Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside)
嘉宾：Tal Raviv
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I've had thousands of people tag my CEO on Twitter calling on him to fire me.
I was actually on vacation and I got bored and I was like, "I haven't logged into Twitter, I haven't posted anything to Twitter for a while.
What's going on on Twitter?"
And I see that the notifications number is maxed out.
It's like 999+ or whatever.
And I was like, "Wait, what?"
And I clicked the notifications tab and I see the first tweet has @CEOhandle fire Tal Raviv.
And I saw that that has a ton of retweets and I keep scrolling down and I start to piece together the story.
Today my guest is Tal Raviv.
This is a very special episode for me because Tal was one of the first and most active community members when I was just starting my newsletter and Slack community.
And as a PM I've admired from afar for a very long time, he's got some really unique and insightful takes on how to be a great product leader.
And interestingly, he's decided to stay in IC product manager throughout his entire career up to this point, which is over 12 years as an IC PM.
I've never met anyone that's stayed in IC for this long.
He's been a PM at Patreon, at Wix, at AppsFlyer, and most recently joined Riverside as their first ever product manager.
Riverside, by the way, is the platform that I use to record my podcast, so this was kind of a meta experience for both of us.
He's also former founder and outside of tech he volunteers as a surf instructor for people with disabilities.
In our conversation, we talk in depth about the IC career path, a bunch of tactical advice on how to be more productive as a pm, including a killer example of how he uses ChatGPT to scale himself.
Tal also explains why every tech company has just two departments that matter, the difference between book smart decisions and street smart decisions.
We also spent the most time I've ever spent in Failure Corner where Tal shares all of the times that he's failed in his career and how those experiences made him stronger.
And it was really important for him to share these things because he wants people to understand that successful people fail a lot and those failures make you better.
If you want to learn more from Tal, he's actually about to launch a course on Maven that's called Build Your PM Productivity System, which based on the conversation that we had I'm confident is going to be awesome.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to follow it and subscribe in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.
It's the best way to avoid missing feature episodes and helps the podcast tremendously.
With that, I bring you Tal Raviv.
Tal, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
Thank you.
It's great to be here.
This is a long time in the making.
It has been a long time in the making.
You're interesting in so many ways, we're going to talk about a lot of different things.
One of the things that makes you most unique and interesting as a PM is that you've stayed in IC product manager for your entire career for 12 years.
I don't think I've ever met a PM that's been in IC for 12 years.
I imagine you've had many opportunities to be promoted, I imagine this has been very intentional.
And I also know a lot of people actually think about this a lot, "Should I move into management?
Can I stay in IC and be successful?"
So I'm going to spend some time here to start.
And my first question is just why?
Why have you decided to stay in IC?
Why have you not moved into management?
I don't really have a strategy for my career.
My strategy is not to have a strategy.
For the longest time I've gone by, am I excited to wake up in the morning and what's going to make me excited to wake up in the morning?
Not every single day, not all the time, but for most of my days that I work, what's going to make me hop out of bed?
And just kind of follow that.
And over time, as I got to have different managers and different product leaders that I've worked with, I've never looked at their schedule or their days or how they spend the high percentage of their time and said, "Wow, that's what I want to be doing," if I compare their days with mine and the stuff they're busy with and focused on.
And at the same time over the years, I've also noticed that the colleagues that I identify with the most, like the ones where I just feel I most relate to them, many of them have that same pattern where they've gone to team lead or director and so on, and their next role they request to be an IC, they insist on being an IC.
Yeah, so from the tech world, that's what informs that.
And the values I had growing up just watching my dad, he's a researcher, he is a professor, and he has a blast every day.
He refuses to retire, he's just so enthusiastic about what he does and he's never aspired to be a chairman, provost like that.
He just loves what he does and he stayed there.
And I just see the joy, the fun.
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So much of that resonates with me.
There's actually a period of my career where I was was not an IC, no, I wasn't IC, and I was just like, "I don't want to be promoted any higher.
Everyone I look at above me is just so stressed and I just don't need this and things are great.
Why would I want to change that?"
And I love that you stayed close to that.
I know a lot of things pull people towards management, which compensation, there's status, more impact, trying to learning to be a manager.
Is there anything there that's just pulled you and you've been just like, "I'm going to give that up and I don't need that," or is it or life is just as good as an IC for you?
I won't lie, over the years, despite everything I said, if somebody who is my same amount of experience or same cohort gets promoted and becomes a team lead and makes that decision and rises up, it does twang in my stomach, it gets in my ego.
I have that moment where I'm like, " Wait a minute, what about me?
And should I be doing that?"
And it makes me question everything.
And then I say to myself, "Okay, so go for it.
Tell your manager you changed your mind or whatever it is needs to happen."
And then I'm like, "Well," I kind of get back to the same logic of I don't actually want that.
So if I could push a button and switch with them, I wouldn't.
But definitely very human at the same time.
For someone that's trying to pursue this path, trying to avoid these sorts of things and say just trying to be successful.
And as an IC looking back, is there anything that you've learned that has helped you be successful and pursue the thing that makes you happy?
I think the big elephant of the room is compensation.
I think whenever I have this discussion with friends and colleagues, that's always the... Well, there's two things, there's compensation and there's can it be interesting?
Don't you get sick of it, right?
So I think that classic book drive, motivation comes from autonomy, mastery and purpose.
And I think for me, the IC role, it definitely is very autonomous.
Being a product manager is one of the most autonomous roles and most amount of agency you can ask for.
I think mastery, I once heard Mark Keating say in a workshop, product manager role is one of those roles where you can just keep doing it for a really long time because it just keeps changing.
And you can change industries without having background in it, the situation changes every time you do it in every different context, it's just so different and interesting.
And purpose is one that I took for granted in the past and I learned how important it is.
I think if you feel that you're building something that you really want to see happen in the world and you really want to make sure it's done well, you don't trust anybody else to do it, you want to be the one to work on it and make sure that this gets done well in the world because it matters to you, then I think you're in a really strong place from that point of view that really gets you motivated and you want to be hands-on and it keeps you really focused.
I want to drill into something you said around compensation and just generally what you've done to stay down this path.
Because I know the compensation, that's a real thing.
Is there anything you've seen or done that has helped you be more comfortable with that in terms of getting the comp you think you deserve being an IC this long being basically a super IC?
I think first of all, you have to believe your worth.
You have to genuinely believe and understand that an individual contributor in product management is worth, can have a really big scope, really big ownership, really big impact and matters a lot.
And I think the industry is coming around to that, right?
We'll talk a little bit more about this, but the great flattening of the last few years, and I've seen talking to friends who are founders and the founders here at Riverside are really looking for people really experienced who are really hands-on.
First of all, we just need people who get stuff done.
And just recognizing that in yourself and believing that and recognizing that in the industry and remembering, there's a really good analogy here in engineering where it really makes sense to all of us that you shouldn't have to rise into management in order to increase your compensation, you're equally or just as valuable not as a manager, as a domain expert.
And that's step one, really understand that you are really, really, really valuable as an IC.
I think tactically speaking, one thing that I've done a few times in different interview rounds is when it comes to compensation, you've probably heard the line, "Well, that's a really high number, but we can't reach it.
But don't worry, we're growing a lot, the product door is going to grow lot.
There's going to be a lot of opportunities to rise into management, so there's going to be a lot of opportunities to increase compensation over time."
And that's a classic line you might hear from a recruiter or hiring manager.
And in those moments, it kind of puts you in a weird position where it's like, well, you don't think you're going to rise up, you can't debate that so well.
And what I say in those moments is, "I'm glad you mentioned that, I actually have no intention of going into management or rising up in those ranks, and I know that you and I know that the industry traditionally undervalues the IC role so it's really important for me to have that number now," and that works.
Wow, okay.
Very straightforward.
So maybe along those lines, just a final question on this track is just for people that are trying to create a space for an IC path at a company or as a company trying to do this, anything you suggest they do to make this a thing for people that actually want to stay ICs to set this up as a real career path?
Have the titles.
I think having good titles that are clear that you can move up into, first of all, just creates it as an idea that there is progress.
Creating clear levels and rubric just like you would for within any level or within any title, I think saying it out loud, recognizing it.
I think it's just at the end of the day, we all want respect, we all want to feel that we're growing, we want to feel that that's recognized.
So I think putting it in words goes a really long way.
So in terms of titles, what are the titles you find?
Is it principal product manager?
Is there other titles you've found helpful?
And how many levels of IC do you find you need?
The ones I've seen on LinkedIn, there's product manager, senior product manager, principal product manager.
I've seen a distinguished product manager last year.
Yeah, I think Amazon has that too.
Amazon too, yeah.
I think those are the exception, not the rule, but yeah, I think putting into words really helps.
Okay, so principal and distinguished, distinguished is the highest level you've seen of an ICPM?
I think, or super IC, I guess.
Super IC, and we're going to talk about that.
And then in terms of rubric and career ladder, basically it's just the same way you have career ladder for managers, just have it further go further for ICPMs?
Yeah, I think product is usually the last department to really just because smaller, I think.
Yeah.
Okay, amazing.
Really helpful.
We've talked about this idea of super ICs, and as you mentioned, there's this been rise of and shift of flattening of orgs, as you said, of people hiring more senior product managers, there's a sense of that, and companies are expecting more of PMs just doing the work, not managing their PMs.
And I feel like you're such an interesting prototypical example of the PMs people want to hire.
And with AI, it's unlocking a whole new lever and opportunity for a lot of PMs where they in theory can actually achieve this thing that companies are looking for them to achieve, which is just get more done.
So any just thoughts along that track of just more is expected of ICPMs, there's more need for ICPMs and AI making it easier.
What have you seen there?
Where do you think things might be going?
We've seen the last couple years, I think you had on here Nikhyl Singhal talking about when Facebook had those really big layoffs that they were biased towards keeping individual contributor product managers.
Zuckerberg talked about the flattening, and I've seen here at Riverside during that same time founders talking about how they're just really looking for, "Can we just find some really, really senior experienced people who want to stay hands-on?
That would be the dream, right?"
I also have heard from friends in the market, the hiring market, that there's just a lot more experienced people competing for the same IC roles as a result of all that.
So I think the result of that is being at 10x PM for example is becoming more and more table stakes, especially like you mentioned with AI.
That's just the tailwind for all of that.
And we don't have to go too far down this track, but have you actually experienced this yourself?
Have you found really interesting ways to leverage AI and become more effective?
Just this week I have an example.
My team, I have one team that's trying to introduce much more rigorous scrum as it hires a lot more developers.
Part of that is a lot more paperwork as a product manager in some companies it's a whole role that they hire just to do that.
And what we did is basically took ChatGPT, told it the format of the stories and epics and so on, and tried something where I just dictated and spoke as if I was doing a kickoff and I just talked naturally and it just put out all this really, really, really amazing detailed stories and so on, and just had to edit it a little bit.
So that was a aha moment for me, like, "Okay, that would've taken either dividing the team into smaller pieces or multiple product managers to be able to keep up."
And obviously the next step is we just take the actual kickoff record that, transcribe that and feed that in?
We're playing around with that as well.
You can imagine what might've taken 10 years ago, five years ago a director organization, like a director level organization, and everybody reporting to that director to achieve something could probably be achieved with an IC now.
And I think this ties in because the product career path is going to be even less about people management and just more and more about leadership and the core of product manager skills.
This is a really interesting example of how you're using AI, I want to definitely spend more time here.
Help me understand exactly what you did.
So you had a bunch of projects that you were kicking off with a bunch of different teams with a PM leading each one or scrum master leading each one?
Actually, we tried this on one team, but it was a really big project, like a ton of stories, yeah.
Can you explain what the project is briefly?
Sure.
I'll say it's a pretty fundamental change to the user experience.
So it touches on everything.
At Riverside?
Okay, man, here we go.
I'm excited.
Okay, so you have this big project you're kicking off to rethink the experience of Riverside.
And normally you're saying you would've had to write all these one-pagers and specs of the components of this project, the different features and product, is that right?
So the high level why we're doing this, usability studies, the design, the vision, all that stuff we did without AI, that was me, director of design, and our founder.
But then it came time for the rubber meets the road, we did a kickoff in the engineers, everybody's bought in and everybody's excited and now we need to really make sure that things are really, really well-defined and very, very clear and easy for testing afterwards and just make all that stuff, the high level stuff really, really specific.
And so that means user stories in JIRA, in this case for this team, that's how they prefer to work.
And a specific format that they've asked for and so it's like a story and there's, it's called like gherkin, "I'm learning this too, this is new to me.
Given this when that then that," it's really tedious.
When it's small, it's actually really fun to write because it makes you think.
But when you have so many things that need to change, it's overwhelming and would either delay the team and there would be the bottleneck or we just have to split it up.
And what we did is we took that template, my team lead said, "Hey, this is the template I would love," I gave to ChatGPT, said, "You're an expert PM, product owner, scrum master," whatever, "This is the template.
Do you understand?"
It's like, "Yeah, let's go."
And then I said, "Well, actually before we get going, I want to tell you I'm holding down the dictation button, used Whisper AI to dictate.
And I was like, "Let me just tell you a little bit more background," I just started talking to it like I would for a developer joining the team, and I just started to talk about why we're doing it and so on.
I was like, "So do you understand that?"
I was like, "Yeah, cool, let's go."
And then I said, "Okay, well the first thing is we're going to change this area and it's going to work like this, and it's really important that this and this happens."
And I just talked super naturally to it just like I would to a person.
And when I was done, I hit enter and it created that user story in that format with all those cases that would take me so long to write.
And I would say the thing that we still really needed a person for was deciding how to break up this really, really big change into those stories, what is the logical way to split it up engineer wise?
Which my team lead did.
But once you have that, each one individually worked really, really well.
So I'm now experimenting with taking the transcript, I tried this actually experimenting with taking the transcript of the actual kickoff that we did and that we recorded on Riverside and how to transcribe, and I copied it and put it into ChatGPT, it didn't work as well.
So I'm experimenting, tweaking it to see how far can we push this?
This was awesome, I love that you're sharing this.
So basically you described the project and all the different features and user stories and words using Whisper.
And do you use Whisper, is it an app or is it within ChatGPT?
Where do you actually access this?
It's built into ChatGPT's desktop app and mobile apps if you dictate it that way.
I also have a desktop app on my own that I use, it's just such a great transcription model.
But it's open source free provided by OpenAI.
Right, it's OpenAI's speech to text system, and then they're adding voice mode soon like it's coming out to people so this is going to be built into ChatGPT soon.
Amazing, okay, so you talk about, "Here's all the things we're going to be changing in the product," you give it a template.
Where do you give the template?
Is it you put the transcript into ChatGPT with a prompt of, "Here's the template," or are you just even still describing that in the recording?
No, the template is something that my team leads, like, "This is how I'd love to have these written."
He just says it as part of the transcript?
He sent it to me on Slack.
He's like, "This is how I want it written."
So the first thing I did, I opened a new thread in ChatGPT and I said, "You're an expert product manager, product owner.
This is the template we want to use for user stories.
Do you understand?"
Hit enter.
So it's like, "Cool, I get it."
And then I start to talk about the changes we want to make.
Okay, this is amazing.
I could go down this track all day, but let's shift a little bit.
Is there anything else you found to be really helpful in having leverage as an ICPM kind of along these lines, whether it's or not just being the super IC essentially getting more done as an IC?
So the way I think about this is how you manage your own time, how you design your days.
How you manage your own time, how you design your days, your energy, your focus, and then your team and how you build that culture and those habits to just give you a lot of leverage as an IC so that still as one person you can own a lot of scope, you can influence a lot, you can manage a lot.
So personally for my time, I really believe, and I think you've written about this as well, in actively designing your days.
And for me, I really strictly split my days between deep work and what I call ping pong or ping pong.
You can imagine it's like when, you open Slack and it's just constant hitting the ball back and forth, it makes your brain feel like scrambled eggs.
You're not going to be doing any deep thinking or reading or strategy.
So for me, I'm a morning person and I block off my morning for meetings.
A lot of people give that tip.
I go even further and I don't open Slack before noon.
I've been doing this for eight years.
I don't open Slack at all.
It gets really extreme to the point where if I need to send a message, it usually fails.
I usually open Slack before noon because I need to send a message and then I realize all these messages don't need to be sent before noon.
Just because I thought it at 11 AM doesn't mean I need to send it at 11 AM.
There's no urgency at that level.
So I actually keep a section of my to-do list, which is when I open Slack, here are the messages I'm going to send.
And I write them as if I'm about to hit enter in Slack, but they're in my to-do list.
And sometimes if I really, really, really rare moments, I'll need to check something, I'll ask the person next to me like, "Hey, can you go into this channel and just show me that thing?"
Because all their notifications don't trigger my brain into scrambled eggs again.
That's an awesome tip.
And I know people will hear this and be like, "There's no way I can do this."
Is your insight is you can?
Yes.
Usually when I share this, people are like, "Well, what if something urgent happens and people are looking for you?"
This has happened twice a year.
You realize how not urgently needed the PM role ever is.
And first of all, over time people really respect it.
They learn that this is how you work and they come to really respect this.
And second, the key people that I work with have my phone number and I tell them, "Feel free to call me at any time if I'm not on Slack.
If you really need a response, just call me, WhatsApp me, whatever it takes."
And first of all, it's like a barrier.
It's not like a quick message.
So it really is only for urgent stuff.
And twice a year I'll get a WhatsApp message from my manager, from my team lead.
"Hey, something urgent is happening in Slack.
We really need you."
And then I'll open Slack and I'll violate my rule.
It's totally fine, but it's so rare that the system works for me.
Amazing.
Okay.
Anything else along those lines?
This is an awesome little tip.
I personally keep a weird habit.
I realized it's a weird habit.
I call it product scrapbooking where I have this massive notion database of every opportunity, big or small that's ever come up.
And when a piece of evidence out in the world comes in, it could be like a support ticket or a CSM sends a gong call or there's a really great Slack thread with an amazing brainstorm happening and ideas, piece of data, whatever it is, right?
I'll file it.
I actively take a screenshot or whatever it is, I file it and I start to cluster these in this really messy notion.
And the reason I do this is that I've learned that we have these roadmaps and strategies that seem linear, but life and customers and insights are not.
So when the time does come around to work on that thing and that opportunity comes up, I can pull up that notion and I already have a bunch of really in the weeds real world clues to start with and even persuade people that we should dig deeper into this.
Or for example, another advantage is that if I'm on a conversation with a person from sales or CSM from customer success and they'll mention a request, I can open that up and I'm like, "Yeah, this is actually this client and that client and that client also mentioned that."
And you see in their face that they feel heard.
"You've been listening all this time, you've been writing this down?"
I think that's really important as well.
I love these tips.
I love product scrapbooking as a term.
It makes so much sense and it's just immediately clear what you're going to be doing and I love how simple the approach there is.
Is there anything else along those lines or is there something you want to share around this other bucket that I think you hinted at of helping your team set you up for success and get more done?
I believe in cultivating very self-reliant teams.
And I think that's really key to having a lot more leverage as an IC, being able to manage multiple teams if needed on much bigger areas of the product.
I think the key of that is having this mindset that product isn't a role, it's a team.
And I read a quote once by Ebi Atawodi and she's worked on Netflix and Uber and she's super experienced and she says something like, "It's not about waiting for products, product said this or that or waiting for product.
We're all product."
And I really try to have that as the cornerstone of a culture of any team that I am on.
I had a new teammate come up to me recently, he just joined and he was on engineering and he came up to me excitedly and he's like, "I found a case that you didn't think about."
And I was like, "Okay, awesome.
But hold on, let's talk about language.
Product is not a role, it's a team."
And whatever it is, I don't even know what it is, but everything that we own, both design was involved, engineering was super involved.
Yes, I was there and it, let's call it, "Hey, I found a way to improve the product, or Hey, I found something that we didn't think about."
It's really, really important.
So first of all, that language, that culture, that it's not like this hub and spoke model and the PM is at the center and making all those decisions and passing things through.
So first of all, that's like a fundamental mindset.
It's really important for each team to have to be more high leveraged as an IC.
The second thing is personally to seek to not be needed, but be valuable.
The difference is like if you think about your day as a product manager, look for situations where is there a game of telephone that's constantly passing through me?
Are there a lot of situations where clearly you're the bottleneck, like your attention, your ability to get to something is the bottleneck and a lot of people are waiting on you?
Do you find a lot of communication is happening, direct messages with you instead of public channels for the team?
Are a lot of working meetings just like you and one other person on the team instead of maybe two or three?
Not too many either.
All of those are opportunities where you can create a different situation where a culture on the team, where people are figuring things out between themselves and maybe involving you at the very end.
So one of the things that I really put a lot of energy into is really encouraging people to get conversations out of direct messages and into channels.
This is a really important way to cultivate people with just working together and figuring things out in between one another.
And anytime somebody sends me a direct message, I say, " This is a great question.
Can you please put it in this channel with the team?
I'll answer there", but it's really important for me that any decisions we make are transparent, that it's easy to find it later, that there's a few other people who should probably chime in if they want to.
And this could be at the team level.
I worked at a company that had a really, really big customer success organization.
They'd constantly find you as a PM and just DM you these questions.
And I'd say, "Great question.
Put it in this really big channel."
And I give a reason, so that way other people on the customer success team can search the channel and find the answer later.
It can help other people.
And if you do this enough, it becomes a snowball effect because other people on the team will see that other people are posting in public channels and feel more comfortable with it.
And that just becomes a chain reaction.
Such awesome advice.
It's so counterintuitive also I think to a lot of product managers where you're basically saying remove yourself as a dependency, delegate more, empower everyone in your team, have engineers come up with ideas, have them write things, one page respects, things like that.
Become less valuable almost, which I think is not the natural tendency.
Become obsolete.
Become obsolete.
That's the dream.
No?
That's my dream.
I love that.
But if I think about trying to do this, I think you need a real confidence as a PM and comfort with chaos.
A lot of times PMs, they want to be the hub because the more they can control the narrative, the more they can control what people see.
PCX pinging an engineer like, "Oh my God, they're just going to start working on this thing.
And then we have this roadmap.
We have priorities.
What are they?"
How do you manage that challenge?
Yeah, there's a great phrase I heard a mentor once say, which is culture of a process.
Process is important.
And sometimes you need to process to scaffold until you build the culture.
But I think it's like you got to view the team as this asset you're building.
This culture is an asset that you're building and you're investing in it and you're cultivating it and you want to build something that's stronger than... That's a great example, a CX person or just directly messaging an engineer or just asking for something.
You want to build something that's resilient to that.
That's the real product that you're building as a PM I think is the team that builds the product, and is resilient to all these things.
It doesn't happen overnight.
It's not going to happen in the first quarter that the team has formed.
But it happens over time gradually with little messages and little interactions and positive feedback and asking people to work a little bit differently and giving them a reason why and building trust.
And I think that success in my job is to build a very self-reliant team that's very resilient to all those things that I would otherwise, like you said, to keep me up at night really make me worried.
You shared an example of how you do that.
These little, I call these micro interactions.
So much of a PM is these micro interactions with team members, which is so much harder now in a remote world where you can't just walk by and just do a little chat.
The chat you shared I think is an awesome example where the language was a really powerful shift in how this person thought.
Is there anything else along those lines you could share of how to create this sort of culture?
One thing that I try to do is when somebody takes something that would be my job and does that, whether it's on the design side, they lean in more or on the engineering side, they lean in more people bring ideas or they say, "Hey, I took the liberty of doing this."
It could be as small as something bureaucratic or as big as an idea or a suggestion.
I just shower them with positivity.
I just show them just how excited I am that they did that.
I just want that to happen again and them to feel even more bold.
And just like when somebody takes something off your plate, when somebody does kind of the PM, what you think is like, that's PM thinking, what are you doing?
Right?
Just really want them to feel that that is extremely welcome.
And I imagine there's a bunch of coaching you do to help engineers, designers, researchers, data, people think the way you think almost, to become more PM-y.
Is that a part of this too?
I don't know if I would call it coaching.
Like I said, it's just a lot of little behaviors.
So one thing I try to do along those lines is when there's something that's on me to do for someone or the next logical step, I try to do that live with them.
So if somebody asked me a question about, "Hey, what does the data show about this?
If we went that direction?"
I'm like, "I don't know.
Let's find out."
Instead of saying, "Hey, I'll get back to you, let's open Mixpanel, let's play around with this."
And I don't tell them, "Hey, it'd be great if" I just show them how easy it was.
Like, "Hey, if I could figure this out, this Fisher Price data for PMs, you could totally figure this out."
That's what I'm trying to imply by showing it.
Or if it's create a JIRA ticket just to make something happen quickly and document it, I am like, "Hey, let's just do this together on the call right now and make sure I get it right."
And what you see is over time, some people more than others, but they start to just naturally want to do that themselves.
Ask you for that access, start to do those things.
"Hey, I did this and I wrote the JIRA ticket for it.
I did this and I did the data analysis" and that grows over time.
You actually have a course that you're launching or is out now or about to launch that teaches a lot of these things.
Talk about that.
Yeah.
This is a passion project I'm working on with Maven, the learning platform.
It's a course called Build Your Personal PM Productivity System.
And it really goes super deep and super practical into these topics, exactly like how to design your time, how to manage yourself, how to manage your emotions, how to cultivate self-reliant teams, how to give feedback and create a product org that puts less overhead on you as a PM.
And yeah, the idea is to just take all these topics and just make this really, really, really hands-on.
Awesome.
I feel like I wish I had this.
And I feel like you're such a great person to teach this because as an IC, this is how you succeed.
This is the thing that makes it hard to stay as an IC.
And again, with the rise of AI almost creating a space for super ICs, as we talked about, it feels like this kind of stuff is going to be more and more important.
So we'll definitely link to that in the show notes.
I want to shift to a different topic.
I think you've kind of shown people this already, but you have a lot of very contrarian opinions about a lot of things.
You see things a little differently, and there's a few other things that I've seen you talk about that I want to spend a little time on.
So I'm just going to go through a few of them and just share whatever you want to share on this.
Sound good?
Sure.
Okay, cool.
The first is you have this phrase that, or this concept that every tech company basically is just two departments that matter.
So yeah, over time working at a bunch of hyper growth companies, I've started to notice that there's some departments that are the reason that company won the market.
And also started to realize that, and this is sometimes true of the department that I'm in product, that even if product did a 10X job, it wouldn't be a 10X outcome for the company over the decade.
But for example, it could be if marketing did a 10X job, the company would have a 10X outcome over the decade.
§02Transcript · 38:46–1:12:48
And I started to observe this over the years, and I noticed it's roughly usually two things.
Two companies, sorry, two departments.
It's roughly two departments that this boils down to in each company.
So I'll just make this really concrete without naming names.
The companies that worked at, the two departments at one company was product design and support.
If those two departments were 10X, then the company would win.
Another company was data accuracy and customer success.
Another company, the thing that made them win in the market was trust slash brand, like a trusted brand and payments.
And another company that I worked at looking back, what made them win in the market was marketing and engineering, like scalability.
So product sometimes is on this list.
So one of the companies I worked at, like I mentioned, product design product, if that department does 10X impact, then the company will succeed 10X in the market.
But in my career, it mostly hasn't been product.
Product has to do a good job, but it's not the biggest lever for that company, even though it's a tech product company.
And I think this really crystallized for me when I finally worked in a company where product is that department.
You feel that.
Okay, so the $64,000 question, whatever billion question is, how do you know which two departments matter most?
First of all, look at what really drives the growth.
What's the growth model?
What are the levers?
Ask those questions.
How does it work?
Ask officially and ask as part of your back channeling and reference checking.
And the second thing is if you're really seriously checking out a company, evaluating a company, truly understand that customer and what are they actually paying for in this industry?
What is the real product?
What's the real value that they're getting?
Clearly they're paying for a product or a service, but beyond that, what are they actually paying for?
Ask those questions and I think that'll make it clear.
I think maybe one trick here is just see what team drives growth.
Oftentimes it's going to be sales, oftentimes it's going to be product experiments they're running, could be marketing.
Exactly.
And that department, whatever role you have, if you're in that department for that company, that's going to be your career defining work.
That's why it's so worth it.
You're going to attract the best colleagues or careers are going to have a step function jump.
It's a totally different experience.
And this is when people say a company is engineering driven, product driven, marketing driven, sales driven.
This is exactly what they mean, which team matters most to the company because they're driving the most growth.
So if you're a salesperson on a sales driven company, you'll be valued more highly than being a product person at a sales driven company.
Yeah.
When I graduated from college, I had a friend give me advice.
He was like, "Don't be a finance guy at a tech company and don't be a tech guy at a finance company."
This was 2009.
So anyways.
Yeah, and I think this is where a lot of people struggle with their PM at a company that is very not product driven, and you read all these books about being empowered and having agency and autonomy, and instead, they're just the team that, they're just feature factories because other teams are running the show and we don't need your opinions.
We know how to grow this thing.
Just build this thing for us.
And here's the thing.
That's okay.
That's what that company needs to succeed in the market.
You think about the Olympics, this is analogy that came to mind recently.
It's like, let's say you can think how a marathon runner looks and how a swimmer looks.
They look very different.
You can spot them in the row of athletes.
And if you imagine product being a lap muscle, that's product department, you can be a lap muscle for a marathon runner.
You can be one for a swimmer.
And a marathon runner needs one and it needs to work.
But where do you want to be that lap muscle.
On the swimmer, on the marathon runner?
I love that analogy.
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Let's move on to another, let's say hot take that you have.
You have this kind of phrase that there's a big difference between book smart decision making and street smart decision making.
What's that about?
Yeah.
This one comes out of a lot of mistakes I've made myself and seen around me as well.
So I'm so guilty of this.
Book smart decision making as a PM is all the stuff we talk about all the time.
That's data, design, technology strategy, frameworks, all that stuff.
And it's really important and it's why we're strong at it.
Street smart decision making is taking all that and then seeing something from somebody else's point of view.
This goes beyond empathy.
I'll tell you what I mean.
It's like giving the customer's perception just as much weight as you would to logic.
A really big example of this, and I won't name the company.
I was at this company that changed the structure of the pricing and the change was actually not meant to make more money.
It was meant to unblock a payments roadmap and enable all these feature requests that were stuck behind this fundamental change.
And in preparing for this, the company did a lot of analyses and just made sure that this was actually really good for customers and that this would only, the number-
This would only ... The numbers and the predictions and the models are like, "This is a positive thing."
I know all the people that were involved were the most empathetic, did this because they really cared about this customer, genuinely.
I've never seen people, at the executive level, at the product level, at the data level, these are the people who really genuinely wanted the best for this customer and they rolled out the change, and in reality, bottom line, it was a big revolt on the internet.
It was a big deal and it was rolled back.
And the bottom line why there was such a gap between everything ... And actually, by the way, all the analyses proved that to be correct.
All the models, all the predictions, everything played out the numbers as predicted.
The problem was the perception, the narrative behind it, what it looked like when you've logged into the product and you saw only the negative, but you didn't see all the positive because the positive was what happened 30 days later and you saw the negative immediately.
A lot of things like that.I would've made exactly the same mistake.
Not a criticism.
I would've probably made more mistakes, but that's what opened my mind to, oh my God, you have to really think more than just logical, more than just utilitarian.
Another example of this is there's a company I worked at where all the features that were on a higher plan were invisible to the lower plans just because everything was built really fast and there was time to make them visible so people could upgrade.
So we got that ready and we did this and we're about to release it, and we realized tomorrow morning a bunch of customers are going to log into the product and there's all these features that they've been asking us for because they didn't know that we have them, because they were locked and only on higher plan.
Suddenly, from their point of view, the company built everything they'd asked for and all of it requires paying more money.
How are they going to feel?
And so, we didn't roll it out that way.
We rolled it out in smaller pieces and in different ways because we realized that's going to feel really if you think about it.
But, practically speaking, or theoretically speaking, we didn't upsell anything.
These were all things we already had built.
Everything's above board.
That's the perception of what was going to happen.
And that second example, is there anything that triggered that recognition or is it just people sitting around being like, "Oh, what about this?"
Because the first example, you had a great point where customers were telling you this isn't necessarily what they want, and you're like, "No, no, no, you're going to do great.
Trust us, it's going to be really good for you."
But there's feedback, at least, in the safety examples or something that's like ... What I'm asking about is how can people develop the skill?
I love this advice.
I think that intuition came from spending time in the customer community and support tickets and just noticing smaller versions of that that people have feedback on.
And you kind of start to see what our customers, at the time, what they would tend to, what their suspicions always were.
They're very trigger-happy to blame the company for XYZ, and if you see enough raw data from customers or if you get on a customer call and they mention nickel and diming and all these things, you start to understand this is the target persona.
This is how they think.
This is what they're sensitive to.
It's interesting because at Airbnb there was a lot of that, a lot of hosts being really upset about changes constantly. Everything that changed there. And usually the changes are to help the business in some way, help the guests in many ways, and it's always this balance of we got to do this. This is just the future. Is there anything there, just real quick, of just learning when we got to do this anyway, even though they're going to be versus like, "Oh, [inaudible 00:50:12] let's roll this back."
Yes.
Okay.
Yes, for sure.
This is just what I'm talking about is to recognize it.
What you do with it is a different thing.
I joke when we do changes to redesigns or changes to the UX and we're going to get inevitable complaints.
I just tell my team, "We're going to deploy this and we're all going to log out of social media for two weeks."
And that's the strategy.
That's extreme.
We don't actually do that, of course, but that's what we wish we could do sometimes.
And the insight there is just social media will amplify one person's loud voice versus how many people actually are upset about this?
How important are they to the business?
It's like, don't pay attention to the loudest person.
Also, I think the key there is the two weeks, because if people are still complaining after two weeks, then there's something here.
But in those two weeks there's going to be a lot of feedback that comes from a resistance to change that they're going to adapt to and won't be able to remember what was before.
But sometimes you make mistakes and if there's a real mistake, you'll know about it for a long time.
And obviously you'll pay attention to support tickets and all that stuff.
It's just-
Obviously, a disclaimer, during those two weeks, we look at every support ticket and we look at everything on social media, for sure.
Okay.
Two more examples about the street smart book smart that are really important.
Oh, please, let's do it.
Let's do it.
This has happened twice to me where I worked on a team that made a very logical UX change and quickly found out that we ruined the sales demo.
So, for the users of the product, the experience became a little bit smoother.
It was an optimization.
It wasn't something critical.
But then, for the sales demo, it communicated the value less.
It was harder for people as to really understand in one glance.
So, a lot of times, this comes from taking something that's very visual and making it very efficient and small, so you might gain fewer clicks, but it'll make it harder for the sales team to communicate and for that ah-ha moment to happen on a call, to the point where we made this change and then salespeople would send me Gong link recordings in the past and in the current demos and just show me the difference and it would pain me to watch these.
And I was like, "Oh, we got to fix this.
People aren't getting the value, how they even going to experience it?"
Okay.
I know that you have a couple more hot takes that I wanted to make sure we have time for.
One that I love that I agree with, and it's kind of the thesis of this podcast almost, which is that there's no right way to get things done in a product, team, or in a business, in spite of what you may read online.
I'd love to hear your take here.
Yeah, I didn't always understand this.
In fact, I moved continents because I had professional FOMO, so I moved from Israel to San Francisco because I believed, and actually a lot of people had that feeling that whatever we're doing here in Silicon Valley, they know how to work.
That's the big leagues.
And I got to work shoulder to shoulder with people who came from Apple, YouTube, Salesforce, Facebook, Slack, Amazon, Stripe.
I got to work with the people who came from these companies I admired so much and I came over with a conclusion that we're all just making it up as we go along in tech, we're all just improvising, as we should.
That's the beauty of it.
Every situation is different, every market is different, every company is different.
What it takes to win is different.
And so, myself, I've had phases where I've been this zealot of everything has to be outcomes driven, and then I've gone to let's just ship as much as possible and figure it out and everything needs to be A-B tested and quarterly planning has to work this way and should do scrum or don't do scrum.
And they just realized it's not that simple.
It's about figuring out the problem at hand and optimizing for that and having an open mind and just understanding that we're all improvising.
That's really powerful and I think people may hear this and be like, "Yeah, I think I get it."
I guess for people that are just ... Everyone's reading my newsletter, reading all the newsletters, listening to podcasts, listening to how people work, what's your advice?
What should think, in your mind, when they read about how another company runs?
My personal story, one of the things that happened when I landed in San Francisco, I really felt like an imposter.
I was like, "Okay, wow, everybody else here really knows how to work and I need to learn from them."
And six months later, I found myself giving talks and writing blog posts about how to work, blog posts that were being used in like Reforged courses and all that, advising people and sharing.
And that's when it hit me.
That's the beauty of this industry is that that can happen because everything is changing so fast.
How did I get there?
I was just on a team doing something really difficult and interesting in a very unique way, and that's how you learn.
That's the real way to learn.
My manager Adam Fisherman, at the time, told me something related to this, which is like, "The best networking is just to do really good work at a successful company and everything else will work out."
So I think the same goes for learning.
The best learning is to just do really good work at a really good company with really good people and solve problems that have never been solved before in this way, which will inevitably happen.
That's what we're all doing.
And everything else will work out.
You'll be the one writing the blog posts, not just reading them.
Such important advice.
So kind of the takeaway here is just if you want to become much better, if you want to be the one sharing advice versus the one reading advice, easier said than done, but the advice is work at a company doing interesting, hard things, driving impact, growing, being successful, and that's how you level up.
Yeah.
I love that.
That's the best way.
Yeah.
And again, easier said than done.
Not everyone can join an awesome, high-flying tech startup.
Interestingly, you did this in Israel, right?
Away from the core of Silicon Valley, so you can find great places outside of Silicon Valley.
Absolutely.
Great.
Okay, so I know that you wanted to spend a bunch of time in Failure Corner, which I love.
It's this recurring segment on this podcast where folks share times they failed in their career and things they've learned from those experiences, and you wanted me to carve out meaningful time here, which tells me that you've had a lot of these experiences, for better or worse.
So, what I'm thinking is let's just go through a few of these stories that you think might be helpful to people to hear about times things didn't go great and what you learned from those experiences.
How does that sound?
Yeah.
It's really important for me to share this, I think.
During low points in my career, having someone share with me a failure story just really helped me understand that that's part of it and I'm not alone.
You browse LinkedIn, you see these incredible profiles with these incredible pedigrees and what you don't see ... It gives you this sense that everybody's just had a smooth sailing and everything's going great, and everybody's been here long enough, has had a ton of failure stories and a ton of low points and self-doubt.
So, it's really meaningful for me to just talk about this.
Let's do it.
Let's get into it.
Let's get real.
I'll say this, twice I've wasted an entire quarter of a growth team's time because of my poor use of user research.
First time, I can look back, and after 12 failed A-B tests ... 12 failed A-B tests set us on the right path and got us to revisit our hypothesis, but if I had only spent more time with the customer, and this was the kind of A-B testing that people say, "No, you can't do user research.
You can't ask somebody how a button's going to affect their purchasing."
But if I had spent time with the customer to just understand who they are, what motivates them, how they got there, why they're paying, all that stuff, I would understand that not every checkout process is the same psychology as Groupon or Amazon or Booking.com.
So, the things that work on those sites work not just because people are the same everywhere, but they work because people are in the same mindset.
For Groupon, for example, Amazon is different, Booking.com is different, and what you're working on, why people are buying in this situation that I was in was so different.
They had so much motivation over such a long period of time.
They had constant reminders naturally in their lives that they were happy to get and the things that didn't work were all the things that worked that Groupon and Booking and Amazon, all these e-commerce sites did, those were not relevant.
And we tried all those things and they fell flat.
The moment we realized that, and it clicked for us, all these A-B tests that should have printed money, did nothing.
Once we realized that, then we really started to increase conversion and it was a super successful team.
But man, I look back and if I just used more qualitative research, even though it was an area that traditionally you don't use qualitative research, I could have saved so much time.
It's also a great reminder of just not assuming wins that work at another company will win for you, which I think everyone's like, "Yeah, I know that."
But I think people don't know that.
I think they often, "Oh, look at this.
Amazon's killing it with this feature.
If we add it, we're going to win so hard."
And so this is a great reminder.
Don't just take stories from others.
This is something [inaudible 01:00:54] actually talks about a lot is don't take stories from other companies as gospel.
You're a company.
There's so many things that are not the same.
Awesome.
What else else do you got?
The second example of that is I was building a referral program and we made a user research plan and we ended up only executing half of it, which means we talked to the people who were already using it successfully, and we decided to skip talking to the people who should use it but didn't.
And we're like, "Yeah, we get it.
It's probably the same feedback."
We were in a rush for a lot of other reasons.
There was a lot of pressure, just unrelated reasons and just decided that, "Okay, we have enough information.
We don't need to spend more time.
Let's start shipping."
And that was a huge mistake as well.
Just spent so much time building something that didn't work.
And yeah, I think my lesson there is the reasons that got me to hurry and make that decision with not as much data were reasons that I just kind of took people's word for stuff.
I didn't think as first principles as I should and I really caved into the time pressure.
So, yeah.
It's like [inaudible 01:02:11] therapy.
Just letting it all out.
This is great.
And so far our recurring theme is spend a little more time on the user research, talk to more customers.
Again, something we always hear, but a lot of people are like, "Ah, user research.
I don't need that."
And what we're hearing here would've saved your team months and quarters, potentially.
Yeah, each of those wasted an entire quarter.
Oh, geez.
All right, cool.
All right, what else?
What else we got?
I have, three times, been a hair away from getting fired.
And what I mean by that is a senior executive has come to me and said, "You are a hair away from getting fired."
And one of them, there were changes that the head of product really wanted to make and I felt strongly that it shouldn't be made, and I voiced that directly, candidly, personally, and repeatedly, and then we had that conversation and a colleague told me, "Listen, look at it this way.
If you trust the leadership team to adapt if something's not working."
I said, "Yeah, I trust them."
"Well, what they need from you is just to rely on you that you're going to be with them even if [inaudible 01:03:29] the disagreeing come in, that's what they need from you.
If you're right, they'll adapt.
If you're wrong, then great.
You learned something.
Product work got better."
So, the most important thing was there's a song, a lyrics that goes, "You got to give in to win."
It wasn't about being right, it was about just being supportive and letting things fix themselves instead of ... So, that was that moment.
Literally that was the conversation.
The second moment, bigger story, but I was on a group that my manager and I, we just weren't a fit.
And that happens.
It's really important to share that happens.
It's common.
It's somebody I respect deeply and has done amazing things and I still respect them and we didn't work well together.
And the next step was, okay, well I guess it's time to let me go.
His manager was like, "Hey, before we let you go, I want you to stay at this company and let's find you another group to work in."
I was like, "Okay."
He's like, "Just finish the initiatives you're on.
Don't start new ones.
The quarterly planning is coming up.
Sit in all the meetings, look for opportunities, and things will work out."
And I did that and I didn't find an opportunity that I was excited about and my initiatives wound down and I didn't know ... Okay, well what's going to happen?
And then there was a group where actually three PMs left at the same time.
One went on maternity leave, one got an offer from Feng, and one had to start an emergency tiger team for their area of expertise.
And this director, he filled two of the roles, one internal hire, one external hire, and there was one more role.
I reached out to him and he is like, "Yeah, great.
Come put your desk next to mine.
We'll just work on a few projects together, get to know each other."
And I could tell after a few weeks that, even though we'd been getting to know each other, he was still interviewing for that third role.
And I realized that something was stuck.
And at the same time, the director who had reached out and said, "Hey, please stay at this company.
You'll find something," called me with a very different tone.
He is like, "Listen, you can't just float around without a role.
If you don't find something soon, we're going to have to let you go."
And he was right.
So I found myself in this situation and I actually reached out to a friend, Gai Peleg.
He's a friend and a mentor.
I actually met him through the [inaudible 01:06:14] community.
Oh, amazing.
Yeah, he's here in Israel.
We got coffee and he told me, "Listen.
Clearly you have nothing to lose.
There's probably an elephant in the room.
This new director is wondering why'd you leave this older group?
He's not opening, he's not broaching the topic, so it's up to you to do it."
And I was like, "Okay, what do I say?"
He's like, "Well, what would you say to him if you didn't have to edit yourself?
You didn't have to censor yourself."
And I told Gai, "Well, this is what actually happened.
This is what I believe.
This is what I could have done better."
And he's like, "Dude, that's totally fine to share.
You should share that.
Word for word, just say that."
So, the next day, I took the director aside and we had this conversation.
I shared vulnerably just like, "Here's what I think I messed up.
Here's what I think.
It wasn't under my control."
And that conversation, just the vibe changed.
I could feel like a weight off our shoulders.
It really felt like we got closer.
Two days later, I was part of the group.
I joined the group.
I did some really awesome work there.
That's such a powerful lesson right there of just opening up and being vulnerable and just sharing what you're actually feeling.
And this has come up a couple of times in the podcast.
It's what brings people closer.
You think being vulnerable and showing weakness makes people think less of you, but almost always they think more of you because they didn't realize what they were doing.
They didn't realize what you're going through.
You kind of think they're reading your mind.
Yeah, we've all been through that.
It doesn't look like it.
When you see someone you think is successful, that you admire.
You look at somebody's LinkedIn profile, you look at their resume, you look at their bio.
It doesn't look like that, but we've all been through all of it.
And most times, folks don't know what you're feeling or going through, and so, just sharing, "Here's what I'm seeing, here's what I'm feeling.
Here's why things maybe aren't working for me."
Goes a long way.
Amazing.
These are awesome stories.
What else?
Where else have you failed?
I've single-handedly tanked new payments for a whole week for a company I worked for.
It was a well-meaning change.
It was super logical.
It was kind of streamlined.
And I violated my own framework for when do you run A-B tests.
I even wrote a blog post about this and I violated that and I was like, "Oh, there's no downside here.
We don't need to measure this.
This just kind of makes things way smoother."
And then I get a call from marketing and they're like, "Why are none of our campaigns converting?"
Listen to your own advice.
Run A-B tests sometimes.
Run A-B tests sometimes.
If you're dealing with really sensitive flows that have big downsides, even if you think logically in your mind, there's no reason there should be a downside here.
If the stakes are really high, yeah ...
There should be a downside here?
Great.
Yeah, if the stakes are really high.
Yeah.
All right.
What else?
I have some stories.
I don't know if they're failure stories, but they're like wild west-
Let's do it. Let's do it.
That's what it feels like, one time I completely disobeyed quarterly planning.
My team was told to do one thing and we just said, "No, we're going to do something else."
It's not as dramatic as it sounds.
It was like, "Hey, we really, really believe that this is an opportunity and if we delay this, there's going to be a really nonlinear cost, opportunity cost to this and we really should do this."
I'm like, "No, you should still work on this."
We're like, "Okay, what if we made it a really small team and it was just for one quarter," and then, "Fine, okay, we have built that capital to be able to do that."
But I remember your W framework post, I love that, and I don't know what letter that would be, but that's how that you got-
You go up to the side, split it off in two, make it a Y. But most importantly, did it work?
Was that a good idea?
Was that a right call?
Yeah, it was a right call. It's become a way bigger team today and yeah, I still read press releases and blog posts from the company where it's clearly that team's work continues so yeah.
Amazing.
Excellent.
I got lucky though.
Yeah.
All right.
It sounds like.
Again, this is just like-
Wild West.
... Wild West.
PM is no less wild than life itself.
I've pulled an April Fools prank on an executive team that resulted in my CEO seeing me... the next time he saw me, just looked me in the eye, said, "You Tal," and walked away.
Can you describe the prank?
So the prank was... I'll say, first of all, the best April Fools pranks are the ones that touch just ever so gently on people's biggest fears at that time.
So in a work context, whatever somebody's biggest strategic fear is that quarter or that March of that year, whatever people are talking about, you just have to touch it a little bit, they'll do the rest of the work.
So this company, there's this really big debate about internationalization and should we do that, and there's a big trade-off to doing it and other things we could be doing with the same resources.
And this was just on everybody's minds, especially the leadership team.
And it was March, so my buddy and I, also at the company, we decided what would be people's biggest fears would be that a really big company would launch the same thing in Europe.
And we created not just a fake screenshot, not just fake news, we created a fake domain name website publication.
It was really detailed.
We really invested a lot in it, and of this German website, and we made up a tech arm of Der Spiegel.
We called it Spiegel Tech.
We bought the domain, I'm probably incriminating myself by saying this, and then what we did is we knew that if we had sent that link on the 1st of April to the executive team, nobody would believe it.
So what we did is every executive on leadership team has that senior report that they really trust.
So we got all of them in on it, and the link would come from them and each of them took it further.
The senior engineer who was really critical to the company, he created a fake recruiting poaching email.
If I recall, I think the legal counsel created a fake cease and desist.
§03Transcript · 1:12:50–1:31:20
We just went all out and this was on a Saturday so we ruined the executive team Saturday, they had an emergency call.
It was a Saturday.
We ruined the executive team Saturday.
And every time that we decided that a particular executive had suffered enough, depending when they woke up and how long they had been dealing with us, we would let them in on it, let them into the private channel and ha ha.
So Monday rolls around, CEO sees me, "You, Tal."
"Great.
I'm still employed."
And I hear later that day that the leadership team had their Monday meeting and somebody mentioned that even though that was a prank, it really got me thinking.
And then the CTO of the company goes, "Wait, what do you mean prank?"
And it dawns on him and he just gets up, throws down his jacket and walks out of the room.
So we forgot to tell him.
He had to stew with that the whole weekend.
So yeah, sometimes something goes too far.
And that is well executed.
Oh my god.
It actually reminds me at Airbnb when I was leading a lot of the April Fool's jokes year after year, and one of the best ones we did was we launched, it's basically we did the opposite of what you did.
We launched AirBrb, which was a desk sharing service, and we made a whole launch video.
We announced it as a new product, AriBrb and the idea is you go get lunch and you can, "I'll be right back," and then your desk can be rented out for 20 minutes.
For 20 hours.
And we had a whole website and we had amazing video launching it, and basically it was the opposite.
All the desk sharing companies got freaked out.
Oh no.
Because they though we were legit.
It's the greatest fear, yeah,
Yeah, exactly.
You don't have to do too much.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the good news is they quickly realized it was not real, but we probably led to some calls, some board calls.
Okay, this was awesome.
Any other stories?
I've had thousands of people tag my CEO on Twitter calling on him to fire me.
This was by accident.
But yeah, I was actually on vacation and I got bored and I was like, "I haven't logged into Twitter.
I haven't posted anything in Twitter for a while.
What's going on on Twitter?"
I see that the notifications number is maxed out.
It's 999 plus or whatever.
I was like, "Wait, what?"
And I click the notifications tab and I see the first tweet is, "Has @ceohandle fired @talraviv yet?
And I saw that that has a ton of retweets and I keep scrolling down.
I start to piece together the story and there was a change, the pricing change earlier I said had an uproar and the Internet was up in arms about this.
And somebody found a blog post from a year earlier because Brian Balfour interviewed me about an onboarding experiment that we did.
And part of that interview I shared that at this company, we'd rather have fewer customers where we make a bigger impact on their lives than a lot of customers, that we make a smaller impact, and explain the logic and the product principles.
That was really core to the mission of the company.
And somebody took a very limited screenshot of that to prove that know Tal Raviv hates poor people or something.
And that screenshot went viral and that those tweets got embedded on like NPR and Washington Post, and that was a little nerve-racking.
I wasn't fired because I actually wasn't connected to that.
I wasn't on that.
I really felt bad that the PR team, marketing team and all that, I reached out to them and was like, "I'm so sorry.
You guys are working overtime because of my big mouth."
And they're like, "Don't worry.
This is happening to everybody at the company right now.
Everybody's having... People are digging stuff up, unrelated stuff."
But yeah, that's stuff that happens.
What a life you've led, Tal.
Maybe just to close out this portion or discussion, is there something that you think people should most take away from this really important stuff you're sharing of just things that usually don't go well for people that do well in, there are many things that go wrong?
So the feedback I get from executives about these moments that really I think is transferable and helpful is that they know that no matter how silly I'm being or what stuff I get myself into, that they know for a fact how seriously I take everything.
They know how much, if I make a funny presentation about something and I put a lot of jokes into it, but they're like, "It's still extremely clear how seriously you're taking this."
So I have peace of mind.
Yeah, I think you have to have both.
You can't just have these adventures or do these silly things or make these mistakes.
It's important to give the confidence that you know you're making a mistake, you're on top of it before anybody else, that it's bothering you more than anybody else.
That if you're communicating and you're trying to make you creative and that first of all, you've done all your homework and you've put a ton into it, and that gives you the basis.
The funny side of this is I have friends who make fun of me that I work really hard to justify... I have friends that make fun of me, that I work really hard so that I can increase the amount of bullshit that I can get away without being fired.
Depends how you look at it, but it's really important-
That's amazing.
... to give that peace of mind.
Yeah, build that trust bucket and then just deplete it completely every time.
And then just throw it out the window.
Amazing.
Tal, is there anything else that you want to share before we get to our very exciting lightning round?
We've covered a ton of stuff.
It feels like there's been three podcasts within one podcast.
But just before we move on, is there anything else you wanted to share or touch on or leave listeners with?
Oh, let's do it.
Okay.
The lightning round, yeah.
Well, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round.
I've got five questions.
Are you ready?
I'm ready.
First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?
The best book on product management that I've read.
It's called How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk.
I encountered this book, my sister is a speech therapist and she had it on her bookshelf at home in her apartment.
And I was jet lagged one night I was visiting her and I read it, and if anybody has read, Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss where he talks about how these senior FBI agents in 70s, 80s were realizing that all they were doing in their negotiating tactics were just not working and decided to try something different.
And that's something is basically nonviolent communication.
And he gives these amazing examples of decades of using this with kidnappers and terrorists and organized crime to defuse situations and create productive outcomes.
So this book, with all due respect to FBI agents and terrorists and hijackers and kidnappers, this is about kids.
So this book for me, this is what really the example is how it's communicated.
It's illustrated almost like a comic book, tons of super concrete examples.
And for me, I think that's when these principles really sunk in.
That book really resonated with me the most, more than the book itself for Nonviolent Communication or the Never Split the Difference, both of which are awesome.
So I really recommend that book.
Man.
I want to do a whole podcast on what you learned there, but I'm going to force myself to move on.
That's awesome.
This is going to be really helpful to me as a new parent.
There's a book that another, I'm just going to throw out a book recommendation reverse lighting round on this topic, that Joe Hudson recent podcast guest recommended offline that I've found to be incredibly helpful.
It's called Listen.
It's an orange book so there's a few on Amazon and will link to them in the show notes, but it's just called Listen.
And it's about why listening is the most powerful way to help your kids get through stuff that is challenging to them.
I'm not going to-
It's a powerful title.
Just listen, that's it.
And there's all these different ways of listening.
So anyway, okay, we'll keep going.
Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed?
I recently rediscovered Ted Lasso.
The first time I watched it, I got tons of recommendations, it's hilarious.
I didn't connect to it.
I just didn't connect to the humor.
I was like, "Ah, okay, fine."
I stopped watching it.
And then I heard a podcast where somebody recommended watching it from a point of view of leadership lessons and they just couldn't stop recommending.
They so passionately recommended it and I was like, "Okay, let me revisit this."
And when you watch it from that point of view, it's mind-blowing.
If you think about, I'm sure a ton of people listening to this have watched this show, you think about the premise of the show, it's this guy who's been given an impossible task and he's surrounded by the worst human beings in the world in terms of just the worst human beings and behaviors.
And the way he gets through that is... It's hard to describe, you have to watch it.
I think any attempt to summarize it, but the show, just watching it how this character behaves and gets through this stuff is incredible when you watch it from that point of view.
And for me, it definitely affected how I work, definitely influenced me, but not just work, just also how I deal with aggressive Middle Eastern urban life situations, how I deal with... I've applied this dealing with really tough locals at surf breaks in South America.
It's incredible.
I'll give a story of the surf break.
I was in Chile and I was surfing and it was an hour the day where a lot of the people who were local would be surfing.
And a bunch came out and they started giving me these looks.
This happens in everywhere in the world, every surf break and just really uncomfortable.
And one of the guys especially, and after a while I was realizing I'm not going to get to surf if this keeps up and there's no conflict to get out of this.
And I swam up to him and I asked him, I was like, "Hey, are you from Pichilemo?
Are you from here?"
And he's like, "Yeah, why?
I was like, "You are one of the luckiest people in the world."
And he didn't... he was totally caught off guard.
He started smiling and that just changed the whole vibe.
It got to a point where he was telling other people, let me have this wave.
And that's how my experience in a lot of surf breaks and my friend calls it Ted Lasso, the Ted Lasso somebody, which is also very genuine.
You really have to believe it.
Okay, next question.
Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love?
So this morning I spent half the day surfing.
And I think the products I've really come to appreciate, there's not a lot of products used in surfing.
It's like a wetsuit, board shorts, maybe a hat.
But you can really feel, I surf with O'Neill wetsuit, Hyperfreak wetsuit but that doesn't matter.
It's one piece of gear is really well constructed, you can feel that the person behind this also surfs or spends a lot of time with surfers and really gets you, probably gets you more than you understand on face value.
And you start to notice all these details over time.
It takes a long time to notice all these details and you can really feel that there's a person behind this product that gets you.
And it's like art almost.
When you feel a piece of art or music really resonates with you, you feel that the artist is communicating with you directly and letting you feel something that they were feeling.
It's almost like that.
So I think for me, it's outdoor equipment that you can feel that the person behind this is using it along there with you.
First time a wetsuit has been recommended on the podcast, a great milestone.
Two more questions.
Do you have favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful and work and life share with friends or family?
I think I can... I'm doing three surf stories in a row, but this is a life motto that's just stuck in my head for almost, for more than a decade now, which it comes from a piece of plywood outside of surf shop in Mexico, that was painted on it, "You can't stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf."
And yeah, there's a lot to that, that over time that I've really tried to apply that in a lot of ways, emotionally, organizationally at every level, you think about that.
Along those lines.
Final question.
So at the beginning of this podcast, you mentioned that this podcast has been a long time coming and the reason that's the case is we had this scheduled for some time in early October.
You live in Israel, war broke out.
You've been living through that, being in Israel this entire time.
I saw this Venn diagram that you put out that I think summarizes your life right now, which is... I forget one side of it, but just like-
Apocalypse.
... apocalypse, one circle, the other is, got to get to work.
Got to wake up and make-
Israel's in the middle.
That's what it... Yeah.
And you've been in that for the past year.
So I'd love to just briefly just hear how that's been for you in the past year.
How are you doing?
How's life for you?
Here at Riverside, we've had a bunch of people out for reserve duty.
I think all of them are back now.
I have a team lead.
Well, people are still going in and out of reserve duty while working here.
I have a team lead who leaves on Sundays around 4:00 PM, goes to the base, won't say what he has to do, but it's super intense and shows up the next morning a little tired but back at work.
And general, it's not just in Israel, we have teammates in Ukraine-
Oh wow.
... all along at the same time.
Yeah, one of my teams is almost entirely in Ukraine.
So we've had moments where we'll all be on a call and then there'll be missile siren here in Israel, here in Tel Aviv.
And we'll say, "Hey, sorry, we got to go."
Go down to the shelter, hear the explosions overhead, come back, sit back down.
Later that day, we'll have another meeting.
And on the Ukraine side, you'll hear like, "Hey, that beeping, isn't not the missile alert on your end?"
And, "Andre, isn't that not the critical alert on your iPhone?"
He looks at his phone, he'll be like, "Yeah, but I got 10 minutes.
Let's just finish the meeting."
Right?
These surreal moments where you just, at the same time where everything's not normal, people have this really strong desire for normalcy.
It's work and everything around us and our routines become more important than ever.
And it's just these... You have, "Oh, where's Vlad?"
"Oh, the power grid was attacked in this town," so he's working, I mean in getting the generator back up.
Oh okay.
But I don't know if it's a no excuses mindset or badassery so much as I know on my end, it's just that, I think for Ukraine team definitely, at my end is just really, really crave the routine and the sense of normalcy when you can get those moments.
And like I said, I think during this podcast working on this course, all these things, I'm not doing them because things are normal.
I'm doing them because they're not.
So, yeah.
And I'll use this opportunity to say that biggest thing in all of our minds is there's 107 hostages that have been held for 328 days by Hamas and you need to bring them home now.
Yeah.
Well, let's hope the hostages come home.
Let's hope things end soon.
I'm really impressed with how much you've been able to get done in the middle of all of that.
And thanks for making time for this.
I know that this isn't the most important thing in the world right now, but I think this conversation is going to help a lot of people, and you have so much wisdom to share.
Thank you.
Thanks for being here, Tal.
Thank you.
On the course real quick, just to make sure people check it out, how do people find it, just throw that out there as a final step.
It's on maven.com in the product catalog, and I'll have it... I'll probably post links to my LinkedIn as well.
You can find it there.
And yeah, it'll launch in mid-October.
That'll be the first cohort.
Amazing.
And we'll link to it in the show notes.
Tal, thank you so much for being here,
All right, thank you.
Bye everyone.
Thank you so much for listening.
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