YouSaid · the spoken record

Nikita Miller

lines on the record: 74
first: 2023-04-06
most recent: 2023-04-06
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

“I am doing some angel investing, maybe a little bit less so recently, but I'm starting to ramp that up again. So are there any early stage seed or preseed companies out there? You can ping me”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On Twitter and LinkedIn, easy enough to find me. I'm very responsive actually, or at least I try to be when folks reach out on anything product related and ask me questions. I think that's always helpful. If you have other ways of doing things, I'd love to hear about it.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, good question. Two things. But one, the big one is probably checking out the Not Worldwide Marketplace. It is the most comprehensive two-sided marketplace to find your wedding vendors to create your wedding team. And you'll find that they're really cool, small businesses on there.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Helping product teams, triads, product design, engineering, and data, understand their shared roles and responsibilities.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The browser company. I think they're a product that's clearly having a lot of fun. And you can feel that in the product when I first opened it, they haven't unveiling experience, which isn't something you'd expect of a browser. And there was something really delightful about it.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am really into K dramas right now. Is that a Korean Korean dramas right now? Crash landing on you is, you know, it's great. It's a love story.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are not product books. I recommend Anakmathavas. You will hear thunder, a book of poetry that is excellent. I recommend almost anything by James Baldwin. The fire next time I most recently reread. And back to software, high output management.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, that's helpful. I asked this to my five year old, honestly. Five year old. We talk about it a lot. Like now we're going to quarterly planning, all of us, right? And now we have information from Q1. So let's look at it and say, okay, given what we know now, what are we optimizing for? Because it might not be the same thing we did before with new information. Or it may be. And that's usually just then helping us get better at figuring out obviously how we're doing trade-offs, right? Because the first point isn't clear, then the trade offs aren't going to”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I ask this question like. The time. I ask this question to my husband like, what are we optimizing? Yeah, I'm sure.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The question I ask myself, and I ask everyone in my life probably, whether it's on my team or when folks, friends talk to me, I always ask, what are you optimizing for? That's the question. It's what are you optimizing for? And it's the short, medium, long term end product, but it's that what are you optimizing for today, this quarter, this year, whatever time horizon? And I think that can be just a really illuminating way of thinking about, obviously, honestly, like just how are you spending your time? And I think it works for product as well. Like every time we talk about OKR or goal setting, ultimately it is, what are we optimizing for for some period of time? And I think that always, for me, whether personally or in product, is very illuminating.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I do. I also think my, I am my family. I'm Jamaican. I'm a Jamaican immigrant. All of our experiences inform like how we perform our jobs and how we think about problems and being able to expand that is, yes, I would recommend it to every and anyone that gets the opportunity. And I think it's really important as product managers because I think it's really hard to be a product manager if you cannot empathize with the people and problems that you're solving for. Being out of your comfort zone obviously is one way to learn empathy.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like making space for people across functions to share ideas and then across geographies to share ideas, especially in companies where English might have been the primary language, but most of the employees were not Native English speakers. Like there was a lot of time, I think, that I felt that I wanted to spend and I did on just creating space for people to like comfortably share their ideas, honestly. And that for me was really formative because I think it's been, yeah, it's really impacted how I've approached my entire career. And I don't know that I would have had I not had those experiences.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Creativity. So in Shanghai and also in London at the time, this was a decade now, so many things have changed since then. There just didn't seem to be as much room for ideas to come from anywhere, which I think is also related to what I've seen before”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which, as you can imagine, was really overwhelming. And so I remember because I was young and I didn't know that much about project management, and I definitely did not have all the answers, I spent a lot of time helping the team help me answers. And that was a little bit of the culture shift in our team at the time. And I actually think that's kind of carried me through my entire career, right? Which is trying to figure out how to share the product management load. So like we're like equally responsible for what we're building. So that was a good, like unintentional learning that I think has been really important for my career. I think that part of that learning that I've had obviously here and in London as well was the figuring out how to make room for”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The confusion around what product management is. Is universal. That's like not specific to US, I think. And the fact that it's changing, that I think was the same. I don't know that I found that many differences in terms of kind of how we approached goal setting all very similar, the need for urgency, like all those principles. I think this are the same no matter where you are. Part of what I experienced when I started in Shanghai was the feeling that the product management manager was expected to have all the answers.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially for everyone, for any new person in organization, I think how we work culturally, having a contact that you can reach out to, all of that, I think, is really crucial. I'm definitely of the so much of my early learning was in person. And I have no idea how we're going to replicate that in a non-office setting. It's just really hard.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the flexibility of it that I'm sure you've talked about with others is really important. I do think that the Nintrello and Alassian, I think, did this really well, is having standards around a couple things. The biggest one, I think, was overlapping work hours. So everyone had general flexibility, but there were some set of hours where everyone needed to be online at the same time for the most part every day. And that made a big difference. Onboarding happened in person. I think that in person onboarding for new folks is really important.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that particular one was one very cross-functional and the unlock there was giving the data person mention. The space to educate all of us. That was it. It was like, you have the floor. Educate.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I can speak about it generally, which was just. We had a change in strategy, and we need to land a couple of core decisions about what we might build. And there were lots of documents and lots of conversations. And back to the velocity of decision making, like remotely, that can be really hard because with time zones, someone sends a doc, you comment on it, you get to the other day by the end of the week. And so days and days have passed, and we still haven't landed it. And people have really strong opinions. Obviously, that's something that big. So it's like, nope, okay. Great. Wave of flag. And not everyone can make it. Most people could. And the folks who could not were, yes, on a screen.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, the agenda is pretty tight before we get there. Myself, or someone else, were responsible for making sure that that's a well articulated agenda that we all kind of agree on before we even get there. So I think that's one, I think 48 hours, two nights, right? And that's important to me because it is the, tends to still just be hours in a conference room or a meeting room during the day, but you do need to build in the, and let's go have dinner. Since we're all in person anyway, or let's have an extended lunch and maybe an extended day. I think that's just really important. And even early in my career, when I was working more internationally, the company I worked for was pretty amazing because two or three times a year, the entire company globally came together for a week or two.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like solving a hard problem remotely with folks that you haven't spent in person time with, that you haven't broken bread with, that you haven't disagreed with in person and built that trust is just really hard. In fact, it's much harder. So some of the things I've done even here, like the Not Worldwide, is periodically when there's a really gnarly problem, I like wave the flag and I say, hey everyone, why don't we try and get together for two days and like hash some of this stuff out and then we can go back to our remote lives. And I think folks have been. Maybe unsurprisingly, very open to that because I think they see not only the efficiency but the camaraderie that can happen there as opposed to what was happening potentially on a hangout or a Zoom call.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They don't have events or off sites as frequently. And I think flexibility is really great. But I think that makes it really hard. And to me, what I've figured out, I think, is that it especially makes it hard to solve hard problems.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's my entire career has been with remote or distributed teams. That's right. When I started early my career, I I lived abroad for a while in Shanghai. I had a core team there, but also worked for the distributed team in Europe and Latin America, which meant all kinds of crazy hours and lots of sprints like we just talked about. Things that worked well. One, like documentation, it's a thing, asynchronous communication, everyone just has to get used to it and better at it. So increasingly just being better communicators, whether it's on a video or written, I think that's just really important and everyone building up that muscle is really important. For all of the roles I've been in this notion of what does it mean to have really meaningful and valuable in-person time that can sustain you for the remote and distributed time is really important. I think a lot of what's happened now in COVID and even now a lot of teams are have never met their co-workers. Like they don't onboard in person.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it can also be at different points in your life, right? So right now, at this particular moment in my life, I'm probably not going to go hard at a super early stage startup. Because I believe that you probably need to be in person. And working really hard together for long periods of time. And not everyone feels this way. I know that. I've had these conversations with lots of friends and colleagues. But so personally for me, that's probably not the decision I would make at this moment in my life.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A marathon, then, like, you know, the next week I'd probably do my long run in the morning and not start work until 10 a.m. Like that was my version of balance, right? And I think we're all lucky enough, many of us, excuse me, are lucky enough, especially in tech, that a lot of companies kind of get that form of flexibility. So now fast forward 13 years. It is very similar. It's like I don't do all of the drop-offs and pickups for the kids, but there are some weeks where I'm like, this is the week. I'm going to do all of the drop-offs and pickups or this is the day. And that's felt much healthier for me than this expectation that I'm somehow going to balance it all and everything is going to be equally great or cared for all the time.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am currently mom, and as you can imagine, that's a lot to manage at any given time. And so recently when I think about work-life balance, I don't use the word balance. I use optimization. Right? It's this question of what are you optimizing for right now, whether it's today or this quarter or this year, with the understanding that I don't think you can have it all at the same time all the time. And so I'm like increasingly coming to peace with that, where that's been interesting over the course of my career as China with my husband about this yesterday, just thinking about it, was early in my career, I remember when we had big releases, like folks would just work nonstop for a couple of weeks. We would stay in the office late. We would come in early. If it was international, we just probably wouldn't sleep because we wanted to make sure we QA everything before we released it. And that was an expected part of the product development life cycle. And there was a lot of my early product years and I just did it and it was very exciting and I quite enjoyed it. But even then, the flip side of it for me was I also, I was a runner back then. So if I was training for a half marathon,”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The PM rule is really hard. I feel, especially now that I'm managing a lot of teams, right, and PMs at a lot of different levels, I do find that periodically I remind them with the core of my being that like, I know this is hard, right? Like it is hard. There are a lot of expectations. You're expected to be competent across many areas all the time. You're expected to have an answer and you're expected to keep your calm and like not lose your shit. And that's really hard. It just is. It's stressful, right? So I think I spend quite a bit of time with my team, my PMs. Like helping them understand that I understand that. And so when we're problem solving, let's probably not solve for everything. Let's focus on one of many things that are expected. So yeah, it's really hard. On work-life balance, as I mentioned to you, of like think about this a lot.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are many ways now. I think there are a lot of the typical programs that are a lot of the big tech companies. I think getting into startups as a product manager is a pretty awesome way to get into product because Just a lot of problem solving. The problem with that is you don't have anyone to teach you the right way, but the product will teach you the right and wrong way if you're with a team that is moving quickly. So yeah, I still think that's working on smaller products and companies is a great way to get into product management, in part because you'll get to touch all of the functions that are kind of required parts of the product discipline. And I think it's hard to get that experience otherwise.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back in my ed tech days, a friend of mine, her kids were in school and she came in one day. Her son was in grade school at the time in elementary school. And he had this match to careers, what you see, and they had person at a computer, this image. And it was product manager. There was an option for product manager. And that's when I knew. I was like, okay, this is. Is mainstream. We're about to become consultants.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so necessarily. I think a lot more PMs are, a lot more PMs are taking boot camps or. Coding classes, which I think is all to the good. I don't know that it's a requirement, but there is more of that, and I think it is very helpful. Similarly, a lot more PMs are taking more classes or digging more into data analysis, also really valuable. So, yeah, I don't think it's a requirement. I am not like a technical PM. I don't have a tech background. I think I've been doing it long enough at this point to do okay, but I think it's a benefit.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Design as a means, honestly, to an end. I think that's trending and probably for the better. I think the best designers I've ever worked with are also like exceptionally savvy business people. And I think engineers are increasingly becoming more product focused, more user-focused. So, you know, product engineers or something Trello, I think, did really well, this idea that great ideas can come from anywhere in the org and any function, I think is really magical. So as you're seeing, PMs becoming more technical. I think designers becoming more business oriented. Engineers are becoming a lot more product, user focused. To me, that's amazing because it means that we're getting closer to what I'd consider like really deep collaboration. And it's not to say that we're not experts. Like there are expertise within that, that we expect of folks, but that care for other disciplines, I think is where a lot of magic happens.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's one, just macro. In terms of the roles, I think that what we're talking before about roles and responsibilities and defining those for product managers, I think product managers are increasingly, I think, a bit more technical or expected to be. I think there was a moment where they were technical and then it was, no, no, we're all generalists. And now I think we're going back to PMs need to be more technical. I think designers, the expectation is that there'll be more Business oriented”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I think the biggest change for product, kind of macro, is how I'm mainstream It is that I still find fascinating. Getting degrees in product management and going to business school to transition into product management and like the whole discipline. And there's a whole business, honestly, around the business of product management, which I find really fascinating and didn't exist. And I think for better or worse, it comes with a lot of good and in some ways I think might have removed some of the quirkiness and creativity that probably is required of product. But that's probably a different podcast.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ask a bunch of questions. What did you deliver? And the more questions okay, fine, but what did you deliver to production? And how long have you been working on that? Like, how long, what was the cycle time? So these questions that are really just, I think, seeking to understand, because I understand complexity, right? And so That exists everywhere, but maybe helping folks see that as they're reviewing their own work or their team's work goes a long way.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, the biggest thing is just if folks are working on a sprint, it's very simply like, what did you deliver this sprint? That's it.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unfortunately, the answer is it depends. If you're working on a business that is 30 years old and has many acquisitions or is very different from a startup, right, or a growth stage company, I think it just varies.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You talk about it, and then two quarters later, someone mentions it again. And you're like, oh, okay, so what are all the things we did in between that time to now why that thing seemingly simple thing didn't get done? And I think that's hard to say as a product manager because everything we do is all about prioritization and ensure there are a bunch of other things that were prioritized. But they're like these little things that come up periodically or bug fixes. Like something is broken. You know, how long does it take us to recognize it and actually fix it?”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How much time do we spend on what I'd consider optimizations versus bigger bets? And how long does it take for that to happen? Right? Because, you know, you've talked to the folks or been in the companies where you talk about something that by most measures is pretty simple. Like, you know,”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know that there are others out there doing this and thinking about things very similarly possibly to what we're thinking about it. So how do we differentiate ourselves? And a lot of that is about like how quickly are we getting many ideas to market. Small tangent. The competition side is interesting to me because I've worked at a few companies where I've worked with founders who are like, we don't have competition. We're the only ones doing this. And then fast forward a few years and you're like, here are all the companies. We're your competition that you didn't recognize then. That our shipping great product now”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mostly reminding people often And I don't think that the question of, well, show me Elizabeth, everything you ship. That's never going to work. Well, that doesn't make people feel good about the work that they're doing. But, you know, let's talk about our experimentation backlog. Like, what do we have in there? How quickly are we getting those things out? Those are the kind of conversations that I think help. I think that having a good pulse on competition helps. As just a friendly reminder”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More often and move faster. Yeah, there's not a lot of understanding of our role in urgency. It's urgent, and software in particular probably can't forget that because someone else is likely doing something similar or better and faster.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So OKR One way to talk about that. Great. But embedded in that is, and how are we going to get there? And the fact is the more tries you have at it, the likelier you are to get it right. So we're not actively monitoring how fast does it take us to ship things to market.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Often have to revisit on Teams, on all the teams I've ever been on that, yes, that comes are important, but also the indicator is around execution of velocity. So if that's not in line, then a lot of the other things don't matter that much.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out comes an output also. Comes up a lot. And I think that in many of the companies that I've either worked with or advised, coached over the past few years, it was all about outcomes. Like everyone was outcomes, outcomes, outcomes, which is right. You want to make sure you're doing the right thing with the right goal, and that's fine. And some folks, you know, myself included at certain points like swung way too far on the outcomes train and forgot that output is an indicator of that. So if you have a team that's doing all of the ideation and figuring out how to make decisions quickly and getting the right documentation and setting up the right product briefs and design briefs and experiment briefs, all the things that we know go into successful product development, that's great. But if you're also not shipping a lot of things to market quickly enough, then it just doesn't matter that much. So that conversation is one that I think we”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like why that's valuable and how it works, and some of that is also shared by the PM because if you haven't articulated clearly or well enough what we're trying to do, then it is hard to kind of break that apart. So yeah, those are the two things that are on my mind a lot.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one just identifying what the velocity issue is. It can vary. So for PMs, it's often around the velocity of decision making, right? How long does it take us to actually, from saying we need to do a thing To defining it potentially and then deciding are we actually going to do it or how? And that, I think, takes a long time for most companies, most people. So velocity of decision making. So I think that tends to fall on the PM most often. The actual execution of it, right? The development tends to fall on both PM and engineering. So in engineering, I find that Depending on the org, you know, some folks understanding up tickets into small pieces and why that's valuable and how to do it. And that's something that I think everyone in industry probably needs a refresher on.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I encourage them to revisit it, and it's usually because something's fallen off the rails. I think if I were really great at it, I'd say every three months or like every six months, let's have a look and see how this is going. But often it happens because there's some conflict or tension or something was missed and someone thought it was theirs or not. And we have to do a quick retro.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That also varies per company. That depends on the organization and kind of the work. Some teams require data scientists, not all. Some require analysts, right? So that just depends on what the team's working on, what's needed.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From my experience as a product manager, it was always a blocker. Getting your hands on the data, maybe having someone to troubleshoot with if as a PM you couldn't kind of understand or figure it out yourself. It was just always a blocker. And so then you'd also then have to go and negotiate with other teams about getting someone's resources to look at this problem. So that's one. The other is just that data scientists, as with most humans, like we get better the more focused we are and the more in depth we are in understanding the product itself, right? So if you have someone that's dedicated to a zone or an area of the product, then it's much easier for them to spot patterns as opposed to attempting to understand what's happening every time a ticket comes in.”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of people end up putting a lot on the PM's Because of that misunderstanding And so you end up looking at something as a group and saying, well, no one human can do all of those things all the time. So let's talk about what the shared responsibility looks like. And what I think is really powerful about the triad is that it's a recognition of like there are shared responsibilities. Who's responsible for making sure that everyone understands what we're doing and why? The PM leads that, but evangelizing that is something that would be expected of designers and engineering managers and data scientists as well”
2023-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source