Ora Levit

There are a lot of newsletters out there, but the Product Leadership Essentials newsletter is your monthly guide to building up your product leadership skills. Subscribe and join and get the latest news and top tips sent straight to your inbox. 📩

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🎙️Tonight is the night! Join Bosky and me for a deep dive into the importance of soft skills in product management. We’ll discuss how EQ can help you grow your career, enhance your products, and build better relationships. See you at 8:30 PM CET at this link 👉🏻 https://lnkd.in/e3RiyHjE

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I wrote Hiring Product Managers to show that hiring can be an agent of change. We need to stop thinking of hiring as simply 'ticking a box' - approaching hiring in a meaningful way can have a great impact on our personal growth, team dynamics & the shaping of our organisational culture. Get your copy!

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📣 Product Folks: 😡 Have you and your team hit the wall with trying to focus on value? That *could* look like: ▶ No steady stream of data to inform strategy, prioritization + roadmaps ▶ Stakeholder misalignment ▶ Competing priorities ▶ Duplicative or overlapping work streams 🤓 Are you ready to put Product Operations into practice at your company? Join me for Produx Labs' Product Operations June 5 Masterclass! Snag your seat today. https://lnkd.in/ephFvTwf #productmanagement #productops

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Alignment. The most frustrating part of the product marketing job. One way to make it easier? A little psychology. One perpetual challenge of product marketing is achieving a semblance of stakeholder alignment around product launches, messaging, and go-to-market strategy. Imagine the assortment of opposing viewpoints, priorities, and personalities you're attempting to unite: ➖The CEO wants big swings and is impatient for explosive growth ➖The product manager considers their labor of love an uncompromisable masterpiece ➖The sales team is skeptical of any potential disruption to their cadence ➖A myriad of conflicting agendas from CS, marketing, legal, and beyond Having so-called “synergy” with this eclectic group takes an impressive feat of diplomacy. The main issue is that people are hard-wired for psychological biases that cause resistance to unified alignment. Some tendencies working against you: 1️⃣ Confirmation Bias We instinctively discredit or dismiss information that doesn't adhere to our preconceived beliefs, no matter how valid. 2️⃣ Authority Bias We inherently trust and defer to authority and hierarchy rather than objective facts, data, or logic. 3️⃣ Sunk Cost Fallacy We're irrationally inclined to continue courses of action we've already invested in, even if changing paths is wiser. 4️⃣ The Anchoring Effect We latch onto the first piece of information as a reference point, distorting subsequent judgments. So how do you achieve stakeholder buy-in and alignment despite the psychological opposition? Being as intentional about addressing the core psychological drivers as your actual strategy. Balance data-driven influence with personal rapport-building to make stakeholders feel genuinely heard. Use intellectual humility to earn trust and establish objective credibility from the outset. Most importantly, leverage psychological biases in your favor: ✅ The Mere-Exposure Effect Repeated exposure builds familiarity and leads to buy-in. Gradually introduce information, rather than an information overload. ✅ Loss Aversion Frame alignment as an opportunity to avoid losses or negative consequences rather than solely focusing on potential gains. ✅ Social Proof Befriend respected internal champions. Their advocacy carries weight in selling your vision. ✅ Decoupling Isolate issues to avoid conflation and overwhelm. It's meticulous work, but mastering psychological angles is equally vital as any technical PMM competency. Your entire launch falters if you can't align a diverse collection of personalities. So be like Freud (well maybe only 50% like Freud to comply with company drug policy).

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Market awareness and building commercial acumen are hot topics in the product management community right now. Next Wednesday for #WorldProductDay2024, Anthony Marter and I are sharing learning journeys and practical tips on how product managers can build their business nous, GTM muscles and "exec speak". If you're in Auckland, and you're product-interested, come along! 🚀 🚀 🚀 #product #strategy #market #value https://lnkd.in/ger4jyKw

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How can product leaders move the needle and take the lead in this shift? Moving Off the Solution – guide your team to step back from the tech stack and view the challenge from the POV of a new user. Measuring Customer Perceived Value -- require PMs to sit with a cohort of users -- typical users. Conduct a discovery exercise. A small sample size is sufficient. Embrace the Change – this should require a complete change in mindset but a different orientation. Focusing the team on adoption, cross sell and upsell has clear near-term and long-term ROI for the company. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gjJk_K5V #leadership #prodmgmt #ROI

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Having examined the careers of 1,000+ product managers, I find five "hidden" roadblocks that surprised these talented folks: 1. Being Stuck in Non-Product Land: Many find themselves in environments prioritizing outputs over outcomes, stifling essential skills development like customer insight and strategic vision. 2. Getting Known Only for Execution: Excelling in execution can, unfortunately, pigeonhole you into more of the same, preventing you from taking on more strategic roles that drive significant impact. 3. The Comparison Trap: Comparing your career to others can be detrimental. Each journey is unique, and focusing on your own path and progress is vital. 4. The Upper Limit Problem: This psychological barrier where you subconsciously limit your success can significantly hinder you. Recognizing and pushing beyond your internal limits is key to achieving greater career heights. 5. Extreme Manager Dependence: Relying too much on your manager for career progression can leave you passive in your own career development. Taking ownership and advocating for yourself is essential. Remember, your career is your story to write. Inspire your teams and stakeholders by transforming your environment and narrative. If you're stuck in a less product-led role, find ways to steer towards a more outcome-focused approach. Share your vision, and slowly shift the culture around you. If you would like to see an entire video that discusses these findings in depth, please comment "video," and I will send you the link.

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Lenny Rachitsky I listened to your amazing podcast with Todd Jackson about product market fit. The 4P framework ( persona, problem, is amazing. All the benchmarks, strategies, and tactics that Todd Jackson shared are spot on. Recently, Sequoia Capital put out a solid framework, the ARC Product Market Fit Framework for Hair On Fire, Hard Fact, and Future Vision. When I combine these two, 4P relates well with the Hair on Fire category of the products. I wonder how the 4P framework would work with the products' Hard Fact and Future Vision categories. Lenny Rachitsky Todd Jackson I wish I could hear more about PMF in the Hard Fact and Future Vision categories. For rest, These are amazing content about #productmanagement, #productmarket fit, #startups Here are links: 1. This is the link to the entire podcast: https://lnkd.in/eTX5tGtE 2. This is where the 4P description starts: https://lnkd.in/eTX5tGtE 3. This is the link to the ARC Product Market Fit podcast. https://lnkd.in/ezprPT-Q

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Interesting thing I've learned about building a benchmarking tool is that what a lot of early adopters actually want is an influencing tool. Completely reframes product features. Example: Old feature: Auto generated board reports 1. Choose metrics 2. Generate Graphs 3. Download as pdf/ppt New feature: Show me the stories I could tell with my data. 1. Here are the stories you can tell 2. Choose story 3. Generate metric benchmark graphs that help tell that story 4. Suggest narrative 4. Download Excited to see where peoplemetrics.fyi goes :-)

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Chief Product Officers have the shortest tenure of any C-Suite member: 2.5 years. In my recent interviews with Product Leaders, a common theme emerged - navigating a role under a non-technical Founder/CEO can be extremely challenging…but not impossible: CPOs that focused on educating their org about how product works, shared their vision and strategy constantly, and showcased how product metrics tied to clear ROI and customer value had longer tenures and better, more collaborative relationships with the rest of the organization > those who didn’t.

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Metrics come up all the time in talking about how to prove design systems value. The prevailing idea is that increasing adoption is the key to unlocking value. I disagree. I think it may be a part of success, but it is a bad way to express value. Here is why! Adoption is the kind of metric you get when you throw up your hands because you can't get the right data or you're more focused on building the design system than what you can build with it. It is the equivalent of "well, people seem to use it, so it must be great!" this can be fine if you're just starting out, but it doesn't tell you how your system is actually delivering value. Heck, NPS (which is also pretty imperfect), or a qualitative ask of product teams of "how valuable is the design system to your daily work?" or "what would change if the design system went away tomorrow?" is a better proxy for value than just "do people view some pages or login once a week?" Adoption can be pushed as a mandate. After seeing hundred of design systems up close, I can say definitively that high adoption doesn't differentiate between dream design systems and that 17 tool spaghetti monster that has documentation in Excel with hundreds of links to a private Git repo along with a 22 swim lane flowchart that you just... keep... scrolling... down. The only reason why adoption persists as a common metric is because even really bad design systems have the ability to generate significant value. So what's better? First, we need to hone in on the unit of repeatable value. This differs depending on the stated goal of the design system, but the vast majority of good design systems that operate at a significant scale are focused on how fast the organization can build products using the system (that's not the same as building components or designs in the system itself). At Knapsack, we tend to express this at this as cycle / iteration time from design to code across product teams that consume the design system -- either faster iterations or fewer iterations. We tend to focus on capacity because individual cycle velocity is often poorly understood and varies between product teams or disciplines. However, most teams have a fair handle on their capacity both for a single cycle and across a historical range of cycles. These can also be expressed easily as a relative percentage increase or decrease. It also accounts for a lot of secondary things (e.g. QA time) There is a goldilocks zone that consistently lands between 20 - 40% greater cycle capacity. For most of our customers, that's literally millions of dollars. If you're using adoption, you're not alone. We've heard time and again on the Design Systems Podcast that folks look at this metric ALL THE TIME as a measure of success, but it certainly doesn't paint the full picture, nor is it the north star for understanding value.

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All right, it's live! My Sharebird AMA on how to think about and use AI inside of your PMM org, as well as how to think about it in your product positioning. It's been super fun to answer these questions and get them out of my brain and into the wild! 🤗 Every PMM should be waking up each day asking themselves, "How can I automate my job with AI?" ...And then put it into action. You'll come out the other end as a more valuable, strategic resource. #generativeAI #productmarketing

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The perfect idea doesn't exist. No idea turns out exactly how you expect it to when it confronts reality. As Naval shares, quality products come out of confronting reality 100x by putting something in the hands of customers and continually tinkering with it. 📌 I shared 9 more tips to elevate product quality here: https://lnkd.in/gRzMGmNE

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As a product builder, one of my favorite concepts is Balaji Srinivasan's Idea maze (attached below). End users of a product only see the final decisions made. They don’t see every tradeoff the builders agonize over and the alternative universes that could’ve been. Great product are designed by builders that put an incredible amount of thought behind each decision. Steve jobs talks about a similar feeling in building the Mac. IMO this is the essence of finding product <> market fit, and makes a world of a difference in outcomes. For example, “video on the Internet” in the early 2000’s was an obvious emergent trend. But Youtube and Vimeo are very different products, and company outcomes. I think about this concept often for the market of “GTM signals” and "AI for Sales." It’s hot right now, many GTM teams are talking about using signals and AI, and there’s a wide diversity of products to choose from. Some tenured GTM operators gripe about how this is nothing new and it’s a renaming of age-old concepts like ABM, intent, B2B marketing, etc. There’s some truth to that and as a builder I’m always curious about the history of our space, but I also believe that AI (specifically LLMs) are unlocking new use cases that were previously not possible. So next time you see a new product in a confusing market, keep an open mind and see if it helps you accomplish something radically new. You could be looking at the next Youtube.

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Product marketing often gets pigeonholed as being responsible for launches, messaging, and sales enablement. But smart product marketers play a much bigger strategic role that gets overlooked. The best product launches and roadmap decisions happen when product marketing has a real seat at the table to help shape strategy from the start. Here's why: 1️⃣ PMMs provide an outside-in perspective that prevents myopic thinking, realigning what customers need and value 2️⃣ As a credible voice of the customer, great PMMs bring real data from research and win/loss analysis to substantiate recommendations 3️⃣ The 10,000 ft. view. While PMs dive into user stories, PMMs keep an eye on the big picture - competitive forces, market trends, and corporate initiatives 4️⃣ PMMs ultimately own pricing, packaging, go-to-market. Those financial factors should absolutely influence product strategy PMMs shouldn't dictate every decision, but we need influential voices when defining problems and prioritizing features. Products improve when product marketing's insights are embraced early. Fight for a real strategy seat rather than an afterthought hired to "pretty up" finalized plans. The goal should be a true collaboration between PMMs and product teams.

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I love a good "drama", so when the guest post "In Defense of Feature Team Product Managers" by Ben Erez hit Lenny's Newsletter, I brought out my popcorns and was ready to dive in. When Marty Cagan released his article "Product Management Theater" in January, it definitely caused a stir in the product community, leading to Lenny's podcast with Marty on this topic. Marty has strong opinions on what makes a “real” PM. Having read Marty's books since I was a PM newbie, his work has been my guiding light, though it sometimes made me question if I fit his definition of a true PM. Ben Erez’s recent post was a breath of fresh air, counter to the popular narrative. He highlighted the value of feature teams, especially for CEOs with a clear product vision, and emphasized the crucial roles PMs play, whether on feature or empowered teams. I appreciate Lenny for bringing these #diverse perspectives to light. It’s easy to be influenced by thought leaders, but hearing different viewpoints helps us form our own opinions and decide what’s best for our unique circumstances. Hats off to Lenny for creating such an #inclusive space! - In defense of feature team product managers by Ben Erez: https://lnkd.in/gaGkSn6f - Product Management Theater by Marty Cagan: https://lnkd.in/gD36X2zU - Lenny's Newsletter by Lenny Rachitsky: https://lnkd.in/gWGpjX7g #productmanagement #diversity

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Product Leaders: Visibility is your responsibility. Don't just say, "Oh, that's all politics." If you don't take 100% ownership of communicating your achievements to your organization, your career suffers. But even more so, the company suffers because wrong decisions get made on who gets promoted and put in charge of important things. Do the work, and then take responsibility for communicating it.

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Incentives matter... and there's an "incentive paradox" at play when product-led meets sales-led. When you are doing a great job with product education, have transparent pricing, and make it easy for anyone to get started, you will have inherently less meetings as a percentage of traffic. If you are measured on short term performance on meeting volume, it can be tempting to start to add friction back into the process. This is often a mistake. Product-led companies with a sales-led component will often do far better in the long run; as an easy to use, helpful, easy to learn product often attracts more champions, awareness, and funnily enough... demo meetings. You have to work transparently with other teams and to align on the goals and have the tough conversations with the stakeholders ahad of time so you don't find yourself scambling and making rash decisions. #productmarketing

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