YouSaid · the spoken record

Tamar Yehoshua

lines on the record: 84
first: 2024-09-26
most recent: 2024-09-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Find me on LinkedIn and I have a substrat called Practical Intelligence where I've been interviewing practitioners who are working with AI. It was my way of learning. I started when I was a VC trying to continue doing it. And how can they be helpful if you're a customer clean? I'd love to know what you think, what works and what doesn't work.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of analogous to talk so your kids listen is when they come home from school, you can't just say, How is your day? Say, you know what? I did the podcast with this person and it was super interesting because they talked about this or that. Or I'm massively screwed up and I should have asked them this or that. And they'll be like, oh my God, I was at school today and this is what happened. Like if you share your life with them, they will share their life with you.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“14 months. I think the best parenting book I read, besides the How to Talk to your kid, listen to how to listen to your kid to talk is, I think it's called Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Baby. Like we are much happier when we sleep well. We perform better at work when we sleep well. Children need to sleep. So making sure that they sleep well, and sometimes that's like I did the whole sleep training, like cry until you fall asleep. And my kids still speak to me. So it was okay. And so you just like that is like the basic things. Like make sure that their basic needs are met. And then as they... Share your life with them. So, a piece of advice I was given was.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have one that my father told me when I was being really indecisive about what college to go to. He was really kind of bored of the conversation and he said there are no right decisions. You make a decision right. And it is so true because you'd never know what's going to happen in life. You just have to commit to whatever you're doing and have no regrets about it. You can't be like, oh, you know, 10 years later, what if I had taken that job over there? It's like, you make your success based on how you approach the decisions that you've made.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the zoo as in Kiss in French. And then on the tech side, I mean, the honest answer is glean I was listening to your podcast with Nikita who said that people over 22 don't use new products except at work and that like stuck with me and the products, new products I usually use are at work and I use Glean 10 15 times a day. Like I use it so much and it changed the way I unboarded. It changed the way I work I like I just Even like the simplest questions you don't bother people you don't you don't interrupt people on Slack you're like you know what's the latest status with this deal? What's the last time we talked to them? I meet somebody at a conference and I can quickly say have we ever talked to this company before and I can just get an answer or without asking an engineer where's the latest design doc? It's just it has really transformed how I work. So I know I know it's cheating in that it's the product I work on, but it's the actual honest”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A really good dark chocolate that's simple, like no frills, none of this, just dark chocolate. I discovered this chaga called the zoo chocolate. It's a guy in Oakland who makes it himself super niche. He was selling at the farmer's market. And it's just like if you were like a simple, like no nuts, no anything just in pieces. Great pride in the beans and races, I'm from.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know if you like British murder mysteries. It's kind of a niche thing, but. There's a guy named Anthony Horowitz, and the latest series he did was called Magpie Murders. And it's just like kind of an intricate story. So I enjoyed it.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need to read this book. That is not how to get people motivated. And he read the book and he's like, you're right. So it just changes how you think an organizations to affect change. So that's on the kind of organizational leadership. And one book I really liked was Team of Rivals. It's a book about Lincoln and putting together his cabinet and during the Civil War. One, I just learned a lot about the Civil War that I didn't really know. And it's about, again, a book about leadership. And it was fascinating.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One book was recommended to me by Shashir, the CEO of Koda. When I started at Slack, he recommended the book Switch, How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. And it's such a good book. And it's about like, how do you set up a path for people to follow the whole elephant and the rider? So setting the path, but yet motivating people to go down the path. And I read it and we had an all hands about like there was, I don't even remember the topic. It was something that we were like all up in arms about that we had to do. And I just read the book and after the all hands, I went up to Stewart and I'm like, you did that all wrong.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're definitely like AI newsletters that I look at. There's AI podcasts that I listen to. I now have a commute. So in some ways, that's good because I get to keep up on the AI podcast. So I just try and listen. I'm trying to build some prompts for myself to make it easier to say, like take in to, I haven't perfected this, but the chat GPT voice mode where you can load it. Somebody who just, I just hired Lean was saying he does this. He loads up stuff before his commute and then he'll be like summarize these articles and then he can ask questions to it. So I need to up my game there. But I definitely have a list of Ben's bites and the neuron. And I love those are good summaries and like I like Gill and Sarah Ghost podcast. I listen to cognitive revolution. There is kind of too many of them right now, but I pick and”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I, in my decades of working in tech, have never been working in an environment that's moving so quickly. And it's really exciting. I mean, it's super energizing, and it's also scary. You have to change how you're working. You have to change how you're working so that you can keep up because it is going to be, it's going to be an interesting decade ahead with all these new tools that are coming out and staying ahead will be hard, but it's also, there's so much, I think richness and opportunity here. So I advise people to get in the thick of it and try it out because you'll be surprised at how much how many products we can build.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that your whole product gets better as the LLMs get better. That I think is a frame of mind. Of how you approach the value add you're having.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the industry transforming so rapidly? You need to make sure that your product gets better as the LLMs get And that too many people are building things to make up and compensate for the LLMs, that all that work is going to go away. So it's okay to do it, to understand that it's going to go away, but that can't be your differentiator. You have to understand that your differentiator is something that will continue to be there as the LLMs get better and smarter.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What should my top priority be next week when? Like, we don't even know what your priorities are. But then there's golden cases that are just amazing So, we're not the example of refining queries and search took years for people to understand how to do. And it took a lot of features of like autocomplete and refinements at the bottom of the page. So we need to build in those things to guardrails to help with the change, to help suggest, oh, Lenny, here's what you could do. Here's a prompt to find out the status of your feature that Tamar built. So how do you give people guardrails so that they understand what is going to work and what isn't going to work? Because this whole, I don't know what I can ask. And then on top of that, the Hans terministic, like an enterprise CIO will go use ChatGPT on the weekends, but they come to work and they expect their software to be deterministic. So how do you help educate users about that? And then the other thing I'll say about using LLMs.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it basically is a knowledge graph of your organization, so you can ask any question. Think of ChatGPT for your enterprise. Ask any question about your enterprise. So search, people understand search because they understand Google and you can put in a query and then you refine it. But chat interfaces, people still don't really know how to use. If you look at the stats from ChatGPT, from what I understand, The retention is fairly low. Like people use it, they play with it, and then they don't get back to it because it's not in their workflow, and they have a hard time figuring out what they can and can't do for it. When I got to Gleam, the first week, I met with the assistant quality team. And one of the biggest issues they have is people, you're trying to use Glean for things that there's like no way it could know.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First week at Glean was eye opening in learning some of these things. But let me first just explain what Glean does for people who may not know. So Glean was started as enterprise search, which Glean reads content of all your SaaS apps. So it reads the content from Microsoft, Google, Slack, Salesforce, JIRA, like any SaaS tool that you use. It indexes it and enables you to search. So it started as just enterprise search. Then using AI. So as an AI search using BERT models and using vector embeddings in 2019, because the early engineers at Glean came from Google and Google created Bert to enhance search. And so it was obvious that they would be using ML techniques for search. Then GPT-3 came along and they added a natural language interface, a chat interface. You can ask the question in natural language and get an answer.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think Think you'll need fewer. I think you'll be able to do more things. So, think about every company our head of sales came to me the other day you need to hire more engineers because we just have so many things we need to build. I'm like, when have you ever worked in a company where you thought that you didn't need more engineers? Like you always Want people to build more stock. So I don't think you're going to need fewer. I think you're just going to get so much more done.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, let me rephrase. It's not going to be harder to be a great PM, but to be a PM, the not so good PMs jobs will go away. The great PMs will still have great jobs.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who are more like just execution? And I think that part of the job hopefully will be lowered because I hope a lot more of the execution will be able to automate like updating JIRA and like, you know, all these things that just take time and creating even like launch cals, which PMs have to do manually now. So hopefully a lot of that work goes away. And then people can be more creative. And I think designers and PMs are kind of going to blend because the best designers I've worked with are product thinkers and a lot of really good PMs can also design. It depends on what kind of product you're PMing for. So I agree with the caveat that it will become harder to be a great PM.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that AI, the one thing that's not good at has been creative. So, if you're a PM who's doing the kind of route work, it's going to take your job away. But if you're a PM who actually is strategic and can pull the pieces together and be creative and think how you do something that it's going to differentiate, because it's not going to give you that leap. It'll say, here's what customers are asking for. Here are the problems today, but you have to figure out how to solve it. So in some way,”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%, and you can compare what is Claude PR saying that's like they just launched Claude Enterprise. How is Claude Enterprise different from OpenAI Enterprise? And these things, again, you can do it yourself, but these micro improvements in your productivity help. There's a, for my newsletter, I interviewed Clairvaux who came out with Chat PRD. And so product managers are using it. We're just starting to evaluate it internally. So I haven't personally used it yet, but it's super cool. And you can use ChatBRD to do a PRD. And Chat PRD gives more templatized and more frameworks of how to do that. And these, again, these things are going to keep getting better.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was like, ooh, I could do this. So that's another example. And engineers are using it for automating part of the incident management of like, I got an incident. How do I see all of where their previous incidents that were similar to it? Were they not? And so these are the type of things you can look at to say to help you. like the simplest, simplest is there's so much news. Let me just like paste in all these things and summarize them like as a product manager at Glean, hear all the latest news. What do I have to care about? What's impacting me and potentially competitive to any of the products that I have?”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many examples. So, one that I did really recently is I wrote a prompt in Glean to help me get the status of features. And like, you have a Launch Cal and you can look at Launch Cal and we'll say a date. But then like, is it really the date? What are the outstanding issues? So it will look at our launch cal and it will look at see if there are any OpenJIR tickets, what the Slack conversations are to see and the customers who are beta testing it and like bring all these together to tell me, okay, launch date is this according to Launchdale, but here are all the open issues and here are the open conversations that people are talking about. So then I can give me the confidence level of the future looking. So I can run the prompt, just put in the name of the feature and get like, so I don't have to read all of these channels. So this is a prompt that I built like two weeks ago because we're advancing our prompting capabilities. And so I was testing it out.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you have to use your creative juices as a PM to figure out how it can help you and have patience to iterate and keep trying because the models that we have today can do a lot already.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to be leverage on your time. So you get a lot of articles sent to you, summarize them. Use AI to summarize the articles. We use Gong at Glean to record all our sales calls. We have a Glean app that will read all the Gong transcripts, put them in a sprite sheet in a certain format of who the AE is, etc, and then summarize all the top requested features from all the Gong calls. And we took a while to get it right. Like at first, the summarization, the prompt wasn't good enough and would give us features that liked our salespeople would recommend and didn't distinguish that this was actually the customer. So you have to tweak it. It's not going to work out of the box. But then we got it to the point where it worked. And these things really save time.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who is more forward thinking and loves playing with new products? And he had this use case that blew me away. So he said, and this was like a couple months ago, so before it was right when Gemini had expanded the context window. So his product had a Discord channel. And he took the transcript from the Discord channel, which was huge, right? And he fed it into Gemini the entire channel and then used it to ask questions like what is the sentiment of my product? What is the most requested feature? What are the things people are unhappy with? Like this never would have occurred to me. It's like, that is so smart. And he's like, it was like a gold mine. Do you know how long it would have taken him to read? And he just wouldn't have done it, right? So your, think about like for the argument, oh, I'm too busy. Well, if you use these products, you're actually not going to, you're going to.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use the products. Like, this is what good PMs should do, period. Always be using new products. It's not a unique thing for AI when mobile came out, PMs needed to be using mobile apps all the time to try them out, see what the UIs are, see what's working, what isn't. And the same goes even more for AI. Use ChatGPT. If your organization has clean, use clean, use Claude, try them all. Like, try them and see what they do. I was talking to product manager. I know.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experienced engineer to know when it's getting it They're going to keep getting better. So I think people have to be careful about not getting left behind, but their jobs aren't going to go away. They're just going to change. And I'm of the believer that we're just going to have a lot more software. But I talk to engineers and to PM saying, yeah, I tried that. It doesn't really work. And then go back to how I worked before. And that's a dangerous spot to be in, I think.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think AI, we are underestimating how much it's going to change how we work. It's not going to be sudden from today to tomorrow because people haven't figured it out yet. They kind of haven't figured out how exactly to leverage it. But the people who have are going to be so far ahead. They're going to be far ahead of everyone else because they're going to be working faster. They're going to be working better. And in five to ten years, I think the lines between product managers and engineers and designers are going to blur because AI will enable product managers to build prototypes, to build designs, designers to build a product like Sigma already has their Figma AI. You can press a button and you can get your initial prototype working. You've got all the cult pilots. So they're not quite there. You need to be an experience.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to give you a little bit of my history with AI to get to that point. I actually, this is when AI was a completely different technology stack. I have a master's in AI. So I started like working in AI when it's evolved so much. And then, of course, at Google, using it for autocomplete and search. And it's transformed so many times. But then with this last transformation of Gen AI, and that's what brought me to glean of seeing this, like meeting lots of AI companies, I'm like, wow, this is really going to transform how we work. It's just fascinating seeing these products I was kind of one of those people, oh, yeah, it's going to be so far away until I saw GPD-3. And”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How toxel your kids will listen and how to listen so your kids will talk. Maybe it's the new name of that book, but it's so good and it's so true in everything and also in products. So whether you're in a forum and explaining to customers, whether you're enterprise customers, you're explaining, you're hearing them out, people want to understand.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had no idea she did this. She just called this IC engineer and she listened to them and she heard why he was upset and she explained her reasoning. He was so blown away that she called him that he completely changed his opinion and then he told everyone else in the org. And so it had this effect. And I learned a lot from watching her do that. Like, she never even told me she did it. Like later, she just did it. You just act. You're authentic. You listen to people and you're transparent.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really good one. It's a leadership example. So when I was at Google, there was always a controversy about something. But there was a controversy about it was like blogger or something. I can't even remember what it was. It was like we made a change. And there was an engineer. We were like 50,000 people at this time. It was an engineer in my team and IC engineers like super unhappy about the change. And I knew Rachel Letstone. She was in charge of all of PR and global policy at Google. So huge job. And I emailed Rachel and I'm like, hey, do you have like an FAQ or something that can help me because I don't know why you made this change? That I can help explain to the engineer and my team. She did not respond to my email. She picked up the phone and she called him.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And deal with the people who are unhappy. But the trick is you have to be respectful and you have to be transparent and you have to explain. You have to go to people and say, this is why we made this change and you have to be authentic. You can't be dismissive and you can't have marketing speak. You have to really say here's for real why and you have to listen to your audience. You don't want to alienate your early users because most people like if you made a good decision on why you moved this or why we stopped using Slack calls and moved to huddles and like you have to do it over time and give people choice and then give them enough time to move. So you have to do it in the right way. But if people feel heard, it makes a difference. And I have an example that's not a product example, but I think is a”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I saw it more when yeah, you unlaunch things, you take things away. There's always some set of users that are using a feature that nobody else does. And then you take it away and they're super unhappy, but there are more people you're going to make happy. So you get a product manager gets caught in this trap of the vocal minority and the number of people using your product depends on what phase are you a Google, are you a Slack? Are you a glean? But the number of people using your product today is usually, unless you're a Google, far smaller than the number of people who are going to be using your product tomorrow. So design it for the people, the bigger number of people who are going to be using it tomorrow. Like if you have to redo the UI and, you know, the like who moved my cheese, people will be unhappy. But all the new people are going to be like, this is so much easier, then do it.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes, absolutely, we would be in the reviews and we would huddle with somebody to ask a quick question. We used huddles all the time. I still do. I love huddles.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We iterated every quarter, just like you iterate on a product. So every quarter, we would say did the OKR planning work or not, and then we would adjust. So we got to the point where at one point we added up all the hours of OKI reviews and all the people in them. And it was like some insane number, like 300 and something. And we're like, this has gotten out of hand. And so then we're like, we have to do something drastic. And that's when we moved them to async. It was also right after Slack clips launched.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And sometimes we would invite people like there's an issue with QA, so we'd have the QA leader come in and present to us. But we tried to limit the number of meetings with teams. So it would be like the Monday meeting was the big meeting that you had to be there and you had to be able to talk to your project. And that was it.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we every Monday we had a Monday meeting where we reviewed the progress on the top OKRs and red, yellow, green, and don't talk through the green ones, only talk through the red ones. And what are the issues? And again, both there. And then we had a weekly meeting with the four of us where we would just go through any issues in the organization, what's going on, what's not”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we would say, do we have any follow up questions? And we put in channel our follow up questions to the team. And sometimes there would be, there'd be like five to ten teams that we would then have a follow-up meeting with. We would say there's things that we, this is like a really high priority project or there are a lot of questions that we have. And then we would do a meeting, but we were always doing those meetings together. So that was the OKR reviews of getting the alignment and by asking the questions, we could then, by it just being us, we could kind of dig into the team. And we shadow chief of staff. So it was the two of us plus our two chiefs of staff, and which they also did a divide and conquer, and they worked really well together. They were both longtime slash employees. So for years, they had, one had been an engineering director and one had been a TPM.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Used OKRs to drive our processes, and we would have the teams present OKRs to us. When the team got too large, it got to be too much time to go through every team's OKR review. So we had them. We had a Slack channel for each team. Their OKRs, they were a planning channel for each one. And people would post a doc and then a Slack video of going through the major points. And we had a time limit of how long they were allowed to be. And they would say, here's our OKRs, here's the things that you would pay attention to. And then Cal and I would do a marathon and we would watch them all together.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you gotta spend a lot of time together? I mean, there isn't kind of a way around that, and you have to document things and make sure that you've talked it through. And if you don't agree with something and you're not sure it's a priority, you have to speak up and you can't just be like, okay, whatever. And then go to somebody in your team and be like, oh, God, that CTO, like, why did he make this decision? Like, that just doesn't work. So I'm a very direct person. So if I don't think that something is the right priority or is working, I will be very clear. We had different forms. So I'll be very tactical here on the forms that Cal and I had to get. So we had”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that you have to respect and trust that they actually will follow up on what they say they will in Cal and Fuzzy were like amazing that I would go to Fuzzy and be like, hey, we need more mobile engineers because this one product is not going to ship. And he's like, I'm on it, got it. And that was all I needed to do. And like, obviously he couldn't do it. He'd come back to me and like, hey, there's going to be a problem. But it was like just things got done. That's the best part of it.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To all of the OKI reviews, all of the, we had weekly exec reviews, we had the updates on our OKRs. So we did them all together, but I knew like here's the things that he was going to ask the questions on and dig deep. And then when I was, he would take a backseat. But of course, we could ask questions in each other things. But I knew that he was taking ownership. And he knew what I was taking ownership of. But I think the bottom line was respect.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't want any of this like people in the organization, they ask mom, they ask dad, and they got different opinions and playing one against the other, like that doesn't work. So one goo have to know that you're not going to do that. So, if somebody would ask me something that was in Cal's domain, I'd be like, did you talk to Cal? I would never try and go around him. So we were very clear on you're going to drive this. I'm going to drive this. And if it was unclear, we would talk and we would say, okay, who's going to take this one? And we would do all our reviews together.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably the most important thing that a product leader does because if you have great ideas of what to build but you can't get them built, then you go nowhere. So one, make sure you're somewhere where you have a good engineering partner. So Cal Henderson was the co-founder and CTO of Slack, and like I couldn't have asked for a better engineering partner. He's just awesome. And you need to, that has to be part of your evaluation criteria that you meet and value your engineering partner before you join and or you know that it's not the right one and the organization is willing to make a change. So that can happen too. You can go in and understand that something has to change, but that is a very, very important thing of what you're doing and what you're assessing when you go in. And then I think what's really important is that you're aligned. You understand your roles and responsibilities and where you're going to divide and conquer and where you're going to be aligned.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They went into their competitors' conference and stood outside their competitors' conference. This is in the Beyond Software. This is in his book that he wrote about the early phases of Salesforce and tastes guts. He pushes the envelope.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that there are people who are really, really good at what they do. So Mark Benioff is an amazing marketeer. He's so like his marketing mind. So, we, after the acquisition, I got the opportunity to be on stage with him at Dream Force, because, you know, Slack was a new shiny thing. So of course, Slack was going to be in the keynote. And so I was in Benioff's keynote two years in a row. And so I watched how he approaches his keynote and the whole thing around Dream Force. I mean, Drain Force is incredible. The impact that it has on the ecosystem. And so I think that as a product, people don't think of him as much, but as his marketing abilities are amazing what he's done.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engineering have to work together and design because design is just in it as much as sometimes you can get design engineers who are doing the prototyping. So your first prototypes are like Figma prototypes and then you get prototypes on real data. When I was at Google, one of our teams, the front-end team, I remember we got, we hired a bunch of prototypers and our head of front-end engineering said to me one day, this is my secret weapon. This is how we move faster. So, I do think it's a mindset shift and a tech stack shift.”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're doing it right, it'll be faster. And you need to have an engineering infrastructure that enables prototyping. So some engineering infrastructures are too heavy and they don't actually enable prototyping. Like we had a problem with our mobile apps that it was too hard to prototype and we actually redesigned our mobile apps until we got to the point where it was easier because our desktop app was pretty easy to prototype. But you have to have a layer of abstraction that enables you to do that and you have to have engineers who have a prototyping mindset. And if you build multiple things and you have this mindset is I'm willing to throw it away, you write code that you know is never going to make it to production. So you can get, you can just crank it out much faster. And then you can see what works. And then you build the production code. And so you actually get to your end goal of something working faster. But you need the engineering team to have the same mindset. The product and”
2024-09-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source