How the PM Role is Changing in 2024 | PM Expert Panel

If you draw a pie chart and divide every PM's time span, increasingly over the last 10 years, it has gone towards internal processes, internal systems, internal communication. Taking away the precious time needed to understand the customer and actually focus on the product, right? And that is why the genesis started at Airbnb. Start thinking about how can we switch that pie chart into more customer focus, customer obsessed, and less on the internal. I don't want to use the word shenanigans, but like, let's just use the word shenanigans. You know, internal stuff. I'll give you a couple of example, right? There's meetings, there's status reports, there is Kanban processes to manage, there's scrum standups to go to. There's a lot of stuff that PMs do, right? And as a result, they lose time and jealousy on that. So that's one trend that happened today.

My guests are Sun Chan, ex General Manager at Airbnb, Nikki, Product Director at Duolingo, and John, Senior Director at Toast. We talked about how the PM role is evolving, the case for dual career track for PMs, our favorite product manager, use cases for AI and how to avoid PM title envy and pick your own path. Over 200 people tuned into this conversation live, so I think you'll love it too. Be sure to like and subscribe for more interviews like this. Let's get started. Yeah. I'm super excited to be here today. I guess today we're going to talk about how the PM role is evolving and how you can also advance your product career. And I'm really lucky today to be joined by three amazing product leaders. I'll let them introduce themselves. Sunchen, do you want to go first?

Happy to. Hey everybody. Welcome. I'm excited to be here. My name is Sanchin. I've been in Silicon Valley for the last 18 years. My first job was at Microsoft. That brought me over here. Most recently I was at Coinbase as a VP of Product. And then before that I was a Head of Product at Airbnb. And before that amongst the first hundred employees of Instagram. It was a fun ride. Excited to be here.

Thanks. Achen. Nikki, you want to go next?

Good thing. So I'm calling in from Almost Snowy, not quite Snowy, Minnesota. And currently I'm a Director of Products at Duolingo, where I manage the New Subjects initiative, but have been working in product roles for I think like 13 or 14 years. I was also at Airbnb where I worked on Airbnb experiences. How's it going? Good to see You. And then before that, I was a Director of Product at Etsy and I was an early employee at Etsy. I joined also in their first 100 employees, which was also a crazy wild ride. So I'm excited to be here today. I think the PM role has really evolved in my last 13 years, but is really speeding up and changing, especially into 2024. So happy to be here with you all.

Okay. And last but not least, John.

John Cutler. I currently work at Toast in an interesting role, Senior Director of Product Enablement. So I enable our great PMs and product teams. Prior to Toast, I was at Amplitude, where I was a product evangelist for four years. I probably met with many of your companies while I did that, which was a lot of fun, and then worked at Zendesk and Pendo and a couple other companies after a life of playing music and other things before I got into tech. So that's a bit about me. And I write a newsletter. I enjoy writing a lot and drawing pictures of product stuff.

Awesome. So I also want to say that, you know, for all of our panelists, everything that we say here is our own opinion, doesn't represent our employers. Just get that out of the way. So let's start with the PM role itself. Right? So maybe I'll share two anecdotes. To start, I think a few months ago, Branchesky from Airbnb shared that he had eliminated the classic PM function. And then later he had to clarify that he actually meant unifying product management and product marketing. And recently, I think it's because I spent too much time on Twitter. But recently I've seen several startup founders talk about, you know, how they're proud of not hiring PMs, and, you know, also they're more focused on craft than on AB testing or metrics. So curious to hear from all of you about the PM role. I guess. Sun Chan, I start with you, since you worked at Airbnb.

Yeah, happy to share. So actually, one thing I'll share is even though the announcement happened right now, when I was there, the journey or the path had already started. So I'll actually want to share with you all the genesis of this idea a little bit more. So how many of you, when asked at your company's survey, say, man, I spend like 80% of my time on internal meetings, internal processes, internal things, you know, and as a result, I don't have enough time. You know, I'm overloaded with the. If you can just type in over there or give me a response, that'll be great. Because a lot of times what I hear is like, oh, my God, 80% of my time is going into this internal bullshit. The other thing that I hear a lot is, oh, my God, I can't. I don't have enough time to talk to my customers. I don't have enough time to innovate because I am drowning in meetings or status reports or something else. Right? I mean, these are the most common thing that I hear a lot. And that was true at Airbnb too, back in the day, right? So one of the things that happened was Brian Chesky was inspired by Apple. You know, there's a lot of people at Airbnb, the board as well, who are inspired by work from Apple. And the thought process was if you draw a pie chart and divide every PM's time spent, increasingly over the last 10 years, it has gone towards internal processes, internal systems, internal communication, taking away the precious time needed to understand the customer and actually focus on the product. Right? And that is why the genesis started at Airbnb start thinking about how can we switch that pie chart into more customer focused, customer obsessed and less on the internal. I don't want to use the word shenanigans, but, like, let's just use the word shenanigans. Shenanigans, you know, internal stuff. I'll give you a couple of examples, right? There's meetings, there's status reports, there is kanban processes to manage, there's scrum standups to go to. There's a lot of stuff that PMs do, right? And as a result, they lose time and jealous illness. That's one trend that happened. The other trend that happened was that Brian personally came from a design world. And if you ever talk to a designer, you know, they don't made the painting, you know, because they did a user research with 10 customers and said this is what the painting should say. They don't work like that, right? The way they work is like, I build what I want to build and I'll find people who actually love what I'm selling, right? So what, the process changes as well from ideation, right? So at Airbnb, AB testing was truly a bad word. It doesn't mean that you. You don't AB test, but what it meant was if you ever ask someone what are you working on, they don't open up an Excel spreadsheet line by line, showing you the hypothesis and the experiments they're going to run and the unit economics that they're going to get out of that. That is the how the what was equally more important? So as PMs, you'll be spending a lot of your time thinking about what are we building, why are we building, who's it, who are we building for? And with an awesome design team, be fabricating what we call the prototype of what it is building. So at Airbnb, it's a prototype driven product management, not a spec driven product management. Right. I don't remember any of my PMs writing detailed PRDs. You know, I remember a lot of them spending a lot of time with designers actually making the product that we want to ship so we can touch it, feel it, smell it. You know, again you, I can't smell software, but you get that. And the metaphor that I'm using over here is that was really important. So I think those were the two trends that led to the outcome that Brian has announced recently. But this is a trend that I think everybody has to understand because I don't think everybody should adopt what Airbnb is doing, just like everybody shouldn't adopt what Apple is doing, just like everybody should adopt what Google is doing. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is you join Startup X and say, I came from company Y and it worked for them. So I'm it's going to work over here as well. I think that's another thing to keep in mind is that it doesn't happen that way. So you have to contextualize all the learnings. But I do believe that the product management time spent has to shift away from internal cooking, internal management to actually be more allowed to do more on customer building the product, testing the product, etc around there. So I'll pause there and then we can go around the room and there's a lot more to unpack here.

Yeah, the only thing I would build on that was so I also used to work at Airbnb, so this was really interesting when I heard that news. But as somebody who's worked at a number of different companies in various different product roles, both IC roles as well as management roles, one thing I've seen is the PM role is very different inside of every company and it should be right. Like you're building a very different product everywhere. You have different sorts of customers that have different needs. And so I was excited to see Airbnb experimenting. I think they're doing what's right for their product, which feels like a trend I imagine you'll continue to see as people evolve their orgs and figure out just what works from a process standpoint for them. So good on Them I'm really curious to see, like, what the next couple years look like for them, honestly. But I was excited to hear it.

Yeah. I think one thing I would add there, meeting so many teams and my role in Amplitude is I started to think of product management as just a collection of hats. And you started to. I met teams that just ran the complete spectrum. So, like, this Airbnb thing did not surprise me in one bit because I could just pattern match across other companies that had decided to put those hats on those particular heads as you were kind of working through. So the one thing I observed too at Amplitude was it was almost like I was, you know, not only is the role different, but the product management role. I would say that on any given week, it was like a 20 year journey of maturity of different companies where they were, you know, we'd be talking to some companies that felt like it was 2002 and some companies that felt like it was 20, 22 in the same week. Right. So the thing that occurred to me there is that it's very easy to pinpoint these specific transitions for specific companies realistically. You know, there's some orgs where engineering wears some of those particular hats. There's some orgs where design wear some of those hats. There's some where PMM wears some of those hats. So that's one thing that it really hammered home, that product. There are product managers and there's product management, and product management is a series of hats and some companies, product managers choose to wear some of those hats or not. And frankly, I've seen other companies that said we have no product managers yet every product management hat was being worn by someone. They just didn't decide on the title of that. So I was, I'll just add there the difference between product management and product managers and the hats that you wear, you notice the spectrum as you go out and interact with different companies.

Yeah, so true. And Peter, one part of the question I don't think we dug deeper into, but if we can take two seconds to talk about it, your question was also how, you know, linears of the world that are posting on Twitter and others they don't need some of that stuff is also happening. So I wanted to add a little bit of that comment over there, if that's okay. Go for it. Yeah. So I think one thing I want to also share is product development methodology and approach is also very unique across companies. So one is the role of product management is different and the other is how companies actually build products itself is also different. So I want to take a minute to talk with you all about how Airbnb decided to build products over the last three years or so. So oftentimes what we do is we write a PRD or do a design mock or whatever that might be, you know, for a feature or a group of features or a product area. And then what we do is the entire company does that and everybody has resource constraints, so they cut things. And in the end what ships is literally your org chart or some version of that org chart that is not fun for the customer. So what Airbnb does is slightly different. There's a guy by the name of Hiroki, you can search him, he was Steve Jobs, left hand guy and he actually left Apple to join Airbnb to become the chief marketing officer at Airbnb. So I work very closely with him and now both product and marketing reporting to him by the. As a, as an example. So this is how it works at Airbnb. The first thing at Airbnb that they write is what is known as a marketing narrative. It is a simple language term description of what will happen to a user's life when your partnerships, so they work backwards from the communication to the user rather than forward from what can we ship and then craft a narrative for the user of what is shipped. Is a fundamental difference in the approach that this company takes, is very much inspired by hardware companies and Apple, for example. And this is the difference you'll see. So twice a year they do major releases and at that time they have written down the narrative of this is what we're going to ship and this is what the customer must feel. For example, when I book, when I want to travel at Airbnb and I'm traveling with a large group of people, I'm able to easily find the home that I desire. That's the marketing narrative that they're writing. And from there, each team that takes that marketing narrative and thinks about what products they must ship to meet that marketing narrative. So there's never a debate on a, you know, we got to cut features to ship. You know, there's another paradigm of lean startup, right? Like cutting is shipping. You might have heard this before, right? In Airbnb. Well, slightly different, which is here's the marketing narrative. We gotta rise to that occasion and ship that cohesive structure. And the biggest advantage of this is that if there are five or six different teams working together, they're all working with the same outcome in mind, as opposed to your back end team cutting certain features while your front End team is not cutting certain features and what ships becomes very unusable by the user. So this is another thing that I wanted to just highlight to make sure people understand how obsessed Airbnb is about the customer's understanding of their product and the simplicity of the journey.

So, as product leaders, how do you design the incentives? Right, because I show many incentives and I'll show the result. So, like, as companies scale, you have these career ladders and, you know, you get evaluated based on, you know, some big product review and, like, stakeholder feedback. You don't get evaluated based on, like, customer feedback necessarily. Yeah. How do you design incentives for big companies to actually focus more on building a customer interaction?

Yeah, I mean, I can share some examples. I would love to hear others as well. But I think this all starts down very top down. You know, I always tell people is that your company's culture is pretty much dictated by your executive team or the founder that you're working at. Right. So I think it's really important to start at the top. And I think, Peter, to your point, the aligning of this in successful companies that I've seen is very much about the what and the outcome. I'll give you an example. When I was at certain companies that I don't want to name, you know, because it'll be published somewhere and then I'll have to be sorry if I use their name. But I just, just assumed there was a company that I worked with, their peer feedback was very important. As a result of that, nobody bloody pushed boundaries because I was worried what Peter Yang is going to say in my peer feedback at the end of performance review. So I'm just going to do the least controversial shift that I can to put this thing forward. Right. So the most successful company that I've worked in, I have found that what you deliver was very important. And peer feedback did not make more than 10% of the rating of a person's performance review. Right. So this is just an example of how you can strengthen these things. So customer obsession, customer focus translates very clearly sometimes in the output and the impact you're delivering for your area. Right. So the conversations in. Right. Performance reviews in the right company should be obsessed over what did we deliver for the customer, what was the impact of delivering that? And I'm not saying the how is not important. Yes, you got to work with people, you got to have collaboration, et cetera. But the way to attach to some of these other things that are culture killers, like peer feedback, you know, stakeholder reviews. Oh, did I get a chance to have a product review with the CEO, because if one of my colleagues did, they have a feedback from the CEO saying that product review is amazing. I don't even have a chance to do that. So how will I get promoted? Right. Those secondary things are not very important. So that's one example that I think we should think about. And I personally, as a leader that I built Airbnb and Coinbase product manager organization. To me, not all feedback is gift. Sorry, Sheryl Sandberg. Not all feedback is gift. Actually, feedback is paralyzing. It forces people to sometimes not do the right thing. So I'm also of the camp that incentivize me to align towards the customer obsession.

Awesome. Nikki and John, I'd love to hear from you on this topic too.

Yeah, the first thing that comes to mind, I've realized in the last year of my career at least don't fool yourself into believing you can perfectly design incentive systems in that sense, that there's a lot of second and third order effects and it kind of assumes a certain worldview of everyone you work with. So I'll give you a specific example. You know, I'll talk to a leader and they'll say, well, well, everyone just wants this. You know, everyone just wants that. And you'll talk to those people. And they don't just want that. They might have a very, you know, some people are craft oriented. Some people are really like the process that they're working through. Some people could care less about how they got there. They only want to know kind of what that thing is. And maybe some people do care about career advancement all the time and doing this stuff. So just to add, you know, as the counterbalance to what Sasha just said is that I've become very cautious about designing games for teams because. And I think that this is what I would say is incentives start with the behaviors of the leaders and what you celebrate and the behaviors of what you value and what you talk about. And if you don't, it's so easy to overthink incentives. Like you can design a game for everyone, but really it does start with what do we spend a bulk of our time talking about? An example being, you know, when the first three slides of a deck are all about the process of the team, and then you only spend a little bit of time at the end talking about how the customer felt when they used it. That's essentially creating part of the incentive system that you had. So I think for product leaders listening, you know, don't always, I think, be Cautious about your ability to design a perfect incentive system, especially assuming that everyone in the world thinks just like you, because they probably don't start with the behaviors that send the messages that you want to send. And then I think incent people often craft the incentives they care about around those outcomes in that part of the culture. So, I mean, just as a counterbalance, that statement. Nikki, curious your thoughts?

Yeah, one. One thing to add. So I think this is something that Duolingo does really well. And you know, you can feel this when you use their product. Right. It's just very delightful. Clearly designed around customer needs. And one of the big things that is incentivized and talked about every, like, all the way up to the product review with the CEO down into, like, team product reviews is do customers like this? Is this going to have a good impact? Are we hitting achieving the outcomes that we've set out to achieve? And I think if you can do a good job of just making sure that's baked into your culture. So that comes up in job letters, it's in performance review feedback. It is basically everywhere and everyone's talking about it, then the org will take it seriously and they'll bake it into the product itself. And I think you can tell honestly, like, if you use a product, I'm just going to try to pick one. I don't want to pick on anyone's product in case there's somebody out there. But you can kind of tell when you use somebody's product if the product team is not incentivized with the right things. Right. Like, you're like, ooh, there's a lot of red notifications here. Clearly it's different teams fighting with each other over eyeballs, things like that. Right. And so I think just making sure that's part of your process just is extremely impactful.

Love that. All right, so along similar lines, let's talk about a dual career track for PMs. So, you know, like, there's been a lot of layoff recently and middle managers were hit especially hard. And now, you know, headcount is very constrained at many companies. And, you know, before it was like, hey, how can I manage more PMs? How can, like, manage managers? And now, so, like, so now that there isn't as much of an offer option to hire and build a team, do you guys think, like a IC plus management track is possible for PMs, or is that already happening? Why don't we start with Nikki actually on this?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, I hope to see more of this, honestly, I think one thing that I've really enjoyed in my career and I've taken roles very strategically based on my desire to keep my hands on the product. I haven't really wanted to layer myself with a bunch of managers away from actually building the product. And I've been able, I've been lucky enough where I've been able to kind of keep very close tabs on the product itself. And so I'm kind of in a pseudo, I see management role right now. I have a team, but I'm also still shipping stuff. And so this is just my advice to people is get really clear on like what you're looking for in your career. Some people really are amazing managers and they love to manage and some people do not like to manage, but because of career ladders and the way that they are so linear, we push people into management roles a lot when it's not always good for them. And so I hope to see more of this sort of like dual management meet ic as long as we're not burning people out. Because I think it's hard to do both things well at the same time. But I'm hoping maybe that will be a good output of some of the harder tech environment times we're in right now.

Yeah, I think the one thing that comes to that too is being very conscientious about disrupting your career. Because I noticed that just looking at hiring in the last year, a lot of people were wandering into interviews and they'd kind of lost their edge. And their basic claim to success was either one or two or three companies they worked at and their ability to manage lots of people. And they'd really lost their edge for talking about outcomes and talking about, you know, so they had become, you know, just career managers in that case. And I think that people need to be very conscientious about purposely disrupting that track. And so if you feel yourself potentially slipping into that, I think it's going to be a lot harder in these coming years. There's just going to be less demand for folks who are needed for that type of thing. And so I've met a lot of leaders recently who have just purposely down ranked, you know, they've taken titles lower than that in, in an effort to really like sharpen their skill set again and just be current. And so I think it's something folks need to keep in mind. Such an. Interested what you think about that?

Yeah, I think so. A couple of companies that actually do have dual track as well, so plus one, everything Nikki Johnson. And I think if you look at Facebook, you go all the way up to an IC track, to product director level. So that's an L8, which is a product director at Facebook is a pretty decent niche, chunky role. You have a large team that you're managing, but there's also a product director who's an IC as well. Similarly, at Coinbase during the last year or two, we also tried to create an IC role as well. And at Airbnb we went all the way up to principal, so I think it's possible to do that. But there's also an understanding that I like the technical ladder, you know, where you could become a distinguished engineer or like a vp. IC level vp. I think in the product management ladder, it becomes really hard to figure out what it looks like beyond that.

Distinguished product manager.

Exactly.

It's really funny. Like, what is that?

Right? What does that even mean? Right? So. So I think the short answer is yes, there should, you should absolutely continue to rise in the IC track. It's totally possible to rise in that all the way up to product director level. And I think you can do that and it'll be very successful because you're going to, like Nikki said, you're going to continue to sharpen your skills, but at the same time also recognize that at some point in time that becomes not sustainable afterwards as well. But for majority of people, that's a good path.

Awesome.

Awesome.

All right, so I'm gonna take a few questions from the audience now. So the first question is from Jack, which is how do you see the relationship between PMs and designers evolving in the coming years? Anyone want to take a crack at that?

Do you say relationship or ratios or both?

Relationship.

Yeah, we can talk about ratios if you want.

This is this. I'll just take it. Maybe I'll do a 10 second stab. @ least in a lot of companies that I'm observing is designers are becoming increasingly really strategic and business savvy. And I think that the main thing from a product manager standpoint is, I mean, I remember, I don't know, 2005 or something like that. If you were a PM, you basically did everything. You did everything. Oh, you're writing the marketing copy, you're doing this, you're doing all these things. Oh, I'm going to just pick some code, I'm going to do these things. And then there was a time there where you were even like these design sense exercises for PMs, I don't believe in them at all. Like that's why we hire amazing designers. I did an interview at Facebook once, and they're like, we're going to test you on design sense. And my answer, because I've been in a company with amazing designers, is like, why? Why would we do this? I mean, we. And then I didn't get. I didn't even get called back for that thing. So. So my point is that, like, designers are becoming increasingly business savvy. And I know what Sunshine was getting at is that prototypical designer. Like, I just want to ship and everyone's going to come to the thing. But I think that is. I think PMs are going to need to let go of some of the reins and then, like, some of their habits that they develop in certain organizations. It's probably different at Airbnb, but In many organizations, PMs need to let go of the delusion that they had that design sense and then also start to acknowledge that these folks that you're working with can be highly strategic and need to be looped into the business perspective as well. Yeah, Nikki? Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, I. That's a really awesome question. Honestly, I agree with what you said. I think, like, the partnership between product and design is going to continue to get really tight, and designers definitely are becoming more strategic, which is wonderful, honestly. Allows them to be more autonomous, to make the right decisions. I really do think. I personally do think you should still invest in your own design sense as a pm. Like, I think it's easy to be like, oh, that's their job, when I actually just think you're going to your critical design feedback at times. Hopefully there's no designers in the room today, but I think it can help. It makes the design better, it levels up the product. But. So I think that's still a skill that you should have. But I do agree that designers are becoming more and more strategic. And in a perfect world, like, the team is so good that you as the pm, you can just kind of sit in the background and they do their thing and you're just there to kind of help shepherd everyone in the right direction. Right. That's the ideal scenario. Although that often is not what happens. So maybe we'll get there someday.

Or you get fired because you're not needed anymore because all you were is the shepherd. Yeah.

Yeah. I think less shepherding, more doing, I guess. But I think the short answer is I think the industry is very diverse, so it's very hard to give one answer. So if you come from the world of B2B, it's very different if you come from world of B2C, it's very different. Within B2C there are lots of verticals. But I think overall the macro trend I see is that design becoming more and more strategic in nature, having more and more seat at the table, having more involvement early on in the ideation phases of what the product strategy itself is not in the design ideation phase, but more of a product ideation phase as well. So that trend is clear. I have met some incredible designers in my career who are, who have product sense, design sense and also business sense. Right. So I think it's important to leverage them. And last but not the least, I just want to remind everybody, PMs tend to be general career. Right. We tend to be more T shaped than anything else. So I think it's important to understand Nikki's point what a great design sense means, what a great engineering aspects mean. But just don't be delusional that you know anything better than those specialists would. So bring them along at the right space as you continue to do the product management that you're doing.

Yeah, I have a very specific example. Just in 10 seconds is at amplitude. One thing that Justin is the head of product and then our and really empowered our designers to was actually shaping the end of year vision that sort of catapulted us into the next year. And it was just an incredible thing to watch about how galvanizing that was for the rest of the company and how it really, it's. It's similar to what I'm hearing a little bit it's happening in Airbnb. But it, it really was like setting that vision and using those design skills to make that real and tangible. It didn't mean those were the prototypes, it just meant that they were actually setting those outcomes and that vision was just extremely powerful. Sorry. Yeah, go ahead.

You know, as I mentioned, I think it's still a very tough job market right now. So this is question from Nate. I'm on a hunt for my next job. Seems like the only way to get hired these days is to either having worked at Fan or you know, having worked at similar companies. How does one break through this wall?

Yeah, I can start with that one. I really do. I mean I think yes, people value faang experience and it is very validating for your resume. However, I actually really think early stage startup experience is. Can sometimes be even more validating honestly because you get to wear so many different hats and you really can career climb and career jump faster at a startup than you can. If you go into a FAANG and you kind of got to work your way up, up their traditional ladder, that takes a long time. So I wouldn't be too worried about that, honestly. I would say find a good series B startup that looks like they're on some sort of growth rocket ship and I would argue that you probably are going to get better experience and you're going to grow faster. That's slightly controversial, hot take, but I know FAANG experience is relevant. You could eventually go to a FAANG if you have a really good startup experience. So don't pigeonhole yourself. Honestly, I think there's lots of other opportunities that are not faang and they're still thankfully, at least now startups are starting to get funded again. I think we're starting to see that flywheel spin a little bit faster, which is good and so hopefully there will be more jobs in those roles soon.

Anyone else want to add anything on this?

It's hard out there. That's just the bottom I think.

Yeah, add some this. I also agree with Nikki's advice to find a growing company, not necessarily like the big companies and find one that matches your domain and skillset and another hack is like just like find and reach out to your hiring manager directly. Don't be like another resume in the pile. Usually the hiring manager is a little bit more open to if you come from a non traditional background. If you have a really good pitch, if you did some research on their product and have some feedback, they'll at least have a conversation with you. So try that.

Just one thing you've just brought up there. Remember the economy didn't affect all companies in the same way. So one thing I noticed big time was that at Amplitude we were dealing with lots of companies at different things. There's a lot of these kind of like I'll give an example of something like a Lego or one of these companies like Lego still was selling stuff this whole time. They were actually like growing their whole product org the same thing with like a Home Depot or these companies. Now normally you'd look at that and be like oh, I might get stuck in this like slow moving enterprise division. But that's not the case in all of those things. Like there are roles for Lego popping up around certain community plays that they're doing or certain cool products that they're building. And so one thing I wouldn't is like don't completely write off large major brands that are building out that have a strong leader in a division that you could, could understand. Their background and maybe worked at a company that you enjoyed their products. If you see that leader building out those teams, they actually have a lot more budget now than some other companies have been impacted in a different way. So I don't overlook the hidden roles that might be out there. Just based on what you might assume of a big company that works in a certain way. That would be a bit of advice to give folks.

Yeah, one last thing I would add, and I think this is one of the places where our industry has really evolved, which is really exciting and this wasn't the case when I started in my career like 13 years ago. But you can also build something yourself and ship it, give yourself your own practice. You could build an AI bot, you could write a newsletter, you could just launch a thing and practice putting something out in the world and having people consume it and learn from that. And I think with like no code tools and just generally with AI, there's so many things you can build so much easier today than you could have 10 years ago. So again like if you really are struggling to find a PM role somewhere, create your own PM role for yourself and ship some stuff and then eventually get your things out there and more opportunities will come.

Yeah, I think that's a great transition into our next topic which is, you know, there's a big generative AI wave happening now and in some ways with AI, you know, PMs can actually ship stuff themselves. But you know, let's say I'm a PM and I'm not really working on a Genai product right now. Like how do I ramp up on the space and get my hands dirty? Any advice?

I can go up north nights and weekends now. Go Nikki.

That's good advice.

Yeah, I just give myself like a six hour a week experimentation budget on all this stuff because I feel I need to stay sharp and like I build things and like I just think it's like some like a muscle you need to learn about if you don't have the opportunity and then it's paid off at work. You know, just even like silly things that we've figured out can be make a lot more effect even in enablement in product operations. We're able to use these things but it was only by staying sharp and researching. Nikki, go ahead.

Yeah, no, I agree with that. I think that's what I've been doing too. Honestly. I just been trying to use AI multiple times throughout my day, every day and surprisingly like have becoming. I'm getting more adept at using it both personally and professionally. And so I think like, just start using it is a good place to start. Also, just honestly sign on to Twitter. Everyone's if you follow some people in tech, everyone's sharing awesome new AI use cases every single day continue to blow my mind. And so continue to just get out there and try things and you're going to start learning more and more.

Yeah. And I think one recommendation in addition to everything that people have said is that don't be afraid to go into the technology itself. One of the things I've learned in my career is that unless I can buy a million products on Amazon, I still may or may not know how to build a retail product or how to build a scalable e commerce thing. But if I can actually understand how the shipping works, logistics works, et cetera, I can probably do a lot. So my advice would be there's actually a very good course or a set of courses from Google that are available for free that I did like six months ago myself over the weekend night to John's example and actually helped me understand how the thing actually works and actually what are the limitations of it and what the trajectory looks like. So I would also encourage, in addition to what John and Nikki said, please give that a shot as well. It's free course available over the weekend. You will learn a lot from it.

One thing I'd say without going into specifics, because I can't, but even as a company, if you're an enablement or a leadership role, even creating sandboxes where people can experiment, this is something we've done internally and trying to clear any legal hurdles or other things that might exist. To be able to experiment in a very, in a way that will never impact your customers. It's like you, you just. Little things like that count because in a corporate environment there can actually be just a lot of things that limit your ability to do it. So even if you wanted to try to solve a problem internally in your company, if you work at any kind of bigger company, it might be harder than you think. So that's like a very actionable thing if you're a leader to, you know, partner with legal and partner with any team that's working around this and create a sandbox environment where people don't feel worried or limited or concerned about what's going to happen with that data because we obviously don't want anything like that to happen. So that's something you could do.

Another tip. So I actually just shipped a genius product and after shipping I realized, hey, I actually don't understand exactly how this thing was built. So another tip is like, if you have engineers who are experts at this stuff, just like grab 30 minutes of their time and make them draw diagrams and make them walk through like how retrieval augmented generation works or how how all this stuff actually works. Right? And I think you'll learn a lot and they love explaining this stuff to you. So let's wrap up the AI topic. Maybe you guys can all share one AI use case either from work or your personal life that you use like ChatGPT or these products for like, what's your favorite AI use case?

I train AI or I make it believe that it's like eight different people. And then I simulate discussions between those people to create training internally. So for like conflict resolution or for thinking about how to handle crucial conversations, what I'll do is I'll actually. And if you follow my writing, you can probably tell I'm doing this behind the scenes. And thinking about it is, you know, I'll say, you know, you've got this individualistic, highly meritocratic leader who believes that the whole world resolves around them and you've got this, you know, communitarian ex hippie who wants to do this and then you've got this other person. And then I'll have create training material quickly by getting different perspectives of people so then people can learn how to like navigate different worldviews in their company. So that's like one specific thing I've done in the last two weeks. You should try it. It's funny.

Nikira Sanchin, do you want to.

Yeah. One of. One of the clever use cases that we've been using at Duolingo is somebody at Duolingo made an OKR reviewer. So you can pass your quarterly okrs through it. And it basically gives you feedback on, you know, are these measurable, are they clear and you know, synthesize in a thoughtful way, et cetera. And it is. Has. It probably saved me hours this most time, like this last time of okrs, just making sure that I was saying the right things and that they made sense. Sense. And it just felt like I had a little buddy who was helping me out, which I needed that day. So that was great. I've also used it at home. Personally, I've just said, okay, here's what's in my fridge. What would you make for dinner? And it will send me full recipes for things, which is stupidly helpful.

That's awesome.

Yeah, I think I'll give two use cases. One work, I use chat GPT style Usage for data analysis a lot. So I have a lot of data that comes to me from all different places and I don't want to create anything. Of course I have a data science awesome data science team that does a lot. But still there's a lot of stuff over there. So that's one handy nifty buddy for me. If I'm presenting to the board, I use it to create certain charts. If I'm analyzing certain aspects, I can do that. The second thing that I just saw was having a work assistant. I'm forgetting the name of the company. If I do find it, I'll post it over here. But what it is, you know, if you want to know about our travel policy, if you want to know what the paternity maternity leaves are, you know, there's a now a company that has a work buddy, you know, it's you don't call up HR anymore. You don't have to look at wiki. I forget the name but like just type and say, hey, what is our HR policy? Or what is this thing about that, oh, what is the document that talks about the 2023 vision for the company? You know, it just gets everything done, you know, so I'll face it over there. An incredible use case to traverse the Trevor toes of information in every company that you join.

That's amazing. I guess I'll share one too. So I got access to the recent ChatGPT voice feature and on my drive to work, like I basically talk to it. I upload a bunch of custom instructions about my life and I talk to it about everything from weekend trips to stuff at work to you know, like my new newsletter stuff. And yeah, it's like, it's actually like feels like a real human conversation in some ways. It listens to you more than real people. So it's a great experience. If you have access, you should try it out. All right, so why don't we move to our last topic and we'll do a Q and A. So we talked about how the PM role is evolving. We talked about how not everyone wants to be a manager and you know, how individual PMs can leverage AI. Maybe you guys can share some idea about kind of the end state of a PM career, right? Like does everyone destined to become like a VP or cpo or like are there other paths that people can pursue? Anyone want to take a go first?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think logistically speaking it's very hard for everybody to become a CP and vp. So I don't that's one. But also more important, I don't think everybody wants to. I've met a lot of amazing product people, people who actually don't aspire to do that. They have other agendas, goals. I'll give you two or three examples that really inspired me. One is a gentleman at Facebook without naming his name. Incredible product manager comes from design background and he loves the craft so much that he wants to continue to be deep dive like hands dirty and continue to be that in their career rather than removing themselves away from it. The other career path I see of PMs do a lot is becoming founders. You know, it's incredible how many founders are XPMs as well in addition to being ex engineers or ex designers. That's another path that I've seen and adjacent path I've seen many people do is they go into adjacent disciplines like marketing, like product operations, like leading customer success teams in B2B world, you know, so they're like adjacencies as well. But I feel like they go on and do amazing things as well. So I don't think everybody should aspire to be and I don't think everybody wants to be a CPO vp, but I know lots of other opportunities that they can continue to pursue and continue to make great career progress, career fulfillingness and also good dollars, you know.

Yeah, just to add on that. I mean I think one of the things that I've always, it's always kind of bummed me out about career ladders generally is like there's a start and a finish and it's, and it's a linear path that you have to travel. I feel like somebody uses this analogy. So this is not my analogy and I don't remember who it was. So sorry. Feel free to post if you know, if you can find this person. But I always like to think about your career as a, instead of a linear ladder, it's like a jungle gym or some sort of playset where you can move around and try different things and really spend the time figuring out what uniquely is fun to you and what you like and then move your career in that direction. And the cool thing about product management is you get exposure to so many different parts of other people's jobs because you're in touch with so many stakeholders every day. You can really figure out what sort of fills up your cup and what you really like and then you can invest and lean in that. So I think not everyone has to be a cpo. I think you could be a director of product if you're into that. You could start a, a startup if you're into that. You could write a newsletter if you love to write, like John, et cetera. And so I think just you doing your own internal reflection and getting clear on like what do I love about, you know, products generally and how do I take that forward is such a good exercise that you can invest your time in.

Yeah, I mean just to go back to what I echoed before, there is a sort of generational component to this. I'm almost 50 and there was a time when just a general awareness of how things work and where you can fit into different orgs and the glue, you know, this glue idea or the shepherd idea or anything. And that could be very. That could take you a really long way in your career for a good two decades. And I think now, especially when I see people who are 22, I'm going to be a PM and they're starting when they're 22. I'm just like doing the math in my head like what's going to like 35, 40, like I'm doing the math in my head like what. Unless they're, you know. So I really would recommend that you think of your product. Product career is you should build like you should think of your key skills and then maybe build out one or two other really areas of curiosity and interest for yourself. Reluctant Nikki said So that might be really deepening this idea of just general business management. Like there's still roles for that. It could be, you know, some acknowledgement around operations or it could be service design or it could be something like just depending on your age. And if you're closer to my age than maybe closer to 22, you should think about how you build those extra pillars in your career to be able to. Not you. You will not be able to rely on just being an uber generalist in this particular space for too much longer. And so it's important to build those extra pillars, those extra chops. Like I'm doing this course on deep finance in the last like three weeks that I'm going super deep in that area. I'm just. You really have to see it. You're. It's the product of you kind of cliche, but you really have to think about expanding now. If you're 22 and you bought into this whole PM is going to be a rocket ship forever and you're going to make tons of money all the time kind of thing. You've got your own thing on your hands. Right. So we're going through a period where that might not be the case and it might be harder than you thought. So always really think about, you know, getting fleshing out your skill set is something that I would think very deeply about.

Yeah, I think it's easy to fall for the LinkedIn title rat race, you know, like I think only wanting to take a job. The next title up is a very limited view of things. Like, you know, there, there's like conversation, there's culture, just what you're actually interested in. So you gotta balance all of that. All right, so why don't we take some more questions from the audience to wrap up. So next question is from Prithvi. So Prithvi asks when interviewing a user, what tactics should we follow to extract the most insights? Just ask them about how good your product is and, you know, how should you actually talk to users?

Don't talk a lot, just let them talk. That's the best thing I can think. If you're in any interview where you're Talking more than 20% of the time, probably something's going wrong. You should read Steve Porticol's book on interviewing users. So don't take our word for it. And then the other thing too is, yeah, it's. That's the major mistake I see is just talking too much and only knowing how to talk a lot. And so you should give yourself extreme challenges, like what would it take to only talk 5 or 10% of the time on a call? And then other things come into place as you learn more about UX research and different things you're doing. Nikki?

Yeah, I see some people in the chat talking about the mom test book. I love that book. That is a must read if you're a product person. I would also say go to ChatGPT. Describe your product that you're working on and the users you're going to be talking to and have it write a little interview guide, take some of the stress out of that. Having to figure that out yourself. That is one thing I've tried and I found it really useful. And then agree with John, don't talk too much. Like let them tell you. And you can kind of, you know, get wisps of their product needs just on the way they're describing how they're using the thing, which is cool.

Maybe. Next question from Adam. How do you think the core skills needed to be an amazing product leader have evolved?

Because the question focuses on leader, product leader, not anything else. I think it's important to understand what leadership is. I think in my mind, great product leaders are Past the phase of basic product obsession. What do I mean by that? When you're in product leadership position, I think today it's becoming increasingly more important for these leaders to be very much into the detail and understand what is happening. The more you become, come, become in a leadership position. Again, I'm not defined leadership just by the number of people you manage, but just assume your scope is increasing, you have a larger surface area, etc, it becomes harder in order to stay on top of things. So what I notice a lot is that the most successful product leaders are, are so intimately familiar with the user, are so intimately familiar with the industry that they are in and the competition that they have that they are like the best advocate of what's happening, you know. So the, the myth that you need to verse is that the more leader like you become, the less hands on you are. Now actually you have to be more and more hands on. You have to be more and more deep, deeply involved. That's one thing I would say. The second thing I would say is if you are, if you aspire, if you're a product leader, just remember the amplification aspect of your job is really important. What do I mean by that? Nobody ever got to Mount Everest alone. You know, you need to have to know how to lead teams. They don't have to be a direct reports they have, they could, they don't have to, you don't even have to have any reports. But the more important thing is you just got to recognize that it's a team sport. It's not tennis, it's soccer. It's like basketball, it's not tennis. Right. So for the American audience who don't know soccer that it's like basketball, not tennis. So if you're a product leader, please try to understand what it takes in human skills perspective to actually amplify the work of people around you. Whether sales, there's marketing, whether it's design.

Whatever that is one thing I have related. Yeah, not to dispute that but I was saying also decide what kind of person you want to be. Like there are people who really pride themselves on being more of that leader and empowering like 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 people to get into all the details. There's more, there's some people who, who take a lot of passion with craft and there's some leaders and, and having met a lot of them and who are very successful at what they do. I think also it's like figure out what your own personal style is and the environment you want to be in and Learn how to smell out organizations that will actually value what you want to do and where you want to be. Because nothing's worse than arriving as like operator, you know, operator, leader who wants to get into all the details. And you arrive in an org where people are pretty much like, yeah, thanks, like we don't need that right now, we need you to do something else. So that's like one bit of advice I would give folks.

Yeah, I love that. To build on that. Like as you get more. I think as you move along the career path and you get more senior in your career, you get really good at figuring out organizationally how organizations work and when you're interviewing. Especially if you're going to go into a leadership role somewhere getting really plugged into how they work, what is important to them, what their principles are. Things like that will help you make sure that your, your own principles like mesh well and that your skills are going to be additive and not subtractive. In an environment like that, your number.

One career skill is how to smell out orgs. We should do a whole session on that. But like that's a great. The poor fit that lasts you 1, 2, 3, 4 years of your life where you can't necessarily extract yourself immediately from that and then the drain on you psychically in those environments. There should be that. We will do a maven course just on how to know if you've got a good fit with the place you're at. Because. Because the interviews will never tell you.

Okay, go ahead.

How do you suss that out? Is there a question you can ask the person when you're interviewing or after we get the offer? Any kind of quick tips on that?

Yeah, so I'm relatively new is to duolingo. I joined actually it's been about two years now, so not that new anymore. I feel new still. And I spent a lot of time asking a ton of questions because I had made a different decision in the job that I had before and I didn't love it and I left really quickly after I joined. And so I asked a lot of questions on like how do you work? How does, how do product decisions get made? What does the product review process look like, who's involved, who's deciding and just really spent a lot of time digging into just the day to day operations of their product organization. And then I also really drilled who was going to be my manager on his management skills, how he likes to work with his team, his communication style, all of those things and ended up feeling great about what I heard and joined. And then I'm still here two years later. And so I think it's just really kind of again, figuring out like what you like and what you don't like in your job and just making sure that's gonna, you're gonna lean into the things that you like by asking the right questions. I also think, Sorry, I feel like I'm like a broken record for chat, GPT, ask chat, gbt, those types of questions, what you could be asking when you're interviewing somewhere because I'm sure have some zingers for you, you to add.

To that stalk members of the board, because you're essentially working for members of the board. So figure out what agendas they've brought to all their prior investments because you're going to end up working for their incentives and their agendas. And then unless you have a really strong CEO who's going to push back on it. And then I would say that the other thing too is you could have a completely chaotic, messed up org. But there, there can be a boundary of goodness that you can learn a lot. So you all, you're picking your leader, right? Like you're picking the person that you're going to work with in your immediate surroundings. So you could do as much as you want on the culture of the but there could be an enclave of goodness or there could be everything's good, but you just happen to find the enclave of not so goodness. Those would be two bits of advice. Sanjay.

Yeah, I mean, I was just reflecting as you guys are speaking about my time at Instagram, Coinbase and Airbnb. I think the thing that I tried to look at these companies was the propensity of the leadership team for change. What do I mean by that? You know, when I joined Airbnb, a lot of things were messed up too. You know, no company is perfect. There's always a problem in all these companies, right? So my criteria has always been do the people in power or the people who are decision maker, what is their propensity for change? Because I can come in and build a new product development life cycle. I can change the spec template, I can change the decision flow, I can change information flow. But if the organization is not willing to change, none of that shit's going to happen. Right? So more likely than not, I'll just advise all of you when you join a startup. I was Amongst the first 100 employees on Instagram. Lots of broken problems. Problems. Lots of that was bad then it was right. And if I just evaluated against Facebook, I would have failed that test. And I would have never joined Instagram because Facebook had this amazing thing. This is how things happen. This is how the development, lifestyle, everything was figured out. Instagram had nothing figured out. When I joined Airbnb, the biggest problem that I heard from PMs, including Nikki and others, was sunshine. We don't empower our PMs. Brian Chesky makes all the decisions. How do we fix that? So there are all these problems, problems in every company that I've been at. But what I look for is, hey, if I'm coming in, can I change? Does this organization has nimbleness to change? Does the founder has a nimbleness and desire to change or not? Right. So that's the journey I took and luckily it turned out to be fine for me.

Yeah. One thing to double on that is that know the difference between chronic problems and acute problems. Sanchin, what you said really resonated is that companies that are making progress, if you ask them, like, how often do you just work things out? It might not happen in one quarter. It might not happen, but they'll say, you know what, what? Six months. I thought it was terrible six months ago, but we went back and worked it out. It's much more important than those are the you don't you want fewer chronic problems and more acute problems which will come up all the time and evidence that you've knocked them out. So that's such a great point, Sanjay.

Right.

And all of you, if you're at a PM role, I mean, you yourself know at least half your job is smells like you don't like it. Right. But you still do it because it's important to get the right part hard. The other 50 that you love, get that thing done. So every job, every company is not perfect. None of them will be perfect. If you're looking for a perfect one, you'll never find one. Your job is to cover into an imperfectness and just know that the animal that you join, using an analogy, is just willing to change.

All right, yeah, I think we're out of time here. But, you know, I want to give a chance for our panelists to share, like, if you want to, people want to continue conversation with you or like, where can people find you on the Internet? I'll start with like, I guess John, who has like a huge following already.

I don't log into that Twitter thing anymore. So I'm not. It's going to take me like two, three weeks to get back to you there. But unfortunately, LinkedIn, that's probably a good way to get in touch.

Yeah, I just started posting a lot on social media at the Real Sunshin. I only talk real shit. Don't no bullshit. So if you want to follow the Real Sunshin, go follow me on YouTube, Instagram, I'm over there and we'll chat more.

Yeah, you can follow me on LinkedIn. I also don't really tweet a lot, unfortunately. I would love to be a an X person, but I'm not. So follow me on LinkedIn. I also have a newsletter that I eventually want to get going again. It's nikki.substack.com awesome.

And you know what, if I am still on Twitter, unfortunately, but on Twitter and my newsletter. Yeah, on X. And my newsletter is. Yeah, crittereconomy. So.

All right. It's a great newsletter. So there you go.

Thank you.

Thank you.