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

“Which is a little bit different from how it was when I started in product, where actually a lot of that was put on PMs. And some of you might recall Cause a lot of issues for product managers because they were the ones that were constantly like, what's happening in the sprint, what didn't make it, why didn't it make it, kind of doing a lot of that work? And I think PMs are still responsible to keep track of that, but engineering managers are increasingly expected to be the ones that are actively making sure that sprint goals, for instance, are met. And that's a shift that I've seen recently that we do have to debate often.”
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, I'd see recently, I'd say in the past maybe five years, one of the things that has shifted and has caught some people by surprise. I don't know if it should or not, is around project management. So I think like 10, 12 years ago, everyone expected that they would have scrum masters. And Scrum Masters have largely in many companies just kind of disappeared. But then you think, well, where did that responsibility go? Because someone has to do project management, right? And this is different from program management, like internal to a team. And from my perspective, a lot of that now sits with engineering managers.”
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
“Write your own. So I, as a product manager, I write what I think my role is and also what I think, what my expectations of my counterparts are. And they do the same.”
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 usually comes in a couple of forms. It's what the expectations as an IC, what's the expectation as a manager or with your team, and then what is it to each other? And what are the things that are shared, right? So, you know, when we're running an experiment, like a product manager is likely to write a product brief and go into the details of what that means. The data scientist is likely to help write the actual experiment brief, but we're all putting inputs into it. But then when it comes to data and analysis, my expectation is that both of you are doing that together.”
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
“To our teams. And from there, we cascade it throughout the org. This is very time intensive, right, as you can imagine, and often leads to a lot of debate because depending on the kind of orgs or people's backgrounds, our expectations might differ. But I think that contract early on 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
“It's a chair. Great. So I think about that a lot. Like, what are the roles? What do you expect for each of them? And how do you define the responsibilities that we have to each other? I know it sounds kind of maybe, you know, on the softer side, but I think a lot of what we can solve for in creating strong teams is exactly that. And the exercise that I often do is I generally have an idea of what I think the role and responsibilities are and the expectations across these four roles. But the exercise, especially with leaders in an org, is to have them sit down and write them for each other. So Alassian has some of this that they do in the form of playbooks, but it's basically, I, as a product leader, I'm going to write down what I think the expectations and the role and responsibilities of my engineering manager, my designer, of my data. And then we look at it together, and then we arrive at essentially a contract with one another about what we think that looks like and what that responsibility is.”
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
“Excellent. Well, that's kind of what I spent a lot of time thinking about. And I think every company go into, you approach it slightly differently. For me, it usually starts with Individuals kind of identifying very clearly early on roles and responsibilities. Like, what are the expectations of a role? So in software, for most of us, one of the things that I think I've seen done well or contributed to multiple companies is the triad, product design, engineering data. And what does it look like for these roles and data science like other”
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 the biggest that people probably know about but are often underutilized are power-ups, which is basically our integrations. And power-ups are folks that are usually doing things that are more complex often. But Trello, you know, when you think about it with other products like Asana's, you mentioned linear, some of what people are worried about is that it's just not powerful enough. And PowerPoint's a way to do that. And there are dozens and hundreds of integrations that you can use it for. So that's worth checking out.”
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's a great question. I think that. I mean, couples like this is a, it's such an emotional thing for people, for individuals and their families and their friends. So I think I personally feel like I empathize with that in a way that I might, that I don't do the same for product, even though I'm a product manager because there are many projects and there are always things that we need to manage. And that's just part of the gig. Whereas planning your wedding for couples, like this is for many, the most meaningful time of their lives. And everyone does this differently. So we have folks that are planning their multi-hundred person weddings and their 10, 15 closest friends weddings. But the emotional side of it is the same. And you don't want to let them down because most aren't going to do it again.”
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
“Find inspiration and plan their wedding day to day to our marketplace, our two sided marketplace. We have our e commerce business that's supposed to registry and paper and obviously our affiliate businesses and the ads businesses. So it's a little bit different from a SaaS productivity tool, the business that we're in. But a lot of the problems that we're solving for users are actually really similar.”
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 lot of similar. So, folks planning their weddings, I mean, think of it as an emotion high stakes thing that you're hopefully going to do once. And so the pressure is really there, the pressure and expectations are really high, not unlike product managers or other folks in software. And ultimately, wedding planning is this huge project, right? Where you have a bunch of stakeholders, friends, family. You need to manage multiple vendors. And the time horizon for a wedding, once you're engaged, is anywhere from like 12 to 18 months. So it is a long time project. So yeah, I think there's a lot of similarities there. Some of the things that are a little bit different in terms of how we're building the product is the amount of decisions probably that need that go into wedding planning are far more than you'd imagine. So one of the reasons being at the not is so interesting is we go all the way from planning tools. So actively, how do you help people?”
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
“Or a designer or a developer, and how do you make sure that that core is there so you get the 80% and then you spend time on the 20% that you know that a very small segment of users are going to use, but they're probably your core. So maybe you spend some time there. But yeah, the answer is no one's going to be happy. And with Trello in particular, it was challenging because for a while we were in there, we built a product that was easy to use for everyone. And so then trying to really narrow in on, well, what is a software development use case and what do we really need for that? And that might be very different from what a mom and shop is going to need or someone planning their wedding is going to need.”
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 you're right, it is a bittersweet place to be. I think I less thought of it as building for product managers and just thought about it in the context of productivity. Overall and productivity software in itself is really what's bittersweet because There are a lot of trade-offs, and when you're dealing with a software team, for instance, how you measure productivity or define it for a PM or designer or engineer or a data scientist is probably really different. And so the impossibility of solving for all of those use cases, I think, is always what's challenging. And we know that no one product is actually going to solve all of those use cases, no matter what the marking taglines are out there. And so it was really challenging to figure out, well, what are the core things that a product manager might need to see”
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 that Smaller teams, especially folks that are ideating when you haven't landed on what you're going to build yet. I think Trello is a great product for that, for pulling ideas, for prioritizing them, for tracking how we're progressing through discovery. I think Trello is really great for that. For things that have been decided and are ready to go and are really in the breakdown of these tasks and assign it to people, then something like JIRA is probably a better use case. But I'm sure there are people that'll disagree with that.”
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 it was broadly a bunch of little things. So, all the enterprise features that you can imagine that all products need to kind of operate at the enterprise level, smaller features around labels, like how do you color them? How do you name them? When do they appear when you invite people? Do you invite individuals or do you invite teams? So a lot of the work was around going from like single player or two, three-player mode to five, 10, 20 people.”
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
“Kind of into the product and then spreading it throughout the org. So not only software teams but sales teams or marketing teams. And so the big push there was around collaboration. How do you create a shared perspective for everyone working on a project, not just a software team? So we had a good time thinking through what's the customer experience, but obviously in the context of enterprise, which for Trello at the time was really tricky because it's such a customer first product, I think shifting our mindset to understand like enterprise and team specifically as a cohort was very different. And I think we've done a pretty good job of that or the team did a good job of that. And I think being a part now of the Atlassian Suite kind of definitely leaned into that even more.”
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, that's probably not what you guessed. So when I started Trello, I actually joined to build out Trello's enterprise business And so a lot of our growth and retention was actually about how to get more teams”
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, it started off, I think, being inspired by software teams and wanting to understand how to move and manage tasks easily. That was the origin story, but then very quickly became the kind of tool that anyone could use to manage anything. And now I think we're back more, the product is way more towards the software development. And that's a lot more of the competitive advantage. But I think the people that are excited about Trello and the ones that made Trello really impactful weren't necessarily software.”
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 if you want something simpler, you kind of have to pull things away or tease things apart. And that was definitely something that helps Trello stand out I think now, many years later, you'll find that Trello is very fully featured and fully powered, and we lean into that, or they now lean into that a lot more. But that wasn't always the case.”
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 that's who we're geared towards. Trello, when it first started, was very much on being simplicity of design, being easy to use, tactile, easy to onboard. You don't need customization. You can use it in single player mode or multiplayer mode. And so that meant that at the beginning, we got a lot of people using the product that were small businesses, that were families, that were people planning their weddings potentially. And then over time, as our users became more sophisticated or had more problems to solve, that's how I think we evolved and grew with them. So some of it's around, you know, this concept of progressive disclosure where you start with a small problem and as it gets more sophisticated, Trello grows with you. Where they think some of the other products start with complexity.”
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
“Few things. So, I think Trello initially started out as being the kind of task management or planning tool for anyone as opposed to the others you just mentioned, which tend to be in software, right, in our industry.”
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 we're sticking to celebrations. I think we're leaning on. The world needs a lot more celebration right now. So helping folks do that.”
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 a nice way of putting it. We talk about it as being there for the big celebrations in life. Like we have these celebratory moments that mark adulthood. And so to be part of that journey, we primarily focus in the wedding space, but yes, across the whole journey.”
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
“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.”
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