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Tamar Yehoshua

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2024-09-26
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2024-09-26
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  1. “If it was awesome and he came in, and his first task was to work with Stuart on it. This redesign. And Story came in and said, I want you to take everything in the interface and put it behind one button. Everyone's like, that's never gonna work. And he's like, do it. Just do it. And so we had our prototypers, we had also engineers, front-end engineers who were really good at prototyping, like literally took everything in the interface and put it behind one button. And he said, this is how you're going to see what you really need in the interface. We were never going to ship that. But it was the beginning of the redesign.”

    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

  2. “And that even though he was such a great product thinker, he would always say, I can't tell you if this is going to work. I have to feel it. I have to try it. And a mockup doesn't tell you what it's going to feel like. And he would push people to do prototypes, not incremental of just to get a feature out, but really to think. Very soon after I started, we launched a design lead, Ethan Eisman, and he led a redesign of the new information architecture for Slide.”

    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

  3. “It literally was. There was a grid with four boxes in 2014, and it never changed. That was his master pan. And what we worked on each year changed. But somebody recently asked me, well, did he always like, you know, you guys did Slack Connect much later. I'm like, yeah, but it was always part of the plan. It was always part of his vision. So he saw forward in the vision, but he also was very much into the details. And I think the thing that I learned from him the most was the power of prototyping.”

    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

  4. “Said that is your advantage. Then he goes into his talk about how it's a hill and it takes seven years to build a product. You can't look at it in the near term. You have to be in it for the long term. And you can be sure I never went in and said I need a lot more resources. So that was Stuart, again, I went to Slack because I wanted to work with Stuart Butterfield. I think he is the best product thinker in the valley, or he's not working in product right now. He's taking time off, but he's got this combination of long-term thinking and in the details. So in 2014, he wrote a master plan for Slack, which was build a product people love. Build a network that Slack Connect, build a platform that makes all of your other SaaS products more valuable, the Slack platform, and then do some magic AI stuff. Magic AI stuff took a lot longer.”

    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

  5. “From these meetings was his consistency. He had principles that you had made it easier for you to operate in his company because you knew what he cared about. Because he always had these principles. Everything had to be customer driven. Everything had to be relevant for the customer. He hated icons. That was just the thing. He had to like write what they were because people couldn't figure out what they are. So anytime you showed an icon, he would get annoyed. But they were like, so, but you would go in and after a couple of meetings, you're like, okay, I know what he's going to ask about. I know how he's thinking and I know what his principles are. And I think those consistency enables you to operate a large organization more effectively. And then there's one other thing that I really remember was one of the few really small meetings I was in with him. And we were presenting, working on a new product. And I was like, you know, our competitors had like 10 times as many people as we do on this. And he looks at me and he says,”

    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

  6. “So he goes around to all his leads and says, What do you think? What do you think? What do you think? And I'm sitting there like, I don't care what you think. I just want your basis things. But he wants to make sure that it's a team effort and that he's listening to what everybody in his organization thinks. And he always spoke last. He is by far the smartest person I've ever met in my life in that I've worked with a lot of smart people, but he's ability to go deep in any domain and nail the core issue and remember, like we would have quarterly meetings and from quarter to quarter, he would like remember things that he had talked about before. And then he would go into like the architecture of search and why are you doing it this way or that way? And you're just like blown away that he knows that. But the thing that for me, the biggest takeaway.”

    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

  7. “And I mean, there's so many good books, and there's so much to learn about how he works. So I won't try and cover those things. The things that stood out to me from the meetings I had with him were a couple things. One, a lot of people have written about these six pages. So he doesn't believe in PowerPoint. You write a six-pager about, I mean, it's like, you know, studying for a final exam is writing these six pages. So you go into the meeting and there's the people around the table, his executive team. He does not speak until everybody around the table speaks.”

    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

  8. “Probably can't narrow down to one, but I'll talk about Bezos first. I was very lucky to join Amazon early when I still like I had quarterly meetings with Jeff Bezos. This was before AWS launched. So it was before Amazon was known in the valley. And this is another example. I went there because I went to work for Odie Manbar who started A9. And he was talking to me one night trying to recruit me and he spent two hours on the phone with me telling me how amazing Jeff Bezos was. And this was before there were any books on it. And that really convinced me to go there. So there's a lot written on Bezos. Read his shareholder letters, read the books about him, read Colin Breyer's working backwards, the everything box, I think it's called, or the everything store.”

    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

  9. “There's lots of good companies, and there's lots of smart people. You don't have to be at the top brand. And if you go somewhere where you're going to learn and it's going to get you there, I mean, I made mistakes. I went to some companies, multiple companies that failed or stopped crying and didn't do well or didn't have all the right people. Careers you don't make every step is to the right place. You remember in what you cited all the companies I went to that did well. You left out all the ones that I went to that didn't do well. And so then people will assume that every time I made a job change, it was to a company that did well. No, that was not the case. So if you focus on that learning bit, you will get there. And there are lots of paths. There isn't just the open AI or lean or anthropic.”

    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

  10. “That I thought it was just amazing advice. And then on the flip side, on the negative side, some people are looking, putting too much emphasis on where will I get a big financial return. And I found that financial returns are the hardest to predict. You know who's good, you know who you want to work with. You can predict where you're going to learn. Because even if a company fails, you learn a lot. But predicting financial success is so hard because you don't know what's going to happen with the market, with the world, with like crypto and NAI and people who do that and say like I had one person say I took this job because I'm a mercenary. They just paid me a ton. Did not work out for me. And I feel really bad when people do that. But I think that it's just a dangerous thing to do.”

    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

  11. “Yeah, and it's really bad when you don't have the gravitational pull. It's super hard. I would say that one thing that if you're a manager, I always advise managers, go somewhere where you can recruit. And one, I got a piece of advice from a friend. She said to me, Take a job where if you hire people, it's going to make their careers. I was like, whoa, because I was getting offers for some kind of turnaround jobs. And if you think you can turn around, great. But you want. You're going to hire the best people, you want to make sure that it's going to be a good place for them and that they're going to learn and they're going to grow. And so you want to do right by them and you really earnestly want to say you can make your career by coming here. And I thought that gave such a higher bar for every job I was looking at as a leader.”

    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

  12. “Have those connections. I mean, everybody talks about the PayPal mafia and how they've gone on to do things. Like I was super lucky to be at Google for so many years and I know I spent a lot of time with ex-Goglers that I met and that are all working in different companies now because you build those relationships by working together. So if you follow people and where you're going to learn the most You go step by step. I think that's a great way of progressing in your career.”

    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

  13. “You learn the most from people. I don't look for domains or, I mean, some people have a domain like I'm super interested in like, you know, climate or whatever, and they really want to work in that area, and that's fine. So maybe within that area, but you follow people who are the best at what they do. So it's not good enough to follow somebody who you like. You want to follow somebody who's either the best product thinker or the best engineer or the best salesperson. And so that you will learn the skill of how to be the best at that. So you follow people where you're going to learn the most. And a way to do that also is you look at where the great people are going. So you want to go to companies where there's also a nexus of great people because they together will do great things. And even if the company fails or succeeds but not as much as you'd like, you still”

    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. “And they're like, oh my God, that's so great to hear because I have no idea what I want to do in five years. I'm like, I still have no idea what I want to do in five years. I've never had an idea what I want to do in five years. And when, you know, early in your career, you have a lot more angst about it because the forks in the road are more significant because they can go like, do I go get an MBA or do I go work for somebody? Do I be a product manager or an engineer? And those really take you in very different paths. And I meet a lot of kids in their, I shouldn't call them kids. My kids are my kids' friends, but a lot of people who are younger in their career who are struggling with this a little bit. So what I believe. And I've always believed that you follow people.”

    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

  15. “Really recently, I was talking to somebody in their 20s who was asking me for career advice, and should I be a product manager, et cetera. And like I'm trying to put together my five-year plan. And I said, I never had a five-year plan. So to be clear, some people need that. That's the kind of people they are. They want the planning. I said, it's great if you want that, but I never had it. And the person I was talking to just relaxed.”

    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

  16. “And it's not a good excuse to not have an organization that functions. You should still strive to have an organization that's functioning and keep people happy and motivated and all that.”

    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

  17. “Well, no product market fit is a death sentence, I would say more like that. Like you can't, like if you built a product that people aren't really excited to use, then you don't have a company because it's very hard to do that unless you have a distribution machine and then you catch up over time, but we will not name companies like that. So there are other ways of doing it, but yeah, that is the most important thing.”

    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

  18. “Really do start breaking, but then once you get all the right leadership in place, processes in place, then it starts to get better. So it goes through ups and downs and level of chaos.”

    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

  19. “A lot of it is that because if you are in hypergrowth, you've got customers coming at a really fast pace. You're growing your company really quickly in the number of employees. And it's just really hard to keep up because things in the infrastructure break, things in the communication breakdown, you've got at any given point 50% of the company has been there less than six months. But you have to grow really fast because once you hit product market fit, if you don't, then your growth will stop. So if you're suddenly growing, especially if you're an enterprise company, you have to have salespeople. If you're a consumer company, your systems have to keep running as you scale and look at companies like MySpace. Well, they died because their product got too slow. And so some companies have initial product market fit and then they don't keep up. And so I do think a lot of it is it's very hard to grow that fast. And so things.”

    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

  20. “They're not a company I would enjoy going to work in the morning, or they're not aligned with what I'm good at. So just because a company is doing well, if the chaos is chaos and something that's going to make you upset and unhappy, don't work 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

  21. “Until they get to a certain scale Now, once you reach a certain scale and you've already conquered the market, then you kind of need to be well run. Then you bring in professional managers and things are about the cost and executing and getting all the like once you get to like over 5,000 people or 10,000 people like you got to have things that, I mean, then you're like a growth engine. So different, you have to know what phase you're in and what's important at that phase. So it isn't that at every phase, chaos is okay. And also some chaos is okay and some chaos is not okay. If you're changing your strategy all the time and you're changing your direction and you're changing like you're changing projects on people all the time so that they can't actually achieve anything. So there's this is again so you can't simplify it that some chaos is okay and some isn't. And also some chaos is right for you as a person. Like there are some well run, there's some really great companies I would never work at because they don't fit me.”

    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

  22. “I had that perspective of let's just make sure that we do the right things and don't get too worked up about all the things that are broken because every startup has so many things that are broken.”

    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

  23. “So, what are the things that really matter? We always talk about product market fit. Nobody really knows what product market fit is, everybody has a different explanation, but it means like people want to use your product, that they're like clamoring for it. So you've built something that people value and that people value and that solves a problem for them, but that's also not good enough. You need to build a great product, but you also have to have distribution and you need to have a sales team that works. And those are probably, and you have to have enough money in the bank to get there. So those are probably the things that are the most important I might be missing something. And then within each of those, there's the things that really mattered. And there's so many features that we built at Slack that were the most important features ever that failed and nobody used, so that clearly didn't have an impact. And you can see that in retrospect, but I think after being at multiple different big companies and small companies,”

    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

  24. “I can think of one company I know really well amazing CEO well run well oiled machine everything hired zeal and they flatlined So you just see it. You see it over and over again, and people get very upset about these things that aren't working. And one of the things I try and do is give a perspective of what matters and what doesn't. And it might even be to the sales team because you get like all these requests for features all the time. If you did every single one, it would be impossible. But even if you did, 80-90% of them won't matter for the success of the company. But then there are some that really matter.”

    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

  25. “Love working at well run companies. It's more fun. Your people are happier. I like running a well-run team. So I aspire to have a very well-run team and to work at a well-run company. But what I've seen is when a company isn't well-run, like IT isn't working, marketing is broken, there are not enough people in HR. There's a lot of turnover. All of these things. I've seen that they're not correlated to the company being successful. So I can think of a couple examples right now of companies I know, not Glean where I'm working today, where there's like high executive turnover, where people get yelled at. There are lots of people fired. There's reorgs all the time. People I talk to are super unhappy, but the numbers are amazing. Like they're growing like crazy. And the opposite of Sid is also true.”

    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

  26. “Was my first management job, and they're like, and I wanted to be a manager. And I said, here's why I don't think that this team should exist. It's not the right thing for the company. It's not going to be productive. And my manager was so stunned. He was like, wait, you're saying no? I'm like, yeah, because here's how you should organize it. And then he's like, you know, you're right. And I'll find you something else. And he did”

    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

  27. “Are you helping the business move forward? So it's not about I achieved what I was asked to do, but did you build something that people actually used? It's not about just launching something. And did you do the right thing for the company? And that is different. It's a different mindset. Did you enable the entire organization to be more productive despite you? So I remember very early in my career I was working as an engineer and I was offered a job to manage a team that was across different programs. And I went back to my, I took a vacation, I came back and I said, you know, I don't think this team should exist.”

    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

  28. “And listen to your customers, listen to the people because I also see this as like, you're building a feature and you think it's the best thing. Because of course everyone's going to want it because you worked on it and you're going to put it front and center in the interface where everybody's going to see it. Well, no, you got to earn that right. And that is another thing that people do is they want the thing they worked on to be right there. But it might not be the most important thing that a person needs at that point. So have perspective, have perspective of what your users are actually trying to achieve.”

    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

  29. “One of the things that I caution product managers about is that you don't want to be too overly reliant on metrics and you want to also have an intuition. You want product managers who understand intuitively their customers and their product. And sometimes you'll make decisions because you just know it's the right thing to do because it feels right. And it usually is right if you understand your product well enough. How do you get good at it? Ask a lot of questions. Don't assume you know. Go in. Mark Benioff would always say, have a beginner's mind. Go in assuming that you know nothing.”

    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

  30. “And when I was growing up, we would have family occasions, go to events, whatever. And afterwards, in the car ride back, he would always give his perspective of analyzing what happened at the event. What this person was thinking, why did they say this? And then he would like quiz me of like, why do you think they did that? And it was really interesting because it taught me to see the whole room, to see how people react. Like Lenny, if you say something and somebody else is there, look at the other person. What's their face saying? You can understand so much if you're paying attention. So I think when you want to build for people and lead organizations, it is about the people and understanding them and motivating them.”

    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

  31. “What are they trying to accomplish? What's the goal for their career? So you have to be able to read people, ask lots of questions to understand them. And I'll say one thing that really helped me. This is a strange segue, but my father was a psychiatrist”

    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

  32. “So now the question is the difference in leadership and executive roles, and like when you're getting there, so how do you start transitioning? So after you've done a great job at everything and you understand the core skills that you need, another thing you really need to know is understanding people and motivations. And when you're building products, you have to understand why does somebody want to use your product? What problem are they solving? Why do they want to click on that button? What's going to make them feel good when they click on them? What's it going to give them delight and what's also going to make them feel bad and frustrated? And what do they not want to do? So you need to understand motivations in people for building products and for building teams and organizations. So just like why does somebody want to click on a button? Why does somebody want to join your team? Why do they want to work hard?”

    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

  33. “One of the things that I think is overlooked is do a really good job at whatever your job is at that point. So people have a tendency, especially product managers, are very ambitious and they want to get to the next level and they're always eyeing the next job, but you're not going to get the next job unless you do really well at the job that you're in. Like knock it out of the park, however simple, however easy it may be to you. do a great job and in tech jobs there's like table stakes there's table stakes of you need to be technical you need to know the latest technology you need to understand your product the product you're working on no matter what your role is you have to understand it deeply you need to understand metrics so especially product managers have kind of a wide berth of things that they need to understand so those those are a given you need to do that”

    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

  34. “Make sure you go somewhere where you have a good engineering partner because if you have great ideas of what build but you can't get them built then you go nowhere so that has to be part of your evaluation criteria that you meet and value your engineering partner before you join. 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. You 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.”

    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