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

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

“So, Tinders modernization model has two pieces to it. It's got a subscription. There's a couple of different tiers to the subscription. There's a base subscription called Tinder Plus. And then there's the default subscription or the main subscription called TinderGold. And Tinder Gold, the advantage of Tinder Gold is it essentially allows you to break the rules of Tinder. So Tinder normally you can't see who swiped on you and you're only going to match with someone if you swiped right on them and they swiped right on you. Tinder gold allows you to see all of the people who have swiped right on you so you can go through those people and determine do you want to match with them. So really important sort of fundamental capability that people are willing to pay for. On top of that, there's a set of a la carte products where you can buy, you can essentially buy them in bulk. You can use one of them. You can buy multiple of them.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Tinder was always interesting in terms of product discovery. We did a lot of focus groups when I was there. We had people talk about their preferences around dating both one-on-one and ending groups. And those always led to really interesting conversations. One of the things that to me was the most surprising is when I was there, we noticed that there was a small set of Tinder that we're spending a lot on Tinder. And so you'll often see this behavior in social games where you have users that are essentially whales who your average RPU might be $30 and a whale is spending $200 or $300. And so we noticed that a really significant percentage of a la carte revenue, which is microtransactions, was coming from a very small single digit percentage of users. When we looked at how much people were spending, our hypothesis was these must be high net worth people that are looking to flaunt their wealth and they don't really care about the money.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Narrower set of people. And so by keeping the product experience really lightweight, really serendipitous, they were able to create a way of meeting each other that's really different than the other dating products, which are more of those search engines for people.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a counter example, which I think is really interesting, which is almost every dating app has filters and a whole set of filters. So you can filter based on occupation, income, religion, height, smoking preference. And Tinder for it's now got some ability to filter, but for the large part has resisted the urge to put those filters into place. And the reason was from a product philosophy standpoint, they wanted people to get to know each other in chat rather than to feel like Tinder's a search engine for people where you plug in a bunch of criteria, you can go into that specific filtered list and then meet only the people that you want to meet. And that really reflects in the product as well. A lot of people like using that product because they meet people that they say they never would have met otherwise. Because if they were given the ability to put their criteria in, of course they're going to put their criteria in and they're going to look at a fill.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For where strategy is informing particular decisions and when a decision should look like competitors and when a decision should be different than what one of your competitors or comparables is doing.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Allow people to get to know each other. That sparks interesting conversations that leads to deeper conversations that ultimately leads to long-term relationships. And so because of that difference in product strategy, there are some differences in product roadmap, but there's also some similarity in product roadmap. Both Tinder and Hinge made a significant investment in video chat post-pandemic, knowing that people were going to spend a lot more time online before they met in person. And so as a result, they needed to enable people to talk with each other via video within the product. And then the last piece is on goals. So ultimately, both companies have very similar goals in terms of they measure success based on meaningful conversations. So they want people to match. They want people to chat with each other. But the specific product mechanics that enable people to get into those conversations are different. So the high-level product goals are really similar. Some of the more detailed product goals are really different. And so using the strategy stack, you can get a really good feel.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around how the apps There's a really big difference in terms of customer acquisition model. Hinge relies a lot on television ads. That helps them reach the audience that is likely to use their product. Tinder relies much more on influencer marketing and event-based marketing. So there's some interesting similarities between the companies in terms of their strategies and some interesting and important differences. The product strategies for Tinder and Hander are actually really different. So Tinder was the original swipe-based dating app. It was built to be a really lightweight experience where swiping is really fast, getting into a match is really easy, chatting is really easy, and Hinge is one of the first really successful post swipe dating apps. So they deliberately did not build a product around the mechanic of swiping. Instead, they wanted people to spend more time on each other's profiles. They wanted to create more tools for those profiles. So Tinder profiles are very simple. Hinge profiles have prompts.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both of them are dating apps, but they have missions that are really different. So Hinge's mission is almost created in response to Tinder. Hinge's mission is designed to be deleted. This is something that is prevalent throughout all of the marketing, which is come to our app. We know that if our app works for you, you're going to find someone, you're going to kick off a long-term relationship, and you're going to delete our app. And we consider that success. Versus Tivier's mission is really to make single life more fun. Tinder's mission is to be an app that's on people's phone whenever they're single and often throughout their 20s and into their early 30s. And so those missions are really different. One is a temporary use case, the other is a continuous use case. And so despite the fact that they're serving the same underlying use case, which is to help people meet each other, they have very different missions. The company strategies are also pretty different. They have some similarity.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the article itself has an example which I won't go through now of Slack versus Discord. I think that's a really interesting example because the products are so similar. And yet the company strategies and the missions are so different. They're serving incredibly different audiences, despite the fact that many of the items on those team's roadmaps are likely the same, threatening, reactions, channels, video chat, things of that sort. I think a really interesting example from my past life is comparing Tinder versus Hinge.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Resources to be able to work on that skill. And I think it'll make you feel a lot more empowered as a product manager as well if you don't need to feel like you've got to depend on a designer to help you visually think through your product each and every time.”
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's great if you're able to work with a designer, but I also think it's really important for PMs to understand design, to understand UX and UI, you can always just sketch things on paper if you don't have design skills. I've also time and time again throughout my career, I've gone back to balsamic, which is a really good wireframing tool. It's been around for a while. It's incredibly fast to work with. And often in an afternoon, you can create a set of very high level conceptual wireframes that you can put in front of people that will give them a much clearer understanding of what it is you're trying to build than if you were just to share them with them a spec that is words alone. So I would suggest learn how to sketch, learn balsamic, having that ability to think out of conceptual level about how UI and UX works is, I think, a critical part of being a product manager. And if it's a skill that you don't have today, there's great...”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is that you're building, what's going to fulfill the strategy, and what are some of the trade offs that you need to make in order to bring that into fruition because there's always going to be a limited number of pixels on the screen.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a conceptual framework that shows you how things are laid out. It helps me understand how the pieces are going to come together. And most products are ultimately rendered in terms of visuals. They're pixels on a screen. And so it's important for you to understand how are those pixels going to be organized. I think an interesting litmus test question for this is in a lot of mobile apps can only have four or five things on their NASB bar. What are the four or five things if you just describe your strategy in words, people might come up with one navbar that's completely different than another nav bar? And as a result, you then find at the moment that you're implementing your mobile app that there's completely different perceptions of what's valuable to the company and how the functionality should be organized. And so the process of setting your strategy and then defining it really crisply in wireframes helps to get really specific and concrete about what”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Steak that we put in the ground was the strategy doc wouldn't be complete without wireframes. This was the first time that we were doing that in the context of strategy. And the thing that we were really trying to solve for is the fact that oftentimes when you talk about strategy in words alone, everyone takes away a different interpretation of that strategy. Whereas when you actually can show people wireframes of what the product will look like when that strategy is implemented, it creates much more alignment. And so the analogy I like to use, it's a little bit like working with an architect. You would never work with an architect that didn't provide you a blueprint of the house that they want to build for you. Because being able to describe a house in words alone is not enough. Everyone will come away from that with sort of a different interpretation of what is needed. Once you can see the blueprint, and the blueprint doesn't need to be high fidelity,”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This framework originally started when I was at TripAdvisor, and we had to develop a plan for what we wanted the strategy to be for trip planning. This was going to be a really big new feature for the company and for the product. Trip planning is one of these intractable problems. There have been a number of startups that started as trip planning startups, and nobody had really nailed it. Google at the time had a trip planning app that had some interesting elements to it, but it wasn't really clear that they were nailing it. And so we knew that there was both a really valuable problem to solve here, but also a really difficult problem. And we wanted to take an end-to-end approach to solving for this, where rather than just working bottoms up and getting to things experimentally, where we might not actually ladder up to a clear product strategy, we instead wanted to work top down, define what do we want to achieve, how are we going to achieve it, and what are the incremental steps we're going to use to get there. And one of the things that we said was.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about vision as part of mission. I always get confused about what the difference is between vision and mission. And so, you know, when I was originally working on this. There was a version of this that had the mission and the vision together. There were versions that kept it separate. Often what I've heard of as the distinction is the vision is sort of the vision that the company sees for the future. And then the mission is the mission that the company has in light of that vision. And I think you can really bring those two together. And you can both describe that world and the role that the company plays in a single statement. And that's usually enough to make progress and help to start to define the strategy. Cool. But I know you've written about this as well and you've put a spotlight on vision.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work together as a system where if a PM is looking to define strategy, they can work top to bottom. And if they're looking to debug strategy, they can actually work bottom to top. And so if you're having trouble meeting your goals, it might be because the roadmap isn't set up so that it can help move those goals forward. If the roadmap isn't right, it might be because the product strategy hasn't been really clearly articulated. If the product strategy isn't right, it might be because the team doesn't understand deeply enough what the company strategy is, how the product fits into it, and ultimately the company's mission that it's trying to make progress on.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing is strategy. So whereas a mission is aspirational, strategy is rigorously logical. The strategy is the logical plan that your company is going to use to bring that mission into being. And so it's got to be very specific. It's got to be very rigorous. And it's basically the approach or the plan that the company will use to make progress on achieving its mission. And so the mission and the strategy at the company level really define what is the company trying to accomplish. And so the next level of the strategy stack is the product strategy. And the product strategy is the connective tissue between what is the company trying to accomplish and what are the day-to-day things that the product team is doing. And so underneath the product strategy, the product strategy informs a roadmap and the roadmap ultimately informs the goals. And so those five pieces the company mission, the company strategy, the product strategy, the product roadmap, and the product goals.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And be able to be tracked back to pretty fundamental gaps in terms of an individual PM's understanding of strategy. And oftentimes those gaps were not just because the person might not understand the strategy. It may also be because the strategy hasn't been completely defined. And so the product strategy stack is a system that helps people understand what framework they're using in order to make decisions and what's going to drive value for the business. So the top of the stack is the company mission. And the company mission is the change the company wants to bring to the world. It's really a qualitative aspirational statement of what is the company's purpose. And in some cases, it might not be a company. It might be a particular team within a company or it might be a particular subsidiary depending on the environment you're in. But it's basically the overarching mission that helps to guide the process of moving forward.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The goal of the product strategy stack is to help people take a set of terms that are normally conflated together like goals, roadmap, strategy, and separate them into really clearly defined parts. And the reason I first started using this concept is I would often have PMs come to me and they wouldn't know whether to decide between doing A or B. So it might be that there's two features. They're roughly the same opportunity size and they wouldn't know whether or not they should execute the first feature or execute the second feature. And more often than not, when I talked to teams and helped to debug that issue, what it came down to was that there wasn't a deep enough understanding of what the strategy is. So what is the framework that should actually inform that prioritization? And so oftentimes I was seeing difficulty prioritizing as well as tactical issues surface in the day to day.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of, even if you're not into marketplaces, I think it's worth looking at what they're creating, the events that they're running, the people that are involved. They've just done a great job of curating that whole experience to provide a really great foundation for founders.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think too. The best communities are the Indie Hacker community. What I really like about that is it's a lot of people who are thinking about how do I build something solo? And that's really different from being at a larger company. If you can think about a spectrum of, you know, you have a larger company somewhere in the middle, you have VC-backed startups where you can take some of the ways of thinking about things that you learn at a bigger company and apply it because you have the ability to invest a significant amount of resources. And then at the opposite side, there's one person who's got a dream. They want to start something. They're trying to figure out how to do everything themselves. They're entirely generalist in terms of being both builders and sellers, as well as figuring out all the logistics. So I like the Indy Hacker community. Another really good community is everything marketplaces. Mike, the founder of that community, has just done a fantastic job of bringing together a set of founders. He specifically focused on marketplace businesses, which have some unique dynamics to them, especially in the very early stage. But it's a great example.”
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's important to plug into an early stage network as soon as possible. There's a bunch of different ways to do that today. There's communities that are focused on founder dating. There's communities focused on just being a place where founders can spend time. There's a great community of people in the Indie hacker community and a few other related communities. And so I think it's important to connect with folks that are builders that are excited about entrepreneurship, both on the development side and the operation side as well as on the investment side, connecting with angels and investors who are seeing what's happening within earlier stage companies, what are the things that are top of mind, what are the technology trends that people are”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think a lot of times people that are at larger companies are used to working in a particular way. mastered their craft in terms of how they think about the next thing in their career. They really want to go deeper into that craft. And people who like the earlier stage are much more generalist. They're fine with kind of moving back in time. Like you're not going to find a lot of senior engineering leaders or senior product leaders that want to write code and specs at big companies, but you will find those in those networks of people that are founders and that are interested in the earlier stage.”
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 that I found really surprising is the networks are pretty different. So I've gotten a chance to work with an incredible amount of great people over the years. And when I was starting a company, I was excited to reach out to people, tell them what I was doing. And there were a number of people that I worked with at larger companies that I was potentially excited about working with. And what I found was that people sort of really build their lifestyles and their careers around a particular stage. And there are some people that like to move between stages, but the majority of people don't. A lot of people that are at larger companies, they like the benefits that come with that. They like the types of problems that they're working on. Yet there's a whole other community of people who love to work earlier stage, could be founders. It's also freelancers who like to help to build startups. It's investors and angels. And so that's been a really interesting part of the journey is meeting new people, getting to know those networks, and starting to build.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can spend a lot of time sort of in paralysis around analyzing market research or going through all of the different things you can do strategically, thinking about all the different potential variants that you could build, all the different pricing strategies. Whereas in statistics, it just makes sense to kind of get to a point where you have conviction, execute on that, and then move on to whether or not that felt like the right thing, in which case you can double down or that was the wrong thing, in which case you can shift direction and do that pretty quickly.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You throw things out there, you run an experiment, you get to see what statistically significant, and based on that, that provides a really nice way to learn about what users want and iterate towards an optimal product. At a startup, you can't do that. You just don't have those users to test with. And I think a lot of startups make the mistake of trying to use an experimental approach too early where it just takes either way too long to get statistically significant results, which reduces that latency, or those results aren't as valid because you have to use a much smaller sample set. And so I've had to shift my mindset from an experimental-oriented approach to making decisions to much more of a conviction-oriented approach. And I've often found myself asking the question of like, do we just have enough data to have informed conviction and we should move forward and stop digging? Move forward in a particular direction and then see whether or not that turns out to be the right one. Because too often in a startup.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about velocity as sort of the quantity of work and latency is how quickly you can go from an idea to actually being able to test that idea and learn whether or not that idea was the right one. Cool. One of the questions to test out latency that I like to ask PMs is if there's a really simple change that you want to make to a product, like being able to change a button so you can test two different texts on a particular button, how long does it take to go from we think that this change is worth making to actually getting the results of whether or not it was the right change. Got it. Cool. The second thing is really thinking differently about how to make decisions. I think a lot of really effective companies today that have large audiences get to rely on an experimental way of making decisions.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Short cycle time between an assumption or a hypothesis and being able to validate that hypothesis. And that's just not true at larger companies where there's a lot more momentum. The analogy I like to use, it's like driving a car, right? If a car is going really, really fast, it can't turn as quickly. The turning radius is lower. And so startups have a really tight turning radius and bigger companies have a really high rate of velocity. And so that was one of the things that for me took some adjustment in terms of thinking about how to like boil down what would have been a pretty big ambitious plan at a larger company into something that has much smaller pieces and where you can iterate towards things and get data every day or every couple of weeks rather than have sort of a bigger project that might take a quarter long to execute.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been a couple of really interesting mind shifts I've had to go through over the last 18 months as I moved from a product leadership role to a founder role. The first one is really thinking differently about speed. I think there's this common, I would say it's a misconception that startups are faster than larger companies. And what I found initially is actually things felt slower when I started my own company because I didn't have as many engineers to work with. I didn't have a team built around things. We didn't have momentum around existing users to be able to research and target. And what I realized as I've kind of been through the journey over the last 18 months is that the speed that startups have is not really about velocity. Bigger companies can always get more done. They can always spend more. They can always move with a higher degree of velocity than smaller companies. The advantage of smaller companies has really is in latency. You can have an idea one day, you can test it the next day, and as a result, you can have this really...”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reforge, but one of the things I found incredibly helpful in my career that really helped me level up was one-on-one coaching. There was nothing that could really replace the opportunity to have a conversation with someone who had the ability to ask the right questions, had the ability to help you see around corners, do the experiences that they had had. And coaching had just not gotten any more accessible over the years. And so about 18 months ago, I decided to start outpace, which is a company focused on making elite expert-driven coaching available to everyone. And we're using a combination of really focusing on the product, using a lot of systems and content to structure the coaching process. We're also using AI to make coaches more efficient with the goal of making”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sounds good. So I spent about 10 years or so at bigger companies working with large product management teams and large engineering teams. I find that work incredibly fulfilling in terms of the ability to impact people at scale. But I was also really missing the idea of kind of building something new and really thinking about where things are going and not having to solve for some of the legacy constraints that large businesses have to solve for. So I decided to leave Tinder. And at that point, started to explore what I wanted to do next. I spent about 18 months working with ReForge as an entrepreneur in residence or an executive in residence with ReForge, helping them build and launch the product leadership program and helping them launch the product strategy program. And during the process of doing that, I had conversations with dozens of people that were at the middle point of their career and found a really interesting common challenge in that there's lots of ways to learn new skills now. There's great podcasts and blogs. There's great cohort-based courses.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different than how other companies in the space like Nintendo or Sony were thinking about gaming. Spent about six years there, worked on stuff on the platform side, on the content side. It was a really great experience, but I knew I wanted to go earlier stage. So I went straight after Microsoft. I went to business school, dabbled a little bit in management consulting, but decided I really wanted to build things. And so I went back into an early stage startup right after business school. I started as employee number one at a fintech startup. Shortly after that, I joined Brian Balfour, who's the CEO of ReForge at his first startup. And my most recent few roles have been product leadership roles at TripAdvisor, whereas head of the consumer product team, product leadership role at Facebook, and then I was the chief product officer at Tinder. And for the last couple of years, I've gone back into the startup side of things and happened to talk about that some more.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've been in the tech industry for a long time, so I will date myself. I started in the mid 90s, my dad was at American Express and he had just done a big buy of computers, one of their first big installations of computers, and he brought home an Apple TC computer. And back then, there wasn't much to do on it other than to learn to code. So I started coding really young. I was nine, ten years old and really just fell in love with technology. And that's persisted with me today. I started a game company in high school. I did that full-time and part-time in college. So I dropped out for a little bit during college, went back to finish up my degree. And then my first role out of school was Microsoft. And so I joined Microsoft at a really interesting time when they were making a pretty significant investment in games. And so I joined as one of the first people on the Xbox Live team really focused on thinking about how does a company that's building its future on the internet think about where gaming is going. And that was really.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, thank you. That means a lot. I've been a fan of all of your work as well. I've been following the podcast. It's been great to see how it's evolved over the years.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Framework I like to use with product leaders that I'm coaching is to think about a matrix, your ideal goal is to lead in a scalable way, which means you feel really confident about the direction of your team and your team has the autonomy to move in that direction. There's 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.”
2023-01-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source