The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack)

You've worked at so many great companies. YouTube, when you joined, my understanding is.

YouTube was losing a lot of money. There were many times where Google leadership reconsidered the acquisition and should we like.

Sell YouTube, if you can believe it or not. At Thumbtack, it looks like you went.

From one to negative one and then back to one. I remember in a board meeting, the new model really started to show legs and one of the board members, Brian.

Shreier at Sequoia, said it was the prettiest smile graph that he had ever seen.

When you were at Facebook, you built what is called the new product experimentation team, trying to create a startup within a startup. You're thinking on a different time horizon. If you're a large organization, and you do some performance management process twice a year in your zero to one incubator, you've already killed it. It's the wrong incentive.

As the chief product officer, Grammarly, I'm curious what word you most often misspell.

The T-E-D-T-E-H. T-E-H, yeah, exactly. Oh man. Yeah, yeah.

Today my guest is Noam Lewinsky. Noam is currently chief product officer at Grammarly. Previously he was an early PM at YouTube, where he spent five years leading the creator product experience experience, and then the broader YouTube consumer product experience. He then went on to take on the chief product officer role at Thumbtack, which involved helping the company reignite growth after a downturn caused by some changes Google made in SEO. He then went on to Facebook, where he created the new product experimentation team, whose charter was to incubate big new ideas protected from the larger Facebook org. GNOME has such a unique set of experiences, taking products from zero to one, from negative one to one, from one to a hundred, and even starting his own companies. He's never really been on a podcast before and he rarely ever tweets or posts anything online, which we actually talk about. In our conversation, we walk through the lessons that he's learned through his amazing career at YouTube, Facebook, Thumbtack, and at Grammarly. We talk about when it makes sense to kill your project at a company, when it makes sense to ask to be layered at a company, why you should be keeping a nose out for which products matter most at a business and how to find those products. Why you need to diversify your growth channels at your business. Why you should be finding work that is going to most stretch you to help you advance in your career. A bunch of advice for creating space for innovation within a large company. And so much more. Noam is such a gem and I'm really excited to share his wisdom with you. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow this podcast in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes. and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Noam Lewinsky, after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Whimsical, the iterative product workspace. Whimsical helps product managers build clarity and shared understanding faster with tools designed for solving product challenges. With Whimsical, you can easily explore new concepts using drag and drop wireframe and diagram components, Create rich product briefs that show and sell your thinking. And keep your team aligned with one source of truth for all of your build requirements. Whimsical also has a library of easy-to-use templates from product leaders like myself, including a Project Proposal One Pager and a Go-To-Market Worksheet. Give them a try and see how fast and easy it is to build clarity with Whimsical. Sign up at whimsical.com/lenny. for 20% off a Whimsical Pro plan. That's whimsical.com/leni. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market-leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risks. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/lenny. That's v-a-n-t-a.com/lenny. Noam, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me, Lenny.

It's absolutely my pleasure. I've heard so many great things about you from so many people. I think you're friends with a lot of guests that have been on this podcast. And something that I find really interesting about you and really respect about you is that you've worked at so many great companies and you've done so many big things in your career. But you barely ever tweet. You don't have a newsletter. I don't see many things on LinkedIn. I don't think you've even been on a podcast before. I think the only evidence I can find that you exist is you have this YouTube channel that's just like you go-karting and kids and people wishing you a happy birthday.

Oh gosh, I should go monitor that. I forgot about that.

You might wanna, yeah, anyway, people are gonna go find it now.

Yeah, yeah, that's funny. Yeah, you know, it's funny. I think about that a lot. Like, am I doing something wrong? Should I be putting more effort I mean, it's funny that you mentioned newsletter. Like, I spend a lot of time with the Substack team. It's been a very active advisor there. The team is fantastic, by the way. And I think about it, am I doing something wrong in my career by not doing that? But just to be honest, it's just not, it doesn't come authentically to me. It doesn't come naturally to me. I get really focused on the thing that I am working on and get really deep in the thing that I am working on. And I have a a hard time kind of multitasking a lot outside of that, to be totally honest. And the way that I kind of get to know the industry and other teams and whatnot is just through working with people. I'm not like a very big networker. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that. I wish I were better at that. I get to know people by doing work with them, by helping them. And it doesn't necessarily scale in the same way that Twitter does, but it's It's served me well so far and it's more kind of authentic and it's what comes more natural to me. And so that's how I do it. So like, I'm doing a lot of coffees. I'm like, you know, meeting people that way. I'm not doing a lot of tweeting or writing of newsletters, maybe one day.

But that's not me today. So I think this is an awesome example of you can be incredibly successful as a product manager and as anyone in tech not investing time posting online and I'm going to incriminate myself here, but I feel like the advice I always share with people is the best. People are not spending time tweeting and talking online, sharing on LinkedIn. They're just doing the work. They don't have time for that sort of thing. And I think you're a great example of that. Is there anything along those lines that you share with folks that are just.

Like, Hey, should I be investing time here? I think everyone can chart their own path and has a way that is sort of authentic to them and leans on their strengths. What I often coach people is Do what you like. You're generally going to be a lot better at the things that really fill you up, that really get you excited. And life is short. There's so many things to be doing out there. We're so lucky. The number of interesting waves of technology that I've experienced just makes me feel like it's going to keep happening for a long time. We're very fortunate to be born in the time that we are and have the opportunities that we are. So why spend your time doing something that doesn't feel good because you think that it might lead to some success where if you lean on what's authentic to you and what makes you happy, chances are you're going to be one of the best people at those things.

I love that advice. And I think it's so important. I think there's a lot of pressure on people too. I need to do this, I need to do that, I need to tweet, I need to share content to be successful. And this comes up a lot on this podcast that the more you could just stick close to what gives you energy and what you enjoy doing, oftentimes that leads to things you wouldn't expect and a lot of success. Speaking of that, looking at your career arc, I noticed a really interesting pattern and a really diverse set of experiences. So just kind of talking through places you've been. At Facebook, you worked on zero to one stuff. At YouTube, the way I see it is you almost went from negative one to one. At Thumbtack, It looks like you went from one to negative one and then back to one. So it's like a really unique turnaround story. And then with Grammarly, it feels like it's like, I don't know, one or, I don't know, five to a hundred or wherever you end up taking it. So I thought it'd be fun to talk through each of these experiences because they're such unique approaches or such unique experiences and see what lessons and wisdom we can extract from your journey.

Sounds great.

Okay, sweet. so I'm thinking reverse chronologically, we start with YouTube, which the way I see it is it's kind of negative one to one. When you join, my understanding is YouTube was losing a lot of money. When you left, they were not losing money. And I was actually just looking. They're valued apparently at 200 billion dollars today. YouTube as a business. So I know you haven't been there for a while, but great, great work. What lessons did you take away from that Journey? What stories come to mind from that part of your career that might be helpful to people.

Maybe first to start with kind of like why hop around these experiences? I always tell people I feel like I'm an IC trapped in a manager's body sometimes. Fundamentally, I like to build. That's why I do this. I like to make things. And so sometimes the more fun way to make things is to start something and sometimes the better way to make things in the situation that I'm in is to try to support teams and lead through teams. And so I joined YouTube through an acquisition of a company I started. And in the beginning, what I was doing there is just rebuilding that product on Google infrastructure and for YouTube customers. And maybe the first lesson was actually to look around at what the rest of the team was doing and be really honest and open about the relative priority of the thing that you're working on, even if it might lead to your project getting canceled. So one of the things that I remember doing really on is actually talking to the leadership team and being like, I don't think we should be putting 50 engineers on this project. Looking at the rest of the roadmap and the rest of the priority, or the rest of the priorities, excuse me. I think this team would likely be better served elsewhere, even though that was likely negotiating my way out of a job in like month three. I don't know, I just, I kind of felt like that was the right thing for the team and for the business. And then that started a very interesting journey because, you know, from there basically, you know, the leadership was like, You're right. We're going to wind that down and build some of those features into the existing product. And now you come and lead this focus area we're calling the Creator Focus Area. So I went from basically rebuilding the product that our startup had built to leading one of the three focus areas at YouTube. There was the Viewer Team, the Creator Team, and the Advertiser Team. And Hunter Walk, who's amazing, was leading the Viewer Team. And Shashir Morocha who's also very amazing, was leading the advertising team.

What an alumni community.

There was me. And I was like, you know, I was sort of like, you know, 29-year-old startup-y guy working with these guys who were awesome. And YouTube in general was and continues to be an incredible team. And so I think that was like a first, like really good lesson that in the right organizations, even in large organizations, advocate for what's best for the team, advocate for what's best for the organization, even if that means that it puts you at a particular difficult moment. If it is a healthy team that rewards those sorts of decisions and actions, good things will happen. If it's not, that's good to know too. And that's good to know early. that's one thing that comes to mind. Maybe one other, I would say, atypical career choice that I made shortly thereafter is then when I was put.

In.

That role, I really struggled in that role. I was reporting to the CEO at the time, a guy named Saurabh Kumar, who's also awesome, who Google's sixth employee and just learned a ton from him, like an incredible strategic thinker. But he was asking me questions that I felt like they were from a different planet. I was like, I didn't know what they meant. And he just thought in a different way, a different level, a different scale. And that's still something that I was learning. Eventually, I figured it out. But I was really struggling in that moment. And I had a really good relationship with both Hunter and Shashir, and they really helped me through that. And eventually I went to Saler and said, Hey, I think I should actually report to Hunter. I think this would work better if we combined the organizations this way and then we divided and conquered this way. And again, very atypical. No one has ever come to me in my career and said, I would like you to layer me in this other person. You know, in that moment, I was just like, this is how I will do better work. This is how I will get better support. I will be kind of like happier and more productive and it will be better for the team. And you know what? Like I, for me anyway, I was right. And we, we made that change and Hunter was a fantastic manager and support at YouTube. I like learned a ton, grew a lot. And then eventually when, when he moved on, you know, Shashir took over the, the organization and then I moved into the, into the viewer part of the organization, which is where I spent the rest of my time there, which was leading and supporting the viewer PM team at YouTube.

These stories are amazing. It connects to your point that you're kind of an IC in inner child IC, where you keep trying to kill your career by accident. Like, no, let's kill this project I'm working on. I'm going to demote myself a little bit, but clearly it's worked out. Is there anything that you saw that gave you that confidence that this is actually going to be okay? Because again, people don't normally think this is how you get ahead in your career, is you kill your team and you layer yourself.

Yeah, I think having a broader view of the company's strategy, having an instinct for what we should be doing and why, and how I might prioritize all of these investments if I were given the opportunity to do that. I think internalizing that and understanding that and then trying to align whatever is under your influence towards that overall goal is very helpful and made me feel like I'm pretty confident this is going to be okay because it will lead to better results for the organization given what we're trying to do. And so as long as I'm trying to push decisions or actions that actually lead to better results. If it's a healthy culture and organization, I should be okay. And I think that the other thing is just over the years, I got extremely lucky. The first job that I got out of school was an incredible group of people. And it gave me a nose for talent. It gave me a nose for what like great feels like and what like a high functioning team feels like. And it's hard to like kind of like know that without like experiencing that. And so in the moments like and YouTube was also one of those teams, like Grammarly is one of those teams. Thumbtack was one of those teams. Being able to sniff that out when you're trying to kind of choose the next team is very important. But I think that's another thing that gave me confidence. Like I I learned these people well enough, Hunter, Shashir, et cetera, to have that kind of the instinct that the right thing will happen. This will be better for me and the broader team.

Got it. So the key there is just you have to trust that the team around you is good enough that you're not going to be pushed off into a corner. I think you made a really profound point here that a lot of people don't get about the job of a product leader and a product manager, that a big part of your job is to think about what is best for the business and work backwards from that. Not necessarily what's the best thing for the user is the highest priority, necessarily what's the best thing for my team and how do I hit the goals that I'm obsessed with. It's what is going to be best for the business broadly and then make decisions there. Is there anything more you can say there about just how powerful that is as a way of thinking about prioritization and decisions as a product manager?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think ideally, things that are best for the customer, there's high overlap with that, with things that are best for the business, but not always, right? And I think figuring out some principles that help kind of guide those sorts of conflicts can be really, really helpful. At Thumbtack, we had principles about which sides of the marketplace we wanted to serve in, in which order and kind of when we serve Thumbtack. Right. So it was customers first, pros second, and then Thumbtack last. And that's actually the first two. Saying Thumbtack last is like the easy thing to say. Actually doing it in action, I think, is a very different thing. But that first one of like, should we especially when you're starting a marketplace, as you know well, Lenny, supply is so critical. Many marketplaces live and die by the quality and liquidity and supply. And so why would you focus on customers first in the Thumbtack perspective and supply are the pros, the people that you hire? Well, we always just felt that what the pros need from us is more customers. what the pros need from us is like high quality customers. And so if we really try to, you know, make a great customer experience that attracts more customers, helps them find the right pros, provides the highest quality customers, then that will therefore be better for the pros. And so that's how we should we should prioritize them. So that's and if we do those things right, then the business will benefit, right? And so doing things like raising prices because we think it's good for the business, even though it causes liquidity issues in the marketplace might be a little, you know, a little bit of a local maxima, locally optimizing rather than globally optimizing. So I think sometimes in these sorts of questions, trying to establish some set of guiding principles that help navigate some of these more ambiguous or thorny questions can be really helpful.

I want to circle back to this first point you made and the experience you had convincing people that your first project shouldn't be something you work on. How long do you stick with something that isn't going well and then decide, okay, let's convince people this is something I should move on from versus like, you don't want to give up on a project quickly, right? You want to give it a shot.

I mean, look, I don't know that it's a perfect answer, but I think the reality is that what kills most projects, most early companies is stamina. And I think that you, you know, we all need to work on, you know, kind of being more resilient about kind of like, I remember at Thumbtack, Marco, the CEO, we used to say that it feels like we're running uphill and chewing glass. And you kind of like, that's right. Like we want to do that. That's good for us. We take our medicine. So you want to practice that sort of resiliency. But ultimately, I think that what starts to happen is you start to lose the stamina and you're just not bringing your best self to the situation. And so many of these things that are like so high ambiguity where you don't know exactly what to build or you don't know exactly, you're not getting the signal you need or the feedback you need to be able to hone it in and know that you're doing something well. They require just an ungodly level of faith and stamina. And so that's sort of like what I look to when you see like a team that is motivated, that is building something like they're really excited about. I mean, just like the inertia, the quality, like just everything, it's just like a whole different game where when you see a team that's sort of like down and out and they've, you know, they've really, they've been hitting their head against the wall for a long time. Sometimes they just need like a change of scene, a change of pace, and they get to like a much better situation. So, My honest answer is, yeah, it's the when do you run out of steam is usually the question. And I think that happens usually before you, you know, like in the startup case, a lot of times before you run out of money or, you know, these other things.

We've talked about Thumbtack a couple times now, so let's talk about that. I love this description of running up hill, climbing glass. My understanding is when you join, things were going well, and then things started to go much less well. and then you help turn things around. Talk about that part of your journey and what you learned from that time.

Yeah, sure. Again, really fantastic team and really strong founders. You know, that company was just on the bleeding edge of things like SEO and growing by SEO. And it was like one of the best organizations at driving growth through that channel. But I think the thing that I learned really early, which Lenny, you know, with your background, you probably know as well. SEO is a sort of like a live by the sword, die by the sword, you know, channel of, of growth. And I think that one channel growth company is, like, always a no-No and so that, that's a little bit of kind of what we, what we had at, at thumbtack. So it was funny because I remember when I joined and, you know, Marco and I had an agreement where it's like, okay, I'm gonna take do my several three months of like onboarding, listening tour, new leader, inheriting a team, I've always gotten advice like that's what you should do. Marco being an entrepreneur and a hard running founder is like, yeah, yeah, sure, sure. And then like a month in, it's like, all right, we got to run like 2024 planning, go. Or not 2024, sorry at the time it was. And yeah, in the early days, like when I was there, Thumbtack was seeing triple digit growth. Then we had some, you know, a couple SEO hits that got us down to double-digit growth. And then, like, you know, not too long after that, we were actually, for the first time in the company's history, seeing negative year-over-year growth. And Google was just, like, really coming down on our category as we were, by the way, trying to rebuild the whole product and change the monetization model and everything in between. So it was a really tough moment of how much do we spend to reinforce the old model while we're building the new model, changing the engine while the plane is flying. And I think I remember in a board meeting, once we turned that around and over time and also the new model really started to show legs and and really started to work. One of the board members, Brian Schreier at Sequoia, said it was the prettiest smile graft that he had ever seen. And it was a really, you know, obviously a really proud moment there. But I think that the thing that I took away from that, which I tell PMs quite a bit, is, you know, growth masks all problems. Like you don't really have an, I think, true understanding of like what is working well and what is not working well when you have like incredible growth. YouTube was a great example of that. And at Thumbtack, it had incredible growth for quite some time, but it was essentially burning through a lot of demand. It was just dropping a lot of demand on the floor because there wasn't sufficient liquidity on the supply side to really meet that demand. And the team knew and was trying to work on that problem, but it wasn't as urgent or high priority because you're having triple-digit growth. what's wrong, what's wrong? Like everything's going great, right? And then the moment growth starts to slow or certainly when growth starts to be negative, all of a sudden the tenor in the organization really changes and you start like looking at things very differently and trying to understand like what's actually going on. And so I think it's actually a very healthy thing for businesses to go through, you know, as they kind of turn into long term sustainable businesses to have those sorts of moments because I think otherwise it's just really challenging to identify where the true issues are. And I think as a PM, if you've only ever worked on things that grow and you've never felt the other side of that and how to kind of help turn that around with your team, I think you lose a lot in your career if you don't experience that. I'm kind of naturally paranoid and especially as I manage growth, I often look at things and ask myself, okay, what do I do right now if it negative. How would I prioritize things if it went negative? Having gone through that experience, I just look at things in a different way of urgency. I look at things at different levels of priority given having gone through that experience.

With this thumbtack story, I think it's rare that a business gets the smile graph that you describe, this pretty smile graph that this board member has ever seen. I think that is rarely the case. Usually it doesn't come back up. Can you share what you did to help Thumbtack turn things around? I know it's very particular to Thumbtack in the business, but just anything there that would be useful to people?

Sure. First of all, this is very much the team. It's not just things that I did. But so, I mean, first was turning on multiple channels of growth. up until then, Temtac had kind of tried and stopped paid channels, other organic channels, like referrals, all of the typical things. And so we just went back to first principles on a lot of that and also just kind of reformed a team around that and basically got an amazing team together, one of them, Whitney Steele is running marketing at Descript now. Another one, David Schein is running product at Hims. But basically went back to first principles on some of those growth channels and experimented our way to much, much better results. And, you know, I think that one of the things that we were doing incorrectly at Thumbtack is Thumbtack is actually a marketplace that is actually made up of thousands of marketplaces, right? DJ's in Philadelphia is one marketplace. DJ's in Atlanta is another marketplace. Contractors in Sonoma is another marketplace. And then Thumbtack is obviously the container of all of those marketplaces. And I think we were just bifurcating our targeting and our growth efforts a little too narrowly, assuming we had to sort of grow in that way, market by market. rather than targeting more broadly, providing sort of the more aggregate data to Google and others, and then optimizing from there. The fact that we already had really good showing in SEO and really good page rank in SEO helped to bolster things like SEM and then eventually Facebook as well. But I think that the core issue, those were kind of the growth levers. the core issue with the Thumbtack product was that it was just a very high friction customer experience that really left customers waiting. So the way that Thumbtack worked basically was a customer would find them through a search query. They would come in and they would answer a number of questions about the job they needed done. And then Thumbtack would say, okay, great, we'll get back to you in 24 hours. And this is a modern day experience, right? And then what Temptek would do is they would take that job and they would federate it out to as many of the pros that might kind of like match the criteria. And then the pros would pay to quote to show up as a potential provider for that job. Now, I don't want to take anything away from that team because that worked phenomenally well for a really long time. And it's actually it's a perfect case study in like just do the scrappy thing that works to grow and they did that very well. But the stage and size of the business when I joined it had kind of like outgrown that. And the team knew that. That's obviously a very high friction experience, right? Like the idea that the customer, they're super excited, they want to hire someone, and at that moment you'd be like, Cool, talk to you soon. Not the best experience. And the fact that you're asking your supply to put up money to even show up to customers in the first place, where what the customers want to see is the supply. Tell me who I can hire. Also, a lot of friction on that side and also in some cases, some unfair revenue on that side. Because if folks are paying to be seen and maybe they're looked at, but there's not really high intent, then you're not going to get the customers they want. They're going to be spending revenue. They're not going to be getting revenue back. turns into just a bad loop, obviously. So the main thing we did is to rebuild that whole loop, change the monetization model, build a system where essentially pros could provide instant quotes. Lenny, I'm sure from Airbnb, this is very familiar. The move from request to book to instant booking, it was a very similar thing in a different kind of category of service and supply, obviously. But that shift and doing that shift across those thousands of marketplaces and then finding the right friction point for monetization and when and what to charge people for and all of that change, that is what really, you know, at its core, turned the growth engine around at Thumbtack. And it's just a real testament to those founders that they kind of believed that, like saw that and were willing to kind of like, run a pill and shoe glass to get to that point. I don't know the details of the business anymore. If I did, I wouldn't speak to it, but from what I hear, things are going well. I think that served the company well. Yeah.

As you were talking about that, that's exactly an experience Airbnb went through. I actually led that effort at Airbnb. It took three years of my life.

Oh my gosh, we should talk about that one day.

Yeah. I've written about it here and there, but honestly, very quietly is one of the biggest transformations Airbnb went through, shifting from, I'm going to go request a book to basically every booking now on Airbnb is instant. And that was a very difficult and painful journey, but looking back, I don't think Airbnb would have made it if not for that. And unlike Thumbtack, we did it before things were starting to fall apart. We're like, we, and actually I was going to say, the lens that we used that I find really helpful here is you should be asking yourself, if somebody was to come into our space and disrupt us and start now to become the new Airbnb, what would they do?

Yeah, totally.

And it was obvious they'd be make it instant, just the way it works. Yeah. Welcome to Airbnb's disrupter.

Yeah.

And so yeah.

Another learning there is any product you work on that involves like bits and atoms is exponentially harder than products that just involve bits. But it's amazing how something as seemingly simple as make it instant ends up being so incredibly deep and complicated. And especially on an existing business, kind of making that transition while still growing is just very, very complicated. Fantastic learning, I'm sure you had as well.

Very difficult to change people's expectations and behavior. This could be its own podcast episode, just changing marketplaces into an instant experience. I wanted to circle back real quick to the first lesson you had there, which is Adding new channels, I think that's a really interesting takeaway here. So essentially Thumbtack was reliant on SEO, Google slash the sword as you described, started changing things. So traffic stopped coming. And I think a cool lesson here is just if you're reliant on one growth channel, which I think most companies actually are, I think most companies have one main driver. I think a lesson here is potentially before things start to fall apart, especially if you're SEO driven, start to explore more proactively paid referrals.

Totally. I mean, I think maybe it's, it's again, it's kind of like living through that. Now, anytime I like look at a product or look at a team, it's like one of the first things that perks up the paranoia of just like, oh, no, you don't want to be in that in that situation. Let's figure out now how you start to diversify because you just never know, like you say, when one of those might dry up.

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I would say this. I think especially at the leadership level, the team that reports to the CEO, that group doesn't always have the opportunity to do a lot of project work together, right? You've got your CFO, you've got your head of sales, you got your product and your engineering, and there's just not as often a sort of natural ways for that group to work together. And then when something happens, like growth goes negative, that group is very important. And that group's ability to tackle hard things together is very important. And I think that one important lesson from that is no one can be a bystander on product strategy. If you've got, just because you've got product in your title doesn't mean you're the only one that should be thinking about product strategy, certainly at that level. Certainly not in engineering. The CFO, the head of people, everyone needs to have a seat at the table when it comes to product strategy, what the company's doing, and what they're going to do to kind of grow out of the situation that they're in. Because otherwise, in those hard times, it can be like a, what have you done for me lately? Sort of a dynamic. And that's just not the right dynamic to have on that team. And I'm not saying that at Thumbtack we had the right dynamic, but I think it was a really important learning in that moment of how that team, even if they didn't typically get as involved in things like product strategy and what we're building, how everyone had to be all hands on deck and really thinking about those sorts of problems because the only way I think you can get a whole company and team out of those situations. That's why everyone getting involved in doing their part and pulling on the levers that they have in their area in order to do that well. I don't think it can work in any other way.

So there's a lesson there, build a relationship with the leadership team before things start to go awry.

Yes, certainly that. But I think it's also incumbent for people in our roles and in engineering roles to bring strategy to that discussion, to that group in a way that it is possible for everyone to engage and everyone to internalize and understand what it means for their area and to even have obviously a say in because they're on the leadership team at the end of the day. They should feel like their fingerprint is also on the company strategy. And as soon as it starts to feel like that's their world, that's our world. And I think that's true for any of those, any of the functions. It's true for what's happening in sales, it's true for what's happening in marketing. As product managers, we naturally need to be the connective tissue across all of that, but I think the whole leadership team at that level should feel like connective tissue across all of those functions.

Okay, let's transition to Facebook. And this is, I think, an example of zero to one. So when you were at Facebook, you built what is called the new product experimentation team. I actually thought it was called the new product experiment experience team, but I think it's new product experimentation team. And my understanding is the idea there is instead of Facebook having to buy the next Instagram and WhatsApp and all the things, basically incubate startups within Facebook and this fabled concept, a startup within a startup, create all these startups within a startup. And as an outsider, it feels like it was really fun for a while, but it hasn't let any amazing new businesses for Facebook. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm curious what that experience was like, what he took away from it, how it went, what you think about when you look back at that part of your journey.

I was one of a few folks that kind of joined that team early and helped build that team, how it ended up and how it closed down. I don't, I'm not familiar with because I wasn't there. But I think in terms of was it a success or not because it didn't build the next Instagram, I think is a little bit of the wrong bar to set for, for, for things like that. Um, you know, to, to some, to some extent, it's like, you know, did, did, did the group win the lottery or not? And let's judge their, let's judge their success. Obvious, I'm not, I'm not saying that, you know, discovering something like Instagram is just like winning the lottery. But you, you, you get what I mean in terms of like the, the rarity of those sorts of discoveries and those sorts of products. I think that that team was very realistic about sort of the, what I would say would be like the champagne level outcomes and or more like the, you know, kind of beer, like nice dinner, kind of like level outcomes.

Good wine.

Yeah, the wine. Yeah, thank you. That's a better analogy. And I think we built knowing those sorts of outcomes would also be very beneficial to the organization. So as an example, one of them is at Facebook scale, doing things that don't scale or doing things that start out small was just a muscle that was really hard to come by. It's like any community product that you build, any kind of social where there's community density that's important early on, any product that you build that way, starting with a million users is a really hard way to do that. And at places like Facebook and Google, it's hard to run an experiment with a hundred people. It's not hard, it's impossible, right? this idea that you would have to get real small, that you would have to start very targeted, that you would have to start with things that clearly don't scale and don't have a chance of being big from the get-go is really, really hard in an organization like that. And so creating that space for NPE to be able to do that, to be able to help remind the organization what are the mechanisms we need to be able to build and learn that way was very beneficial. Even simple things, you know, like at an organization of Facebook size, maybe you experience this at Airbnb, like it is really hard for product managers, engineers, and designers to talk directly with customers. It is like basically impossible. You're almost always like, talking through some third party, some recruiting, you know, agency, you know, like, and getting like reports and you're not always in the room. And imagine like building a startup, like a product from day one and not being able to sit right next to your customer and being like, show me how you do this or show me how you do that. You know, it's like, it is, it's incredible. It's incredibly hard. You're, you're looking for such faint signal, the idea that you would try to get it through layers of indirection and games of telephone is crazy. But at that scale, that's what you have to do, because there's all of these legal concerns and many other realistic concerns about what you can say to who and who you can talk to and what you can tell them about what you're doing and all of these things. So creating an environment where those sorts of constraints were lifted and were different was very beneficial, I think, to the organization and kind of started to shed a light on some of the things that were broken that make it hard to kind of build zero to one in those sorts of environments. I also think it was a really fantastic recruiting tool. You know, it did build a really great group of folks, many of which have left to go start interesting companies. But I guess what I'm trying to say is I think when you're an organizational leader and Shreya was the org leader that was supporting NP at the time, and he's fantastic and really did a good job of firewalling that team. I think you're looking at a a set of objectives and a number of ways that you might help the company and the organization. And even if you set that kind of like that light on the hill to be like, go find the next Instagram, many of the things that you would do along the way to find the next Instagram end up being very beneficial to the broader organization. We saw a lot of that at NPE.

That's a really interesting perspective. There's a lot of other goals with something like this. It's not just find the next massive business. the way I think you just, what I'm getting from this is like shine almost a mirror on the organization. Like here's the things we can't do with the regular business and we have to do something, we have to set this up in order to try something totally new and radical. Recruiting tool, I think is interesting. There's actually a teammate or being B, the way I described it was, I don't know how many people know about Burning Man and how it works, but there's this trash fence around the side that catches all the trash so it doesn't go into the desert. And I feel like there's teams sometimes.

That are the trash fence.

It's funny. Yeah. Or someone's about to leave and they're like, no, go work this cool stuff over here in the fridge, which is really interesting, but it's still within the company and maybe help with that, just keep people that are awesome at Meta.

Yeah. And you're right that the team didn't kind of discover the next Instagram. For what it's worth, things like Threads and ideas like Threads were in that team all of the time. I think that if that team caught the wave of generative AI and all of the opportunities and sort of like new technologies there. I think things could have also, because those are certain moments where you like having small, like really motivated, dedicated teams that aren't thinking about anything mainline can lead to like faster discoveries. I think that can also help. But there were a number of things that basically end up becoming features in other products and they were just easier, faster ways of validating and building building them because you didn't have the constraints of the mainline product development organization, right?

For someone that is thinking about trying to create a startup within a startup, something a lot of big companies are trying to do, is there a piece of advice or two that you'd share for helping this be effective? Maybe one is just the goal may not be build the next big business. There's these sub goals also. What comes to mind?

God, there's so many. And Shreya did a really fantastic job of removing a lot of these constraints. But so one is, I would say, think really hard about the incentive system. You know, smart, good people, you know, they even if they're not, they don't, they don't, even if they're not trying to, they end up kind of gaming things towards the incentive system. And so think long and hard about that. So for instance, if you're a large organization and you do some performance management process, like twice a year, and that's how you're going to evaluate and incentivize people in your zero to one incubator, you've already killed it. It's just like, it's the wrong incentive. It's the wrong timeframe. It creates adverse selection problems for the sort of people that you bring in. And so it's hard in an existing organization to say, we're going to take all these company processes around even how we level people and pay them and motivate them, and we're going to throw them out the window for this group, right? How you build the infrastructure you use. This is something that the NP team did really well. Everyone got to do their own thing from an infrastructure perspective. Just do what is best for the problem you're trying to solve in this moment, knowing that you're likely going to throw away a lot of this code anyway. like being able to do that in an organization like Facebook or Google, if you ask anyone that works those things, is really hard. And, you know, it takes someone like a Shreya to be like, Nope, like they're gonna get to do this, sorry. And so I think that's really helpful. For what it's worth, one of the organizations that we talked to that I felt like was doing this in one of the best ways was Nike. And Nike has this, you know, incubation lab and they just, they just, it's a completely different operating model. They recruit a completely different type of person, very different incentive system. And essentially, like, where they end up plugging them into Nike is that when they have something into the kind of the distribution marketing kind of growth like arms of Nike, but for the product discovery process, they're doing their whole, whole different thing once they've, like, find some fit. Then Nike comes in and goes, boom, I'm gonna help you explode your fit. But I think that the number one thing I would think about would be the incentive system and the adverse selection that can cause.

To me, the most important element of the incentive system, and maybe I'm reading between the lines, is you're basically competing against them starting their own thing and having upside if things go super well feels really important versus I'm just gonna get a cool salary meta and work on this thing. that doesn't lead to the same experience, right, as a startup or like everything's on the line. Yeah.

And also what time horizons, right? Like when you're starting a company, you're not thinking like in the next six months, I'm going to get a promo and I'm going to get a good rating and things are going to go well. You're thinking on a different, excuse me, time horizon and you're thinking about an outsized impact or an outsized incentive. And so I would think about that if you're starting things internally as well.

Awesome. Okay, let's move to the final bucket, Grammarly, which is where you're at now. And the way I'm thinking about it is this kind of like a one to rocket ship or, I don't know, 10. It's further along than one, but that's where you're at now. To me, Grammarly is interesting because it's one of the very few successful B2C subscription businesses. There's almost none. There's like Duolingo. Grammarly, and I know you're doing B2B also, but there's so few, there's so many dead bodies trying to build a business on top of consumer subscription. And so I'm just curious, what's the current state of Grammarly? How are things going? What do you think has been the key to it being successful all this time and continuing to grow? And what lessons have you learned? I know you just joined relatively recently, but anything you've taken away from that journey so far?

We don't talk about it often, but Grammarly is a much bigger company from a revenue perspective than I think people realize. The company has been around for 15 years and was profitable from day one and continues to be quite profitable. So it's a very healthy business that is much larger than folks might realize. That is actually quite intentional because the company was trying not to be noticed for a long time, very intentionally. The fact that you would have grammar and spell checking in Google Docs or grammar and spell checking in Word, people would often write off the company that how is that a business? How is that a feature? These products already have it. That was very convenient for Grammarly. they could kind of navigate between these giants in tech and grow a very phenomenal business kind of on this use case that people had kind of written off. Now, come the advent of LLMs, and it's no longer a use case that people are writing off. And sort of the dream of the founders that machines can assist us in communication in this way that they've had for 15 years. I feel like now the whole industry is like, well, this is obviously how we're going to communicate. And machines are going to do all these things for us. And Grammarly is now sort of in the center of that hurricane. And again, I think it's a similar thing where it's like, well, there's ChatGPT, there's Microsoft Copilot. How is Grammarly going to have a chance? But yet, things still seem like the future is bright. And so to your question, I think to what has made it work? I've only been here for 10 months, so please kind of take this with a grain of salt. But my instinct is that people really love Grammarly because of how it works and where it works. And what I mean by how it works is Grammarly is one of the few products where you just install it and it makes you better. You don't have to configure it. You don't have to manipulate it. You don't have to like change anything about like what you're doing. You carry on and across all of your applications, across all of your tabs, you'll start getting pushed assistance to you in the right moment. You could ignore it if you want, no big deal, but it takes a very, very small amount of effort to tap on one of those things, get some value and keep going. And I think that a product that is like, that easy to use, that easy to extract value from, but then also that prevalent, like how many different text boxes do you write in in a given day? I mean, it is not less than 10, it is tens or potentially hundreds, right? And so it is everywhere and it is very, very low effort to get real value from it. And then the where we work is is what I said. You don't have to change anything about your workflow. Grammarly meets you where you are and you get value from it. Doing that really well at this level of quality for a user base of this scale, essentially it's like a huge AI achievement masquerading as a little UX innovation, right? But that experience, that UX, that sort of brings AI to the masses, has obviously served Grammarly really well. I think those are some of the strengths that we're going to continue to lean on to now provide a very different type of assistance and value that we can because of where the technology has moved.

The other thing I've heard a lot about Grammarly, and Yuri was on the podcast and who led growth for a long time at Grammarly, is just how scrappy the business has been and the founders have been from the beginning. The fact that they've been profitable from the beginning, that feels like one of the threads through all of the successful consumer subscription companies. It's super scrappy, not raising money for a long time. Is there anything there that you found to be really interesting or helpful for other folks that are maybe building the space?

When you're a team that kind of starts out of Ukraine and you're not thinking that there's any chance that you're going to raise money and why would you do that? I mean, it really back to our previous conversation of what happens when growth goes negative, really forces you to focus on the important things. And so many of the early engineers who are still here because the company has done so well over the years, they think in like, how is this work going to translate into revenue? They think about the impact on the business from even very deep technical work that they're doing because I think they were brought up in this culture where the business doesn't really invest ahead of its profitability. Because it was a bootstrap business from day one. So that enforces everyone to think about their projects and their prioritization and how is what they're doing over the next two months going to actually turn into more revenue and keep the company growing and sustaining. So I think that culture is prevalent and help Grammarly get to where it is. Now, I just want to be really honest that in moments that we're in today, that can also be detrimental, right? Because the business gets to a certain size, you start getting to kind of like law of large numbers. You need to start thinking about, are there other products? Are there other use cases? Are there other channels of growth? How do you kind of invest ahead of some of that growth and start to diversify? Because at the scale and size that we are and aspire to be, we're going to have to do many more things and service many more different types of customers. And as you mentioned, we're going to have to pull off the motion of B to C to B, kind of get that that product-led sales motion going. So all of those things are happening. And thankfully, the business is as strong as it is where we can invest ahead now in those things while still maintaining profitability and a really strong business.

That's amazing that there are still team members and maybe, I think you said engineers from the beginning 12 years later. I think that says a lot about the business. And before we started recording, they're based in Ukraine and you were saying that They're going to Zooms, there's bombs going off, they have to go into bomb shelters and then jump on a meeting. It's incredible that the team continues to operate and the business continues to do this well in spite of all that.

Yeah, the team in Ukraine at Grammarly is, I mean, it's something else. It's a really fantastic team. And when you speak to many of them, I think actually that the work provides sometimes a very useful distraction, but they obviously feel a lot of pride in the business. They built a lot of this business. There aren't yet many businesses of this size that come from Ukraine. And yeah, I think that that team is incredible and continues to deliver a ton of impact to the company, even in the circumstances that they're in. And I know for the founders, a lot of why they want grammarly to succeed and be the generational company that it can be is for Ukraine, and especially in this moment. And it's awesome to see how that motivates them. And 15 years on the same project is not nothing. That's some serious resilience. And so I think Even in moments like that, using them as a way to motivate and strive for something greater, I think says a lot about the founders and the team in Ukraine. Absolutely.

Hopefully there's a happy resolution soon there. I don't know if you know this, I was actually born in Ukraine. Oh, wow. I know Odessa. I don't wanna talk about that much, but it's true. And I just realized we both have skis in our last. Levinsky and Orzechowski.

So for what it's worth, my dad was born in Ukraine. He was from Kyiv. My mom was from Lithuania. So, yeah, I also have some Ukrainian background here.

All right, this is our Ukrainian episode.

Yes.

Let me zoom out a little bit and get to the final couple questions. So thinking about your career broadly, I'm just curious if there's any general advice you share with people to help them have a more successful career. anything that just generally find is really important to do well or mistakes they make, and this is a big, broad question, but anything come to mind of like, here's something you should really try to do more of or less of?

Look, when you're thinking about career opportunities and what job to take, it's really, really hard to sniff out really well in a high degree of certainty, like success. I think that having a good nose for people and the sort of like people that you can be successful with is something that you can develop. What I found is I always try to prioritize putting myself in positions that are gonna cause a lot of growth and learning. And growth and learning can be very painful. And you kind of like gotta like be okay with that and go into that because on the other side of that pain, I think is the promised land. And that's just served me really well is I can't necessarily predict, you know, with high degree of certainty that this thing's gonna hit, you know, but I can get a sense of the people around me and I certainly can find situations that are gonna stretch me, that are gonna force me to do things that I haven't done where I'm gonna grow and learn significantly. and over sort of the arc of my career, I feel like that's served me well. So that's usually what I tell people is focus on that if you can.

I love that advice. I've used this quote a number of times on this podcast, but something I always come back to is this line, the cave you fear contains the treasure you seek. I'm curious if there's something you have found about when the pain is too much, that you shouldn't pursue that. A lot of people get into these places where their mental health gets hit, their physical health is hit, they're just doing work. They should not be just too much. Is there anything there that you find is just like, okay, maybe this is too much discomfort?

I think about a couple of things. I think in any situation, you should be able to lean on one or two things that you're really strong at that can kind of be the foundation that kind of keeps you going while you learn the other things. So just be wary of situations that are too net new. There should be one or two kind of important things as part of that job going into where you're like, I got this. I know how to do this portion of it. So as an example, if you've never inherited a very large team, and you're going to work through how that works. But the product area that you're working on is one you're very familiar with, what's necessary to be good in that product, whether it's a really good sense of design or a really good sense of analytical thinking, recommendation systems, what have you. There should be a couple of those things where you're like, I got this. These things are going to be a stretch. But these things, I feel like I've got a handle on how to do this. I can always get better, but I feel like they're in my wheelhouse. And I think that tends to allow you to sort of balance the pain with the areas that you already know and kind of manage through in a more balanced and healthy way.

Reminds me of that chart, I think, from Flow of you want it to be challenging but not too challenging. and that's where you end up being most successful. Is there anything else, Noam, you want to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

Yeah, I just think that maybe going back to where we first started, Lenny, work on the things that make you happy, that fill you up. Life is short. We're all very lucky to be in this moment. There's no reason to spend time on things that don't give you energy. There's so much to do out there. I think that's the main thing I would focus on.

Amazing. And even though there will be things that suck that you have to do, I think it's important to try to find as much of that as you can. Not everyone can just like, Nah, I'm not gonna do this work thing. I'm just gonna go on a walk. But I think that's such an important point. We've talked about this actually a bunch on a recent podcast of just doing this energy audit where you pay attention to what gives you energy and what doesn't and try to do more and more.

Totally.

Energy. We'll link to that again. With that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? Yeah, I'm ready. First question, what are two or three.

Books that you've recommended most to other people? You know, I'm gonna cheat on this one and I'm only gonna give you one. I'm only gonna give you one because I don't, I don't want, I don't want to, collide with any other. I recommend Build by Tony Fadell. And other than it being a good book, one of the main reasons I recommend it is that my wife wrote it. So she wrote it together with Tony and I got to see that experience. And she's a fantastic writer and Tony has a lot to learn from. So I recommend that book. I think that the part of it that was particularly inspiring to me to hear, like, even more of the details that are in the book is just how many times he met failure before he made discoveries that are now driving so many of the things that we do. It's just a good reminder to keep at it and do the thing that really gives you that energy because eventually you can make that incredible discovery.

Next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed.

I really like For All Mankind. I've seen that on Apple TV. And then I just finished the last season of Fargo and every single season of that series I think is fantastic.

Amazing. For All Mankind though, last season not as amazing. Consensus that I agree with. But worth watching. Next question. Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates?

I generally like interview questions that allow us to do some work together. So I'm a little bit less on the behavioral tell me about a time when sort of stuff and more on the let's work a product problem together. And it could be anything from let's design an alarm clock for children or lately I've been using one given where technology is at, if we were to rebuild email, how might we do that? I just feel like kind of getting into it and getting into the details and really kind of watching each other part, you know, kind of exercise our craft, I think is, is really important. And I have a, I have a whole podcast one time if you're ready about how most people don't know how to do leadership recruiting. And I feel like as I've, you know, advanced in my career, like the, the interviews for some reason, like, get easier and actually, like, evaluate less about, like, who I am as a product leader and whatnot. But yeah, those are the sorts of interview questions that I typically like.

Amazing. Is there a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love?

It's not recent, but I was a very early user of Arc and I really love Arc.

Your window right now is inside Arc. I also love Arc. We had Josh on the podcast.

Nice.

Just Just watching the onboarding experience of Arc alone as a product person is worth your time.

I love the animation when you download something. I mean, just like all of the little things. And if Josh is listening, we would like to get Grammarly to work better with Arc. So please hit me up because I think there's a few things that the Arc browser is doing that make it hard to get Grammarly to work either.

On the client or in the browser. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often repeat to yourself, share with friends or family, either in work.

Or in life that you find useful? gosh, for those that know me, this is gonna share so much of my personality. I think the first thing that comes to mind is, like, we are meant to struggle. I just feel like through struggle is, you know, how we get better, how good things happen, how bonds form. And so I don't. I don't shy away from. From that kind of life experience.

I'm gonna guess that you're Jewish. I'm also Jewish. That feels like a very Jewish thing to say. I love it.

How would you guess, Lenny? It's like it's literally written on my face.

Yeah. Perfect. Last question. As the chief product officer, Grammarly, I'm curious what word you most often misspell.

The T-E-D-T-E-H. T-E-H. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I find I misspell everywhere. I'm a terrible speller. I'm thankful for my, oh, sorry, can.

We, I was saying I have a product for you that can help with your spelling if you want.

I'm an active Grammarly user. Not only that, I use every product you've worked on, I realized. Oh, nice. Obviously Meta and mostly Instagram of the Meta products. And obviously Grammarly now and YouTube. I have a YouTube channel. Check it out, subscribe and follow. And Thumbtack. My wife is a big Thumbtack user. We found many pros on Thumbtack from all kinds of parts of the world. Noam, thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out? And how can listeners be useful to you?

Yeah, I'm pretty much no ML everywhere online. So Twitter is probably the easiest. My DMs are open. And then how people can be useful to me is please use Grammarly, provide any feedback that you might have. And honestly, if I can be helpful in almost any way, feel free to reach out. I often will take those conversations and build those connections, and that is always very helpful. for me as well.

Noam, thank you again so much for being here.

Of course, have a good one, Lenny.

Bye everyone, bye. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com See you in the next episode.