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Janie Lee

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2024-06-14
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2024-06-14
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  1. “There isn't going to be a straightforward formula or framework for every single situation you find yourself in. I think like when there's dysfunction on your team, you might need a great strategy because the team has no North Star. You might not need a great strategy. Like the team might be in such a bad place that you just need some quick wins for whatever it is just to get velocity because of all of the different permutations of context in any given situation. I think being right is somewhat of an art to figure out like what is the thing needed in this situation. I will also say like amongst the toolkit, product sense is the tool or the skill that feels most art like, but I feel like there are tons of tactics for developing product intuition and taste.”

    2024-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Loom CPO Janie Lee on Three Core Skills that Make the Best PMs, How to Find, Pick and Train the Best PM Talent and Lessons from OpenDoor and Rippling on Product Breadth, Pricing and Talent Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Probably sixty forty more art than science. There is an art in diagnosis and science in how to execute and the art of being a product person is, can you identify what scenario you're in? And then can you then figure out what tool in your toolkit that you want to use to solve the scenario? The science aspect of pulling on your toolkit is interesting because early in your career, you don't have a ton of tools in your toolkit. Most PNs are typically really great at one thing, something like execution, or something like writing a doc and people expand their toolkit over time, mostly by just getting the reps in of building and being in different circumstances. But the ability to diagnose like what situation am I in? What do I need to do to solve it is art because there's just so much nuance and context that”

    2024-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Loom CPO Janie Lee on Three Core Skills that Make the Best PMs, How to Find, Pick and Train the Best PM Talent and Lessons from OpenDoor and Rippling on Product Breadth, Pricing and Talent Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Very, very iterative cycle. I think it's really creating a clearer point of view on what's the minimum level of usability that you need to get the purchasing decision. And then that only gets you part way through the door if the actual users, the admins aren't using the product, you're going to be in trouble, maybe not now, but a year from now when people aren't able to actually administer like core critical roles. And so I think making sure that you have a point of view on what gets you sold versus what gets used is an enterprise software-wide lesson, but I think you need to do both, even if you separate out the time at which you do the two things. But I don't think you can retain customers without doing both.”

    2024-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Loom CPO Janie Lee on Three Core Skills that Make the Best PMs, How to Find, Pick and Train the Best PM Talent and Lessons from OpenDoor and Rippling on Product Breadth, Pricing and Talent Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “One is how do you create a really, really great customer experience by being integrated everywhere? And I think the second is where and how does NDs or experience come into play when you're building so quickly in so many products at the same time?”

    2024-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Loom CPO Janie Lee on Three Core Skills that Make the Best PMs, How to Find, Pick and Train the Best PM Talent and Lessons from OpenDoor and Rippling on Product Breadth, Pricing and Talent Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “About the concept of selling ahead, selling the vision, especially as products, companies are more nascent in their maturity. And whether you talk to Parker in 2016 or now, he's probably selling the exact same vision of the world. And in 2016, obviously, vision versus reality was much farther apart, but the way in which he could sell a version of the world you didn't know existed today is also kind of matched by none. And I think when you can combine getting the problems and solutions right so often, great storytelling, and also having, I think, a real competitive mode of taking a somewhat contrarian point of view on do it all versus focus, you create a really unique opportunity and opportunity isn't and was theirs to capture. And I think they're doing a pretty good job of it so far.”

    2024-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Loom CPO Janie Lee on Three Core Skills that Make the Best PMs, How to Find, Pick and Train the Best PM Talent and Lessons from OpenDoor and Rippling on Product Breadth, Pricing and Talent Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “He understood the customer like no one could. You have the CEO of a company actually being our HR administrator at all stages of the company growth. And you have the CEO literally assigning onboarding tasks to new employees or administering hardware. And I think he develops customer empathy in a way that is unmatched across most folks I've worked with. And I think when you become the expert on the customer problem and you become a customer yourself, you have really, really clear sense of like, what are the critical problems that we just have to solve and have really opinionated points of views on the solution? And you're probably right way more often than the average product person. And so your hit rate is also higher because you know the problem space so well. I think the other thing I'd call out is Parker was a great storyteller and salesperson. We always talk”

    2024-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Loom CPO Janie Lee on Three Core Skills that Make the Best PMs, How to Find, Pick and Train the Best PM Talent and Lessons from OpenDoor and Rippling on Product Breadth, Pricing and Talent Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Last one that's hard that we don't like to talk about is also parting ways with folks when the coaching or the feedback doesn't work in a really transparent but also empathetical way. And I think that's the biggest mindset shift that you need to have as you kind of progress through your career is like at the beginning I was just always looking for a talent dense teams and at some point you realize oh I need to create them and my expectations should not be that talent dense teams exist at a company else they probably wouldn't be hiring me or looking for a new leader and I think that's something that I saw kind of on both ends at OpenDorror.”

    2024-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Loom CPO Janie Lee on Three Core Skills that Make the Best PMs, How to Find, Pick and Train the Best PM Talent and Lessons from OpenDoor and Rippling on Product Breadth, Pricing and Talent Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I think it's all about talent density and how you think about it when you're junior versus senior. I think when you're more junior in your career, and that's where I was when I joined Open Door, I think one of the most impactful things you can do is to join companies where there's high talent density. And I think it's probably the single biggest predictor of career acceleration. I think when I interviewed, I remember feeling like the dumbest person in the room every interview. And I think more importantly, when I ask people why they were at Open Door, everyone said they follow the smartest people they knew there. For me, that was just so high signal. And I think as you get more senior, it's actually your job to create talent density when you join a startup. I think there are components of can you coach people to get from good to great? Can you actually hire people? I think nothing raises the bar more than bringing in really, really, really great operators. And I think the”

    2024-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Loom CPO Janie Lee on Three Core Skills that Make the Best PMs, How to Find, Pick and Train the Best PM Talent and Lessons from OpenDoor and Rippling on Product Breadth, Pricing and Talent Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Being really, really clear on where it's bad. And I think figuring out where do you involve manual processes, whether it's like human operators or in like a product experience today, like you don't need AI and everything, right? It's starting to build that over time. And I think if you choose the right problems and the core things to solve first versus second versus.”

    2024-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Loom CPO Janie Lee on Three Core Skills that Make the Best PMs, How to Find, Pick and Train the Best PM Talent and Lessons from OpenDoor and Rippling on Product Breadth, Pricing and Talent Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I rarely have said the term basis points in a SAS setting, and I think this attention to detail knowing the full P&L of a business is the type of business acumen that I think serves me especially well in SaaS settings, knowing the inputs and outputs in such detail. I think the other one is just learning and building products how to combine automation with human touch. I think when you're building ML or AI products, you always go with the mindset of everything needs to be automated or like this needs to scale. And in shipping, a lot of these pricing algorithms, you actually realize like, hey, we're directionally there, but if it's fully automated today, it's going to be a really bad experience, either for the customer because we haven't nailed it yet or for the business. Because we're going to ship an algorithm that misprices a small set of homes. And so I think really figuring out like where is the automation today?”

    2024-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Loom CPO Janie Lee on Three Core Skills that Make the Best PMs, How to Find, Pick and Train the Best PM Talent and Lessons from OpenDoor and Rippling on Product Breadth, Pricing and Talent Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Call out two things. I think first is I really learned how to be a GM and a business owner. I think being a PM at a low margin business is one of the best things you can do to grow your business acumen. And since then I've only worked at SaaS companies. But in the world of pricing, accuracy and all the details mattered so much. One mispriced home could wipe out the profit of 20 or 40 homes. And so just the act of needing to be right and margins playing such a huge factor really caused me to get into every component of understanding the profitability of a home. And with our pricing algorithms, we had to understand things like outliers. And that required us to go deep and do case studies on every time we got it wrong. And on the flip side, celebrate when we shipped wins to our pricing algorithms that saved a few basis points. I think”

    2024-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Loom CPO Janie Lee on Three Core Skills that Make the Best PMs, How to Find, Pick and Train the Best PM Talent and Lessons from OpenDoor and Rippling on Product Breadth, Pricing and Talent Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “All of these things without sacrificing on any one of them, and you immediately that this was like the kind of dynamic job that I wanted.”

    2024-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Loom CPO Janie Lee on Three Core Skills that Make the Best PMs, How to Find, Pick and Train the Best PM Talent and Lessons from OpenDoor and Rippling on Product Breadth, Pricing and Talent Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Growing up, I think I just had a lot of the innate qualities of a PM. I think on one end, I was just like a weird kid growing up that loved leadership. I was the type of middle schooler or high schooler who went to leadership camp. I actually worked on a statewide nonprofit trying to lead teams of teenagers. And I think if you can lead a group of hormonal teenagers, you're a pretty good track for the real world. I was also a humanities and very much a multidisciplinary background person. I studied public policy, African-American studies, and so everything I did in college was writing and clarity to thought. I might have taken maybe two multiple choice exams, but I was pretty much writing straight every day. And so when I got into the real world, I was really fortunate to jump into a rotational program at Box and my last rotation was on product and I was like, oh my God, I can do.”

    2024-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Loom CPO Janie Lee on Three Core Skills that Make the Best PMs, How to Find, Pick and Train the Best PM Talent and Lessons from OpenDoor and Rippling on Product Breadth, Pricing and Talent Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Course, and thanks for having me, Harry. I think feeling is mutual. Some of my favorite people have been on the show, and I think have learned so much. And so excited to just get into it today.”

    2024-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Loom CPO Janie Lee on Three Core Skills that Make the Best PMs, How to Find, Pick and Train the Best PM Talent and Lessons from OpenDoor and Rippling on Product Breadth, Pricing and Talent Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Parker was one of the best product visionaries I've ever had the privilege of working with. He understood the customer like no one could. I think one of the most impactful things you can do is to join companies where there's high talent density. And I think it's probably the single biggest predictor of career acceleration”

    2024-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Loom CPO Janie Lee on Three Core Skills that Make the Best PMs, How to Find, Pick and Train the Best PM Talent and Lessons from OpenDoor and Rippling on Product Breadth, Pricing and Talent Density · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source