YouSaid · the spoken record

Ravi Mehta

lines on the record: 86
first: 2023-01-19
most recent: 2023-01-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“My startup is Outpays. You can find it at outpace.co. We publish a lot of free resources. We just published a resource that you helped us with, Lenny. Called Unlock your product manager potential. We also have a QA service where you can ask questions of coaches. Our goal without pace is to get more and more people to experience coaching, whether that's in an active coaching relationship or just really quick conversation with a coach. So come downpace.co. That'll be really helpful for us and hopefully really helpful for you as well. And then if you want to follow me, I'm on LinkedIn. You can also read my writing at Ravi-Meta.com.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the questions really helpful is tell me about the client that you're most proud of helping. What was the challenge if they were facing? How did you help them meet that challenge? The person doesn't need to go into anything confidential, of course, but I think what's really nice about that question is it gets you really deep insight into what they value. You get to see where their pride comes from. It gives you insight into how they engage with the people that they're helping. And then you can understand with what you're looking for in terms of a coach.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been amazing. It's such a powerful tool. We just rebuilt our accounting system in Airtable. Webflow we're using constantly. It's really changed how we think about building products. We now ask, you know, do we need to build code or can we do something in Webflow? We're using Superhuman. I spend most of my day in Superhuman. It's an incredibly fast email client. So I love having it on my team. A lot of the team today is using desktop or descript to edit videos. They found that to be something that works so much better than prior audio and video editing solutions. And then I've always loved balsamic. I've been a balsamic user for probably 10 years now. And whenever I get stuck on a user experience issue, I go in, I create some wirefriends and always helps.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Favorite interview question is tell me about a product that you love. And I can have that question last five minutes. I can have that question last 60 minutes. And so that's the first question that I'll typically ask people during a screening interview. I use the word love very deliberately. I want to see what products in their lives they really gravitate to and they engage with and that they can use that word with that helps me understand a lot about what they value. And then I'll ask a whole series of questions, which is why do you love it? Why do you think other people love it? What would you like to see about it in the future? Pick a feature that you'd like to build for that product. Why do you think that's a good feature? How would you measure the success of that feature? So I've used this for years. Is it just such a good way to help understand the product sense that a person has, help get to know a person a little bit better? It's always interesting what people pick products that are more physical products to see what they're into in terms of hobbies and things of that sort.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love Andor. I just finished watching it about a week ago. I think it's not just a great Star Wars piece of content. It's just a really great piece of science fiction. I think a lot of science fiction has gotten very samey and very dystopian recently. This was such an interesting reflection of what's happening today, really deep thinking about what the future could look like, really good expansion of the universe. So it was just great on a lot of levels.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You and I were talking a few months ago. And that's sort of the boat that I'm in. I've been listening to your podcast. I've been listening to Ezra Klein. And then there's a couple of others that are in the mist, but the ones that I keep going back to when I'm walking the dog are those two podcasts.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, one of my favorites is the Ezra Klein show. I love the fact that he talks about a bunch of different topics. He's often got contrarian points of view. He just had an episode recently about a skeptical take on AI that I disagreed with a lot, but it was really interesting to think about it from a different perspective.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really like Hooked. That's a book that I know came out a few years ago, but I find that that model is just such an effective model for thinking about how to create products that are engaging. I also really like working backwards. I think Amazon has such a unique way of going about building products. And they've been so opinionated about what matters within that process. It's great to get a really detailed window into that. I was always curious about how it worked and working backwards was a great way to understand that a lot better.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been really exciting. I haven't been this excited about tech in a long time. And I think it was, we knew we would need to pivot in order to embrace this more, but it completely makes sense. And it fits really nicely into something that we're already doing.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To see how things play out. I think one of the most interesting things about it is not AI as a replacement for people, but AI as a way to amplify people and make them more effective. And I think we'll see a lot of that in terms of both image generation and text generation, where it's less about AI doing all the work and more about AI providing a really good starting point.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, one of the things that we have is we've got text content from all of the participants in Outpace where they're providing very specific answers to very specific questions. We're using that content to prompt, in this case, OpenAI to give suggestions to the coach. And so the coach can go in and say, help me with a suggestion of what I should say as feedback to this particular response. And then the coach can go in and tailor that based on what they know about that person. And one of the most amazing things is we've been able to simulate different styles of leadership by using different types of prompts. So we can have suggestions that are really action-oriented, that provide lists of next steps. We can have suggestions that are more sympathetic, that focus on the person's feelings. We've got suggestions that are more inquisitive, which ask follow-up questions. We've got suggestions which are informative, which provide frameworks and advice. So it's really pretty remarkable how far the technology has come. I know we're at an interesting time right now. It's going to be interesting.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when we started Outpace, we knew that AI was going to continue to advance and that eventually we would want to think about AI as a way to amplify coaches and to help make them more efficient and more effective. We thought that that was going to be a multi-year journey and that we would get to it at some point in the future. But this year has been incredibly exciting with the advances that we've seen from OpenII and stable diffusion and mid journey and all these different models. And so we've actually accelerated a lot of our roadmap around that. We have an interesting opportunity to use AI in the product where one of the things that makes Outpace different from other coaching platforms is we provide both content as well as the coach. And so each week a person will go through a 20 or 30 minute session. That section includes a brief audio lesson and then includes interactive exercises that go into how would you use the things that you just learned in that lesson.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another framework that we talk about in product leadership which goes into this topic, which is as someone who's working with a manager, there's kind of two things that you're constantly solving for. One is the degree to which you're aligned with your manager. And the second is the degree to which your manager has confidence in you. And so if there's a high degree of alignment and a high degree of confidence, you have full support. But there might be cases where there's actually not a high degree of alignment. You want to go in a different direction than your manager wants to go in. But if you have their confidence, you'll get their permission, you'll get their support to go in that direction. And so keeping an idea of like where you are on that radar is really helpful for understanding the currency that you have to be able to push things in the direction that you think is the right one. And if you don't have your leader's confidence and you're not aligned with them, that's not a recipe for success, like one of those things needs to change. Either you need to do things that they are aligned with or”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it often comes down to being overly detailed at the moment that you see a problem. So helping the team get back on track by any means necessary, including potentially getting really detailed about the decisions that the team is making. But as you do that, think about the frameworks that you're using to help the team make decisions and help the team understand that framework. And so over time, the goal is to replace you actively kind of going in and guiding the team's decisions with them having a framework that they really understand so that they can make the decisions that are aligned with where you think the right direction is to go. And the ultimate success is that you give enough of a framework and the team has enough autonomy that they get to answers that are even better than you could come up with. And so that gives the team incredible feeling of power and that gives you a leader as a leader and incredible feeling of”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And ultimately, both the leader and the team are frustrated. So I think the two really effective functional ways of leading are scalable leadership, where the team has autonomy. You have confidence or selective micromanagement, where for a brief period of time, you might take away some of the team's autonomy to set them on the right track, but with the goal of getting back into that scalable leadership mode.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another really effective way of leading, which is selective micromanagement, which if you don't feel confident in the direction that your team is moving, the right answer is not to be hands-off and to let them go in that wrong direction. The right answer is to micromanage, but do it in a very tactical and a very temporary way so that you can help them understand what is the right direction moving forward so that you can then pull back. And the two failure modes are if you're hands off and you let that team go off, the rails, that hands-off mode of leadership might feel really good in the short term. It might help you avoid micromanaging in the short term, but ultimately it's going to mean that that team doesn't get to where they need to go. And then what we commonly think of is micromanagement. I think more of as micro mismanagement, which is you don't feel like you've got a sense of control or a sense of confidence about what the team's doing. The team doesn't feel like they have a sense of autonomy. There's not a clear end.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dynamic range. So a CPO, it's not that a CPO never thinks about tactical issues. Which means you feel really confident about the direction of your team and your team has the autonomy to move in that direction.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They trust them. They give them a lot of autonomy. But as part of that, they don't give them the context that they need so that person may be able to be successful but may actually lack the guard whales and the frameworks to channel their efforts. And so I think the right solution here is to say actually micromanagement is not a bad thing. Some of the most innovative leaders in tech are famous micromanagers. Steve Jobs was a micromanager, Elon Musk is a micromanager, Mark Zuckerberg's a micromanager. Ultimately as product builders and product innovators, the details matter and sometimes you need to zoom into what is the text on a particular button say and you might have a strong opinion on that. And so it's okay to engage at that level. I often encourage product leaders to think about their process of becoming more senior not as a matter of getting more and more high level, but of increasing their”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the challenges I hear PMs that are moving into leadership roles is they often worry about micromanaging their teams. And so I kind of see two failure modes for people that are taking on their first leadership role. The first one is that they do actually micromanage. And so they don't let the person on their team have the autonomy that they need to figure out a path forward. And there's two problems in that. One that really makes that person feel like you don't trust them. The second thing is that rate limits the size of the team that you can manage because you can only do that for a finite set of people before you yourself are tapped out on bandwidth. And it's usually a couple of folks. So that's one failure mode where people sort of treat their first direct reports as an extension of themselves. The second failure mode that I commonly see is just a completely hands-off mode of leadership where a person assumes that the new person on their team”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so key because then you've rewarded the person for giving you feedback, even if it hurts inside, and then they'll want to do it in the future.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things you can do if you are in a product role is ask them to do this exercise and evaluate you. Your manager will almost certainly have some impression of your performance that they haven't necessarily, if they're not doing it proactively, they probably have it intuitively and helping them get it down on paper and getting it more specific can be a really good way to start that conversation. So that's one thing that you can do. A second thing is I think oftentimes people refrain from giving feedback when they feel like that feedback is going to be intrusive. So just inviting your manager to say, look, I'm really looking to level up. Please give me feedback whenever you see something. You can give it to me in real time. Don't worry about wordsmithing it. I just want to make sure that I'm getting better. That agreement with your manager and giving them permission to give you that feedback will make sure that the stream of feedback has a much higher volume. And starting with the quantity of”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a lens helps you move out of that abstract kind of surface level feedback into very specific categorizations of things that a person might need to work on, which I think gets to the root cause of areas a person can grow in and that ultimately leads to more effective feedback that has those compounding returns.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can ask your manager to do that same thing. You can do that in five or ten minutes. And then the areas where your manager and you see eye to eye and the areas where you guys see differently is stimulus for a really deep conversation. And so I think that is like the entry point to providing exponential feedback. And I think about exponential feedback as feedback that has compounding returns. So if you give someone feedback on a particular symptom or you give them feedback on something that's tactical and they fix that in a moment, the feedback, the conclusion of that feedback, it just happens and then it's gone. But if instead you help a person understand the underlying behaviors that led to that particular situation, then they can focus on growing themselves. They can also focus on helping to diagnose their own performance more effectively. And that leads to compounding returns where they just keep getting better and better over time. And so the ability to kind of apply the competencies.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, definitely. So, this is something we can talk about in the product leadership program. What are the most challenging things, I think, for both a PM as well as a product leader is to figure out how to grow yourself and grow your team. And a key way to do that is through feedback. It's really important to provide people with good feedback to help them understand how to grow. But the problem is, and this is true in a casual one-on-one as much as it's true in an annual performance review, it's oftentimes the feedback that people provide is very surface level. It may focus on particular symptoms, but not root causes. And so one of the ways that this framework can help is I'll often encourage people when they're first starting to use the framework just to go through each competency and rate themselves needs focus on track or outperforming on each of the competencies to quickly get a read on where you feel like you're landing.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, definitely. And then on my website, I've got a downloadable kit that's got tools to evaluate yourself. It goes into each of the competencies in more detail. It talks about some of the different archetypes. So you'll find certain styles of PMs have certain clusters of competencies. If you're a growth PM, you might have a certain focus that might include a lot of focus on data and outcome ownership if you're more of a product discovery or product innovation PM, you may have a different set of skills. So being able to sort of map yourself out will help you understand where you want to grow and what types of roles are a really good fit for you.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ultimately, what's really important is does that sequence of business outcomes move the strategy forward and help you deliver impact on that strategy? And then the fourth and final piece is all about leadership. So it's influencing people. The first subcompetency is stakeholder inclusion. So that's being able to work with all of the different people throughout your.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Third piece is product strategy, and that breaks down into three things. The first one is being able to own business outcomes. So it's really important to move away from thinking about product as shipping features to driving business outcomes. And so this competency is about understanding how does your product or the features that you're working on plug into the business and drive value for the business. The next competency is product vision and roadmapping. So that's the ability to take the individual pieces of work that you're doing for a product and put those together into a coherent vision and roadmap that allows you to build towards the product strategy and the company strategy over time. The third one is strategic impact. You're just like product roadmapping is a sequence of features. I think about strategic impact as a sequence of business outcomes. So initially PMs need to be really focused on owning business outcomes and delivering business outcomes.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Building APIs, then your experience is actually the API spec. If you're building an ML models, then your experience might be the training models or the other systems that you're using to identify the effectiveness of those training models. So this can be a skill that you can think about really broadly across a lot of different product roles.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Second area is customer insight. So, in addition to being able to build products, you need to understand customers so you can figure out what to build. The three subcomponents here are fluency with data, which is the ability to use all of the data at your fingertips to make decisions about what customers need. The second one is voice of the customer, which is the ability to have the conversations with the customer so that the product manager can be the advocate for the customer throughout the entire company, as well as the advocate within the product. The third is user experience design. And so this goes back to our earlier conversation about wireframes. I think a fundamental part of being a really good product manager is the ability to think about the user experience in a very detailed way to make sure that you're not just defining functionality, but you're really clearly understanding how that functionality turns into user experience. And this is very explicitly user experience design and not user interface design, because the experience of your product may vary.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Day to day individual contribution. But a CPI was going to think about product execution in terms of the systems that they create to enable teams to define really good specifications, to deliver products really effectively, to execute flawlessly, and to deliver products that have a very high bar of quality.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is product execution. So PMs need to be able to work with their teams to build product. And that breaks down into three subcompetencies. The first is functional specification. So that's the ability to work with your team to define what is the PRD or the functional specification that defines what you want to build. The second thing is product delivery, which is the ability to work with engineering and design and the other teams to take that specification and turn it into working product. And the third piece, which I've changed from quality assurance, is now product quality, is making sure that what you build is high quality, not just from a technical perspective, but also from a design perspective, a usability perspective, and a business perspective. And so ultimately, that's the foundation of being a successful product manager is being able to execute. And that's as true for an APM as it is for a VP or a CPO. An APM is going to think about product execution in terms of their”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Zero to one teams or growth teams or infrastructure teams. So the goal was in about two years to get a person to be able to experience various different parts of product management and have them come out with the skills to be a senior and effective product manager. And so as part of that, we really needed to define very clearly what is product management and how do we help people identify the skills that they need to be an effective product manager and give them a plan so that they can grow those skills. And so that's how this framework initially came to be. The framework consists of 12 competencies in four different areas. These competencies, I think, are the same for APMs as they are for CPOs. And I can talk a little bit about how they change as a person gets more senior. Regardless of where you are within your product management journey, the specifics might change, but the overlying structure remains the same. The first thing that's really important.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, definitely. So we developed this at TripAdvisor. When I joined TripAdvisor, the company was newly public. And as part of being a newly public company and wanted to grow different teams really quickly, including the product team. And what we were finding is that hiring a product out of industry and at the time we were based in Boston. So hiring a really good experienced PM in Boston was taking between three and six months. And that just was too long to reach the sort of growth goals that we wanted to hit from a team perspective and a headcount perspective. And so the header product there came up with this program called the Product Rotational Program where we would hire people directly out of business school and out of undergrad into their first product role regardless of whether or not they had prior product experience. And they would go through two years of rotation, so four six month rotations where they would be able to focus on teams that are, you know,”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you can think about it as a two by two matrix. On one axis of the matrix, you have did we hit our goals? And on the other axis, we have, do we know why? And it's ultimately you want to be in the upper right quadrant. You want to hit your goals and know why you hit your goals. Some teams are in the quadrant where they hit their goals, but they don't know why, which is good for now, but it's eventually going to catch up with you. And then an important thing to be in is if you didn't hit your goals to make sure that you're at least understanding why or at least you're making progress on understanding why. And I think too often teams get so focused on the goals they get less focused on the learning.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. Yeah. I've got a post on the reforge blog. Can't remember the title. I think it's better goal with NCTs instead of OKRs.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or the leadership, and say, we missed our goal, but I think I know why. Here's the things that we did within the quarter, and here's where things started to go off the rails. Here's what I'd suggest that we commit to for the next quarter so that we can be much more sure that we're going to hit our goal. And leadership is always going to be outcome driven, but they also want to have a lot of confidence that we're going to be able to hit those outcomes. And so if you can”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It might be that for the quarter, the way that the company works, the things that it's focused on, you need to actually commit to a goal to move retention or a goal to move your follower account or something like that. There's two ways to do that. One is you can commit to that goal and then in three months kind of hope for the best and just do a lot of work that you think might actually move the lever. The other thing is to say, you know, actually that journey towards hitting that particular goal, we can break into, initially let's spend a couple of weeks understanding. We'll talk to customers. We'll do some analysis. We'll form some really good hypotheses. And then based on those hypotheses, we'll start to figure out like, what do we need to execute on in order to start to validate those hypotheses? And then we can execute on those things and validate those hypotheses. And depending on where in the quarter things start to go off the rails, you'll have a feeling for where that frontier is. And when you miss the goal, you can then go back to the team.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and so the four buckets are it starts with understanding risk, which is we have something that we want to do, but we don't really understand what the levers are. Next thing is dependency risk, which is we understand what we think the levers are, but we may or may not have the tools that we need in order to make progress. Then there's execution risk, which is we have all the resources that we need. We have a really strong hypothesis, and then we may or may not be able to execute against those hypotheses. And the last thing is strategic risk, which is we have a hypothesis and it might turn out that that was not the right hypothesis.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the first type of risk is really understanding risk. And if you don't understand how to move a particular metric, then the right goal is to set a goal to increase your understanding, not to move that metric. Once you have an understanding of how to move the metric, your team may or may not be able to execute very well. It might not be able to execute those sorts of experiments. It may not have the resources that it needs to execute. And so then you might want to set an execution goal. So we want to hit 20 experiments this quarter. And if you can hit those 20 experiments, you'll know that you're executing really, really well. And even if those experiments don't work, that moves that frontier a little bit forward. And then finally, the ultimate frontier is strategic risk. Like we understand how to move retention or we think we understand how to move retention. We're going to do a set of things to do that. And then, you know, either we'll learn that our understanding is correct, in which case we can pull that lever more, or we'll learn that it's not correct, in which case we need to go back.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How to move. And so I think ultimately the goal is to drive outcomes, but oftentimes there's things that come before that that need to be addressed ahead of time so that you can really understand what the plan for meeting those outcomes is going to look like. And so I refer to that as like the frontier of understanding. There's a point at which what the team knows and what the team doesn't know, there's a junction point there, which is this frontier. And it could be actually, we don't know what moves retention. If you ask me to remove retention, I can brainstorm 10 experiments, but I don't actually know why people are continuing to use our product. And so then it doesn't make sense to commit to a retention goal because you're going to sort of throw spaghetti against the wall, have a bunch of experiments, dumb will stick, and maybe you'll be able to move the metric, but you won't have understood exactly why, or you might move the metric in a way that is not tied to the strategy that you have as a business.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that sounds good. So I've done a little bit of writing about goals, which came out of, I've been at multiple companies that have put OKRs into practice and had a really hard time with that. And I've talked to a lot of product teams who have had a hard time. So the question I started asking is like, why are companies having a hard time with OKRs? What's happening that is preventing teams from being able to set goals that they really understand how to achieve and achieving those goals? And one of the things that I found, which I think was sort of a first principle that's happening at a lot of companies is this idea of always focusing on outcomes over outputs. And comes from a good place, which is ultimately, and I think this is the case, like ultimately a PM needs to measure their success based on whether or not they generate valuable outcomes for the business. But that doesn't necessarily mean that in this quarter, we need to commit to a specific outcome or that we should commit to a specific outcome that we may or may not know how.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think as part of the strategy, you'll typically have some quantifiable elements of that strategy. So for example, for TripAdvisor, our strategy was with trip planning, we wanted people to come directly to TripAdvisor and spend more time.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A destination. And so I think about all of the pieces of the strategy stack as being really clear about what is the end destination that you're solving for. And then you should work on goals to the extent that they help you reach that destination. And if you find that achieving your goal is actually pulling away from the destination, then there's a really important conversation to be had about do we leave that gain on the table because it's not aligned with our destination? Or do we need to change our destination? And I think what happens too often when people start with goals and then create the roadmap is that the goal takes precedence and there's no context. There's no principles that are ultimately driving that. And so those decisions about the direction of the product come and go without even really being noticed because there was nothing to calibrate against.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's definitely a contrarian point of view. I've had a few people yell at me about this. Typically, what happens is goals are almost the start of a strategic process rather than the end of it. A company will say we need to increase our revenue by X, we need to increase our retention by Y. What's our strategy to be able to do that? And what I found over the years is that that goals first approach puts the entire energy of the product team on moving the goals without any sort of structure of what success looks like and why. The analogy I like to use, it's a little bit like taking a road trip and starting out by saying, hey, we need to drive 250 miles. It's like, no, if you're going to take a road trip, you first decide where you want to drive to. If you're in LA, you might take a road trip to Vegas. And so our destination is Vegas and we'll know whether or not we reach there if we've driven 250 miles because that 250 mile goal is in the context of”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's really cool. There's so much opportunity. I think there's a lot of really good dating ideas that haven't been explored yet.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, one of the things that was unexpected when I started at Tinder was a couple times a week, I would meet someone or I'd be in an Uber and the Uber driver would tell me people would share like, oh, I met my boyfriend or a girlfriend or I met my wife or husband on the platform. It was really great to hear the stories. One of the things I didn't realize is the degree to which because of Tinder's very lightweight designs, it's been able to support the LGBTQ community much better than other dating products. And so some of my most fulfilling conversations with people who felt like they wouldn't have met their significant other without Tinder because there were just no place to do that.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was great. And the PMP was working on it for about a week. She was running into my office a couple times. Every time she had a call with one of these folks to share what she learned. And so those are like the high level takeaways. But it was really interesting to get to know this demographic better. And then just talk to users. I think oftentimes people don't spend enough time just picking up the phone and having a conversation one-on-one with the user of a product and getting into understanding their psychology, what value they're getting, and how to really optimize for that.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there were two things that came out of those conversations. One is Tinder Platinum. So that's a third tier of the product that is a little bit more expensive and then comes with some additional features, as well as a bundle of these consumables that you can use within the product, additional super likes and boots. And the other feature that came out of that is it's almost like a super swipe. It's the ability to, instead of just send a super like, you can send a super like with a note. And so it costs a lot more than a super like does, but it essentially allows you to break another rule of Tinder, which is you can't chat with anyone before you match. This allows you to send that first chat message to a person before you've matched, basically to show that you're really interested in matching with that person, further increases the likelihood that you'll match with them. And we were able to price it at a point which was much higher than we thought the pricing was going to be because we knew that people were thinking very differently about what the utility of that would be.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Essentially, people saying, I really want to meet someone. They have a use case. So sometimes these were folks that were in the military, so they were moving around a lot, or they were sales folks, they were often in different cities, or they were someone that was new to a particular city. And it wasn't that they were higher net worth. They weren't earning any more than the average Tinder user. They just had a much more intense use case. They wanted to meet someone. And what they were framing the cost of Tinder on was not the cost of other subscriptions. They were framing it on the cost of dating. And they were saying, you know, if I go on a few dates a month, that's probably a couple hundred dollars anyway. It could be even more than that, depending on whether you're in New York City or other places. And so they thought about that spend of a couple hundred dollars a month on Tinder as a small investment to make sure that they could date the people that they wanted. And so it was a really interesting example of we identified something quantitatively that was really interesting that we knew was potentially a lever to grow the business.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The two primary ones are super likes, so super like allows you to send a superlike to an individual person. If you send that super like, they're three times more likely to match with you. So it's a really good way in a very targeted way, say that you want to meet and match with someone. The other product is Boost. And so Boost works the same way that Facebook Boost works or any other Boost product works where your profile is going to show up a certain amount of times within the feed. If you pay to boost it, it will show up more often. And so what we noticed was that there was a set of people that were spending hundreds of dollars a month on boost and super likes. Let's just identify some of these users, put together a usability study, and start talk to some of them and understand why they're using Tinder in that way and why they're willing to spend so much money. And so what we found was actually, very different than what we had assumed.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source