep scrolling down. I start to piece together the story and there was a, a change. The, the pricing changed earlier. I said, had an uproar.

• 1:15:50Speaker 00

  And the internet was up in arms about this and somebody found a blog post from a year earlier. As Brian Balfour interviewed me about an onboarding experiment that we did. And part of that interview, I shared that,

• 1:16:09Speaker 00

  you know, at this company, we'd rather have fewer customers where we make a bigger impact on their lives than a lot of company, a lot of customers that we make a smaller impact. And kind of explaining the logic and the product principles. That was like core, really core to the mission of the company. And somebody took a very limited screenshot of that to prove that, you know, Tal Aviv hates poor people or something. And that screenshot went viral and that those tweets got embedded on like NPR and Washington Post. And that was, that was a little nerve wracking.

• 1:16:46Speaker 00

  I wasn't fired because I actually wasn't connected to that. I wasn't on that. I really felt bad that the PR team, marketing team and all that. I reached out to them. I was like, I'm so sorry. Like, you know, you guys are working overtime because of my big mouth. And they're like, don't worry. Like, this is happening to everybody at the company right now. Everybody's having, you know, people are digging stuff up, unrelated stuff. But yeah, that's stuff that happens.

• 1:17:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  What a life you've led, Tal. Maybe just to close out this portion of our discussion, is there something that you think people should most take away from this really important stuff you're sharing of just like things that usually don't go well for people that do well in product? Like, there are many things that go wrong.

• 1:17:31Speaker 00

  So the feedback I get from executives about these moments that really, I think, is transferable and helpful is that they know that no matter how silly I'm being, or, you know, what kind of stuff I get myself into, that they know for a fact that how much I, how seriously I take everything. Like, they know how much I, if I make a funny presentation about something, right, and I put a lot of jokes into it, but they're like, it's still extremely clear how seriously you're taking this. So I have peace of mind. Yeah, I think you have to have both. You can't just, you know, have these adventures or do these silly things or make these like, these mistakes. Like, it's important to give the confidence that you know you're making a mistake, you're on top of it before anybody else, that, you

• 1:18:16Speaker 00

  know, it's bothering you more than anybody else, that you've, if you're communicating and you're trying to make it creative and like, that first, first of all, you've done all your homework and you, you know, you've put a ton into it. And that gives you the basis. Like, the funny side of this is I have friends who make fun of me that I work really hard to justify, like, my friends that make fun of me, I have friends that make fun of me that I work really hard so that I can increase the amount of bullshit that I can get away with without being fired. Depends how you look at it, but it's really important to, you know, to give that, to give that peace of mind.

• 1:18:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, build that trust bucket and then just deplete it completely.

• 1:18:52Speaker 00

  And then just throw it out the window.

• 1:18:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing. Tell us, is there anything else that you want to share before we get to our very exciting lightning round? We've covered a ton of stuff, all kinds. It feels like there's been three podcasts within one podcast. But just before we move on, is there anything else you wanted to share or touch on or leave listeners with?

• 1:19:12Speaker 00

  Let's do it. Okay, lightning round, yeah.

• 1:19:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  Well, with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions. Are you ready?

• 1:19:20Speaker 00

  I'm ready.

• 1:19:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

• 1:19:25Speaker 00

  The best book on product management that I've read is called How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. I encountered this book. My sister is a speech therapist and she had on her bookshelf at home in her apartment. And I was jet lagged one night, I was visiting her, and I read it. And if anybody has read Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, where he talks about how these like senior FBI agents in 70s, 80s were realizing that all they were doing, their negotiating tactics were just not working, and decided to try something different. And that something is basically nonviolent communication. And he gives these amazing examples of decades of using this with kidnappers and terrorists

• 1:20:10Speaker 00

  and organized crime to diffuse situations and create productive outcomes. So this book, you know, with all due respect to FBI agents and terrorists and hijackers and kidnappers, right? Like, this is about kids. So this book is, for me, this is what really, the example is how it's communicated. It's like illustrated, almost like a comic book, tons of super concrete examples. And for me, I think that's when these principles really sunk in is from that book really resonated with me the most, more than the book itself for nonviolent communication or the Never Split the Difference, both of which are awesome. So I really recommend that book.

• 1:20:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  Man, I want to do a whole podcast on what you learned there, but I'm going to force myself to move on. Yeah, that's awesome. This is going to be really helpful to me as a new parent. There's a book that another, I'm just going to throw out a book recommendation, reverse lightning round on this topic, that Joe Hudson, a recent podcast guest, recommended offline that I've found to be incredibly helpful. It's called Listen. It's an orange book, so there's a few on Amazon and we'll link to it in the show notes, but it's just called Listen and it's about why listening is the most powerful way to help your kids get through stuff that is challenging to them.

• 1:21:29Speaker 00

  Powerful title.

• 1:21:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  Just listen, that's it. And there's all these different ways of listening. So anyway, okay, we'll keep going. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed?

• 1:21:40Speaker 00

  I recently rediscovered Ted Lasso. The first time I watched it, I got tons of recommendations. It's hilarious. I didn't connect to it. I just didn't connect to the humor. I was like, ah, okay, fine. You know, I stopped watching it. And then I heard a podcast where somebody recommended watching it from a point of view of like leadership lessons and they just couldn't stop recommending. They just so passionately recommended it and I was like, okay, let me revisit this. And when you watch it from that point of view, it's mind blowing. If you think about, I'm sure, you know, a ton of people listening to this have watched the show. You think about the premise of the show, it's this guy who's been given an impossible

• 1:22:20Speaker 00

  task and he's surrounded by like the worst human beings in the world in terms of, you know, they're, yeah, just the worst human beings and behaviors. And the way he gets through that, right, is it's hard to describe. You have to watch it. I think any, any attempt to summarize it, the show, like just watching it, how, how this character behaves and gets through this stuff is, is incredible when you watch it from that point of view. And for me, when I, it definitely affected how I work, definitely influenced me, but not just work, like just also how I deal with, you know, aggressive Middle Eastern

• 1:23:00Speaker 00

  urban life situations, how I deal with, I've, I've applied this, dealing with really tough locals at surf breaks, you know, in South America, like it's incredible. I, I, I'll give a story, the surf break, I was in Chile and I was surfing and it was an hour of the day where a lot of the people who were local would be surfing and a bunch came out and they started giving me these like looks, you know, this happens in everywhere in the world, every surf break. And just like really uncomfortable and.

• 1:23:40Speaker 00

  One of the guys especially. And after a while, I was realizing like, I'm not gonna get the surf if I, if this, if this keeps up. And, you know, I'm not, there's no conflict way to get out of this. And I went, I swam up to him. Uh, and I, I asked him, I was like, "Hey, are you from like Peachy Limo? Are you from here?" And he's like, "Yeah, why?" I was like, "You're one of the luckiest people in the world." And he didn't, you know, he was totally caught off guard. He, he started smiling. Um, and like, you know, that, that just changed the whole vibe. It got to a point where, you know, he was telling other people like, you know, "Let me have this wave."

• 1:24:21Speaker 00

  And, um, that's not my experience, you know, in a lot of surf breaks. And, um, I, you know, my friend calls it Ted Lasso, the Ted Lasso somebody, uh, which is also very genuine, like you really have to believe it.

• 1:24:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay. Next question. Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love?

• 1:24:39Speaker 00

  So this morning, I spent, uh, half the day surfing. And I think the, the products I've really come to appreciate, there's not a lot of products used in surfing. It's like a wetsuit, like board shorts, you know, maybe a hat. But you can really feel, uh, like I, I surf with, uh, O'Neil wetsuit, hyper freak wetsuit, but that doesn't matter. It's, it's like when a, a piece of gear is like really well constructed, you can feel that the person behind this also surfs or spends a lot of time with surfers and really gets you, probably gets you more than you understand on face value. And you start to notice all these details, um, over time. It takes a long time to notice all these details.

• 1:25:23Speaker 00

  And you can really feel that there's a person behind this product that gets you. And that's like, it's kind of like art almost, you know, when you feel, you know, a piece of art or music really resonates with you. You feel that the artist is like communicating with you directly and letting you feel something that they were feeling. Uh, it's almost like that. So, um, I think like, like for me, it's outdoor equipment that, uh, you can feel that the, the person behind this is like using it along there with you.

• 1:25:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  First time a wetsuit's been recommended on the podcast. A great milestone. Two more questions. Your favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful and work in life, share with friends or family?

• 1:26:02Speaker 00

  I think I can, I'm doing three surf stories in a row, but um, my, my, this is a life motto that's just like stuck in my head. Um, for almost a day, yeah, for more than a decade now, which it comes from a piece of plywood outside a surf shop in Mexico. Um, that was painted on it. You can't stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf.

• 1:26:27Speaker 00

  And uh, yeah, like there's a lot to that, that you know, over time that I've really tried to apply that in a lot of ways, emotionally, um, organizationally, like at every level you think about that.

• 1:26:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  Along those lines, final question. So at the beginning of this podcast, you mentioned that this podcast has been a long time coming. And the reason that's the case is we had this scheduled for sometime in early October. Uh, you live in Israel, uh, war broke out. You've been living through that, being in Israel this entire time. I saw this Venn diagram that you put out that I think summarizes your life right now, which is, uh, uh, I forget one side of it, but just like

• 1:27:08Speaker 00

  Apocalypse.

• 1:27:09Lenny Rachitsky?

  Apocalypse, one circle, the other is gotta go get to work. Gotta wake up and make some

• 1:27:15Speaker 00

  Israel's in the middle. That's what, yeah.

• 1:27:17Lenny Rachitsky?

  And you've been in the middle of that for the past year. So I'd love to just briefly just hear how that's been for you in the past year. How are you doing? How's, how's life for you?

• 1:27:28Speaker 00

  Here at Riverside, we've had a bunch of people out for reserve duty. Um, I think all, all of them are back now. I have a team lead. Uh, well, people are still going in and out of reserve duty while working here. Uh, I have a team lead who leaves on Sundays around, you know, 4pm, uh, goes to the base. Uh, won't say what he, what he has to do, but it's super intense and shows up the next morning, a little tired, but back at work and um,

• 1:28:02Speaker 00

  And in general, we have, it's not just in Israel, we have teammates in Ukraine. All along at the same time. Yeah, like one of my teams is almost entirely in Ukraine. So you'll have, we had, we've had moments where, you know, we're, we'll all be on a call and then there'll be, you know, missile siren here in Israel, here in Tel Aviv. And we'll say, hey, sorry, we gotta go, go down to the shelter, hear the explosions overhead, come back, sit back down. Later that day, we'll have another meeting. And on the Ukraine side, you know, you'll hear like, hey, that, that beeping, isn't that the missile alert, you know, on your end and Andre, like, isn't that the, that the critical alert on your iPhone?

• 1:28:46Speaker 00

  He looks at his phone, he'll be like, yeah, but I got 10 minutes. Like, let's just finish the meeting. Right? Like all these like surreal moments where you just, at the same time where everything's not normal, people have this really strong desire for normalcy. It's, you know, work and everything around us and our routines like become more important than ever. And it's just these, you know, you have, oh, you know, where's Vlad? Oh, you know, the power grid was attacked in this town. So he's working on getting the generator back up. Okay.

• 1:29:19Speaker 00

  But, you know, I don't know if it's like a no excuses mindset or badassery so much as I know on my end, it's just a, like, I think for Ukraine team, definitely for my end, it's just like, really, really crave the routine and, and the sense of normalcy. When you can get those moments and,

• 1:29:37Speaker 00

  like I said, I, you know, I think during this podcast, working on this course, all these things, I'm not doing them because things are normal. I'm doing them because they're not. So, yeah. And I'll use this opportunity to say that, you know, biggest thing in all of our minds is, there's 107 hostages that have been held for 328 days by Hamas.

• 1:30:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, we need to bring them home now.

• 1:30:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:05Lenny Rachitsky?

  Well, let's hope, also just come home. Let's hope things end soon. I'm really impressed with how much you've been able to get done in the middle of all of that. And thanks for making time for this. I know that this isn't the, the most important thing in the world right now. But I think this conversation is going to help a lot of people and you have so much wisdom to share. Thanks for being here, Tal.

• 1:30:27Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:30:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  On the course, real quick, just to make sure people check it out. How do people find it? Just throw that out there as a final step.

• 1:30:34Speaker 00

  It's on maven.com in the product catalog. And I'll have it, I'll probably post links to my LinkedIn as well. You can find it there. And yeah, it'll launch in mid-October. That'll be the first cohort.

• 1:30:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing, and we'll link to it in the show notes. Tal, thank you so much for being here.

• 1:30:55Speaker 00

  All right, thank you.

• 1:30:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  Bye, everyone.

• 1:30:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.