YouSaid · the spoken record

Tal Raviv

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2024-09-22
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2024-09-22
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  1. “It's on maven.com in the product catalog. And I'll have it. I'll probably post links to my LinkedIn as well. You can find it there. And yeah, it'll launch in mid-October. That'll be the first cohort.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And it's just these, you know, you have, oh, you know, where's blood? Oh, you know, the power grid was attacked in his town. So he's working on getting the generator back up. Okay. But, you know, I don't know if it's like a no excuses mindset or badassery so much as I know on my end, it's just a, like, I think for Ukraine, definitely, it's just like really, really crave the routine and the sense of normalcy when you can get those moments. I said, I think doing this podcast, working on this course, all these things, I'm not doing them because things are normal. I'm doing them because they're not. So, yeah, and I'll use this opportunity to say that biggest thing in all of our minds is. 107 hostages that have been held for 328 days by Hamas. Yeah, you need to bring them home now.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So we've had moments where we'll all be on a call and then there'll be missile siren here in Israel, here in Tel Aviv. And we'll say, hey, sorry, we got to go. Go down to the shelter, hear the explosions overhead, come back, sit back down. Later that day, we'll have another meeting. And on the Ukraine side, you'll hear like, hey, that beeping, isn't that the missile alert on your end? And under you like, isn't that the critical alert on your iPhone? He looks at his phone. He'll be like, yeah, but I got 10 minutes. Like, let's just finish the meeting, right? These surreal moments where you just, at the same time where everything's not normal, people have this really strong desire for normalcy. It's, you know, work and everything around us and our routine is become more important than ever.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Here at Riverside, we've had a bunch of people out for reserve duty. I think all of them are back now. I have a team lead. People are still going in and out of reserve duty while working here. I have a team lead who leaves around some days around 4 p.m. goes to the base, won't say what he has to do, but it's super intense and shows up the next morning a little tired, but back at work. In general, we have, it's not just in Israel, we have teammates in Ukraine Along at the same time, yeah, like one of my teams is almost entirely in Ukraine.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Think I'm doing three surf stories in a row. This is a life motto that's just like stuck in my head for almost a day. Yeah, for more than a decade now, which comes from a piece of plywood outside a surf shop in Mexico that was painted on it. You can't stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf And yeah, there's a lot to that. Over time that I've Really try to apply that in a lot of ways emotionally, organizationally, like at every level. You think about that.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “You can really feel like I surf with O'Neill wetsuit, hyperfreak wetsuit, but that doesn't matter. It's like when a piece of gear is really well constructed, you can feel that the person behind this also surfs or spends a lot of time with surfers and really gets you, probably gets you more than you understand on face value and you start to notice all these details over time. It takes a long time to notice all these details. And you can really feel that there's a person behind this product that gets you. And that's kind of like art almost, you know, when you feel, you know, a piece of art or music really resonates with you. You feel that the artist is like communicating with you directly and letting you feel something that they were feeling. It's almost like that. I think for me, it's outdoor equipment. You can feel that the”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So, this morning I spent half the day surfing. And I think the products I've really come to appreciate, there's not a lot of products used in surfing. It's like a wetsuit, like board shorts, maybe a hat”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “One of the guys especially. And after a while, I was realizing I'm not going to get the surf if this keeps up. And there's no conflict way to get out of this. And I swam up to him and I asked him, I was like, hey, are you from Picy Lemo? Are you from here? And he's like, yeah, why? I was like, you are one of the luckiest people in the world. And he didn't, you know, he was totally caught off guard. He started smiling. And that just changed the whole vibe. It got to a point where, you know, he was telling other people, like, you know, let me have this wave. That's not my experience in a lot of surfbreaks. My friend calls it Ted Lasso, the Ted Lasso, somebody, which is also very genuine. Like, you really have to believe it.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I'll give a story the surf break. I was in Chile and I was surfing and it was an hour the day where a lot of the people who were local would be surfing and a bunch came out and they started giving me these like looks. This happens everywhere in the world, every surf break. just like really uncomfortable and”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “When you watch it from that point of view, it's mind blowing. If you think about it, I'm sure a ton of people listening to this have watched the show. You think about the premise of the show, it's this guy who's been given an impossible task, and he's surrounded by the worst human beings in the world in terms of, you know, just the worst human beings and behaviors. And the way he gets through that's hard to describe. You have to watch it. I think any attempt to summarize it. The show, like just watching it, how this character behaves and gets through this stuff is incredible when you watch it from that point of view. And for me, when I think it definitely affected how I work. Definitely info to me, but not just work, like just also how I deal with aggressive Middle East.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I recently rediscovered Ted Lasso. The first time I watched it, I got tons of recommendations. It's hilarious. I didn't connect to it, I just didn't connect to the humor. I was like, okay, fine. I stopped watching it. And then I heard a podcast where somebody recommended watching it from a point of view of leadership lessons. And they just couldn't stop recommending. They're just so passionately recommended. And I was like, okay, let me revisit this”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “These principles really sunk in is from that book really resonated with me the most more than the book itself for nonviolent communication or the Never Split the Difference, both of which are awesome. So I really recommend that book.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “If anybody has read Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, where he talks about how he's like senior FBI agents in the 70s, 80s were realizing that all they were doing in their negotiating tactics were just not working and decided to try something different. And that something is basically nonviolent communication. And he gives these amazing examples of decades of using this with kidnappers and terrorists and organized crime to diffuse situations and create productive outcomes. So this book, you know, with all due respect to FBI agents and terrorists and hijackers and kidnappers, right? Like, this is about kids. So this book is, for me, this is what really the examples, how it's communicated. It's like illustrated almost like a comic book. Tons of super concrete examples. And for me, I think that's when.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “The best book on product management that I've read is called How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. I encountered this book. My sister is a speech therapist, and she had on her bookshelf at home in her apartment. And I was jetlaged one night. I was visiting her, and I read it.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “It's important to give the confidence that you know you're making a mistake, you're on top of it before anybody else than anybody else, that if you're communicating and you're trying to make you creative and like that, first of all, you've done all your homework and you've put a ton into it. And that gives you the basis. The funny side of this is I have friends who make fun of me that I work really hard to justify. Like I have friends that make fun of me. I have friends that make fun of me that I work really hard so that I can increase the amount of bullshit that I can get away without being fired. Depends how you look at it, but it's really important to give that peace of mind.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “So, the feedback I get from executives about these moments really, I think, is transferable and helpful is that they know that no matter how silly I'm being or what kind of stuff I get myself into, that they know for a fact that how seriously I take everything. Like they know how much, if I make a funny presentation about something, right? And I put a lot of jokes into it, but they're like, it's still extremely clear how seriously you're taking this. So I have peace of mind. Yeah, I think you have to have both. You can't just have these adventures or do these silly things or make these mistakes.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I wasn't fired because I actually wasn't connected to that. I wasn't on that. I really felt bad that the PR team, marketing team, and all that I reached out to them and was like, I'm so sorry. You guys are working overtime because of my big mouth. And they're like, don't worry. This is happening to everybody at the company right now. Everybody's having, you know, people are digging stuff up, unrelated stuff.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “At this company, we'd rather have fewer customers where we make a bigger impact on their lives than a lot of customers that we make a smaller impact and kind of explain the logic and the product principles. That was really core to the mission of a company. And somebody took a very limited screenshot of that to prove that Tal Raviv hates poor people or something. That screenshot went viral and that those tweets got embedded on like NPR and Washington Post. And that was a little nerve-wracking.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “By accident, but yeah, I was actually on vacation and I got bored and I was like, I haven't logged into Twitter. I haven't posted anything to Twitter for a while. What's going on in Twitter? And I see that the notifications number is like maxed out. It's like 999 plus or whatever. And I was like, wait, what? And I clicked the notifications See the first tweet has at ceo handle, fired at Tall Raviv yet. And I thought that that has like a ton of retweets. And I keep scrolling down. I start to piece together the story. And there was a change, the pricing change that earlier I said had an uproar. And the internet was up in arms about this. And somebody found a blog post from a year earlier. Brian Balfour interviewed me about an onboarding experiment that we did. Part of that interview I shared that”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And he just gets up, throws down his jacket, and like walks out of the room. So we forgot to tell him he had to, you know, stew without the home again. So yeah, sometimes you gotta something goes too far.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “If I recall, I think the legal counsel created a fake CS and desist. We just found all out. And then, and this was on a Saturday. So we ruined the executive team Saturday. They had like an emergency call. It was a Saturday. We ruined the executive team Saturday. And every time that we decided that a particular executive had suffered enough, like depending when they woke up and how long they had been dealing with this, we would let them in on it, let them into the private channel, and ha So Monday rolls around. CEO sees me, fuck you tall, great. I'm still employed. And I hear later that day that the leadership team had their Monday meeting. And somebody mentioned that, you know, even though that was a prank, it really got me thinking. And then the CTO of the company goes, wait, what do you mean prank? And he dawns on him.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “We created not just a fake screenshot, like not just fake news, we created a fake domain name, website, publication. It was really detailed. We really invested a lot in it. And of this like German website, and we made up a tech arm of their Spiegel. We called a Spiegel Tech. We bought the domain. I'm probably incriminating myself by saying this. Then what we did is we knew that if we had sent that link on the 1st of April to the executive team, nobody would believe it. So, what we did is every executive on the leadership team has that senior report that they really trust. So we got all of them in on it. And the link would come from them. And each of them took it further. Like the senior engineer, it was like this really critical to the company. He created a fake recruiting poaching email.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “So the prank was, I'll say, first of all, the best April Fool's pranks are the ones that touch just ever so gently on people's biggest fears at that time. So in a work context, like whatever somebody's biggest strategic fear is that quarter or like that March of that year, whatever people are talking about, you just have to touch it a little bit. They'll do the rest of the work. So this company, there's this really big debate about internationalization. And should we do that? And there's a big trade-off to doing it and other things we could be doing with the same resources. And this is on everybody's minds, especially the leadership team. And it was March. So my buddy and I also have the company, we decided what would be people's biggest fears would be that a really big company would launch the same thing in Europe.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Wild West PM is no less wild than life itself. I've pulled an April Fool's prank on an executive team that resulted in my CEO seeing me like next time he saw me just look me in the eye said fuck you tall and walked away”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “But most importantly, did it work Yeah, it was the right call. It's become a way bigger team today. And yeah, I still read press releases and blog posts from the company where it's clearly that team's work. Excellent.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “That's what it feels like. It's like. One time I completely disobeded quarterly planning. My team was told to do one thing and we just said no. We're going to do something else. It's not as dramatic as it sounds. It was like, you know, hey, we really, really believe that this is an opportunity. And if we delay this, there's going to be like a really nonlinear opportunity cost of this. And we really should do this. I'm like, no, you should still work on this. We're like, okay, well, what if we made it a really small team and it was just for one quarter and then like fine. Okay, we had built that capital to be able to do that. But, you know, I remember your W framework post. I love that. And I don't know what letter that would be, but that's how that works. Split it”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Running V tests sometimes if you're dealing with really sensitive flows that have big downsides, even if you think logically in your mind there's no reason there should be a downside here. If the sticks are really high”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I've single handedly tanked new payments for a whole week for a company I worked for. It was a well-meaning change. It was super logical. It was kind of streamlined. And I violated my own framework for when do you run A-B tests? I even wrote like a blog post about this and I violated that. And I was like, oh, there's no downside here. And we didn't need to measure this. This is just going to make things way smoother. And then I get a call from marketing. They're like, why are none of our campaigns converting? Listen to your own advice. Ren A B test.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “We've all been through that. Like, you know, it doesn't look like it. When you see someone, you think it's successful that you admire, you look at some of these LinkedIn profile, you look at their resume, you look at their bio. We've all been through all of it”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Yeah, he's here in Israel. We got coffee and He told me, listen, like clearly you have nothing to lose. There's probably an elephant in the room, this new director is wondering why'd you leave this old group? He's not opening, he's not broaching the topic. So it's up to you to do it. And I was like, okay, what do I say? He's like, well, what would you say to him if you didn't have to edit yourself? You didn't have to censor yourself. And I just, I told Guy, well, this is what actually happens. This is what I believe. This is what I could have done better. And he's like, dude, that's totally fine to share. You should share that like word for word, just say that. So the next day I took the director aside and we had this conversation. I shared vulnerably just like, here's what I think I messed up. Here's what I think I wasn't under my control. And that conversation just like the vibe changed. I could feel like a weight off our shoulders. It was like we really felt like we got closer.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “He's like, yeah, great, you know, come put your desk next to mine. We'll just work on a few projects together, get to know each other. And I could tell after a few weeks that even though we'd been getting to know each other, he was still interviewing for that third role. And I realized that something was stuck. And at the same time, the director who had reached out and said, hey, please stay at this company. You'll find something called me with a very different tone. He's like, listen, you can't just float around without a role. If you don't find something soon, we're going to have to let you go. And he was right. So I found myself in the situation I actually reached out to a friend, Guy Pellid. He's a friend and a mentor. I actually met him through the Benny community.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Before we let you go, I want you to stay at this company and let's find you another group to work in. So I was like, okay, he's like, just finish the initiatives you're on. Don't start new ones. And the quarterly planning is coming up. Sit in all the meetings. Look for opportunities and things will work out. And I did that and I didn't find an opportunity that I was excited about. And my initiatives wound down. I didn't know, okay, well, what's going to happen? And then there was a group where actually three p.m.s left at the same time. One went on maternity leave, one got an offer from Fang, and one had to start like an emergency tiger team for their area of expertise. And this director, he filled two of the roles, one internal hire, one external hire, and there was one more role. And I reached out to him.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “It wasn't about being right. It was about just like being supportive and letting things fix themselves instead of. So that was that moment. It was really, like literally that was the conversation. The second moment is a bigger story, but I was on a group that my manager and I, we just weren't a fit. And that happens. It's really important to share that happens. It's common. And as somebody I respect deeply and has done amazing things, and I still respect them, and we just, we didn't work well together. And the next step was, okay, well, I guess, you know, it's time to let me go. His manager was like, hey, you know,”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Cool. All right, what else? I have three times been a hairway from getting fired. And what I mean by that is a senior executive has come to me and said, you are a hair away from getting fired. And one of them is there were changes that the head of product really wanted to make. And I felt strongly that it shouldn't be made. And I voiced that directly, candidly, personally, and repeatedly. And then we had that conversation. And a colleague told me, listen, look at it this way. If you trust the leadership team to adapt if something's not working, I said, yeah, I trust them. Well, what they need from you is just to rely on you that you're going to be with them, even if the disagreeing commit. Like that's what they need from you. If you're right, they'll adapt. If you're wrong, then great. You learn something, you know, product work got better. So the most important thing was there's like a song that a lyric that goes, you got to give in to win.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Yeah, I think my lesson there is the reasons that got me to hurry and make that decision with not as much data were reasons that I just kind of took people's word for stuff. I didn't think as first principles as I should. And I really caved in to the time pressure. So yeah.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “What else you got? The second example of that is I was building a referral program and we made a user research plan and we ended up only executing half of it, which means we talked to the people who were already using it successfully. And we decided to skip talking to the people who should use it but didn't. And we're like, yeah, we get it. It's probably the same feedback. We were in a rush for a lot of other reasons. There's a lot of pressure, just unrelated reasons and just decided that, okay, we have enough information. We don't need to spend more time. Let's start shipping. And that was a huge mistake as well. Just spend so much time building something that didn't work.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Set for groupon, for example, Amazon is different, booking.com is different. And what you're working on, why people are buying in this situation that I was in was so different. They had so much motivation over such a long period of time. They had Constant reminders naturally in their lives that they were happy to get. And the things that didn't work were all the things that worked that Groupon and booking in Amazon, all these e-commerce sites did. Those were not relevant. And we tried all those things and they fell flat. The moment we realized that and it clicked for us and all these A-B tests that should have printed money did nothing. Once we realized that, then we really started to increase conversion and it was a super successful team. Man, I look back and if I had just, you know, I just use more qualitative research.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Let's get into So I'll say this I've wasted twice, twice I've wasted an entire quarter of a growth team's time because of my poor use of user research. First time I can look back, and after 12 failed A-B tests, and then 12 failed A-B tests set us on the right path and got us to revisit our hypothesis. But if I had only spent more time with the customer, and this was the kind of A-B testing that people say, no, you can't do user research. You can't ask somebody what they're, you know, how a button's going to affect their purchasing. But if I had spent time with the customer to just understand who they are, what motivates them, how they got there, why they're paying all that stuff, I would understand that not every checkout process is the same psychology as Groupon or Amazon or Booking.com. So the things that work on those sites work not just because people are the same everywhere, but they work because people are in the same mind.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Yes, really important for me to share this. I think during low points in my career, Having someone share with me a failure story just really helped me understand that that's part of it. And I'm not alone. And you browse LinkedIn, you see these incredible profiles with these incredible pedigrees. And what you don't see, it gives you this sense that everybody's just had a smooth sailing and everything's going great. And everybody has had somebody who's been here long enough has had a ton of failure stories and ton of low points and self-doubt. So it's really meaningful for me to just talk about this.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “That's how you learn. That's like the real way to learn. My manager, Adam Fisherman at the time, told me something related to this, which is like the best networking is just to do really good work at a successful company and like everything else will work out. So I think the same goes for learning the best learning is to just do really good work at a really good company with really good people and solve problems that have never been solved before in this way, which will inevitably happen, right? That's what we're all doing and everything else will work out. Like you'll be the one writing the blog posts, not just reading them.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “My personal story, like one of the things that happened when Landed in San Francisco, I really felt like an imposter. I was like, okay, wow, everybody else here really knows how to work and I need to learn from them. Six months later, I found myself giving talks and writing blog posts about how to work posts that were being used in reforged courses and all that and advising people and sharing. And that's when it hit me like, that's the beauty of this industry is that that can happen because everything is changing so fast, like because how did I get there? I was just on a team doing something really difficult and interesting in a very unique way.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Myself, I've had phases where I've been this zealot of you know, everything has to be outcomes driven. And then I've gone to like, let's just ship as much as possible and figure it out. And everything needs to be A-B tested and quarterly planning has to work this way and do scrum. Don't do it. And they just realized there is no, it's not that simple. It's about figuring out the problem at hand and optimizing for that and having an open mind and just understanding that we're all improvising.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Yeah, I didn't always understand this. In fact, I moved continents because I had professional FOMO. So I moved from Israel to San Francisco because I believed, and actually a lot of people had that feeling that whatever we're doing here in Silicon Valley, they know how to work. Like that's the big leagues. And I got to work shoulder to shoulder with people who came from Apple, YouTube, Salesforce, Facebook, Slack, Amazon, Stripe. I got to work with the people who came from these companies I admired so much. And I came over the conclusion that We're all just making it up as we go along in tech. We're all just improvising as we should. That's the beauty of it. Every situation is different. Every market is different. Every company is different, what it takes to win is different. And so.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Oh, Has happened twice to me I worked on a team that made a very logical UX change and quickly found out that we ruined the sales demo. So, for the users of the product, the experience became a little bit smoother. It was an optimization wasn't something critical. But then for the sales demo, it communicated the value less. It was harder for people to really understand in one glance. So a lot of times this comes from taking something that's very visual and making it very efficient and small. So you might gain fewer clicks, but it'll make it harder for the sales team to communicate and for that ha moment to happen on a call to the point where we made this change and then salespeople would send me gong link recordings in the past and in the current demos and just show me the difference and it would pain me to watch these and I was like, oh, we got to fix this. People aren't getting the value how they're even going to experience it.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Obviously, disclaimer during those two weeks, we look at every support ticket and we look at everything on social media and we, yeah, for sure.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “But in those two weeks, there's going to be a lot of feedback that comes from a resistance to change that they're going to adapt to and won't be able to remember what was before. But sometimes you make mistakes and people will, you know, if there's a real mistake, you'll know about it for a long time.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “We're also, I think the key there is the two weeks. Because if people are still complaining after two weeks, okay, then there's something here.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “That's the strategy. Great. That's extreme. We don't actually do that, of course, but that's what we wish we could do sometimes.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Okay, yes, for sure. This is just what I'm talking about is to recognize it, what you do with it, right, is a different thing. But I joke when we do changes to redesigns or changes to the UX, and we're going to get inevitable complaints of just how my team, we're going to deploy this and we're all going to log out of social media for two weeks.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “I think that intuition came from spending time in the customer community and support tickets and just noticing smaller versions of that that people had feedback on and you kind of start to see What our customers, you know, at the time with like what they would tend to, like what their suspicions always were. And like they're very trigger happy to blame the company for XYZ. And if you see enough raw data from customers or if you get on a customer call and they mention nickel and diming and all these things, right? Like you start to understand, like, this is the target persona. This is how they think. This is what they're sensitive to.”

    2024-09-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source