YouSaid · the spoken record

Jackie Bavaro

lines on the record: 47
first: 2022-06-16
most recent: 2022-06-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That no one else had seen before. And then there's going to be the action what did you actually do to make this happen? And was it hard? Because usually it is hard, but understanding the ways in which it's hard and how you overcame each of those challenges. And then I like to obviously Pian should care about results and be picking. The thing they pick that they're proud of should have good results or have at least results that they learn from. And then yeah, that last part of learning, did you grow from this? Especially if it's a failure, which is like lots of people love to talk about the products that failed or sometimes the interviewer asks them to talk about a product that fails. But I don't want them to believe it at like, yeah, it was a big loss. Our company lost $50 million and we couldn't get it back. But then you want to say like, okay, but what I learned from that is now I need to always run a load test on a staging server and then I've had many successful launches since then that we like didn't have that same problem in.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of it, I mean, it's so different for every question, but I'm definitely looking for try to get something recent. So I want to be something that matches the level that they're applying for, right? So there's going to be a really big difference between the way that an APM answers this question and the way that a director of PM answers the question. I look to see how did they think about strategy, what was their judgment on different choices, what was hard. I have a framework for this. So this is the Perl framework for answering questions like this is problem epiphany action result in learning. So it's a little bit like the star framework, but I kind of want to know like, what's the problem that you thought was worth solving? Is that a problem that I think is big enough? What's your epiphany? What's the insight that you had? Do you notice something that nobody else did? And how valuable was this? So a lot of times that's what makes these PM stories so interesting is that like meeting with customers head on and they said one weird word and you dug into it and you learned this whole new customer need.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love to ask, you know, tell me about a recent project that you're proud of. I feel like a lot of interviews don't give people enough chance to shine, right? To talk about something that they did really, really well and hear about what made it so good, what are they proud of, and how did they achieve those amazing results?”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there's got to be a match between you and your manager, and I think that we had a lot of mutual respect. And I think that I was really lucky in that he was absolutely amazing at vision. I was able to learn a lot from him. And there were a lot of places where I was able to help. So, you know, a lot of my early experience of even getting to learn strategy and vision was, you know, he was like, Jackie, can you help me with the slides for the vision all hands? And I would be doing busy work of putting the slides together, but then I could make some suggestions. I could ask some questions. And first year, I was just basically doing slides. Second year, I had a little bit of shaping. Third year, he let me take the first stab at it, and then he reviewed it. And so I think he was always willing to sort of help me grow and really saw it as a win-win where if I grew into something, then that would free up his time to take on something bigger and better.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love Helen Rosner at Hell's H-E-L-S. She's a food writer for the New Yorker, but it's a lot deeper than food. A lot of it gets into society and bigger topics.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Attracts other recipes you can save any URL and it'll extract the recipe from there and you can do meal planning in there, you can turn things into a shopping list, you can use it across your phone and your computer for like when you want to like sit down and browse but I find that like I really enjoy just browsing recipes and a lot of them I'll never cook but just the idea that like oh I could imagine cooking that it's a lot of fun it's a little bit like traveling”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm not the most up to date with all of the companies, but I do think that Microsoft is pretty underrated. I had a lot of fun working at Microsoft. I learned a lot of good strategy there. I think I got a really good foundation for a lot of the rest of my career.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nothing is settled, but I've been playing around with the idea about whether or not to update the cracking the PM interview book. It's lots changed. Some of the companies there are not the top companies anymore. Some top companies aren't in there. Some of the companies have changed their interview processes. So I think that could be a lot of fun to get that more up to date. Some of the changes that have happened in interviews over the past years.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I'm not sure that I've exited the KVM Career Path. I really like working in offices with people. So I've been sort of waiting for an end to the remote work era. And once I find companies that are in person again, I definitely have some curiosity about that. I might go back to in-person work.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Designer, and you sort of let your designer take the lead on everything. Now you just sit back and you're a note taker, right? And you're not contributing anything. You're not really driving anything. You're not adding your own ideas and making the team better. So that person needs to sort of step up more to be somebody who's really contributing and adding and being a multiplier on the work of everybody else on their team. And then some people step in too much. They're trying to lead everything and they're crowding people out and they're not giving their engineers a chance to present at all hands and they're burning bridges with their coworkers and almost every company peer reviews is a huge part of your review cycle and as a product manager you need to get along well with the other people in your team. You'll be pushing them and encouraging them to get more done than they would have otherwise, but you don't want to do this by having everybody say like I never want to work with her again.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so a lot of it is misunderstanding what the role is at different stages in the career and sort of misunderstanding what success looks like. So this can show up in a lot of different ways. Like one of them is there's lots of APMs who want to become people managers right away and they sort of poo-poo all the like regular everyday work you need to do to be a good PM and that comes across to a manager is like kind of like immature certainly but also just like you don't seem to understand or value what good PM is. So I certainly wouldn't make you a manager, but also now it's a little hard to convince you to do your day-to-day job, which makes you a little hard to manage, which might mean put a little bit less of my energy into managing you. It ends up being a bad situation for people. It's a lot better to sort of show some enthusiasm for the job you're supposed to be doing right now. Other ways that can work is just people sort of optimizing for the wrong things, like leaning in too much or too little, right? So one, some PMs I see get paired with a really strong.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Person, you get assigned a pretty narrow scoped, constrained problem. They're like, hey, can you make the print dialogue for our product? And the right answer to these narrowly scoped defined products is not to invent a whole new print dialogue, right? It's not usually, a lot of times you have been assigned a problem where a huge creative solution is a bad idea. And so if you're in one of the situations, just like do the simple thing, get it done really well, and that'll earn you the trust to be able to take on bigger things in the future. But you don't need to be outstanding to like make it past the APM promotions. You just need to be doing like a solid good job and later your career, there's a lot more room for being outstanding.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think you can use that in almost any role because everybody does have different gaps. But then to go into like early career people, okay. I think that working on a large company early in your career can be just really, really valuable. If you choose a small company and you know it's going to be super successful and you like pick the winner, like that can be better than working at a big company. But big or I'd say even medium sized companies can be really good here. But a company where you're going to be able to learn best practices, you're going to be able to grow your network. I think that these large companies really give you and you'll also be able to make usually a higher salary that starts to build your nest egg. I think that that gives you like a really good foundation for anything else you want to do later in your career. And when you're early in the career, really to have that mindset of absorbing and learning how to be a great PM, one mistake I see people make early in their career is they like they kind of are trying to overdo it. They're like, I like they've been given some project usually as an early career.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brings them in onto your side, so now they'll be in the mindset of trying to help you. It will target the feedback that you get on what you need to do to get that promotion because so much of the time I think the reason that success as a PM is hard is because you get a gazillion pieces of feedback. They're all true. It's all like, yeah, you know, in that meeting, you said a lot of filler words, but that's not the thing that's actually holding you back from the next promotion or it's not the thing that you actually need to improve at.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll start with one piece of suggestion for people at any stage of their career, which is to have a conversation with your manager and say, I would really like at some point in the future to grow into whatever this goal is, whether it's to become a people manager, become a senior PM, become a director, whatever this next step of what you want is. So I would really love to become a people manager someday. What do you suggest that I work on now so that I'll be ready when the opportunity comes up? The reason I love this template is just a really easy way to start off this conversation of saying like, here's my goal. Like by the way, like I do want to get promoted. I do want to grow. I want to become a senior PM. I want, you know, whatever that next step is. I'm framing it in the future so that it's not threatening. It's not like going to put my manager on the defensive and be like, you're not ready to be a manager yet. Let me now have to prove why you're not ready for that promotion yet, which is not the mindset you want your manager in. And then it kind of brings them onto your side. Can you help me out here? Like, let's you and me work together to get me this promotion. Like you and me work together to get me ready there.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nice. Yeah, I think as a manager, you usually have a reason for hiring someone. And usually, at least in your head, you think you've hired them to sort of build on the strategy that you've already created. And there will be room for people to create new strategies and change the strategy. But if they come in on day one saying your strategy is all wrong, like raises the question of like, well, then why did you join my team if you didn't believe in my strategy?”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And write start writing some stuff down. Just start getting your ideas out there. And this will start to give you that framework. You can then try to take that time, fill it out more, figure out what questions you have. What would you need to know to decide which of these approaches is better? What are the open questions you have? And then you can have something to start meeting with the rest of your product triad. So the engineering lead, the design lead, any other key stakeholders you have on your team and to start working with them and start to figure out how are we feeling about our strategy. One thing I love to look for is like repeated disagreements. Are there any times when like we're fighting over whether to add this feature? And I so strongly believe we shouldn't. And you so strongly believe we should. And it's just like ends up feeling like a battle of wills. Anytime you have these disagreements that feel really thorny or they feel like a disagreement in values, that's a sign that really have a disagreement and strategy and that it's worth it to sort of write down what you're strategic framework is or what your strategic principle is.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think that for your first six months on a product, probably don't worry about strategy. For your six months, really, you should be talking to customers, researching your product stuff. Really starting off by saying I'm going to learn the strategy, whatever strategy my company already has, and I'm going to do my research, but I'm going to deliver on that strategy. But all this time, while you're doing your regular product work, so you're visiting customers and you're analyzing data and all these things, you're probably having ideas pop in your mind. You're starting to notice trends. You're starting to notice like what are the pain points people have. And just stay open to that. And after about six months, I think is when you can start to put together a draft of a strategy for your own team. So this, I think you can take half a day, right? Just like block it off. Don't take any meetings, you know, put on your headphones, go to a coffee shop, whatever it is you do to kind of get your alone time and just work on whichever of those three pillars of strategy, whether it's the vision, the strategic framework, or the roadmap, start with whichever one draws you the most.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To a Google shopping result, or is it better to have comprehensiveness where even though the experience will be different each time, we give you a result every time? And so that framing, he was able to take from shopping over to YouTube and ask that same question. And the answer didn't have to be the same, but it gave them a new way of looking at the strategy that he was able to use. So I think having that broad view and looking at lots of other products and seeing how they make their choices and like how do they frame their decisions, that's a good way to improve its strategy.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so definitely there's a lot of cross-applying of strategy that I think really is helpful. So one of the great ways to learn strategy is to cross apply strategy from other places. So one of the people I interviewed for my book was Shashir Mahotra, who's CEO of CODA, and he used to work at YouTube. And while he was at YouTube, he had a very big strategic question that the team had to decide about whether if you search for a video that is not on YouTube but is somewhere else like Hulu, should you link them out to that? And the team was having a lot of trouble making any progress on that. But one day he went to a product review for Google Shopping. Totally different product, right? Shopping versus videos, but they were having a similar issue and they talked about this idea of consistency versus comprehensiveness. They said, is our product the kind of product where it's better to have consistent results all the time? Like every time you click on a result, it takes”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just saw it in a way that I hadn't seen. And so just like hearing that, it's like this accumulation of experiences, I think matters so much for so many, for strategy, for data analysis, all of these things where like I'm really, really good at data analysis, but only because I've seen so many experiments that I when I see a set of results, I like can just instantly remember like four similar experiments and like what the conclusion was and what went wrong with it. And so I'll be like, oh, yes, this metric is up. But if you check this metric, you can see it's down, which means that it might be this conclusion. So it's just, it's talking to people, listening to them.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So strategy really should be collaborative work. I think that there is some amount to which the PM should go off by themselves and think about what strategy they want and have that in their back pocket because that way you actually can contribute to the conversation. But real strategy should be very collaborative. And I think the best way to learn and improve your strategy. One of them is going to be working with the other stakeholders and listening to their feedback and understanding what do they agree with or not agree with. So sometimes it's as easy as a conversation. And I can't remember the details here, but there was one conversation on pricing models that we were talking about. And we were each going to go around the room and talk about which of the five pricing models did we think was best. And I think I was like number three, the most was like number two. And then our CEO gets and he's like, I think really number four is the only reason for these reasons. And I was just like, I agree. I've changed my mind. You're right.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think it's more strategic to get more money from our current users. Here's one thing we can do. What are other things we could do? And how do those stack up against each other? Or maybe it should be that 50% of our effort is on getting more money from our current users and 50% is from going into new markets. Well, which new markets do we think are most promising and what would it take to win those new markets? So I think it's that connecting the dots. And the only way you find out what dots are missing is by talking to people and communicating your strategy and communicating it again and again and really listening for people's confusion because people will try to hide their confusion. They won't get your strategy. There's going to be some assumption that you're making that they are not making. And so you have to like pay really, really close attention to find those missing assumptions so that you can then explain like why this connects to this.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a product manager, to take all of the great product work you've been doing. So let's say you've been doing lots of customer research and you're getting really deep into what the customer pains are and what their needs are. It's your job to take the things you've got now in your mind. You've got a list of like maybe 20 different things your product team could work on. So it's your job to take those things you want to work on and the reasons why you think they're important and match them up against what that larger strategy, that larger financial target was or whatever strategy or vision you're getting from the executives. And basically see which of these feature work, which of this product work that I want to do best matches up with those goals and why. And there's probably a few more missing dots in there. You're like, well, I think that this is going to make us the most money. But why is it because I think this will make us most money because it's helping us get more money from our current users? And we think it's going to be really hard to win new users because we're already pretty saturated in the market. That's where you start to get into strategy, that level of detail. And then you say, okay, given that we...”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I'm probably gonna write something on this soon. In the past month, I'd actually have to two totally different people who came to me with the same problem. And they said my CEO brought me a strategy and the strategy is like increase revenue by, you know, 50%. It's a revenue target number. That doesn't seem like a strategy to me. I don't know what to do. And so talking to people, I started to get a deeper sense of what the confusion and the mismatch is here. And so I think a good strategy is all about connecting the dots. Connecting the dots from this high-level business goal of like we want to increase revenue by this much to like this is the feature we're going to do. And it might have many, many dots in between to help get people from one to the other of like why, given that this is our big picture of you of what we're doing, what's the next step and what's the next step and what's the next step. And as product managers, if you're given a numerical target, that is not a complete strategy. But it's your job now.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your strategy did not actually fit into the timeframe that you wanted, and that roadmap helps you see like, okay, what would it take? And then that can be a little bit of an organizing factor for people across the company to understand like, okay, if we're having a major launch in two years, then we need to make sure that we're going to have the marketing support we need for that launch. Or we might need to have an entirely different business model in two years. We need to do a fundraising round now. So it really helps kind of pull the pieces together.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Backwards from your vision, so you say, like, okay, I think as a company we can achieve our vision in five years or ten years or two years or whatever it is. And you say, working backwards from that, if we're going to be at our vision in five years, what does that mean we're doing in the intermediate years? I misunderstood roadmap for the longest time. A roadmap in strategy is not a commitment. Instead, it's a way to double check if your plan makes any sense at all and is even anywhere near feasible. Because what happens to every team I see do these roadmaps, if you put it together and you realize we're not going to hit our vision in five years or ten, this is like a 30 year vision if we keep going at the pace we're going. And so it's this wake-up call to say, oh, okay, if we want to hit this vision in five years, we need to start working on that big thing now. We need to like take much bigger swings at the bat. We need to say no to a lot more of this optional work. Maybe we need to hire a team that's twice as big. It gives you a way to say that like probably.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of your own tasks that updated the centralized system that was always up to date. So we had this vision of what. I was like, that's going all these years thinking I knew what strategy was, and now I get again find out that I don't know it. And so we had a lot of conversations and kind of figure out like, well, what's missing? And through all of this, I basically realized that there's three key components to strategy. And not everybody's thinking of all three, but if you have all three, you'll have something that counts as a strategy for anyone you talk to. So three parts of strategy are your vision. So this is your inspiring picture of what the future looks like. And this is like, hey, everybody, this is where we want to get to. Don't you want to like come join me? Come build this future with me. Won't this be exciting? And then you've got your strategic framework. So this is where you're saying, here is the market we're going after. Here's what success looks like. And here are our big bets on what we think it takes to win that market. And so that's where you get your pillars. It's your unique way of breaking down the problem to understand like who you're going after and what it takes to win them. And then the third part is the roadmap. And so this is where you sort of work.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, does the cracking the PM career that's on Amazon and it's in the strategy chapter? So what I did is I wrote a document and I called it like on the local universal team. So I called it local universal strategy. And I can't remember what I put in this document. I put it in like just like a random like what my plan was. But I was like, once I wrote it down and shared it with people, then I started getting feedback on it. And then I could start to feel my way to what people meant as strategy. So then I get to Asana and I work really closely with JR, head of product. And I'm starting to get a view of what strategy means. And he's got a robust vision for the product. So, you know, we talk about this idea that when you're playing guitar, you're left in your right hand know how to work together to play the guitar. And like, wouldn't it be amazing if at a company, all the teams sort of had that ambient awareness of what other teams were doing together so that it worked seamlessly together and Assan was the team brain helping this happen? So like imagine a world where you didn't have to have these endless status updates and all this work about work because the teams knew what each other was doing and that like as you kept”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, when I worked at Google, one of the promotions I went up for I did not get. And I got the feedback that I needed to be more strategic. And so I was like, okay, great. What does being more strategic mean? And nobody could tell me. And they were like, I was like, well, who's more strategic? And they were like, oh, this person used to be really strategic before she became a manager, but now she just does managery stuff. And I was like, okay, I have no role models, no words, nothing to explain what strategy what it means to be more strategic. So quick shout out to my book is I've got like a whole list of what it means to be more strategic. So if you pick that up, you can read through that.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do. I think that if you want to pursue the IC path, which I think is a great path, I think thinking of ways to grow beyond the official promotion. So a lot of companies, you can make a lot of money without getting that promotion title. If you're working at a small company, if you're working at one of the companies that isn't the highest paying company, you'll make a lot more money by switching companies than you will by getting promoted at your current company. And like I was saying before, with the thinking about the kind of impact your work has, do you want to work on something that's more cutting edged? Do you want to work on something that your product that your friends use? Do you want to work on something that's going to save the environment? All of these things, I think, are ways to grow. They are a career path. They're just not the like climbing the career ladder.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think that to the extent that you want to be seeing promotions as like you want your level number to go up, I think that it is pretty rare. I think that there's not that many companies that have principal PMs and the ones that have a bunch usually have a partner PM role above that. That's the real principal PM at other companies. And the reason for that is that the reason a company would give you that high of a title is because they have a business need for PM who can have as much impact as like a director. But with a team that's small enough that they can PM the whole team. And there's only a few problems out there like that. So platform type teams can fill that role a lot of the time. Partnerships, somebody who's working on a partnership between two major companies can often fit that kind of description. But they're justn't that many. It's a lot easier to have a big impact if you have, if you're a manager of managers and you kind of can add up the impact of all the people on your teams. So yes, I agree that there's not that many opportunities to go from senior PM to principal PM to partner PM. I don't think you need.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe you could work on a product that affects more people or has a bigger impact on the people that use it or something that has more of a social impact type work, but just really thinking about different ways to grow your impact so that you don't make a blind choice towards people management because it seems like it's the only way to grow.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be able to do that. And I just had no idea what salaries were like. And since then, I've looked at like levels.fyi as one of my favorite sites. They'll show you salaries at different levels, at different companies. And if you make it to like senior PM, which is like one of the middle levels, right? Like this middle senior PM level at most of these big companies, you're making as much as a doctor makes. You're making as much as the lawyer makes. You're like making a lot of money. So you don't necessarily need to climb that career ladder forever to make a lot of money. And especially like at a company like Google, you know, there's a few companies that I know for being like the highest paying companies. You can make a lot of money, much more than you can make a lot of startups just by being an icy path just by continuing to do that job. And companies really need people to do that. So I think understanding that there's different ways to grow your impact and grow your career other than getting promoted to people management. And for me, I think switching companies is one of the really obvious ways is that, or teams of there's one kind of impact you're having at your current job.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely, so sort of two directions I'll take. One is just like, yeah, that being a manager is not as much fun as being an IC. It's a lonely job when your team goes out for drinks, like they treat you differently when you're the manager than when you're one of the other ICs. So it really is, it's more painful and less fun. So for all these reasons, like you might not want to be a manager. At the same time, I felt like I'm like, well, what could I have told, you know, younger Jackie to be like, maybe you don't want to be a manager? And there's nothing. There's like nothing you could have told me that would have convinced me not to be a manager. So I might say that if you want to try it, consider it a two-way door. Considering that you can try for a while. And if you don't like it, a lot of people are now playing with going back to IC. And also to understand the career paths. So when I started as a product manager, I had no idea what salaries people made. None at all. And I knew I wanted to like be able to support a family and stuff when I grew up. So I kind of assumed that I needed to make it to junior VP level to like.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could use a break, but for a while, I kind of felt like, okay, but I don't want to just leave the company and things will be in bad shape. So we worked on hiring lots of really, really stellar people, just really talented people and growing people in their roles and got to a point.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Managers, and I was definitely starting to get burned out. It's really, really tough being a manager. As a manager, like one of the ways that I'd always worked as a product manager is a lot of transparency and authenticity, right? A lot of like explaining to people what our goals are and then kind of showing like this is the solution I think will admit our goals, but I'm open to other solutions. As a manager, there are times when my goal is like backfill for someone I know is quitting in a few weeks, but I can't tell anyone about it, right? Or there are all these sort of like personal secrets that you have to keep for people as a manager. And there are times where like what the person MIT wants is a promotion to make more money haven't necessarily earned it yet. It's not necessarily the right thing to do from a company perspective. So those places where you're sort of torn between these two goals or where like what I want isn't always like perfectly aligned with what's best for the people that report to me that weighed a lot on me. That was very heavy. And so I was like kind of like, okay, maybe.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seats is understand how a company is built and what kind of decisions are happening and what goes on beyond the realm, the narrow perspective of like building features, right? So going from features to like strategy, but also understanding business strategy and like how do the product choices we make impact our financial plans and whether or not marketing has to hire people and whether or not that means we need to open our office. So I really felt like I was getting a lot of personal growth and I was getting an opportunity to learn things that I wouldn't have that opportunity anywhere else because of my sort of background and my deep knowledge of this product that I was able to be exposed to this and have these responsibilities. So for me, I really felt like I was learning and I was growing and I like didn't know it all yet. And so that's really kept me there for a long time. And then I'd say getting closer to the end of that time, I started, you know, I'd become a manager. I had teams, I'd become a manager.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my career. My manager, one of the co founders, had a meeting with the two co founders of Planning Committee. So the planning committee was like the two co-founders, the head of engineering, and the head of business. And they would meet. And after these meetings, he would come back to me, my boss, and he'd tell me, like, okay, here's the direction we have, here's what you're going to need to do. And I had to like ask some questions and I'd be like, but what about this? And what about this? And so after a little bit of time, I would start to be like, hey, you have your planning committee today, right? Like here are the three questions I want you to go in and get answered at that committee. And I want you to like, if they say this, I want you to like ask this and this. And after a little bit of that, I was like, it might be easier if I just go. Like I might be able to save you some time and some energy if I just join you. And it was a way that I sort of talked myself into this higher level meeting, framing it as something that was going to help out my boss. And it did. It wasn't dishonest, but it was a pretty effective way of advocating to get into this meeting. And so I think once I was in the planning committee, I just got a real...”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I loved working at Asana, and Asana, I think, today is incredibly successful, but it was not always obvious that it was going to be incredibly successful. We had some walls in there. There was a time when we were updating our entire engineering framework from an old version to a new version. And we had like a literal 50% of our engineers working on this. So no new features. We set aside half of our engineers to work on new features, and the other half was just working on updating this framework, which meant that we felt like we were moving at half speed. Like it felt like we were moving really slowly. Customers hated how slow the app was and this framework change was needed to change that, but we really were not sure that the company was going to be successful. So staying with the company through those days, it really was this feeling that I was getting good growth opportunities even if the company itself didn't succeed. One of the things I think was really important for me in my career at Asana and growing into head of product management is at one point.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there's sort of two different models I've seen people. Some people like to have a coach all the time and that's a person that they can go to and they can explore their ideas and their feelings and how they're like just bounce ideas off of all the time, have this person who isn't in any way related to like going to be the person who evaluates them later on so they can be totally honest with them. For me I find it's better to have a coach when I have a specific thing I want to work on. I tend to be a little bit like results oriented, action oriented and I don't like to like just show up and be like, so what are we talking about today or like make something up? So I talked to this coach to sort of deal with this issue of like how do I not shut people down and how do I still be a good PM if I'm not saying no to people all the time. But I did and I worked with her for several months. But then once that was gone then I did start to find that personally I would make things bigger when I had a coach because I had something that I knew how to solve on my own and I'd like bring it to the coach and then all of a sudden it felt like it was a big deal rather than a little deal. So I've gone in and out of coaching but I”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was probably pretty early. I'm like imagining what room it was in. And I'm like, okay, I know what time I was in. It was definitely in the first year, maybe six months in.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I kind of have this belief that almost anybody can learn anything. People have different interests, not everybody wants to learn everything. But I find that if you're having trouble learning something, it's just because something's not clicking. There's just some thing that you're misunderstanding or that other people see that you're not seeing. And if people could just describe it in the way that matched your mental model, then you could learn it. So that's kind of how I feel about this interviewing is that the reason that some people don't do as well as they could on interviews is just because like a lot of these interview questions are kind of like trick questions. When they say like, oh, how would you design a bathroom? I used to think that meant like, what do you want in a bathroom? And that's not what it means at all. It means like who is the best customer for a bathroom? What would they want? But if you haven't been trained in this, you wouldn't know.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Help them understand the interview process. And after doing this like three times, I was like, wait a second, if it's only like my friends of a friend who are people who work at Stanford and are already very privileged and I'm telling them how to pass these interviews, like that's not fair. If I'm willing to tell it to a friend of a friend, I have to be willing to put that out on the internet and share that with everyone because we really want to level the playing field and we don't want to make things more unfair. So while I was at Google, one day I get an email from a friend from an engineer I'd worked with at Microsoft and he's like, hey, you want to grab coffee? And I was like, oh, cooled, sure, I'll be friendly. And at the time, I did not realize that that's how all these recruiting chats start. So I honestly did not realize that this was like, I'm being recruited. I thought it was like, let's just catch up. But I said yes. And then he told me about this company. And he's like, hey, it's kind of like imagine if SharePoint was really fast. And I was like, oh, like I loved SharePoint and I would love to work on a fast version of that. And that's how I ended up moving over and becoming the first product manager at Asana to achieve.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Year later, I applied again, and that's when I got into the Google APM program. And of course, at the time, I thought this was like one of the biggest mistakes in my whole career, but looking back, it certainly is what kind of gave me the impetus to write these books and say, like, you know what, even good PMs don't know how to answer these questions. There's a lot we can do to help. And beyond that also, then when I joined Google, I very quickly got sent into being an interviewer. And immediately I noticed there was this real difference in how people would answer the questions. And some people like didn't seem to understand what the question was trying to get at. And some people sounded really good because they'd say, well, I'll tell you three things. You know, number one, number two, number three. And then when I paid attention to my notes, I'd be like, wait, their three ideas weren't actually good ideas. They just sounded like they knew what they were doing. So those really drove me to wanna like share more about how to do well in these interviews. And at the same time, I constantly had people saying, you know, Jackie, my friend's applying to Google, can you talk to them? And I was like, sure, of course. I'll like tell them what we're looking for and I'll like.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I was just really lucky in finding product management is I went to Cornell, studied computer science and economics, and I'd never heard of the job. And one of my friends who'd been a PM intern the summer before was like, Jackie, you have to apply for this internship. And I said, I'm like a sophomore. I can't be a manager. And they're like, no, you manage the product, not the people. And like, just go apply. So I applied having no idea at all what the job was and through the interviews I tried to figure it out. And I love the interview questions. I thought they were a lot of fun and got the job, became an intern on Microsoft SharePoint services and stayed with the team, loved that team, went there full time. When I moved to New York that I started to think about changing companies. So Microsoft didn't have any product management in New York. So I applied to Google and I was like, yes, I'm a good product manager. I'm sure I'll get this job. And I got rejected. And I was like, I was shocked. I really had thought that I would pass the interview.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm so excited to chat with you. I'm so excited that you're doing a podcast and I'm glad I get to be one of the early people on it.”
2022-06-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source