YouSaid · the spoken record

Maggie Crowley

lines on the record: 95
first: 2023-11-05
most recent: 2023-11-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And then usually in the process of writing all that down, you'll start to see, okay, I kind of get where we are. I kind of get what the challenge is. And then you write a section that's like, what's the opportunity from all of that? What's going to bubble up as the talk one or two opportunities for your team? Where do you want to play? Where can you win? Where's the unique based on your unique competitive advantage? Where do you think you all should be and why? Based on that opportunity, what are the challenges, right? So like what's going to be the hardest about taking advantage of that? What has to be another way to frame it is, you know, what has to be. That's a one that's been helpful.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then I put in all right that's sort of the context that we're operating in. Then I want to understand where are we? So what is an honest accounting of the current state of your product? You know, the business overall and then the specific area that you're working in. What works, what doesn't work, what are your customers saying, bottoms up feedback users, customers, teams. Is your support tickets? Get that all out on paper. And then really importantly, where are your technical hurdles? Like, what are the big pieces of tech debt? What are your engineering and technical teams always harping on that they want to invest in? Are there some big things coming down the pipe that you need to think about? Just get everything on paper.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I did was, I just wrote out a Google Doc and I started with okay, and not fancy. These are just bullets. What is the mission? Like, what is the point of the company? What are our goals? Maybe we have some sort of high-level framing of what we're working on. And then I had this big section that was just like the landscape. And in that section, I put in, you know, what's going on with our business? What's happening with our product? What's our point of view on the market? Who are our competitors, you know, a SWAT analysis? key risks that we might be facing. Just dump that all on paper. Then, what are the current quarters, business goals, or whatever you do planning? Like, what are the current things that your company's working on?”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Yeah. Another thing that happens, and I'll give that outline, but another thing I hear, especially as you get further in your career, and unfortunately, if you're maybe an underrepresented person in tech, is that you need to be more strategic. And so that's feedback that almost always happens, especially if you're a woman in product in tech who's knocking at the door of a leadership role. You've probably gotten that feedback. And so I made it my mission to figure out what the heck is this thing? What how do I do it? How can I do it in a way that is demonstrable so that I'm never getting that feedback that's like, oh, she's not strategic. And so what I did was something that I kind of did in the background because I had an engineer who I worked with who really wanted to understand why we were doing what we were doing. And he was not satisfied with sort of a surface level answer. And he was just pushing and pushing and pushing. And so.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For better or for us, it's just like you just have to get that first job. And then once you get that first job, it all gets easier because you can get in and then you can talk about your experience. Because then the second question I have is, what have you shipped? Right. So it's like, have you been a PM before? What have you shipped? And it's fascinating how quickly people can't answer that question. And the people who can are always several steps ahead of the people.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I tell people I do. Unsurprisingly, talk to lots of people who are there are in product or want to be in product, and that's one of the things I always tell them because if they're deciding between roles and they have an opportunity to do something, and my advice is always if you can get someone to stamp you with the product manager role, take it. Because to your point, it's what we screen on.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, I can't say I wouldn't do it because it was awesome, and she was amazing, but it takes a lot of work. The reason why people don't do it is because as a manager, it takes a lot of work because there's so much that these people need to learn. And what we ended up doing is she and I spent four months working together in a WeWork in person to help her onboard really quickly into the role, which was so rewarding. And I loved every second of it. And I wish I could do that again and again and again. But to get that, she basically just hounded me, Christina, if you're listening. You emailed me a lot. We talked a lot. And we waited till the time was right. And then you finally convinced me to do it. So I don't know. I don't know if there's a reliable, if there's a reliable path that I can say, like this is what my advice would be other than, you know, try a startup network, see what you can do.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought about this one a lot, and I consulted the Slack workspace team. Because it's been a long time since I tried to get into product. And so I didn't know what was going on these days because it's hard. And I didn't, I don't know if things have changed. I went to business school and that's how I got in. There was a program that took MBA students. Think there are some entry level programs out there, big tech companies, if you can get them. I think they're really hard to get because there are very few and far between. And so the most common two paths that I've seen are people who switch laterally within a company. Again, challenging but can be done, or people who join startups. So when I was at my last startup, I did hire someone who was coming out of business school who hadn't been into product into a PM role.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just one of those things that, like, People, and when I joined product, it was just sort of becoming a cool job. It wasn't like the hot job on campus when I was in business school. That was more like private equity venture capital. And now there's a sense of cachet around it. But again, it comes back to that earlier point, which is you do get to do cool stuff. You get to decide what gets built. Like that's cool. You have a lot of ownership, like we talked about. You could see it as you have a lot of power. But at the same time, you're responsible. And so with that comes this responsibility to get it right, to make the right bets, ship the right products, get them out the door. And that's there's a lot of work you have to do. You know, again, project management is one everyone hates on. QA is a really good one. You should QA your products. That's great if you have a QA team. You should QA them. You should know how they work. You should implement with your customers. You should be able to sell them. You should be able to, you know, find users. All that stuff is stuff.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're uniquely positioned to have to fill in all the gaps because no one else is incentivized to do that. Like you could, as an engineer, you can finish your work and hand it off and say, I did it. And you don't, the good ones care, but you don't have to care, right? As a PM, like you're not going to do your job unless that problem gets solved for the customer or the user at the end of the day. And so your job is to make sure everything happens for that product.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It might actually make sense to put this in the context of the other roles that are part of the team. So as an engineer, your job is to write the code to really reduce this down and build the thing and make it work to spec. As a designer, maybe your job is to design the thing, design the solution, design the user experience. Obviously, there's lots more complexity in that role. Design your amazing engineering, you're amazing. TLDR, caveat, whatever. But as a PM, you don't have that thing, right? Like it's not like, oh, my job is just to write the one pager. Like, that's not true. Your job isn't just to pick the problem. Your job is to deliver a business result. And so”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To stay positive and to keep people amped for that thing. And part of it can be just like, you know what? Let me take that on, you know, let me grab that whatever. I'll do this thing. I'll hop on this sales call. I'll implement this with the customer. You just have to do whatever it takes.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. This one's no tips and tricks. It's just do the work. If you ever find yourself seeing something like, that's not my job. That's probably a thing you should do. And, you know, it probably isn't your job. And it probably is someone else's job and you can spend your life getting frustrated at that or you can just get over and get the work done. And people who are willing to just get the work done will move faster. Their products will be more successful. They probably aren't carrying around all that anger and crappy emotion because we touched on this earlier. As a PN for better or for worse, and maybe this is not how we all want it to be, but you're oftentimes the emotional center of the team. And it's your job to keep people motivated, keep people excited, keep them bought into the project, and you just have to like keep that optimism going. And it's hard work. Like it's really hard work.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends. Are lots of really good reasons to bounce. I've done it. Many people have done it. But I was surprised at how much I value that experience of having stuck around for a while and how much I learned from it was something I hadn't expected going into it, especially because you don't hear that point of view as much, or I wasn't hearing that point of view as much when I was thinking about the sort of arc of my career. But I'm glad that I did it. And then, you know, of course, people always want to get promoted, always ask that question. And my answer is always create impact, and that can take time.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's because it takes a long time to ship stuff. And so to people who want to progress. You can progress by job hopping, you can progress by In and out of startups, but to me, staying when I was a drift, I was there for almost four years, I got to see two or three cycles of the same product. And that I learned more from that than I did out of the, you know, year or so I spent doing other things each at a time because you got to see the consequences of your decisions. And that's rare. And people, you know, myself included. Of course, you want to be up promoted. Of course, you want to, you know, move up. You know, I'm ambitious. Lots of people are ambitious. But for better or for worse, spending the time is really helpful. And I think allowed me to move faster later because I had just spent the time.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say similarly, it took a lot of years to feel confident that I knew what I was doing. My first PM job was a product management rotation job at TurbAdvisor. I had no PM background. I was after business school. And I left that those two years thinking like, yeah, I've worked on four different teams over the two years. I've shipped all this stuff. Like, I'm good. Went to a startup was there was another product person there. They left and I was the only product person at the startup. And I realized really quickly I had no idea what I was doing. Like I had no one to learn from. I had only had two years of experience and I was not ready for that job. I didn't feel confident in the decisions I was making. That's why I joined Drift is because that team had all these really incredible product thinkers on it. And they were shipping all sorts of stuff. They had all this momentum. And I thought, okay, that's where I'm going to go to learn. And so then, you know, two more years. So that's five years until I really felt like I knew what I was doing.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a really good point. And then you mentioned this a little bit ago, the side benefit is that you learn more. You know, you'll go back and learn why something happened or why it didn't happen. And the more that you follow up on what you've been doing and the more you learn, the better you get every time you ship something. To me, like the other answer of what makes a great PM is if you shipped a lot of stuff. Like the more you ship, the more you learn. And that's why it can take years to build up expertise because you just have to ship a lot of stuff.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's definitely both. I'm not going to pretend like if you're just great at your job quietly that you're going to get what you want. You're not just if you're toiling in the background, doing a great job, getting results. If you have a great manager, maybe you'll be successful. Great managers are few and far between. And I'm of the opinion that I never wanted to rely on someone else to get what I wanted. And so I would always make sure to share that. Always make sure to share my progress because I didn't want to leave it up to chance that someone would notice. So I would suggest doing it for both reasons. And that's one of those things that people want to pretend that everything's perfect and we're all great and we're always going to get what we want and always going to get that promotion, but you have to work for it.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I put reminders in my calendar. I mean, yeah, it's just do that. But like, if you're watching a product, usually you release something and you have that initial push of a couple of weeks where you're finding bugs and maybe you're pulling metrics and everyone remembers it, then I would remember two weeks after that, a month after that, six months after that, put a reminder in your calendar to check your dashboard or check the metrics or check whatever it is that you were doing. A, you won't forget and then share them with whoever might care about it. And it's as simple as that.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Slack just work for us because that's where we are during the day. And I think having easy access to it was important. You could probably use WhatsApp or literal group text. There are small community. There's one I worked in healthcare for, you know, a year and a bit. And there's a Slack community that somebody organized for heads of products and healthcare startups that is similar to those really, really powerful and a really great space to be in. And so you just have to kind of suss out where these things are. You work with amazing people and there's people around you who are going to become your friends and so keep an eye out for them and keep in touch with them when you leave a job because you never know when you're when they might become your little Slack workspace.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if it's a group. It's like three friends. Shout out Alexa and Daphne. Yeah, I mean, the three of us all work together when we were at Drift. We've stayed in touch. And I've just found that in order to be good at your job continuously, you need people who can help give you feedback. And the more senior you get, the harder that is. And so having people who can give you another point of view, who maybe you can vent to if it's not appropriate as a leader, who can give you other experiences that they're going through has been incredibly valuable. And so we just have a little group chat that is focused on product.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You would just like, oh, it's crap. I don't care about that. So I would do that. And then just get other people find, there's probably somebody around you that's good and find people to edit your work and to look at it. I have a little Slack workspace that has three people in it, me and two other women who are product leaders. And we oftentimes send each other our work still. And we say like, hey, I'm struggling with this. Like, can you read it? Help me make it simpler. Can you help me fix this up? And we do that for each other. So find a peer, you know, maybe who's in a non-competitive space, you can do that for you. I mean, I still use those people to help me.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he'd be like, just start, just start here. Everything would go, everything on the first page is Crapola. Don't use it. And he wouldn't even read it, which would drive me crazy.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, great, fantastic. Yes, everyone should do that. A lot of new PMs fall into the trap of thinking that they should have some sort of buildup. Don't do that. Just tell me whatever the thing is. Everyone will think you. Doing things like that. Things like you said, limiting your strategy docs, your conclusions, your next steps to three things, maximum. I would generally say a rule of thumb would be pretty much every doc you write. You can delete the first two paragraphs that you've written. You don't need them. My dad, again, to go back to my dad, when I would write in the sounds cool, but I promise it wasn't when I would write a paper for school. He would just like, and this is that we didn't really have computers, whatever. He would just like take away the first page.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What to simplify in more specifics, I would say anything can be simplified and shortened. Maybe another way to say shorten it. Definitely emails like I read them sometimes don't love them. Make them short. Put the Minto principle is something that I would recommend everyone do, which is like put the headline, the full conclusion first, and then you're supporting argument second”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think maybe I'm good at it on paper, but there's been many times where I've been in situations where things are not simple and you just have to keep fighting for it.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You make a bet that means you know that there's a chance you're working on is not going to work out, and you still have to be the one to like do the thing, jump off the ledge, like drop in on the ski run. So ownership to me never signaled that like risk.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Willingness, and it maybe I should have added this to my what makes great PMs list the willingness to make the bet and be responsible for it. And that's why I think separates the PM role from a lot of other roles and why it's such a challenging job when done right is because you have to be willing to take responsibility. And it's your job to pick the thing and it's your job to be accountable to your team for picking the thing. So you better get it right.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think again, simplification is something and privatization, which is sort of the same thing, gets tossed around a lot as a thing you have to get good at. But it's really challenging. Like getting to the one thing you should do is extremely difficult. And being able and having the gumption to say no to all those other things is really hard because there's probably at any given time 10 things you should do. But you can't do 10 things. You'll never be successful if you do that, a number of things. And so you have to pick one. And so it's both figuring out how to get confident in your decision and then be having the”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like using Notion and you have your three bullets expanding. There's sub bullets, but at least you have that top line.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a very Sort of business school ex consultant point of view that I do agree with and share, which is there's always three things. Few Never more than three things. You have to have a nice round couple. And if you have a fourth, you've got to figure out how to squish it in there because it just doesn't look great if there's four.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have people review your work and listen to them? There's a thing that happens, I think, with PMs where you join a company and then all of a sudden it's like my leader, my boss doesn't know what they're doing and highest paid person's opinion and like the founder wants to swoop in and mess everything up. But those people had an insight on the market that you're in that made the company worth founding. And they probably know more than you. And so you might want to listen to them. And so find people who can review your work, listen to them, and help them to help you simplify.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Users are really struggling with this problem. We found this in research, and we think that the way to solve it is to do X. But that's not what the document says. And so my reaction is always, and if anyone who I've worked with is listening to this, they're going to laugh, is always, just say that, you know, just say that thing. The thing that you said to me in conversation is the thing you should write. There's no reason why your pros in a document has to be a certain way. We're not in school, right? Our goal is to get things done. Those are just some simple tricks that I've used to help simplify what I've already been working on. And as for how to boil things down and really find the most important thing to do, which is another part of simplification, I think the best thing you can do is just Get as many reps in as you can”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a tough one because some people, a broad generalization that I think comes up in things like when you're interviewing PMs for a job and you say things like, are they a simplifier? Are they complexifier? Do they make things complicated? And so some of it's a little bit of just who you are and how you think. But having said that, there's one tool that I use that I actually learned from my dad when I was in grade school, which is when you write something, for example, and a lot of what we do as PMs is written, when you write something, read it out loud. Literally just read the thing you wrote out loud. And half the time you'll realize it's way too complicated. It doesn't make sense. Or what happens is when someone comes to me and they say, okay, I'm working on this thing, you know, check it out. Can you read it? I read it. And then I put it down and I say, what are you trying to say? And 99% of the time, they say, oh.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, cool, let's do a strategy, let's have impact. But then, and when I was starting off as a PM, I was hearing this advice and reading about it. And I was sitting there saying, awesome, I want to create impact. And I'm looking at my job thinking, now what? Like, yeah, impact. Let's do it. Where is it? How do I find it? Someone help me.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the end of the day, the person who has a good strategy will not be as successful as the PM who ships more stuff gets more reps and has the ability to actually create impact. So to me, you could be great at strategy, but if you're not good at this stuff and your stuff isn't getting out the door, you're never going to be that great at the job.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those things to me, communication is super important, analytical ability, really, really important. The ability to look at, especially if you're doing something that has a user experience component, the ability to look at that and understand if it's going to work and build up intuition around that also really important. Those are things that I would see as sort of basics of the role. These are the things that make you great at the role. And strategy to me, and hopefully we'll talk about strategy in a bit, it's one tiny slice. You do a strategy, but it's 5% of the work that you do. Yes, it's important because you want to get your strategy right and you need to pick the right products, but”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Phrase actually, we were talking about David Cancel before we started carrying the water, and this was a big theme when I joined Drift. And this is about how you can't be a good PM if you're not willing to do the hard, boring, unglamorous work of customer support, sales, marketing, writing copy, project management. Like you have to do that stuff. It's your job. No one else is going to do it because at the end of the day, you're responsible for outcomes and results. You're the person that has to do that. And if you're willing to do that work, that's what's going to make your product successful, which is what makes you successful.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't tell you how rare that is and how many times as a leader you might have to ask for that. And for the people you don't have to ask that of is one of the best things when I'm looking at BMs. And it's easy. Like it's not hard to do that, especially if you set up metro tracking or you know how to pull that information or you have somebody who can help you get that. It's pretty easy to do and it's really high value activity. And then the third thing, and I think maybe we'll talk about this later too, is that”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, first one simplifying. I think the second one has to do with this point about. So many people in the spec are the one pager or something will say, okay, here's the metric that I care about, here's what I want to move. Awesome. Maybe they'll even write a SQL query, get a dashboard going, figure out what the number is today. That gets you some extra points. But the really, really good PMs, remember to follow up because especially when you're in management, a couple layers up in management, I'm not going to remember to follow up on that feature. But if a PM comes back to me and says, hey, remember we did that thing, here's what happened”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of when we talk about product, it's like, oh, what should you build? What should you ship? But then you actually have to ship that, and that can take a week, a month, three months, six months, a year. And so as a PM, your job is to stay on that and be the person who's beating that drum over and over again. And those, the best PMs are the ones who can do that and have the resilience and the kind of like energy to stay with it.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Puranization is a tough word because there's so much wrapped up in that and what it means to prioritize. And, you know, I've worked for people who wanted to understand the formula for prioritization and why this thing and like how can you prove that this is the right thing to work on and not that thing. And then, you know, a week goes by and then they want to reevaluate the priority and they want to religigate the priority. And so it's so much more than just a moment in time deciding, but it's the ability to stay with it. And to make sure that it continues to be the most important thing that you finish it and actually see that it worked and that you can get people to continue to stay excited and engage in that project”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are 8 million priorities. There's 700 OKRs. There's 25,000 projects you could work on. And teams will get bogged down in that complexity. Similarly speaking at a startup, you might think that it's easy to find the one thing to do, but at the same time, there's so many fires that are happening and so many things you could do in such a world of opportunity that even just picking one and sticking with it is really difficult. And so the best PMs not only can find the one thing to work on, but they can stay with that one thing long enough to actually finish it.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's an interesting question, mostly because I've worked in startups, zero to one, scaling stage startups, enterprise, all that kind of stuff. And there's a lot of content out there, I think, on how those roles are different and how PMs are different across those different types of companies. But what I've seen is that there are some standard things that are the same across the role, no matter whether you're a consumer or B2B or startup or large company. And in particular about what sets PMs apart from one another. And the things that I look for when I'm hiring or when I'm looking for promotion to promote people or when PMs stand out, even when you're not looking are three things. First, I think the best PMs are really good at breaking things down and simplifying things. So finding at any moment, like what is the really truly the only thing you need to do, especially in a big company.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you ever find yourself saying something like that's not my job, that's probably a thing you should do. And, you know what, it probably isn't your job. And it probably is someone else's job and you can spend your life getting frustrated at that or you can just get over and get the work done. And people who are willing to just get the work done will move faster. Their products will be more successful. And they probably aren't carrying around all that anger and crappy emotion. Because as a PM For better or for worse, and maybe this is not how we all want it to be, but you're oftentimes the emotional center of the team. And it's your job to keep people motivated, keep people excited, keep them bought into the project. And you just have to keep that optimism going. And it's hard work. And part of it can be just like, you know what? Let me take that on. I'll do this thing. I'll hop on this sales call. I'll implement this with the customer. You just have to do whatever it takes.”
2023-11-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, Tripadvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source