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Noam Lovinsky

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2024-03-17
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2024-03-17
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  1. “Yeah, I'm pretty much No ML everywhere online. So Twitter is probably the easiest. My DMs are open. And then how people can be useful to me is please use Grammarly, provide any feedback that you might have. And honestly, if I can be helpful in almost any way, like feel free to reach out. I often, you know, we'll take those conversations and build those connections. And that is always very helpful for me as well.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Gosh, for those that know me, this is going to share so much of my personality. I think the first thing that comes to mind is like, we are meant to struggle. I just feel like through struggle is how we get better, how good things happen, how bonds form. And so I don't shy away from that kind of life experience.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I love the animation when you download something. I mean, just like all of the little things. And if Josh is listening, we would like to get Grammarly to work better with Arc. So please, please hit me up because I think there's a few things that the ARC browser is doing that make it hard to get Grammarly to work either on the client or in the browser.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “You know, I generally like interview questions that allow us to kind of like do some work together. So I'm a little bit less on the behavioral tell me about a time when sort of stuff and more on the let's work a product problem together. And it could be anything from like let's design an alarm clock for children or lately I've been using one like you know given where technology is at like if we were to rebuild email like how might we do that I just feel like kind of getting into it and getting into the details and really kind of watching each other kind of exercise our craft. I think is really important. And I have a whole podcast one time if you're ready about how most people don't know how to do leadership recruiting. And I feel like as I've, you know, advanced in my career, like the interviews for some reason get easier and actually evaluate less about who I am as a product leader or whatnot.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Really, I really like for all mankind. If you've seen that on Apple TV, and then I just finished the last season of Fargo and every single season of that series, I think is fantastic.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Know, I'm going to cheat on this one, and I'm only going to give you one. I'm only going to give you one because I don't want to cloud with any other. I recommend build by Tony Fidel. And other than it being a good book, one of the main reasons I recommend it is that my wife wrote it. So she wrote it together with Tony and I got to see that experience. And she's a fantastic writer. And Tony has a lot to learn from. So I recommend that book. I think that the part of it that was particularly inspiring to me to hear even more of the details that are in the book is just how many times he met failure before he made discoveries that are now driving so many of the things that we do. It's just like a good reminder to keep at it and do the thing that really gives you that energy because eventually, you know, you can make that incredible discovery.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, I just think that maybe going back to where we first started, Lenny, like work on the things that make you happy, that fill you up, life is short. We're all very lucky to be in this moment. There's no reason to spend time on things that don't give you energy. There's so much to do out there. I think that's the main thing I would focus on.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Analytical thinking, recommendation systems, like what have you. There should be a couple of those things where you're like, I got this. These things are going to be a stretch, but these things I feel like I've got a handle on how to do this. I can always get better, but I feel like they're in my wheelhouse. And I think that tends to allow you to sort of like balance the pain with the areas that you already know and kind of manage through in a more balanced and healthy way.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I mean, so I think about a couple of things. I think in any situation, you should be able to lean on one or two things that you're really strong at that can kind of be the foundation that kind of keeps you going while you learn the other things. So just be wary of situations that are like too net new. There should be one or two kind of important things as part of that job going into where you're like, I got this. I know how to do this portion of it, right? So like as an example, if you've kind of never inherited a very large team and you kind of work through like how that works, but the product area that you're working on is one you're very familiar with. What's necessary to be good in that product, whether it's like really good sense of design or really good sense of”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Look, when you're thinking about career opportunities and what job to take, it's really, really hard to sniff out really well in a high degree of certainty like success. I think that having a good nose for people and the sort of people that you can be successful with is something that you can develop. What I found is I always try to prioritize putting myself in positions that are going to cause a lot of growth and learning. And growth and learning can be very painful. And you kind of like got to be okay with that and go into that because on the other side of that pain, I think is the promised land. And that's just served me really well is I can't necessarily predict with high degree of certainty that this thing's going to hit.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Oh, nice So, for what it's worth, my dad was born in Ukraine. He's from Kiev. My mom was from Lithuania. So, yeah, I also have some Ukrainian background here.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And especially in this moment, and it's awesome to see how that motivates them. And 15 years on the same project is not nothing. That's some serious resilience. And so I think even in moments like that, using them as a way to motivate and strive for something greater, I think says a lot about the founders and the team in Ukraine.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, the team in Ukraine at Grammarly is, I mean, it's something else. It's a really fantastic team. And when you speak to many of them, I think actually the work provides sometimes a very useful distraction. But they obviously feel a lot of pride in the business. They built a lot of this business. There aren't yet many businesses of this size that kind of come from Ukraine. And yeah, I think that that team is incredible and continues to deliver a ton of impact to the company, even in the circumstances that they're in. And I know for the founders, a lot of why they want Grammarly to succeed and be the generational company that it can be is for Ukraine.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And as you mentioned, we're going to have to pull off the motion of B to C to B, kind of get that product-led sales motion going. So all of those things are happening. And thankfully, the business is as strong as it is where we can invest ahead now in those things while still maintaining profitability in like a really strong business.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Like everyone to think about their projects and their prioritization and how is like what they're doing over the next two months going to actually turn into more revenue and keep the company growing and sustaining. So I think that culture is prevalent and help Grammarly get to where it is. Now, I just want to be really honest that in moments that were like that we're in like today, that can also be detrimental, right? Because the business gets to a certain size, you start getting to kind of like law of large numbers, you need to start thinking about, you know, are there other products? Are there other use cases? Are there other channels of growth? How do you kind of invest ahead of some of that growth and start to diversify? Because at the scale and size that we are and aspire to be, we're going to have to do many more things and service many more different types of customers.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “You're a team that kind of starts out of Ukraine and you're not thinking that there's any chance that you're going to raise money and why would you do that? I mean, it really, back to our previous conversation of what happens when growth scale is negative, really forces you to focus on the important things. And so like many of the early engineers who are still here because the company has done so well over the years, they think in how is this work going to translate into revenue, right? They think about sort of like the impact on the business from even kind of like very deep technical work that they're doing because I think they were kind of brought up in this culture where the business doesn't really invest ahead of its profitability, right? Because it was a bootstrap business from day one. So that enforces.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Experience that UX that sort of like brings AI to the masses is obviously served grammarly really well. And I think those are some of the strengths that we're going to continue to lean on to now provide a very different type of assistance and value that we can because of where the technology has moved.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And I think that a product that is that easy to use, that easy to extract value from, but then also that prevalent, like how many different text boxes do you write in in a given day? I mean, it is not less than 10. It is tens or potentially hundreds, right? And so it is everywhere. And it is very, very low effort to get real value from it. And then the way we work is what I said. You don't have to change anything about your workflow. Grammarly meets you where you are get value from it. Doing that really well at this level of quality for user base of this scale. Essentially, it's like a huge AI achievement masquerading as like a little UX innovation, right? But that”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Your question, I think, what has made it work? I've only been here for 10 months, so please kind of take this with a grain of salt. But my instinct is that people really love Grammarly because of how it works and where it works. And what I mean by how it works is Grammarly is one of the few products where you just install it and it makes you better. Like you don't have to configure it. You don't have to manipulate it. You don't have to change anything about what you're doing. You carry on and across all of your applications, across all of your tabs. You'll start getting pushed assistance to you in the right moment. You could ignore it if you want. No big deal, but it takes a very, very small amount of effort to”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “These giants in tech and grow a very phenomenal business kind of on this use case that people had kind of written off. Now, come the advent of LLMs and it's no longer a use case that people are writing off and sort of the dream of the founders that machines can assist us in communication in this way that they've had for 15 years. I feel like now the whole industry is like, well, this is obviously how we're going to communicate. And machines are going to do all these things for us. And Grammarly is now sort of in the center of that hurricane. And again, I think it's a similar thing where it's like, well, there's chat GPT, there's, you know, Microsoft co-pilot, like how is Grammarly going to have a chat? But yet, things still seem like there's the future is bright. And so”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “We don't talk about it often, but Grammarly is a much bigger company from a revenue perspective than I think people realize. The company has been around for 15 years and was profitable from day one and continues to be quite profitable. So it's a very, very healthy business that is much larger than folks might realize. And that is actually quite intentional because the company was trying not to be noticed for a long time, like very intentionally. The fact that, you know, you would have grammar and spell checking in Google Docs or grammar and spell checking in Word, people would often write off the company that like, how is that a business? How is that a feature? Like these products already have it. And that was very convenient for Grammarly because they could kind of navigate between”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, and also what time horizons, right? Like when you're starting a company, you're not thinking in the next six months, I'm going to get a promo and I'm going to get a good rating and things are going to go well. You're thinking on a different Time horizon, and you're thinking about an outsized impact or an outsized incentive. And so I would think about that if you're starting things internally as well.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Type of person very different incentive system. And essentially like where they end up plugging them into Nike is that when they have something into the kind of the distribution and marketing kind of growth like arms of Nike. But for the product discovery process, they're doing their whole different thing once they've find some fit, then kind of Nike comes in and goes, boom, I'm not going to help you explode your fit. But I think that the number one thing I would think about would be the incentive system and the adverse selection that that can cause.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Row them out the window for this group, right? How you build, the infrastructure you use, this is something that NPT team did really well. Everyone got kind of caught to do their own thing from an infrastructure perspective, just do what is best for the problem you're trying to solve in this moment, knowing that you're likely going to throw away a lot of this code anyway. Being able to do that in an organization like Facebook or Google, if you ask anyone that works on those things, is really hard. And it takes someone like a Shrepp to be like, nope, like they're going to get to do this. Sorry. And so I think that's really helpful. For what it's worth, one of the organizations that we talk to that I felt like was doing this in one of the best ways was Nike. And Nike has this, you know, incubation lab. And they just, it's a completely different operating model. They recruit completely different.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “God, there's so many. And Shrupp did a really fantastic job of removing a lot of these constraints. But so one is, I would say, think really hard about the incentive system. smart good people, even if they're not, even if they're not trying to, they end up kind of gaming things towards the incentive system. And so think long and hard about that. So for instance, if you're a large organization and you do some performance management process like twice a year and that's how you're going to evaluate and incentivize people in your zero to one incubator, you've already killed it. It's just like it's the wrong incentive. It's the wrong time frame. It creates adverse selection problems for the sort of people that you bring in. And so it's just, it's hard in an existing organization to say, we're going to take all these company processes around even how we like level people and pay them and motivate them. And we're going to.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “And you're right that the team didn't kind of discover the next Instagram. For what it's worth, things like threads and ideas like threads were in that team all of the time. I think that if that”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Leader, that was supporting NP at that time. And he's fantastic and really did a good job of firewalling that team. I think you're looking at a set of objectives and a number of ways that you might help the company and the organization. And even if you set that kind of like that light on the hill to be like, go find the next Instagram, many of the things that you would do along the way to find the next Instagram end up being very beneficial to the broader organization. We saw a lot of that at NPE.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Of these legal concerns and many other realistic concerns about what you can say to who and who you can talk to and what you can tell them about what you're doing and all of these things. So creating an environment where those sorts of constraints were lifted and were different was very beneficial, I think, to the organization and kind of started to shed a light on some of the things that were broken that make it hard to kind of build zero to one in those sorts of environments. I also think it was a really fantastic recruiting tool. It did build a really great group of folks, many of which have left to go start interesting companies. But I guess what I'm trying to say is I think when you're an organizational leader and Shrepp was the organ.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Facebook size. Maybe you experienced this at Airbnb. Like, it is really hard for product managers, engineers, and designers to talk directly with customers. It is like basically impossible. You're almost always like talking through some third party, some recruiting agency, and getting like reports and you're not always in the room. And imagine building a startup, like a product from day one and not being able to sit right next to your customer and being like, show me how you do this or show me how you do that. It's like it's incredible. It's incredibly hard. You're looking for such faint signal. The idea that you would try to get it through layers of indirection and games of telephone is crazy. But at that scale, that's what you have to do because there's all.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Any product that you build that way, starting with a million users, is really a really hard way to do that. And at places like Facebook and Google, it's like, it's hard to run an experiment with 100 people. It's not hard. It's impossible, right? And so this idea that you would have to get real small, that you would have to start very targeted, that you would have to start with things that clearly don't scale and aren't don't have a chance of being kind of big from the get-go is really, really hard in an organization like that. And so creating that space for NPE to be able to do that, to be able to help remind the organization, what are the mechanisms we need to be able to build and learn that way was very beneficial. Even simple things, you know, like at an organization.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “More likely, you know, kind of beer nice dinner kind of level out. Yeah, the wine. Yeah, thank you. That's a better analogy. And I think we built knowing those sorts of outcomes would also be very beneficial to the organization. So as an example, one of them is at Facebook scale, doing things that don't scale or doing things that start out small was just a muscle that was really hard to come by, right? It's like any community product that you build, any kind of like social where like there's community density that's important like early on.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Was one of a few folks that kind of joined that team early and helped build that team, how it ended up and how it closed down. I'm not familiar with because I wasn't there. But I think in terms of was it a success or not because it didn't build the next Instagram, I think is a little bit of the wrong bar to set for things like that. To some extent, it's like, did the group win the lottery or not? And let's judge there. Let's judge their success. Obviously, I'm not saying that discovering something like Instagram is just like winning the lottery, but you get what I mean in terms of the rarity of those sorts of discoveries and those sorts of products. I think that that team was very realistic about sort of what I would say would be like the champagne level outcomes in order.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “That, yes, certainly that. But I think it's also incumbent for people in our roles and, you know, in engineering roles to bring strategy to that discussion, to that group in a way”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Out of those situations, that's why everyone getting involved in doing their part and pulling on the levers that they have in their area in order to do that well, I don't think it can work in any other way.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Only one that should be thinking about product strategy, certainly at that level. Certainly not in engineering. The CFO, the head of people, everyone needs to have a seat at the table when it comes to product strategy, what the company's doing, and what they're going to do to kind of grow out of the situation that they're in. Because otherwise, in those hard times, if it can kind of be like, what have you done for me lately? And that's just not the right dynamic to have on that team. And I'm not saying that at Thumbtech, we had the right dynamic, but I think it was a really important learning in that moment of how that team, you know, even if they didn't typically kind of get as involved in things like product strategy and what we're building, how everyone had to be like all hands on deck and really thinking about those sorts of problems, that's the only way I think you can get a whole company and team.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “I would say this. I think especially at the leadership level, in the team that reports the CEO, that group doesn't always have the opportunity to do a lot of project work together, right? You've got your CFO, you've got your head of sales, you've got your product and your engineering, and they're just not as often as sort of like natural ways for that work, that group to work together. And then when something happens like growth goes negative, that group is very important. And that group's ability to tackle hard things together is very important. And I think that one important lesson from that is no one can be a bystander on product strategy. If you've got just because you've got product in your title doesn't mean you're the”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Totally. I mean, I think maybe it's again, it's kind of like living through that. Now, anytime I look at a product or look at a team, it's like one of the first things that perks up the paranoia of just like, oh, no, you don't want to be in that situation. Let's figure out now how you start to diversify because you just never know, like you say, when one of those might dry up”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Another learning there is any product you work on that involves bits and atoms is exponentially harder than products that just involve bits. But it's amazing how something as seemingly simple as make an instant ends up being so incredibly deep and complicated and especially on an existing business like kind of making that transition while still growing is just very, very complicated. Like fantastic learning. I'm sure you had as well.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “I don't know the details of the business anymore. And if I did, I wouldn't speak to it. But from what I hear, things are going well. So I think that that served the company well.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Folks are paying to be seen, and maybe they're looked at, but there's not So, the main thing we did is to rebuild that whole loop, change the monetization model, build a system where essentially pros could provide instant quotes. Like Lenny, I'm sure from Airbnb, this is very familiar, the move from request to book to instant booking. It was a very similar thing in a different kind of category of service and supply, obviously. But that shift and doing that shift across those thousands of marketplaces and then finding the right friction point for monetization and when and what to charge people for and all of that change, that is what really at its core turned the growth engine around at Thumbtack and it's just a real testament to those founders that they kind of believe that like saw that and were willing to kind of like you know run a pill and chew glass to get to that point”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “For that job. Now, I don't want to take anything away from that team because that worked phenomenally well for a really long time. And actually, it's a perfect case study in just do the scrappy thing that works to grow. And they did that very well. But the stage and size of the business when I joined it had kind of like outgrown that. And the team knew that. That's obviously a very high friction experience, right? Like the idea that the customer, they're super excited, they want to hire someone and at that moment you'd be like, cool, talk to you soon. Not the best experience. And the fact that you're asking your supply to put up money to even show up to customers in the first place or what the customers want to see is the supply. Like tell me who I can hire. Also, like a lot of friction on that side and also in some cases some unfair revenue on that side because if”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Things like SEM, and then eventually Facebook as well. But I think that the core issue, those were kind of the growth levers. But the core issue with Thumbtack product was that it was just a very high friction customer experience that really left customers waiting. So the way that Thumtak worked basically was a customer would find them through a search query. They would come in and they would answer a number of questions about the job they needed done. And then Thumbtack would say, okay, great, we'll get back to you in 24 hours. And this is, you know, like a modern day experience, right? And then what Thumbtack would do is they would take that job and they would federate it out to as many of the pros that might kind of like match the criteria. And then the pros would pay to quote to show up as a potential provider.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “And I think that one of the things that we were doing incorrectly at Thumbtack is Thumbtack is actually a marketplace that is actually made up of thousands of marketplaces, right? Like DJs in Philadelphia is one marketplace. DJs in Atlanta is another marketplace. Contractors in Sonoma is another marketplace. And then Thumbtack is obviously the container of all of those marketplaces. And I think we were just bifurcating our targeting and our growth efforts a little too narrowly assuming we had to sort of grow in that way market by market rather than targeting more broadly providing sort of the more aggregate data to Google and others and then optimizing from there. The fact that we already had really good showing in SEO and really good page rank in SEO help to bolster.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Sure, first of all, this is very much the team. It's not just things that I did. So, I mean, first was turning on multiple channels of growth. Up until then, Thumbtack had kind of tried and stopped paid channels, you know, other organic channels, referrals, all of the typical things. And so we just went back to first principles on a lot of that and also just kind of reformed a team around that and basically got an amazing team together, one of them, Whitney Steele, is running marketing at Descript now, another one, David Shine, is running product at HIMS. But basically went back to first principles on some of those growth channels and experiment our way to much, much better results.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Went negative. How would I prioritize things if it went negative? Like having gone through that experience, I just look at things in a different way of urgency. I look at things at different levels of priority given having gone through that experience.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “The moment growth starts to slow, or certainly when growth starts to be negative, all of a sudden the tenor in the organization really changes and you start looking at things very differently and trying to understand what's actually going on. And so I think it's actually a very healthy thing for businesses to go through, you know, as they kind of turn into long-term sustainable businesses to have those sorts of moments. Because I think otherwise it just really challenging to identify where the true issues are. And I think as a PM, you know, if you've only ever worked on things that grow and you've never felt the other side of that and how to kind of help turn that around with your team, I think you lose a lot in your career if you don't experience that. I'm naturally paranoid. And especially as I manage growth, I often look at things and ask myself like, okay, what do I do right now?”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Brian Treart Sequoia said those are the prettiest smile graft that he had ever seen. And it was a really, you know, obviously a really proud moment there. But I think that the thing that I took away from that, which I tell PMs quite a bit, is growth masks all problems. You don't really have an, I think, true understanding of what is working well and what is not working well when you have incredible growth. YouTube was a great example of that. And at Thumbtech, it had incredible growth for quite some time, but it was essentially burning through a lot of demand. It was just dropping a lot of demand on the floor because there wasn't sufficient liquidity on the supply side to really meet that demand. And the team knew and was trying to work on that problem. But, you know, it wasn't as urgent or high priority because you're having triple digit growth. What's wrong? Like everything's going great, right? And then.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Then we had some SEO hits that got us down to double digit growth. And then not too long after that, we were actually for the first time in the company's history seeing negative year over year growth. And Google is just like really coming down on our category as we were, by the way, trying to rebuild the whole product and change the monetization model and everything in between. So it was a really tough, tough moment of, you know, how much do we kind of spend to reinforce the old model while we're sort of building the new model, kind of changing the engine while the plane is flying. And I think I remember in a board meeting, once we kind of like turn that around and over time and also the new model really started to show legs and really started to work, one of the board members.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Yeah, sure. Again, really fantastic team and really strong founders, that company was just on the bleeding edge of things like SEO and growing by SEO. And it was like one of the best organizations at driving growth through that channel. But I think the thing that I learned really early, which Lennia, you know, with your background, you probably know as well, SEO is sort of like a live-by-the-sword, die by the sword channel of growth. And I think that one channel growth company is always a no-no. And so that's a little bit of kind of what we had at Thumbtech. So it was funny because I remember when I joined and Marco and I had an agreement where it's like, okay, I'm going to take three months of like onboarding listening tour, new leader, inheriting a team. I've always gotten advice like that's what you should do.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “To be able to hone it in and know that you're doing something well, they require an ungodly level of faith and stamina. And so that's sort of like what I look to. When you see like a team that is motivated, that is building something, like they're really excited about. I mean, just like the inertia, the quality, like just everything, it's just, it's like a whole different game where when you see a team that's sort of like down and out and they've, you know, they've really been hitting their head against the wall for a long time. Sometimes they just need like a change of scene, a change of pace, and they get to like a much better situation. So my honest answer is, yeah, it's the when do you run out of steam is usually the question. And I think that happens usually before you, you know, like in the startup case, a lot of times before you run out of money or, you know, these other.”

    2024-03-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source