让宇宙为你所用 | Claire Vo(LaunchDarkly、Color、Optimizely、ChatPRD)
Bending the universe in your favor | Claire Vo (LaunchDarkly, Color, Optimizely, ChatPRD)
Operating Like a Startup
Claire Vo: People often think that I get hired into later stage companies because I’m supposed to teach them how to operate like a big company, and in fact, I say I’m hired to remind them they can operate like a startup.
About the Guest
Lenny: Everybody wants this. Everyone’s like, “Yes, move fast, amazing quality.” What’s an example of that for you?
General Career Advice
Claire Vo: I communicate to my leaders that my expectation is they bring in the clock speed one click faster. If you think something needs to be done this year, it needs to be done this half.
Lenny: There may be a trend happening here of combining engineering product.
Advocate for Your Own Promotion
Claire Vo: I’m using CPTO for short code of running product and engineering design functionally together. There should be no debates over what’s best for product or what’s best for engineering, what’s best for design speed. What is best for the organization?
High Potential Promotes at Org Limits
Lenny: You built a tool called ChatPRD. My guess is it’s the single most popular AI PM-specific tool out there.
Frame Promotions Around Company Needs
Claire Vo: Is it going to eliminate PMs next year? Probably not. Are the skills required going to shift? Yes. Could they shift much faster than we all anticipate? Probably.
Lenny: Today, my guest is Claire Vo. Claire is a longtime chief product officer at Color, Optimizely, and currently chief product officer at LaunchDarkly. She’s also been a two-time founder, engineer, designer, and a marketer. She’s also the creator of ChatPRD, which I suspect is the most used PM-specific AI product out there, which she builds on nights and weekends.
In our conversation, we dig into what PM skills AI will complement and potentially replace in the future, the story behind ChatPRD, and Claire’s advice for how to stay ahead of the curve on AI within the PM role, the importance of feeling agency over your career, and how to bend the arc of the universe to achieve the things that you want to achieve, insights into what it takes to be a successful woman in tech, especially as an exec, how she creates a fast pace within larger companies while also keeping the bar very high, the rise of the CPTO role, combining product and engineering under one leader plus a ton of career advice both for early career people and senior leaders, and so much more.
This episode has something for anyone that’s in product or interested in the role of product, and I’m very excited to bring it to you. If you enjoy this podcast, don’t forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It’s the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Claire Vo after a short word from our sponsors.
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Claire, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.
Horizontal Growth Advice for PMs
Claire Vo: Oh, thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Lenny: I’m even more excited. You’re someone that, to me, has always felt inevitable would be on this podcast and that we’d be doing an episode together. Do you feel the same way, or not? And it’s okay if you don’t.
Organizations Are Highly Malleable
Claire Vo: It’s a privilege and a pleasure, and I’m glad I’m here. I’ve been so impressed with your guests and your content. It’s been so exciting to see just the wide range of product leaders and thinkers in this space. And if I can be on a list of product leaders and thinkers in this space, then I’m doing something good. Thanks for having me.
Beware of What You Excel At
Lenny: It’s absolutely my pleasure.
I want to start by talking about career advice. I was perusing your LinkedIn, and your career path is basically what most PMs probably dream of in their career. Just to summarize, you went from associate product manager to product manager to senior product manager to director to senior director to VP to SVP to chief product officer, and now you’ve been chief product officer of three different companies. And along the way, you’re a founder, you’re a designer, you’re an engineer.
Here’s my question. If you had to boil down what you think your secret sauce has been to progressing so far and so quickly throughout your PM career, what might that be?
Claire Vo: Yeah, so when you list it all out, you can probably guess underneath it all is a relentlessly curious, impatient, eager to build person at their core. I just like building stuff and I find a lot of fun, and I think if you find a career or a craft that’s fun, it’s easy to accelerate your growth in that career. One thing, I just love what I do.
But when it comes to career growth and that progression from, I actually started as a copywriter of all things, copywriter all the way up to a CPO or CPTO that runs an engineering organization, it boils down to something really simple, which is know what you want out of your career, be clear and ask for it, and then make it easy for your boss or whoever can support or champion you to get you from here to there.
And so I’ll take a really specific example from earlier in my career, where I had been in management for design and product management, so a senior manager level over product and design at an e-commerce company, and worked very closely with growth and marketing. We were just two sides of the same coin and worked very closely. And the head of marketing left and there was this big to-do pretty quickly of, “Well, what are we going to do with marketing? And do we need to hire somebody?”
And I sat for about a half a day and I thought, I think I can help here, drew out an org chart, put my name on the top, walked into my boss’s office and said, “This is one potential solve of your marketing organization question, is we’ll bring product and marketing growth together. I can be in this position. Here’s how I’d change the management structure underneath this. Not just where do you put me, but where do you put everybody else? And I think this could work for the company, and this is how I’d suggest we roll it out and this would be my JD.” And I got that job. I think when people ask me about career advice, they want to hear, “What can I do?” Really, what do you want? And how do you make it as easy as possible to make the case to your boss to get you here to there?
The other thing that I give people advice about is know what you want out of your current role and know exactly what you want your next role to be. And I even know this, and I even say this to my boss. When I was VP of product at Optimizely, I said to my boss, “I want to be a chief product officer. Here’s how I’m going to get us here to there, and I want you to partner with me on it.” And even coming into this role when I was interviewing at LaunchDarkly, my boss, Dan, the CEO of LaunchDarkly asked me, “What do you want out of this role?” And I said, “I want my next role to be a CEO role, so I want this role to fill in my gaps, learn, help me elevate my experience to get me to that next step.”
And so I always know what that next role is going to be and I’m always clear about it. Now, I think there’s a fine balance here. There’s one thing to be very clear about your goals. It’s another to suck the oxygen out of the air about only talking about getting promoted. These are probably 0.005% of my interactions with my boss are about my career growth and my path. It’s very small. “Am I clear? Are we on the same page? And am I communicating as I’m making progress against those goals?”
High-slip people I think get promoted basically as fast as the org can support. I’ve almost never wished I promoted somebody earlier. I’ve seen managers or folks promote a little too early, and so as somebody that’s managing their own career, you have to be a balance of ambitious and assertive and take care of yourself and advocate for yourself, and the work needs to speak for itself at the end of the day, and that’s what’s going to drive for your career growth. And so know what you want but do the work and produce the results, and you can have a career like mine.
Protect the Builder’s Time
Lenny: Maybe first to summarize, some of the core advice you’re sharing is know what you actually want because you’re not going to progress towards this amazing future career if you don’t actually know where you’re going. Otherwise, you’ll be pushed in directions that you’re not necessarily interested in going.
I have a sense of where you want to go to tell people and ask for it. “Here’s what I want to be doing in the future. Help me get there.” And I love the other point you made of just, don’t over-focus on that. There’s many people that spend a lot of their energy on, “I need to get promoted. How do I get to the next level? I deserve the next level.” And I guess maybe along those lines, is there any other advice you could share of just how to avoid being that person that’s just constantly obsessed with promotion? Any more advice of just how to find that balance?
Finding Your Zone of Genius
Claire Vo: Yeah. One, you’ve got to lock to the norms, the talent norms of your organization. You should know how those things work, and they can work very casually if you’re a very small startup and they can work more formally if you’re at a very large company. And one, understanding how promotions operationally happen inside an organization can help you have those conversations at the right time in the right moment with the right context. That’s one thing I advise. We’re a slightly larger organization. We do promotion cycles. We have times during which we promote people. And so if you’re talking to me four months before a promo cycle, maybe it’s top of mind, maybe it’s not. I sometimes functionally cannot promote people inside larger organizations whenever I want.
One is, I think, understanding the talent calendar of your team, especially at a larger organization. I think the second thing is really the conversation needs to be about what you being in a different position does for the company and why the company needs it. Often the conversation is, “I want to be promoted because I want to be a director of PM, because I want to become a manager, because I need direct reports.” Instead of saying, “Look, your span of control, you have nine direct reports, you need leverage here. I have a lot of credibility with this side of the product organization. I think we could be doing more if this position existed. And I think I’m good for this position because of what I’ve proven A, B and C.”
That’s solving a problem for the company. That’s not solving a career growth issue for an individual. And I think people who want to be promoted need to think in that orientation versus the other, because honestly, especially now, let’s say [inaudible 00:12:01]. There are not just these wrote every 12 months we’re going to give comp increases and merit increases and you get to be promoted. We really have to be thoughtful about the structure and size and organization of teams. Product teams are naturally pretty small.
So, there aren’t just management and director and senior director roles to go around. And if you want to get into a management, for example, you have to prove that you’re good at organization design. I think really focus on why a role is good for a company or necessary for a company and then why you are the best for that role, rather than, “I want to get promoted.”
Keeping Startup Pace in Big Companies
Lenny: That is such good advice and such important advice that focus on how do you solve problems for your manager and the business, not, “Hey, here’s what I need for my career. This sucks. My career is stagnating.” I love that. And I love so much of your message is empowerment. It’s not just, here, there’s the place you’re in and there’s not a lot you can do about it. Look for opportunities to help your manager, help your business. “Here’s what I can do to move things further.”
And I think there’s an element of timing that you touched on. Propose this at a time when something could happen. You shared this example of there was a marketing gap.
Claire Vo: Yep, exactly.
Clock Speed: Shift Up a Gear
Lenny: Is there another example where you did this sort of thing where you presented, “Here’s how I can help the org,” and that helped another promotion? If not, that’s good.
Claire Vo: It’s honestly how I expanded into leading engineering teams in the technology organization. I was at Color and there was a real need to up-level our engineering organization, and I knew exactly what to do. I had high confidence I had the skills, both technical and organizational, to scale the engineering organization in a way that was really critical to the business, both from a architecture perspective and from a team and talent perspective. And so that was one where I knew there was a problem to solve. I knew that problem was important. I knew we had to solve it fast, and I was confident I knew I could do it. I had confidence that I could help there.
And so I’m still doing it today. And at Color, I came in as product. I very quickly began leading the engineering organization, which was fabulous, and then I actually took on some of our non-clinical operations as well where we had a pretty operational leader. We had some high-scale challenges to deal with, and it fit my talent set and I knew I could help the company pretty quickly.
And this is the other advice I might give particular to PMs. PM is such a generalist role, it’s okay to go a little left and a little right to go up. I took this marketing growth role. That was actually my first director role. It wasn’t only for product, it was for marketing. And I had to learn marketing and I had to develop skills there, but it was a foundation on which I could build a broader leadership career. And so I do think also looking left and right outside of your scope of product can be a really effective way to find growth opportunities.
High Standards: Talent Bar and Feedback
Lenny: I love that advice, and it leads to so many unexpected opportunities. One of the, I think, big questions with PMs, and coming back to your original advice of know where you want to go, there’s so many directions a PM can go. You can eventually become a founder, become a GM, become a CO, something else. And trying these sorts of things often helps you understand, “Here’s what I’m actually excited about. Maybe I want to move into design.”
Address Underperformance Quickly and Clearly
Claire Vo: Yeah, and one of the other things that I think people don’t understand, and maybe I experienced this as a founder and I really feel it inside companies, is the universe is bendable to your will. And what I mean is in most, at least in the stage I operate in in startups and growth stage companies and late stage startups, organizations are very fluid and I like to organize around talented motivated individuals.
And so just because we’re organized in a particular way now, just because these organizations are separate or these are different, together, doesn’t mean that’s necessarily the way they have to be, and so you should think about your career growth in the existing structure of the organization. But as an org design thinker, it’s a very important job that I have to do. You also have to think of this system as a living, breathing entity that can shift over time in particular around highly motivated, highly talented people.
Being a Woman in Tech
Lenny: And I think along the same lines, referencing this advice you’ve already shared of just thinking from the perspective of what is my manager and folks above, what are they struggling with and how can I propose, “Here’s a solution that happens to also have me move into a more interesting role?”
The “Are You Technical Enough” Question
Claire Vo: Yep, exactly.
Selling a Startup to Optimizely
Lenny: There’s a direction I wasn’t planning to go into, but I think it’s really important and interesting is people like you that are incredibly good and successful end up taking on a lot, and that often ends up not being what they want.
Claire Vo: SOS.
The Rise of the CPTO Role
Lenny: Exactly. Any advice on the classic, be careful what you’re good at advice? Any advice on just how to not end up with everything?
Claire Vo: I really believe operating in your zone of genius. I really believe in leaning into strengths. And if you are in a position in which you’re good at things and you’ve been giving a lot of responsibility, but you have tremendous growth edges and you’re spending more time on the things you need to level up than the things you are exceptional at, I think that’s not fair for the organization. I think that’s not fair for you.
I truly believe defining and understanding your zone of genius, where you are exceptional, where no one else can step into the job and do just as good of a job as you can, and where you derive tremendous intellectual emotional joy out of the work is what makes it sustainable over time. And so I don’t actually think it’s about the volume or breadth of the work. It’s about sustainability of the work. And can you show up every day energized and engaged and excited about what you do?
And I think being very aware if you are operating the space or if you’re not. And this might go back to, I think, I have never regretted promoting somebody too slowly, I have regretted promoting somebody too quickly. High-slope individuals in particular areas want to get more responsibility, want to have more scope, and I’ve seen less experienced managers or directors or even people at my level want to give opportunities that put people in a position where they’re neither effective nor happy. And so I think being self-aware of that is really important, and then I also think as a manager, being cognizant of that is really important.
Individually, I do do a lot, but I do feel like I’m in my zone of genius and I also know that part of staying in my personal zone of genius is having this breadth of responsibility but preserving builder time. And what I mean from time is I have to have time to produce real work that comes from me as an individual, and that means that calendar management is quite important. Time management.
Designing Organizations Around Top Talent
Lenny: We’re going to talk about some of the things that you built.
In terms of finding your zone of genius, any advice for someone that’s trying to figure out what it is that is in that zone of genius? I know there’s a Ted Talk of here’s how to think about the zone of genius specifically [inaudible 00:19:33].
Claire Vo: Yeah. I’m not going to relay it in precision, but one of the tactics that I’ve seen out there is basically go through your calendar for the last month or quarter, whatever it is, write everything down, and basically group them into, I hated doing this, I didn’t love doing it but it was fine, I love doing this, and then I love doing this, and if I could spend all my time on this, I would be the happiest person in the whole world. And literally categorize the way you’re spending your time into those buckets, and then put the bottom buckets away. Just focus on that top bucket and go, “How can I be here more?” And often, that is a true guide to where your passion is, where your special expertise is, and where you’re going to add a lot of value because you’re highly engaged.
I think the other thing is really asking yourself, and this maybe goes back to the career advice perspective, really asking yourself, “What do I do that no one else in this organization can do?” There are lots of things that I do that other people in the organization can do, but what are the things that I do that are… You think about a differentiated product that are hard to replicate, and knowing what that is and leaning into that can drive a lot of exceptional career growth but also just make you quite happy.
The Genesis of ChatPRD
Lenny: What’s an example of that for you?
AI Tools and Human Capability Amplification
Claire Vo: I think I’m actually quite good at traversing across and up and down. What I mean is I am fluent across product engineering, design, data and operations, and candidly revenue in a way that vertical or functional leaders maybe are less so. I feel like I have a high level of fluency broadly and can bring conversations between functions together against a business objective pretty easily. It’s just the way I’m wired. I was a founder. It’s second nature.
And the other thing that I think I can do pretty well that I find very joyous is traverse elevation. And so, yes, I love to be up here and think about strategy and vision, but I also like to drop into the details to move things forward. And I think that operating horizontally and then being able to spend some time in the vertical up and down, wherever that vertical up and down happens makes me quite happy. I think I’m pretty good at it.
Will the PM to Engineer Ratio Change
Lenny: Amazing. We’re going to touch on some of these things you just mentioned actually, but real quick, you mentioned this idea of essentially an energy audit. There’s actually a really good guide that I’ll point to in the show notes by Matt Mochary that walks you through how to do this. And we talk about this a bunch on this podcast actually, this whole idea of just find things that give you energy, do more of that. Find things that zap you of energy, do less of that. Easier said than done when you have a job and you have to do stuff that people are paying you to do, but it’s still really helpful if nothing else to help you point you where you want to be going in your career long-term.
Okay, so you mentioned you’re a founder, and it feels like you’re a founder at heart, but you’ve been working at larger companies for a while now. And I hear that you’re really good at setting a fast pace within larger companies and maintaining that startup focus while also having a very high bar for quality and product. Everybody wants this. Everyone’s like, “Yes, move fast, amazing quality.” Why would we not want that? I’m curious just what you actually put into practice concretely that allow for you to build teams that move really fast and maintain a high bar. Are there processes you find helpful, values, ways of working?
Claire Vo: Yeah, it’s really funny, people often think that I get hired into the roles that I get hired into in later stage companies because I’m supposed to teach them how to operate like a big company. And in fact, I say I’m hired to remind them they can operate like a startup. And so I think about it completely differently.
And there are two things I think about in terms of pace and high bar. From a pace, it’s know what your internal pace is, and essentially don’t let it degrade to the pace of your recurring meetings. I often find that pace of organization locks to pace of the calendar, and so I am really thoughtful that reoccurring meetings do not drive next steps. It’s a very tactical thing, but when somebody says, “Oh, we’ll discuss this or we’ll decide this in the next meeting,” it’s, “No, we should discuss this now. We should decide this tomorrow.”
The other thing that I think about is setting one click faster pace expectations inside an organization. I tend to come in and love this, hate it, it’s what I do, which is if I look at an organization that is operating at a lower pace than I would expect, I communicate to my leaders that my expectation is they bring in the clock speed one click faster, which means if you think something needs to be done this year, it needs to be done this half. If you think it needs to be done this half, it needs to be done this quarter. This quarter, this month. This week, today. End of day, in this meeting. And actually setting an expectation that your natural pace is going to be slower than your ambition and being explicit about pulling things in I think can change the way expectations are set and honestly change the energy and momentum in the organization.
The third thing on pace is personal SLA. I never want to be a bottleneck for the organization. This is one of the more challenging things about being in my role, is you are often a point of decision-making, tie-breaking, next steps, approvals, socialization. And if my personal SLA is slow, then the rest of my organization cannot be as fast as possible. I try to be fairly responsive. I try to say, “Do both very high rate,” and also very quickly. It’s really hard, sometimes it’s not totally possible, but it’s a goal I have.
How to Keep Up with AI
Lenny: I love this clock speed concept of just let’s move one iteration faster than we would normally move. How do you actually do that? Is this just you doing it and then everyone trickles down from the way you’re approaching it? Is this a principle on a team? Is there a phrase you use?
Claire Vo: Yeah, it’s a phrase I use and something I asked our leadership teams to do. It started at, one, I’m going to do this, and two, my expectation is you look for opportunities to do this. And the reason I think this is effective, it’s very tangible and it’s very tactical. It just is one of those things that a moment when you’re about to say a due date, you check yourself and you go, “Is this right or do I need to pull it in by an iteration?” And so it’s a very tactical piece of advice and expectation I give to my leadership team. If they can show up that way, then the expected pace of the organization goes up, and then people tend to rise to the occasion.
Efficiency Gains from Using ChatPRD
Lenny: And then it connects very directly to your first piece of advice, is not rely on the meeting cadence to determine your action cadence. I imagine that’s a similar situation where you tell people, “Here’s how I want to operate,” and then you actually work that way and that starts to filter through.
Claire Vo: Yeah, I just think there’s this anti-pattern of, “We’ll make the decision in the next meeting,” or, “We’ll follow up on this in the next meeting.” That is an artificial timeline introduced by Google Calendar or whatever calendar you use. It’s not a real thing, and so I want to put us on real timelines. When can we make the decision? How much information do we need? And that doesn’t mean that every decision is made now, today, tomorrow, but it does mean we don’t snap to artificial cadences to make our product move forward.
Devil’s Advocate vs Dissenting Voice
Lenny: Awesome. Let’s talk about quality. What are some lessons there?
Claire Vo: Yeah, I think in terms of high bar, there’s probably two things that I think about as a leader. There’s the talent bar being exceptionally high, and then there’s the product bar being high.
I’ll start with talent, which is, on the talent side I think you have to define the bar. You have to be really specific, and that means you have to think about pretty deeply what are your leadership principles? If your leadership principle is bring the clock speed up one iteration, be explicit that that’s what you expect to see, and then articulate that and hold people accountable to it.
And so I do think it’s really important to have a specific and measurable career ladder, especially at the senior levels. I often find that they’re very soft. They’re hires and manages multiple departments or takes in cross-functional stakeholder feedback. Those are just not tractable, specific things. And so I think, PMs, put on your product definition or OKR hat or whatever and define some real goals for these levels and be specific in a way that you can look at people and say, definitively, “Yes. Measurably, yes, they’re meaning this bar measurably. No, they’re not meeting that bar.” And so I think that’s very important.
The second thing I think is you have to normalize feedback. And Brené Brown, fellow Texan, love her, “Clear is kind,” I think conflict-avoidant, feedback-avoidant cultures degrade the talent bar. They just do, because the expectations are not stated and you’re not holding accountability. And I do not think that’s kind. That is not setting up people for success in their careers. That is not helping them become the best teammate that they can become.
I really like to normalize feedback and, as I say, take the temperature out of the room when it comes to open and candid feedback. And that means being very clear when people are not meeting expectations, making it very clear that questioning ideas is not questioning innate talent. And I think that has something that people need to hear to normalize feedback. But I think feedback is quite important.
And I think the third thing is unfortunately when you’re working to build a high talent bar and high talent density, then when folks aren’t a fit and it’s not working, moving against that quickly is part of the job. And it’s a hard part of the job and it’s part of the job that most managers really avoid, but I think it’s important because it keeps your overall team operating in a really healthy, effective, performant way that makes everybody happier, including people that probably weren’t a great fit for the work of the role at the time.
The Dissenting Voice: Redeeming Sales-Driven Growth
Lenny: Is there an example of you being surprisingly candid to someone or giving feedback, hard feedback, to someone about quality, something that’s just like, “Oh wow, that’s what I should be doing?”
Claire Vo: There were two leaders in my organization, I won’t say which ones and I won’t say when, but two leaders in the organization, partners across product and engineering, and they could not get it together. They could not work together. They were having misalignments and priorities strategy. They could not communicate. They were having conflict in front of the team.
And the managers that had managed them were taking this very soft pedal approach of, “You need to work on your [inaudible 00:30:47] functional stakeholder, and here am I expecting all this performance management stuff to happen.” And I called both of them individually and I said, “The way you are operating is not meeting our leadership expectations. If you do not change, you cannot be part of this organization anymore. I believe you can operate differently. I do.” And I did. I believe these are very talented people who could operate. “I believe you can operate differently, but it is your responsibility to do so, and I need to see change starting tomorrow.”
I wanted them to succeed. And in fact, they did. It snapped in, they got it, and one of the… Turned into one of the most influential effective managers in our team over the course of probably the next six to nine months. And I think just clearly saying, “You are not meeting expectations. You will not be successful here if you continue on this path. I believe you can get here, but it is your responsibility.” That is the conversation that is clear and kind and honestly very effective in most instances.
Helping Others with Job Searches
Lenny: That’s an amazing example. Clear is kind, as you said. It reminds me of Kim Scott, who’s on the podcast, shared this story about Bob. I don’t know if you remember that story at all of just this guy at their company who was just doing a bad job and everyone knew he was doing a bad job, and then they had to fire him. When they’re firing him, he’s just like, “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t anyone tell me that nobody thought I was doing a great job?”
Claire Vo: And I honestly think saying, “You are not doing a good job,” is much kinder than, “I think you can improve on this aspect or that aspect.” Or, “I’ve gotten some feedback that you could be better at…” That’s not kind because it doesn’t set somebody else up for success either in your organization or somewhere else.
Rapid Fire Questions
Lenny: Okay, let’s go in a different direction. Let’s talk about being a woman in tech.
Claire Vo: Oh yeah.
Waymo and the Future of Mobility
Lenny: This doesn’t get talked about a ton on podcasts like this. I know you have a lot of thoughts. Obviously, you’ve been through a lot. You’ve had a lot of experiences. There’s probably a lot of stories you haven’t shared in other places, so I just want to give you a chance to share what you’ve been through, what you’ve seen, and any advice you may have.
Claire Vo: Yeah, and I’m happy to talk about this. I know a lot of people don’t want to be defined or consistently asked about being a woman or a mom in a C-level leadership role. Let’s not have women in tech panels anymore. But I’ve been reflecting a bit on this lately because I just came from a few years in healthcare, which, from my experience, it’s a lot more women in leadership roles. I was a little spoiled, even in our technology organization. And now, I’m back in startups and tech, where the ratios are completely opposite, especially in roles like engineering, which is a team that I run.
And look, this is just, it’s math. I think Carta said that 13-something percent of founders last year were women. It’s declining year over year. FEMA led founded teams, or at least 2% of venture capital, women hold 30% of senior leadership org roles. Women are 30% of software engineering teams. This is just math. We’re just facts. We’re not in the room in the equal proportions. And as somebody who has, despite the numbers, had a fairly successful career so far in technology, I feel like I owe it to the industry to say it hasn’t been easy and it’s still not easy, even at my level.
And what I want to be clear about, because it gets talked about a lot in forms like this, this is not about imposter syndrome. How could I have any right to imposter syndrome? I’ve proven myself. I’ve been a founder, I’ve raised venture capital, I’ve had a successful exit. I’ve been, as you said, a CPO across increasing large teams. I get to invest in red companies. I’m on boards. I get to be on this podcast. I’m a TikTok influencer. This is not about feeling like an imposter. It’s really about, it is hard and it is different, and the numbers pencil out in a way that is not favorable to women.
And as you said, there’s been a lot of stuff in the past that you look at me now and you say, “Oh, she did associate and all the way up,” but I had to fight for my all-girls school to carry computer science at the same rate that the all-boys school had it naturally. I grew up in teeny tiny startups in the early aughts. I saw some nonsense. I had VCs tell me, “Don’t get pregnant,” when I was… These things happened. And yet here I am, and it’s fine.
And I’m not complaining. I just think what people also don’t understand is that stuff still happens. I don’t need to litigate who it happens with, where it happens. It still happens. I have arrived and it still happens. And the reason I bring this up is I think it should be a point of reflection for industry, and I think it can be a really effective point of reflection for women who want to get into leadership roles.
And the way I approach it is I’m just very curious. I wonder what is structural about technology that creates these things happen? What is cultural? What is external? What has happened to me or happens around me? What is internal? What do I bring into the room that doesn’t serve me? And so I try to stay very curious. And then constant product thinker, what are the points of leverage I can use to move things not just forward for me, but for the industry broadly? How can I influence thinking? Where can I not? Where can I walk away from things?
And then as for the internal aspect of it, I think this is also a very powerful thing, which is I try to stay in an empowered space. I know my value. I have no time for imposter syndrome. It’s not a constructive thing for me, but I do think knowing that, as I said earlier, the universe is bendable to your will. There are things we can change. I don’t think these numbers are not tractable. And so my recommendation and what I’d love to say to the industry generally, to women in particular, is curiosity and empowerment have been my path to joy in this sometimes complicated industry. And I think there’s a lot better we can do. There’s a little bit of ways to go.
Core Life Philosophy
Lenny: Is there a story that you could share if you’re comfortable of just something you’ve gone through or been through that maybe people are like, “Oh, wow, I see what stuff she’s dealing with or other women are dealing with that I had no sense of?”
Claire Vo: I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this one, which is I consistently get asked if I’m technical enough. Not even if I’m technical enough. Let’s put enough aside. If I’m technical. And it’s fascinating to me because as a technical co-founder of my startup, I wrote code for the first 12 months solo. I led the engineering team there. That code is still in production in very large environments. I have run multi-hundred people, engineering teams for many years, and I spend my Saturdays and Sundays shipping code. This is what I do. And truly, the first question most people ask me is, “Oh, well you’re not technical though. You’re a product person.”
And I’ve been really trying to unpack where that is coming from. It’s hard for me to imagine somebody else that looks different, that has a different name, that has a different gender getting that question with my background. And so that’s one of those things that has really been spinning my head. Again, it’s not about imposter syndrome. I don’t have anything to prove to people, but I am quite curious where that orientation comes from. And if it comes to somebody like me, who has really had some proven success, I know it’s happening to other people, and I’m hoping that I can do something from my position to turn that a little bit.
Insights on Creating TikToks
Lenny: And this connects to what you shared, the advice you had of just try to get curious about why it’s happening, which is exactly what you just said. Is that just mostly to help you not get upset and frustrated? Let me just understand, why is this happening again and again?
Claire Vo: One, I do think sitting in your power is very effective. And so curiosity means that I’m in control, and I do think I’m in control more than I’m not. That’s one part of it is, I think. And the other thing is I think a lot of this is it’s complicated. It’s structural, it’s cultural. It’s what you see and what you don’t see, not just in the workplace. It’s what you see and don’t see in media. Am I reading my 7-year-old and my 4-year-old books of, “My grandma’s a software engineer?”
Books called the Mom Test, which I actually think is a great book, but it has this underlying presumption of who is technical, who’s not, who understands things, who doesn’t. And that all bubbles up into how individuals experience an industry that’s driving tremendous economic growth here, where at the end of the day, it’s about economic participation. It can be about individuals and aspirations, but it is also about economic participation.
The reason I’m curious about it is I do think it’s complicated and I do think you can be successful, but I don’t think we’re being successful at the rates I would love to see. And I think we’re missing a lot of innovation and a lot of economic growth by not having incredible, technical, capable women start companies and lead organizations. And so I think we’re all missing out for that, and I’d love to see more of it.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
Lenny: And is there an answer to how do we do this better? Anything you think, hey, you’ve seen work to help get us past this?
Claire Vo: I think normalize seeing it, so thanks for bringing me on this podcast, but I do think normalize seeing it is one of the simplest ways. If you close your eyes and imagine a software engineer, my dream is you imagine a diverse set of folks. You don’t imagine a very specific art type. And so I do think you can’t believe it unless you see it, and so the more that you can provide platforms for diverse voices to talk about their journey in technology, expose that there are leaders out there that come from different backgrounds, technically, culturally, all those things, the more the industry can imagine different types of leaders in different types of roles.
And so I just want to see it more. I want to invest more and raise the voices of female founders. I want to call out their amazing female CTOs out there, all those things. And I think if you can see it, you can start to unlock these very embedded concepts of who is and is not a technology leader who is and is not technical.
Lenny: Awesome. I love that advice. It’s something I try really hard to do with this podcast.
I know you have a fun story about when you were very pregnant selling your startup to Optimizely. Can you share that story? I haven’t actually heard the story.
Claire Vo: Yeah, this was a fun one. Again, this is the universe is bendable to your will and lean into your power, which is, I had been running Experiment Engine, which was a platform for enterprises to run high scale experimentation programs. Not necessarily the underlying A/B testing technology, but all the stuff around hypothesis gathering, insights, aggregation, operations, keeping things on track. Because I really know, as you do, that high scale experimentation programs can be very impactful to businesses.
That being said, it was like a niche inside in industry, as opposed to a large TAM problem. And so I think we just fundamentally hit a TAM ceiling here. We had a great product for a great market that was very narrow. And three years, four years into running the company, I knew that to be true and I knew that we would be better served by being part of a larger organization, and one of those organizations could be a large testing company. And so I remember that was noodling on my mind, but we were also really trying to sell to enterprises.
And I heard that Microsoft, who was one of our biggest customers, was doing a experimentation day with Optimizely, and I knew Optimizely was a natural acquirer. And I knew I had to get into that room, so I called Microsoft and I said, “Hey, friend of Microsoft, I’m going to be up in Seattle seeing our other customer, very large Seattle company, this week, week of experimentation day. Could we stop by?” And they’re like, “Oh yeah, sure.” Well, then I went to other big Seattle companies and said, “Hey, other big Seattle company, I’m going to be up Microsoft at their experimentation day. Would you be…”
I got these two meetings to manifest against each other, and then I walked into that experimentation day and I eyeballed the CFO of Optimizely and I sat in front of him and started pulling up the product and coding at the same time. I was just like, “I’m going to sit in front of him in the row and I’m going to do this and we’re going to have my screens.” And then I went up and did a demo. And I’m not saying that’s the thing that made it happen, but I will say very quickly after that, we became very close partners and ultimately they acquired me.
And I give this advice to founders because one of the things that, and founders and PMs, one of the things that I really hire for is scrappiness. I think you have to be able to do a lot with a little, and I think you have to know where you’re getting and, come hell or high water, figure out a way to get there. And this was a very fun example of working my way into the right room, setting myself up for the success that I wanted, and having the backing, the good job, the great product, the outcomes to earn it. But you also have to get yourself in the room.
Lenny: And how many months pregnant were you?
Claire Vo: I was extremely pregnant. A ticking time bomb of a belly is a really good negotiation tactic in a deal. I think I remember when we were negotiating the final term sheet, I was 34 weeks pregnant, something like that, and they said, “Can you fly out to San Francisco?” I was in Austin at the time. And I said, “Literally, you can fly me out today and back tomorrow, and then I’m not allowed on planes.” And that’s how. It was very fun. It was fun, and what a happy acquisition. I can talk all day about how that was great. Great experience.
Lenny: And I love it’s another example of the phrase you’ve been coming back to of bending, I don’t know if it’s bending the world to your will.
Claire Vo: Bending the universe towards your will.
Lenny: The universe? Even bigger. I love it. It feels like a recurring theme here, is to take agency and control where your career and life is going. And that’s such a good example of just finding a way into this room that would be very hard for someone to get into.
You’ve touched on the CTPO role that I haven’t heard much about. And I know that this is a big topic for you, and I feel like there might be a trend happening here of combining engineering product. Can you just talk about this role and why you think it might be emerging?
Claire Vo: Yeah, I get asked about it a lot because it’s not super rare, but it’s not super common either, and I think it could potentially be rising. And I’m using CPTO for short code of running product and engineering design functionally together. It’s very different. I’ve done both. It’s very different than a pure product or a VP product role.
And so first, I talked a little bit about how I got into this role. I do think you have to be technical to do a role like this. I think a lot of people look at my professional background and think that I use my broad leadership skills and leverage of a great SVP to keep engineering team going. But no, actually I spent quite a bit of time on the engineering side, because as somebody who is responsible for the business outcomes of the product, one of the best ways to drive value is having a highly performant engineering team that works on a scalable platform.
And so I spend a lot of time making sure that we’re building the right architectural decisions, that our infrastructure meets the needs of our team, that our edge team is operating in a way that drives velocity. And I just don’t think you can do that job if you don’t understand how software gets built on a technical level. So I’m the kind of person that when we’re doing a product review, I have the PRD up and GitHub up and I’m comparing both, because I think both sides matter.
I think the other thing that’s different about this role is it’s quite operational, and so you really have to know about operations and organization design. Edge teams are by nature much larger than product organizations. You just think about the classic ratios, there are more people in engineering than there are in product. And the talent challenges are significantly different in engineering, whether it’s the high volume of recruiting, culture-shaped challenges are different. You have to really think about org design. And so you have to have a different level of mindset around organization design and operations when you’re in a CPTO role.
You’re on pager duty. You’re getting paged at 1:00 AM if a service, if there’s a Sub-Zero and it goes down. That is not what it’s like to be a product leader. So you got to know what you’re getting into and you have to be technical. And then the thing I would be remiss to say about this role is the P and the T get a lot of air time. Product and engineering get a lot of air time. Design data, these are such functional, very important organizations, and why these roles get… That’s what the role is and how you could be good at it or whether it would be a fit for your skills.
The question of why have this kind of role, and I think there’s two reasons. There’s the obvious strategic reason of, they’re all the same thing. They’re all building capital P product, they’re all builders, they’re the same types of folks, they’re all builders, and bringing them under one house allows you to optimize for the whole, as opposed to optimize for the function. And if you can find a leader that is effective at that, I think you can get a lot of value added. And honestly, the second thing is it provides a tremendous amount of leverage to the CEO in many ways. At the end of the day, R&D is a very expensive and complicated investment the company is making, and having a single person responsible for R&D investment at the executive level is quite important, especially when you’re candidly spending a lot there.
And so I think it’s those two things. It’s, these are one team. There should be be no debates over what’s best for product or what’s best for engineering, what’s best for design. It should be what is best for the organization at whole. What do our customers need and what do our business needs? And then it’s the accountability candidly of this quite meaningful investment against business objectives and having a singularly responsible individual to care for that investment.
Lenny: It sounds wonderful, having one person to deal with across all these functions.
Claire Vo: It is and isn’t. I’ll just say, I’ve done both. I’ve been a CPO next to an SVP of Eng. I’ve run both together. Founders can play this role. And again, this is why I say you have to optimize around talent in your organization. If your CEO has the skills, bandwidth, et cetera, to do this, they can do this. You can keep the organization separate. They can hold that. If they have a different area of expertise, if they’ve never done that before, if it’s just not working operationally, they have broader areas of focus, then bring it together under someone. I don’t think there’s a perfect organization structure. This has just been one that’s worked well in the shape of organizations that need someone like me.
Lenny: And along the same lines, designing an org around the person, I imagine there’s not many very engineering background experience people that are also really good at product and can do design. I guess how deep do you need to be in each of these functions to be successful in this role? Because it feels really rare.
Claire Vo: Start a company and then you have to do it, in some ways. I’ve worked for both and they’ve told me, I’ve worked for two, they go, “I’m not a founder, but I’m the CEO.” And I go, “That’s fine. I’m an operator, but I’m going to bring a founder mindset.”
And so I think as a founder, especially early stage, you do all of this. You see how all of this is one person, because honestly sometimes it is one person, and sometimes that person is you. And so I do think working in a very small startup gives you the opportunity to experience a breadth of functional skills and develop a breadth of functional skills that can set you up for this kind of role much further down the line. I do think early stage startup experience is one of those shortcuts to getting visibility here.
I think the other thing is, again, I said this earlier, so many people get siloed into, “I’m a product manager, and so my job is this, but it’s not that. And I can only do this, and if designs are needed, I am blocked and I will just wait.” And I just give permission for people to make… We have a leadership principle inside our team that’s like, “There are no lanes.” Our lanes are dotted. They’re not solid in that you can shift over and pencil out a design, an engineer can write a spec. All those things are fine. They’re natural, they’re normal, and I actually think they’re quite healthy. And it’s that kind of thinking that probably is going to breed the type of leaders that could do this type of role.
Lenny: Awesome. It reminds me at GitLab. I just interviewed their head of product, or CPO, and they have a core value of, “Short toes.” Don’t worry about stepping on people’s toes. Have short toes. Don’t worry about people getting into your stuff. It’s all good.
Claire Vo: Yep.
Lenny: Okay. You mentioned AI. Amazing segue to my next topic that I want to spend some time on. You built a tool called ChatPRD. My guess is it’s the single most popular AI PM-specific tool out there, other than some big company’s tool like, I don’t know, Sprague or Figma or something like that. First of all, just what is ChatPRD, and then why did you build it?
Claire Vo: Yeah. ChatPRD comes out of, again, pace setting. And I’ll actually tell you the real genesis of ChatPRD, which is at a previous company we had a quite technical product we needed to build. We’re scrappy and resource-constrained, and our platform PMs were working on something very important, but this was critical and we needed to get it done. And we didn’t really have a platform technical PM to spec this thing out. And it was quite complicated.
And I raised my hand and I said, “I’ll IC this. I think I know what we need.” And between the beginning of the meeting and the end of the meeting, I had used ChatGPT and a prompt to come up with a very serviceable PRD spec for this very technical product. And I took that prompt and that long-running ChatGPT thread and crafted the Claire version of a product leader or product person that could, with really solid consistency, output product specs, give good feedback, build out plans, build out tracking mechanisms and goals.
And so while I say, “She may just be a prompt, but she is prompt,” this was lovingly crafted over several months. And so when the GPT Store came out, for my team I just said, “Hey, you all know I’ve been writing PRDs with ChatGPT.” I created a GPT and just gave it to my team. I was like, “Here, you can use this if you want it.” And they really liked it, and other people started asking about it and I eventually ran into the monetization and access wall that is the GPT Store right now. And so I’ve also been having a lot of fun coding again, and so I thought, this is easy. We’re just going to stand up a standalone app and wrap, come on, it’s a wrapper, it started as wrapper, wrap some of these capabilities and just publish it and put a fairly reasonable price tag on it and see what happens.
And now, I have thousands of people using ChatPRD. Every day, people are creating dozens of specs and PRDs every month. It’s everything from, “I’m an engineer on a team with too few PMs and I get blocked, so I’m going to build my own requirements,” to, “I’m a solo founder and I need to put some structure on my thought for my team,” to, “I’m a PM and this has saved me truly hours of work to get the basics of my product requirements done so I can spend time on the details.” And then I’ve added on more functions and capabilities than the standalone app. It is my personal product copilot that I’ve released for the world.
Lenny: Okay. First of all, where can people check this out? Is it chatprd.com?
Claire Vo: .ai. Come on.
Lenny: .ai, of course.
Claire Vo: Yeah, chatprd.ai.
Lenny: I saw some stuff about the country that has .ai is just making so much bank right now.
Claire Vo: So much money.
Lenny: All these domains.
Then in terms of the stack, just to be clear, so it started as a ChatGPT prompt, custom prompt, you evolved, then it became a GPT, a custom GPT, and now it’s your own app that is using the OpenAI APIs behind-
Claire Vo: It is, yeah. It’s using the assistance APIs. And what’s different about the standalone app versus the GPT is every person that uses the standalone app gets a customized assistant. It learns from their specific content. It learns from their role. It learns from their company. If you use the GPT version, you’re not getting that customization. When you use the standalone app, you are getting that customization. And then I’ve layered on a couple of different capabilities. In addition to having the chat format, it will actually create the document for you and iterate on the actual doc for you, and then working on some additional tools and integrations in the future.
Lenny: Okay, great. What are the most common use cases again? Just so people can get a sense of, “Oh, let me use this for these things.”
Claire Vo: Yeah, about 60% of people use it to put in an idea and get a PRD out. Just get the specs of what are my objectives and user goals, what are user stories, what is out of scope, walk through the UX. In our standard template, I have what’s called a narrative, which is, how do you pitch this product? Which I feel like is a thing product managers miss a lot, which is how to position and pitch it, sequencing and milestones, measurements and goals, all those sorts of things.
Now, that’s the out-of-the-box template. As I said, you can actually customize what your PRD template is in ChatPRD if you do something different or want something different for your company. About 60% of people are using it for that. 30% of people, I would say, are using it to put in a spec or a PRD or a strategy doc or a roadmap and improve it. And then the rest are using it to brainstorm ideas, internal PM work. How do I come up with a good agenda for X, Y, and Z? That kind of stuff.
Lenny: Amazing. Okay, so I wrote a post recently sharing a bunch of examples of how people are using different GPT specifically at work, and I think it’s spurred a lot of people to experiment with this stuff. If there’s one tip that you could share for someone that’s trying to build a GPT or their own custom app using APIs, any advice?
Claire Vo: Prompt matters. We went through this whole cycle of prompt engineering is a thing, it’s not really a thing, fine-tuning is… Prompt really does matter, and a good PM, I do competitive analysis. I use the same input and look at different GPT or ChatGPT. I look at the GPT Store version, I look at other PM tools that do this and I look at mine. I think mine is actually better.
And then I’m getting into a mode now where I may do some model experimentation and tuning behind the scenes, so it might not be OpenAI, it may be other things, but it matters. The instructions matter, the context matters for the quality of the output is something that I would say when building these kinds of products. I think the other thing is there is no solution right now for monetization. Knock on wood, open it and we’ll figure it out. If I had more time, maybe I would create a platform out of what I’ve created for ChatGPT to let other people monetize their GPTs and add on capabilities. But it’s not out of the box yet for folks. There’s a lot of work that I had to do to get it from here to there.
Lenny: Are you making real money with this thing? And is it an idea that this becomes the thing you do someday maybe long term?
Claire Vo: My original goal, and I said this out on X, my original goal is I just want to buy a nice glass of wine a week. That was my goal. I could buy cases of wine now. This is very exciting for me. It’s making what I would consider real money. Is it a venture scale thing? No. Does it need to be? No. I have a goal around my kids’ education expenses. I would love for this to cover a little bit. I have a ambitious but not audacious goal for ChatPRD.
The other goal that I have, which is, let’s put monetization aside, is this is my joy space, zone of genius joy space. And my goal with ChatPRD is it has to be a hundred percent fun for me. This is my hobby, so I’m not doing anything that makes it not fun. It is a pure bliss space for me. I get to code on the weekends, I get to do customer support at night, and I get to build things that I would use. I get to learn new technologies. I want to keep it in that space because it provides a lot of joy for me. Put money aside, I just want it to be fun.
Lenny: Love that. Okay, so some people listening to this, especially PMs, may be like, “Claire, what the hell are you doing? Are you going to replace product managers in a year or two?” This connects to something I’ve just generally been thinking about and that’s come up a bunch, is just over time, which skills and jobs of a product manager will be greatly enhanced by AI and which will be completely replaced by AI, if any, so that people can understand which skills they should be investing in and which maybe are less important.
I guess just broadly, do you have a sense of just here’s skills that are going to continue to be incredibly important and AI will not take these skills and jobs off your plate? Versus, these are going to be the less important, AI will do these?
Claire Vo: At the highest level, I tend to be very short-term pessimistic, although I’ll frame that short-term pessimistic and very long-term optimistic. I am a big believer that technology has made society generally much more affluent, wealthier, happier, healthier. I am a big believer in technology and I am optimistic about its impact on the human race. There are lots of things that are not going well, but I really do believe that innovation and technology, I’m excited for my kid’s future. I’m not afraid of it.
Now, that being said, I am of the mind excitedly that this is going to change stuff in companies incredibly quickly. And part of building ChatPRD is I hold myself to the bar as a technology leader, I need to be leading the league on understanding what this can disrupt, using these tools to make a better team, and actually shifting the size and shape of my organization in response to the technology around us. Is it going to eliminate PMs next year? Probably not. Are the ratios between PMs and other teams going to shift over time? Yes. Are the skills required going to shift? Yes. Could they shift much faster than we all anticipate? Probably. I think there’s a lot of change coming and I want to be prepared for it.
Now, what do I think this replaces and what does it not replace? I was reflecting on this question and communication, lowercase C, I feel like is one of the places that’s going to be replaced. And I call it lowercase C. It’s the functional trading of information that allows other people to do jobs. I think that these language models and these tools are really good synthesizing information, putting together communication, and can coordinate who that communication goes to and get it out in many modalities of content.
And so I’m really thinking about the PM as the keeper of cross-functional relationships and communication is really, I think, potentially going to change. Now, but capital C communication of are you influential? Are you convincing? Are you bold? Can you get this system of humans to follow you down a path? That’s, I think, going to be much harder to replace, and so I’m thinking about the edges of communication and where they’ll change and what they won’t.
Lenny: That’s really interesting. I did a little poll on Twitter asking people of between communication, execution, strategy, and product sense, which skills are most likely to be basically taken over by AI. And communication was number one, by far. I have a contrarian perspective. And strategy was the least voted. I feel like, so strategy work is essentially, “Here’s everything we know about the world and competitors and the market and our advantages. Here’s a plan to win in the market essentially.” I feel like that’s what AI is incredibly good at.
Claire Vo: I agree with you. I totally agree with you. I think, and again this comes to synthesis, good decision-making, and communication, if you can synthesize, distill it into a plan and communicate that plan, I found these tools exceptional. Use ChatPRD and give it a try.
Now, I think it’s the human aspect though of boldness, seeing the future in a way that a thing trained on priors cannot. Those things I still think, and then charisma and attracting all those things to actually make the thing happen are pretty hard to replicate, which is why I love using ChatPRD. I’m not going to come up with the most genius way to do data export for Snowflake for some… That is a solved area that we should just scaffold up. I should customize it to what we do, and then we should ship it. That is not a place where my magic skills as a human are going to impact.
But I don’t think a lot of PMs see it that way. I think there’s this real identity shift that’s going to happen where PMs think that their value is coming from their ideas that they manifest into the world and how they individually manifest them. And I think we’re going to shift to, are you building the right stuff? Are you building it quickly? And is it delivering? No matter what the tool chain is.
Lenny: Yeah. I think your point about getting buy-in and getting everyone aligned, I don’t know how an AI bot does that unless everybody’s got their own little bot and they’re all talking to each other.
Claire Vo: They all just get along.
Lenny: We’re in. I’ll [inaudible 01:07:32] this a little higher.
Claire Vo: Yeah.
Lenny: I actually made this list. I feel like this could be the entire podcast, but I made it a quick list of, “Here’s the jobs of a PM.” And it’s interesting. I don’t know if this is really a question, but it’s just interesting to think about which of these will some ChatPRD maybe do in the future. What does the job feel? You’re writing PRDS, you’re setting goals, proposing a roadmap, aligning a team behind a roadmap, developing a strategy, developing a vision, communicating timelines, finding blockers, and unblocking people, getting buy-in from up on high, getting budget resources for your team, giving feedback on product and design. Those are just some of the day-to-day jobs. I’m so curious just which of these AI can actually just do and not have to worry about it.
Claire Vo: I think a lot of them AI can do. And so the question is, which of them do you want to hand the keys to an AI tool? And which of them are going to be much more valuable as a tool that an individual or a team’s intellect can use to do a better, faster, higher impact job?
Again, I believe in technology and I think this stuff, what’s interesting about this moment right now is every week I see something that I would not have in a million years thought was possible three years ago. Every week, something new comes out where it just changes my mind of what’s possible. I believe all of those are 80% good functionally tractable. The question is, is 80% good functionally tractable the best way to do that? Or can we take a certain type of person with a certain skill set backed by a purpose-built toolkit and make it 3X better, 4X better, 10X better? I think that’s the more interesting question.
Lenny: I think on the point of amazing things are happening every day, we had SpaceX launched the Starship and it was barely mentioned anywhere. We have the spaceship that could take us to Mars and, “Meh, we don’t need to talk about that.”
Claire Vo: We get the kids up and stream it on YouTube.
Lenny: Oh, that’s awesome.
Claire Vo: It’s magic. We live in this magic time. I think it’s so fascinating. But I agree, we’re getting spoiled by innovation.
Lenny: You said that there’s this ratio that might shift with product managers, engineers. I’m curious which ratio, because engineers are also getting more efficient, and so it’s interesting if the ratios will be consistent as engineers become more efficient, PMs get it more efficient.
Claire Vo: I wonder if whole roles get eliminated and replaced, and then ratios aren’t even the right way to think about things. There’s the ratio of this PM role to this many, one PM to seven to 10 engineers or one EM to… There’s those ratios.
I also think there’s going to be this interesting shift of as a manager, as a leader, how you allocate budget against tools and people I also think is going to shift. And I saw something where somebody said that every role that they got asked to open, the team had to spend a week trying to automate it before they were allowed to open the JD. It’s just this very interesting… In my mind people, think that’s scary and it’s going to reduce jobs. Yes, and I do think there’s also potentially other jobs that open up that can become very interesting.
And so I don’t know how it’s going to pencil out. I really don’t. What I do know is things are going to change and I, as a leader and a person that cares for people’s long-term careers, want to be much more forward-thinking than close my eyes to what the possible maybe dramatic changes are in our industry. I’m thinking about it, I’m experimenting with things, and I’m hoping that in our team in LaunchDarkly we’re leading from the front here as opposed to on our back foot.
Lenny: I’m thinking many people listening here are like, “Okay, I need to get on top of this. I need to stay ahead. I want to follow Claire’s lead.” Is your advice simply create GPTs, play with ChatGPT? Is there anything else there to help people?
Claire Vo: I also think PMs need to be thinking about building product skills particularly around these non-deterministic products. It’s been [inaudible 01:11:40]. Part of why I built ChatPRD is not just to stress test how these sorts of things are going to change the product function. It’s literally, this is a new type of product built by a new type of technology and it’s moving very fast. And learning how to build these kinds of products, if you can do that, I just think back to when mobile happened, if you’re a PM that jumped on mobile, you had the pick of the litter when it came to jobs in very interesting startups.
And so I think we’re in the same moment here where, if you can ratchet down and specialize and learn a new technology, you actually can get into very interesting positions. Those are both of my motivations on ChatPRD, is understand how it impacts the function that I lead, but also understand how to build a great product with these underlying technologies that are just much different than the technologies that I personally built on before.
Lenny: And so for someone, let’s say, not super engineering-oriented, I guess how do you recommend people on your team explore this sort of thing? Is it [inaudible 01:12:46]?
Claire Vo: Yeah. I do think studying products that are out there is quite interesting. I love this idea of doing outside-in product tear-downs. What is good about this? What is bad about this? How would I have written the PRD here? What would I be measuring? How would I think about error states? How would I think about if this is a great product, a good product, or an okay product? I do think doing that sort of crit on an external product can be a really accessible way to start to stress test your own skills around this and figure out where there are gaps.
That’s one thing I think you can do. Two, I think there’s a lot of no-code, low-code stuff you can play with. Even if you can’t put your hands on keyboard and write code, you can certainly stitch together things and try some no-code tools. That’s another way to do it. The other thing is find where it’s fun. I think how fun is Midjourney? How fun are some of these more creative tools? And so find where there’s something fun and build art out of it as a mechanism for learning. It doesn’t always have to be commercially driven. It doesn’t have to be part of work. It can just be find a space that you’re personally interested in and play with what’s out there.
Lenny: Awesome. One last question about ChatPRD. With Copilot, there’s all these stats. It’s making engineers 50% more efficient, whatever percentage. Do you have any sense of efficiency gains so far with ChatPRD?
Claire Vo: I have qualitative feedback from product managers who have used ChatPRD, who have said, “This has saved me dozens of hours I would’ve spent on writing documents.” And another person said, “I am a single PM on a team that’s growing and I don’t think we’re going to have to hire another PM now.” There’s the people, there’s both the individual aspect and the hours aspect, which is it’s helping individuals PMs get higher leverage across a broad engineering or building team, and that it’s helping them spend their time more effectively.
Lenny: Many people don’t want to hear that they don’t need to hire a PM. There’s many people looking for jobs right now.
Claire Vo: It’s true, but we can’t… I think we saw this in the last couple of years. Inefficiently hiring and building unsustainable costs into a company leads no one to success. And if that’s a lesson that I can teach anybody, it’s sustainability in organizations is the responsibility of a leader. Yes, I would love to give everybody positions. There are not positions to have. And the best I can do for the people in the team is be really responsible and really thoughtful about that because that helps me grow their careers and helps me sustain their careers long-term.
It’s incredibly complicated, but also on the flip side, this is a very small startup. They can’t afford another PM and they’re extending their runway to build something transformational by not growing the team. And so, yes, people [inaudible 01:15:57] their teams and have these jobs and startups can’t afford it, and they still have great things to do in the world.
Lenny: Great answer. To start to wrap up our conversation, I have these two segments, Failure Corner and Contrarian Corner, and we can pick which corner you want to head to. Would you like to share a story of your career where you failed and something you learned from that? Or something you believe that most people don’t believe? Which corner sounds more interesting?
Claire Vo: I’ll take Contrarian Corner.
Lenny: Let’s go for there.
Claire Vo: Yep.
Lenny: I need some sound effects for these corners. Do share.
Claire Vo: I’m sharing this because you just released your podcast with Marty again. And I’m a sales-led product apologist unabashedly, which is, I think that it is okay to listen to the market and to be commercially oriented in products in ways that probably would make some folks in some types of product organizations squirm a little bit. And the reason why I believe this is I think there are tremendous businesses built on sales-led motions. And I disagree with the fact that that means you do not care for the craft or the experience of users. I think it can be the best of both worlds.
I love sales. I say if I was not in this role, put me on a quota and make me enterprise West. I love to sell, but I think product teams, this opposition we have industry-wide with sales-led I’m not convinced is healthy in every organization. And I was listening to the podcast and I think you all were talking about, you said, “SAP is like this. And who wants to be SAP?” Man alive. There are a lot of companies out there that would love to be SAP, now with a better product, with better experience, with more love from the industry maybe. But what a powerhouse company. And I think we as PMs turn our nose up to powerhouse companies too often because we want companies to be product-led, not sales-led.
Lenny: Amazing. I’m going to not go deeper into this topic because I don’t want to be speaking on behalf of Marty’s perspective, but there’s so much debate that came out of that episode and I love that it trickles to more opinions being shared about ways product can work.
I guess, just to understand your takeaway here, is sales-led companies can be awesome. They can build amazing businesses, and it can be great to be a PM at a company like that.
Claire Vo: Yeah, and they can build great products.
Lenny: Great. Claire, is there anything else that you want to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?
Claire Vo: I will say, because we’ve been talking a lot about AI and replacing PMs, I love to sell. I love to help people get jobs, so if there are ways that I can help people find great fit companies, it’s one of the things that I get a lot of energy out of. I just want to say that in the world. It’s something that sparks a lot of joy. I get a lot of it inbound, “Can you help me get in here? Can you help me get there?” But if there is a tractable way that I can help you get to a connected to a company or a role that you think is great for you, that’s fun for me and I’m totally open to it.
Lenny: How would people reach out to you to try to help you get them [inaudible 01:19:13]?
Claire Vo: I am, of course, on LinkedIn. I’m on X at ClaireVo, all one word. And then if you really want to go into the archives, I have a very fabulous TikTok where I’m ChiefProductOfficer. It’s all one word.
Lenny: Amazing. We’ll link to all these in the show notes. And we will refresh these two facts at the end of the podcast anyway, because I always ask this anyway. Before we do that, welcome to our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?
Claire Vo: I am so ready.
Lenny: Okay. First question, what are two or three books that you’ve recommended most to other people?
Claire Vo: High Growth Handbook I love, and I like Scaling People. These are two books that the reason why I recommend them to people is because they have solid playbook answers to 80%, 90% of everyday leadership scaling people questions. And so they’re just great reference books for what I think great leadership inside startups can look like, and they solve some of the things that you don’t need to solve novel-ly. And then one on the fiction side that I’ve been recommending is Circe, which is a retelling of Circe’s story from her perspective. It’s a great read, and everybody I’ve recommended it to really loves it.
Lenny: From Game of Thrones?
Claire Vo: No, Circe from the Odyssey. Odysseus [inaudible 01:20:34]. She turns men into pigs.
Lenny: [inaudible 01:20:36] lack of culture.
Claire Vo: It’s great. My kids are very into Greek mythology, so this is me meeting them on my side.
Lenny: Amazing. The first two books are both Straight Press. Shout out to Straight Press.
Claire Vo: Yeah, Straight Press.
Lenny: And I have both books in the back there, and my laptop’s actually sitting on Scaling People.
Next question. What is a favorite recent movie or TV show you’ve really enjoyed?
Claire Vo: I have kids, so I don’t get to go see movies. Movies are, that’s an adventure. It’s basically a vacation. I saw Poor Things, which if you like capital W weird capital A art, highly recommend Poor Things. The show that I recommend to people, I love Mythic Quest. Everybody references Silicon Valley, but Mythic Quest gets at some of, I was in gaming once, gets at some of my experiences in the technology organizations. It’s got a technical female lead and think it’s quite funny. I like Mythic Quest.
Lenny: Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates?
Claire Vo: I like to ask candidates how they would improve our business model. I think so many PMs come in with a point of view of the product and the target market but don’t actually understand the underlying mechanisms of how we make money and what our unit economics are and how that could be improved. And the candidates that do come in and have a strong point of view on business model often are pretty successful in our organization.
Lenny: And what do you look for in a good answer that’s, “Oh wow, this candidate’s great?”
Claire Vo: It’s thinking along the chain of value from how do we identify people in the market? What does our pricing model look like? What could they hypothesize our underlying unit economics or cogs are? And then where are their points of leverage along that whole funnel? It’s really, do they have a mental model for thinking about a business model? Have they thought at all about how we make money, either top line or margin? And then can they identify places where they might improve it?
Lenny: Awesome. Basically understanding the business really well. Great.
Do you have a favorite product that you’ve recently discovered that you really like?
Claire Vo: Okay, I’m going to make you laugh because you’ve gotten all these cars, right?
Lenny: Yeah, I have such expensive cars.
Claire Vo: You’ve got expensive cars. It’s not new, I love my minivan. I am a big fan of my minivan. As my friend says, “It’s like driving around your living room.” And when you have two kids, you know what I want to do? I just want to drive around my living room, Bluey included. And so no Rivian, no Mercedes-Benz, but I really love my Pacifica.
Lenny: Pacifica? Okay, I was going to ask.
Claire Vo: But the actual car product that I really love, I love Waymo. We’re in San Francisco, we’ve got these autonomous vehicles. It is, top to bottom, just a lovely product experience from the app to when it shows up, the sound design is great, the cars are comfortable, the displays in the car are great. It is, now every time a tourist comes in, a friend comes in to visit San Francisco, I make them take a round-trip ride in a robot car. And then even I’ve had a customer service experience with the Waymo team where my friend left an iPhone and [inaudible 01:23:44] and customer experience was great, 24-hour service. Top to bottom, great product design, great service design.
Lenny: I just got into Waymo actually in the wait list, and so I’m excited to actually try it. I was actually treated as press early on to ride in a Waymo with a person from the company, just to experience it. And then I never got access to it after. Now, I finally can try it.
Claire Vo: Enjoy. It’s so nice. It’s my preferred mode of travel.
Lenny: The future. We’ve talked about a lot of ways the world is changing. That’s another great example.
Two questions to go. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to, share with friends or family they find useful in work or in life?
Claire Vo: Fast beats right. Every time when debating between, do I noodle this for a thousand years and try to come to the perfect solution or do I make a decision and get executing and direction I have conviction on, I consistently see and believe that fast at the end of the day, wins. Fast beats right.
Lenny: Final question. You mentioned TikTok. You put a bunch of awesome content out on TikTok. Any advice, slash is there a tip you could share with someone that is trying to be successful on TikTok from your experience?
Claire Vo: I’ve been neglecting my TikTok for a little bit with new job and winter with sick kids. This is my advice, and I think you know this, consistency drives audience growth, which is, when I was on TikTok posting every day, you would get followers and engagement and the algorithm would bless you. And when you don’t, you don’t. I think consistency in almost all things wins.
The other thing that I think is a really good advice for any quote-unquote creator of whatever scale, of whatever ambition, is I think thinking about content creation as documentation, not creative generation is really helpful. I just like to talk about what I think about at work and I like to, an interesting meeting or interesting interaction, document why I thought that was interesting or what could be done better. And that becomes the basis of a very natural flow of content for me. It’s a tactic that’s worked really well for me and helps me do stuff in my free time.
Lenny: Amazing. It might be time to start exploring Instagram also with all this TikTok news.
Claire Vo: I know. Yep.
Lenny: Claire, before we started this podcast, I asked you what your goal for this was, and it was to be helpful to people. I think we’ve 100% done that in so many different ways. Thank you again so much for being here.
Two final questions. We already covered these, but just to refresh people’s memories, where can people find you online if they want to reach out? And then how can listeners be useful to you?
Claire Vo: LinkedIn, X, I’m ClaireVo, all one word. And then on TikTok, get me back into it. Give me a follow, maybe I’ll start posting some of my excellent content. But it’s @ChiefProductOfficer.
Lenny: Awesome. And then how can people be useful to you?
Claire Vo: Help each other. That’s what I want the most, which is I do really see, it is a tough time in tech right now and there are a lot of people looking for jobs. One, I think help each other. And then the other thing that I really, if I could ask your audience anything, is if you have a job where your job is typing into an internet box to create products out of nothing, really acknowledge the privilege and joy of that job and try to have some fun because a lot of people want to sit where you’re sitting. Have fun. Appreciate what you have. Enjoy it. Enjoy each other.
Lenny: Great and important advice to leave people with. Claire, thank you so much for being here.
Claire Vo: Thank you.
Lenny: Bye, everyone.
Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Reformatted by reformat_english_direct.py
让宇宙为你所用 | Claire Vo(LaunchDarkly、Color、Optimizely、ChatPRD)
运营如初创公司
Claire Vo: 人们通常认为我被招进后期阶段的公司,是为了教他们像大公司一样运作。但实际上,我说我是来提醒他们——你们可以像初创公司一样运作。
Lenny: 每个人都想要这个。大家都在说”对,快速行动,高质量”。对你来说,这具体是什么样的例子?
Claire Vo: 我会向我的领导团队传达一个期望:把节奏再加快一档。如果你觉得某件事今年需要完成,那它就需要在这半年内完成。
Lenny: 工程和产品合并,可能正在成为一个趋势。
Claire Vo: 我用 CPTO 这个简称来指代把产品、工程和设计在职能上统一管理。不应该争论什么对产品最好、什么对工程最好、什么对设计速度最好——而应该问:什么对组织最好?
Lenny: 你做了一个叫 ChatPRD 的工具。我猜它是目前最受欢迎的、面向 PM 的 AI 工具。
Claire Vo: 它明年会不会淘汰 PM?大概不会。所需的能力会不会发生变化?会的。这种变化会不会比我们所有人预期的都快?很有可能。
关于本期嘉宾
Lenny: 今天的嘉宾是 Claire Vo。Claire 曾在 Color、Optimizely 担任首席产品官,目前是 LaunchDarkly 的首席产品官。她还是两次创始人、工程师、设计师和营销人。她也是 ChatPRD 的创建者——我猜这是目前使用最广泛的、面向 PM 的 AI 产品,她利用晚上和周末的时间来开发。
在这次对话中,我们深入探讨了 AI 会补充哪些 PM 能力、未来可能替代哪些,ChatPRD 背后的故事,Claire 对如何在 PM 角色中保持 AI 领先优势的建议,对职业拥有主动权的重要性,以及如何让宇宙的轨迹为你所用,成为科技行业成功女性(尤其是高管)需要什么,她如何在大型公司中创造快节奏的同时保持很高的标准,CPTO 这一角色的兴起——将产品和工程置于一位领导之下——此外还有大量面向初级职场人和高级管理者的职业建议,以及更多内容。
这期节目对任何从事产品工作或对产品角色感兴趣的人都有收获,我非常高兴能把它带给你。
Claire,非常感谢你来参加节目,欢迎来到播客。
Claire Vo: 谢谢你邀请我,我很高兴来到这里。
Lenny: 我甚至更兴奋。对我来说,你一直都是那种迟早会上这个播客、我们会一起做一期节目的人。你有同样的感觉吗?没有也没关系。
Claire Vo: 这是我的荣幸和快乐,很高兴来到这里。你的嘉宾和内容一直让我印象深刻。看到产品领域如此广泛的领导者和思想者,真的很令人兴奋。如果我能被列入这个领域的产品领导者和思想者名单之中,那说明我做对了什么。谢谢你的邀请。
Lenny: 这绝对是我的荣幸。
职业建议
我想先聊聊职业建议。我翻了翻你的 LinkedIn,你的职业路径基本上是大多数 PM 梦寐以求的那种。简单来说,你从助理产品经理到产品经理,到高级产品经理,到总监,到高级总监,到 VP,到 SVP,到首席产品官,现在你已经在三家不同的公司担任过首席产品官。一路走来,你还是创始人、设计师、工程师。
我的问题是,如果你要把自己在 PM 职业生涯中进步如此之远、如此之快的秘诀浓缩成一点,你觉得会是什么?
Claire Vo: 当你把这一切列出来,你可能猜得到,这一切背后的核心是一个永不停歇地好奇、急切、渴望创造的人。我就是喜欢做东西,而且觉得特别好玩。我觉得,如果你找到了一份有趣的职业或手艺,在这个领域加速成长就很容易。一件事——我单纯热爱我做的事情。
但在职业成长方面,从——实际上我最初是文案(copywriter),从文案一路做到运营工程组织的 CPO 或 CPTO——归根结底其实很简单:清楚你想要从职业中获得什么,明确地说出来并且主动争取,然后让你的老板或任何能支持你、为你站台的人,轻松地帮你从这里走到那里。
举个很具体的例子,是我职业生涯早期的事。当时我在一家电商公司负责设计 和产品管理 的管理岗位,是高级经理级别,与增长和营销团队紧密合作——我们就像硬币的两面,密不可分。后来营销负责人离职了,很快就有了一个大动作:“营销这块怎么办?我们需要招人吗?“
主动争取,让老板轻松帮你升职
Claire Vo: 我坐下来想了大概半天,觉得我也许能帮上忙。于是画了一张组织架构图,把自己的名字写在最上面,走进老板办公室说:“你的营销团队问题,这是其中一个可行方案——把产品、营销和增长合并在一起。我可以担任这个职位。下面的管理结构我会这样调整——不仅仅是把我放在哪里,还包括其他人放在哪里。我觉得这个方案对公司行得通,这是我建议的推行方式,这是我的职位描述。“我拿到了那个职位。我觉得当人们来问我职业建议时,他们想听的是”我该怎么做?“但真正的问题其实是:你想要什么?以及,你怎样让你的老板尽可能轻松地同意把你从现在的位置带到你想去的地方?
我给人们的另一条建议是:清楚你从当前角色中想要什么,也清楚你下一个角色具体要是什么。我自己就是这么做的,甚至会直接跟老板说。当我在 Optimizely 做 VP of product 时,我跟老板说:“我想做 CPO。以下是我打算怎样从这里走到那里,我希望你能和我一起推动这件事。“后来我来 LaunchDarkly 面试这个角色时,我的老板、LaunchDarkly 的 CEO Dan 问我:“你希望从这个角色中得到什么?“我说:“我希望我的下一个角色是 CEO,所以我希望这个角色能帮我补齐短板、学习提升,帮我积累经验,走向下一步。”
所以我始终清楚下一个角色是什么,也始终坦率地说出来。不过我觉得这里需要把握好分寸。清楚地表达目标是一回事,但满脑子只有升职、逢人就谈,那就是另一回事了。我和老板之间关于职业成长和路径的对话,大概只占所有沟通的 0.005%,非常少。就是确认一下:“我说清楚了吗?我们在同一页上吗?我朝着那些目标取得进展的时候有没有及时同步?“
高潜力的人晋升速度基本跟得上组织能承受的极限
那些高潜力的人,晋升速度基本上跟组织能支持的极限一样快。我几乎没有后悔过”要是早点提拔某人就好了”的情况。相反,我见过管理者或员工过早晋升的案例。所以作为管理自己职业的人,你需要在雄心和魄力之间取得平衡,既要自我主张、为自己争取,同时归根结底工作成果要替你说话——那才是推动你职业成长的真正动力。所以,清楚你想要什么,同时把活干好、拿出结果,你也可以拥有像我这样的职业生涯。
Lenny: 先总结一下,你分享的核心建议之一是:清楚你真正想要什么,因为如果你连自己要去哪儿都不知道,就不可能朝着理想的职业方向前进。否则你会被推到一些你并不真正想去的方向上。
我的理解是,你要把想去的方向告诉别人、主动争取。“这是我未来想做的事,帮我到达那里。“我很喜欢你提到的另一点——不要过度关注升职。有很多人把大量精力花在”我需要升职,我怎么到下一级,我值得下一级”上面。顺着这个话题,关于如何避免成为那种整天只想着升职的人,你还有其他建议吗?怎样找到那个平衡点?
晋升对话应该围绕公司需要,而不是个人需要
Claire Vo: 第一,你要了解你所在组织的人才管理规范和制度。你应该知道这些事情是怎么运作的——如果你在很小的初创公司,可能很随意;如果在大型公司,流程会更正式。理解组织内部晋升在操作层面是怎样发生的,能帮助你在正确的时间、正确的节点、带着正确的上下文去展开那些对话。这是我的一条建议。我们是一个规模稍大的组织,我们有固定的晋升周期,有专门的时间段来提拔人。所以如果你在晋升周期前四个月来找我谈,也许我记在心里了,也许没有。在较大的组织里,我有时候确实没办法想什么时候提拔人就什么时候提拔人。
所以,第一点是了解你所在团队的人才时间表,尤其是在较大的组织中。第二点,我认为对话的重点应该是:你到一个不同的位置上,对公司有什么价值,公司为什么需要它。很多时候对话是这样的:“我想升职,因为我想做 PM 总监,因为我想当管理者,因为我需要直属下属。“而不是说:“你看,你现在的管理幅度已经有九个直属下属了,你需要有人分担。我在产品组织这一块有很高的信誉。我觉得如果设立这个岗位,我们可以做得更多。而且我认为我适合这个岗位,因为我已经证明了 A、B、C。”
这是在为公司解决问题,而不是在解决个人的职业成长问题。我觉得想升职的人需要转换思维方式,站在这个角度去思考,而不是反过来。因为说实话,尤其现在——产品团队天然就很小,不可能到处都有管理岗、总监岗、高级总监岗等着你。如果你想做管理,比如产品团队天然规模就偏小。所以并不是说每 12 个月我们就机械地调薪、涨薪、提拔。我们真的需要深思熟虑团队的架构、规模和组织方式。
所以如果你想走管理路线,比如,你必须证明你擅长组织设计。我的建议是,真正聚焦在为什么一个角色对公司是好的、是必要的,然后为什么你是那个角色的最佳人选,而不是”我想升职”。
Lenny: 这条建议太好了,也太重要了——聚焦在如何为你的管理者和业务解决问题,而不是”嘿,这是我的职业需要,我的职业停滞了,这太糟糕了”。我很喜欢你传递的信息中那种赋能力量,不是那种”你就待在这个位置上,你也做不了什么”的态度,而是主动寻找机会帮助你的管理者、帮助你的业务。“这是我能做的事,能推动事情向前走。”
而且我觉得你提到的时机因素也很关键。在事情有可能发生的时候提出方案。你分享了那个营销出现空缺的例子。
Claire Vo: 对,没错。
Lenny: 你还有没有另一个类似的例子,就是你主动提出”这是我能帮组织做的事”,从而促成了又一次晋升?如果没有的话也没关系。
Claire Vo: 说实话,我后来扩展到领导工程团队和技术组织,用的也是同样的方式。当时我在 Color,工程组织确实需要提升一个层次,而我非常清楚该怎么做。我有很高的信心,无论是在技术层面还是组织层面,我都具备以对业务至关重要的方式来扩展工程组织的能力——无论是从架构角度,还是从团队和人才角度。那一次,我知道有一个需要解决的问题,我知道这个问题很重要,我知道我们必须快速解决它,而且我有信心我能做到。
我今天仍然在这样做。在 Color,我最初是以产品身份加入的,很快就开始领导工程组织,效果非常好。后来我实际上还接管了部分非临床运营的工作——当时我们有一位偏运营型的负责人,面临着一些规模化挑战需要应对,而这正好契合我的能力,我知道我能很快帮到公司。
给 PM 的横向发展建议
Claire Vo: 这是我特别想给 PM 的一条建议。PM 本身就是一个非常通才型的角色,为了往上走,稍微往左或往右看看是完全可以的。我当时就接了一个市场增长的角色,那其实是我第一个总监职位。它不仅仅负责产品,还负责市场。我必须学习市场营销,在那个领域发展新的技能,但这成为了我可以在此基础上构建更广泛领导力职业生涯的根基。所以我也确实认为,在产品的范围之外左右看看,是一种非常有效的找到成长机会的方式。
**Lenny:**我很喜欢这个建议,它会带来很多意想不到的机会。关于 PM,我觉得一个很大的问题——也回到你最初说的”要知道自己想去哪里”——PM 可以走的方向太多了。你最终可以成为创始人,成为 GM,成为 CO 或其他什么角色。而尝试这些不同的事情往往能帮助你理解,“这才是我真正感兴趣的,也许我想转向设计。“
组织是可塑的
Claire Vo: 是的,还有一点我觉得很多人没有意识到——也许我作为创始人经历过这一点,在公司内部我也深有体会——那就是这个世界是可以被你的意志所塑造的。我的意思是,在大多数情况下,至少在我所处的创业公司和成长期公司、后期创业公司的阶段,组织是非常流动的,我喜欢围绕有才华、有动力的人来组织团队。
所以,仅仅因为我们现在是这样组织的,仅仅因为这些组织是分开的或者不同的,并不意味着它们就必须如此。你应该在现有组织结构中思考自己的职业成长,但同时,作为一名组织设计者,这是我非常重要的工作之一——你也必须把这个系统看作一个活生生的、会呼吸的实体,它可以随着时间推移而变化,尤其是在那些高度自驱、高度有才华的人周围。
Lenny: 顺着这个思路,引用你之前分享过的建议——站在你的经理和上级的视角思考:他们正在头疼什么?我能不能提出一个方案,这个方案恰好也让我进入一个更有意思的角色?
Claire Vo: 没错,就是这样。
小心你擅长的事
Lenny: 有一个方向我本来没打算聊,但我觉得非常重要也非常有趣——像你这样非常优秀、非常成功的人,往往会承担很多,而最终这往往不是他们想要的。
Claire Vo: SOS。
Lenny: 完全同意。关于那句经典的话——“小心你擅长的事”——你有什么建议吗?关于如何避免最终把所有事情都揽到自己身上?
Claire Vo: 我真心相信要在自己的”天才区”中运作。我真心相信要发挥优势。如果你所处的位置是——你擅长很多事情,被赋予了很多责任,但你有很大的成长空间,而且你花在需要提升的事情上的时间超过了你花在你真正卓越的事情上的时间——我认为这对组织不公平,对你也不公平。
我真心认为,定义并理解你的天才区——你在哪些方面是卓越的、没有其他人能站出来做得和你一样好,以及你从工作中获得巨大的智力和情感上的愉悦——这才是让一切可持续的关键。所以我实际上认为关键不在于工作的量或广度,而在于可持续性。你能不能每天带着精力、投入和热情出现在工作面前?
我觉得要非常清楚自己是否正在这个空间里运作,或者是否不在。这也许可以回到一个观点——我从来没后悔过把一个人提拔得太慢,但我后悔过把一个人提拔得太快。高成长性的个体在特定领域想要更多责任、更大范围,而我见过经验较少的管理者或总监,甚至我这个级别的人,想要给机会,结果把人放到一个既无效又不快乐的位置上。所以我认为对此有自我认知非常重要,同时作为管理者,意识到这一点也非常重要。
保留建造者的时间
就我个人而言,我确实做了很多,但我觉得我处于自己的天才区,而且我也知道,要保持在自己的天才区中,拥有这种广泛的职责范围但同时保留”建造者时间”是其中一部分。我的意思是,我必须有时间为个体——来自我自己的——产出真正的工作成果,这就意味着日历管理非常重要,时间管理非常重要。
Lenny: 我们接下来会聊到你构建的一些东西。关于如何找到自己的天才区,对那些正在试图搞清楚自己天才区在哪里的人,你有什么建议吗?我知道有一个 TED 演讲讲的就是如何思考天才区……
如何找到你的天才区
Claire Vo: 是的。我没法精确复述那个内容,但我见过的一个方法是——回顾你过去一个月或一个季度的日历,不管什么时间跨度,把所有事情写下来,然后基本上把它们分成几类:“我讨厌做这件事”、“我不喜欢但也还行”、“我喜欢做这件事”,然后是”我喜欢做这件事,如果我能把所有时间都花在这上面,我会是全世界最幸福的人”。把你的时间花在哪里按照这些桶进行分类,然后把底部的桶放到一边,只关注最上面的那个桶,问自己:“我怎样才能更多地待在这里?“这往往是一个真正的指南针,指向你的热情所在、你的独特专长所在,以及你能创造大量价值的地方,因为你高度投入。
我觉得另一件事是真正问自己——这也许又回到职业建议的角度——真正问自己:“在这个组织中,我做的哪些事情是其他人做不到的?“我做的很多事情,组织里其他人也能做,但哪些是我做的那些……你想想一个差异化的产品——难以复制的东西,知道那是什么并深入投入其中,可以驱动非凡的职业成长,同时也会让你非常快乐。
Lenny: 对你来说,能举个例子吗?
Claire Vo: 我觉得我确实很擅长横向以及上下穿越。我的意思是,我在产品、工程、设计、数据和运营之间游刃有余,坦率地说也包括营收,这种跨职能的流畅度是纵向或职能部门领导者可能不具备的。我觉得我在广泛的领域都有很高的流利度,能够相当轻松地将跨职能的对话围绕一个业务目标汇聚起来。这就是我的思维方式。我做过创始人,这是我的第二天性。
另一件我觉得我做得还不错、而且让我感到非常愉悦的事情,是在高度之间切换。是的,我喜欢待在上面思考战略和愿景,但我也喜欢深入到细节中去推动事情前进。我认为这种横向运作、同时又能花时间在纵向上上下下——无论那个纵向在哪里——让我非常开心。我觉得我在这方面还挺擅长的。
Lenny: 太棒了。接下来我们会聊到你刚才提到的一些内容,不过先快速说一下,你提到了”能量审计”这个概念。Matt Mochary 有一份非常好的指南,我会在节目备注里附上链接,手把手教你怎么做。实际上我们在播客里也多次讨论过这个话题——找到给你带来能量的事情,多做;找到消耗你能量的事情,少做。说起来容易做起来难,毕竟你有工作,有些事是别人付钱让你去做的,但即使如此,它至少能帮你明确长期职业方向上你想要走向哪里。
在大公司中保持创业节奏
Lenny: 好,你提到自己是创始人,而且感觉你骨子里就是个创始人,但你已经在大型公司工作了一段时间了。我听说你非常擅长在大公司内部建立快节奏,在保持创业专注力的同时还能维持对质量和产品的极高标准。每个人都想要这样。大家都会说,“对,又要快,质量又要好。“谁不想要呢?我很好奇你具体在实践中做了什么,才能打造出行动迅速且维持高标准的团队。有哪些你觉得有用的流程、价值观或工作方式?
Claire Vo: 很有意思,人们经常以为我之所以被聘用到这些后期阶段公司担任这些角色,是为了教他们如何像大公司一样运营。而实际上我说,我是被请来提醒他们——你们可以像创业公司一样运营。所以我思考这件事的角度完全不同。
在节奏和高标准方面,我主要考虑两件事。从节奏上来说,要清楚你内部的节奏是什么,本质上不要让它退化到例行会议的节奏。我经常发现组织的节奏会被日历锁死,所以我会非常注意不让例会成为推动下一步行动的驱动力。这是一个非常具体的战术问题,但当有人说”哦,我们下次会议再讨论这个”或者”下次会议再决定这个”的时候,我的回应是:“不,我们应该现在就讨论。我们应该明天就做决定。”
另一件我考虑的事情是,在组织内部设定”快一档”的节奏期望。我进入一个组织时喜欢这样做——不管你喜不喜欢,这就是我的风格——那就是当我看到一个组织的运营节奏低于我的期望时,我会向我的领导团队传达,我的期望是他们把时钟频率(clock speed)调快一档。意思是:如果你觉得某件事今年要完成,那它需要在这个半年内完成。如果你觉得需要在这个半年完成,那它需要在这个季度完成。这个季度,就是这个月。这个星期,就是今天。今天之内,就在这个会议上。实际上,明确承认你的自然节奏会比你的雄心慢,并且有意识地把事情的时间线提前,我认为这能改变期望的设定方式,坦率地说,也能改变整个组织的能量和势能。
关于节奏的第三点,是个人 SLA(个人服务等级协议)。我永远不想成为组织的瓶颈。这是我这个角色最具挑战性的方面之一——因为你往往是决策、裁决、下一步行动、审批、沟通的关键节点。如果我的个人 SLA 很慢,那么我整个组织就无法尽可能快地运转。我努力做到相当及时地回应,努力做到既保持很高的回复率,也保持很快的速度。这很难,有时候并不完全做得到,但这是我的目标。
“时钟频率”:调快一档
Lenny: 我很喜欢这个时钟频率的概念——就是比我们正常的速度再快一个迭代。你具体是怎么做到的?是你自己这样做,然后每个人从你的做法中自然而然地跟上?还是团队的一个原则?你有没有一个特定的说法?
Claire Vo: 是的,这是我会用的一种说法,也是我要求领导团队做的事情。一开始是,第一,我自己会这样做;第二,我的期望是你去寻找这样做的机会。我觉得这之所以有效,是因为它非常具体,非常可操作。就是那种时刻——当你快要说出一个截止日期时,你停下来想想:“这个日期对吗?还是我需要把它提前一个迭代?“所以这是我给领导团队的一条非常具体的建议和期望。如果他们能做到这样,那么组织预期的节奏就会提升,人们往往会迎头赶上。
Lenny: 然后这和你第一条建议直接相关——不要依赖会议节奏来决定行动节奏。我猜这也是类似的情况,你告诉人们”这是我想要的工作方式”,然后你自己真的这样做,这种做法就开始渗透到整个团队。
Claire Vo: 对,我就是觉得存在一种反模式(anti-pattern),就是”我们下次会议再做决定”或者”我们下次会议再跟进这件事”。那是一种由 Google Calendar 或你使用的任何日历工具人为制造的时间线,它不是真实的东西。所以我想让我们回到真实的时间线上来——我们什么时候能做决定?我们需要多少信息?这并不意味着每个决定都要现在、今天、明天做出来,但确实意味着我们不应该人为地按照日历节奏来推动产品前进。
高标准:人才门槛与反馈文化
Lenny: 太好了。我们来聊聊质量吧。在这方面有哪些经验教训?
Claire Vo: 好的,在高标准方面,作为领导者我主要考虑两件事。一是人才门槛要极高,二是产品门槛要高。
先说人才。在人才方面,我认为你必须定义清楚标准,必须非常具体。这意味着你必须深入思考你的领导力原则是什么。如果你的领导力原则是”把时钟频率调快一个迭代”,那就明确表达这是你的期望,然后清晰地阐述并让人们对此负责。
所以我确实认为拥有一个具体且可衡量的职业阶梯(career ladder)非常重要,尤其是在高级别岗位上。我经常发现这些标准非常模糊。比如”招聘并管理多个部门”或者”整合跨职能利益相关者的反馈”,这些都不是可操作的、具体的东西。所以我想说,PM 们,戴上你们的产品定义帽或 OKR 帽或随便什么帽子,为这些级别定义一些真正的目标,做到足够具体,以至于你能看着一个人明确地说:“是的。可以衡量地说,是的,他们达到了这个标准。不,他们没有达到那个标准。“我觉得这非常重要。
第二件事是,你必须让反馈常态化。Brené Brown,和我一样是得州人,很喜欢她,她说”清晰即是善意”——我认为回避冲突、回避反馈的文化会拉低人才门槛。事实就是这样,因为期望没有说清楚,你也没有追究责任。我不认为那是善意的。那不是在帮助人们在职业道路上取得成功,也不是在帮助他们成为最好的队友。
我真的很喜欢让反馈常态化,正如我所说,在坦诚公开的反馈方面消除房间里的紧张感。这意味着当人们没有达到期望时要非常明确地说出来,要清楚地表明质疑想法并不等于质疑天生的能力。我认为这是人们需要听到的,才能让反馈真正常态化。我认为反馈非常重要。
及时处理不胜任的情况
Claire Vo: 第三件事是,不幸的是,当你致力于建立高人才门槛和高人才密度时,如果有人不合适、事情行不通,迅速采取行动也是工作的一部分。这是工作中很艰难的一部分,也是大多数管理者非常回避的部分,但我认为这很重要,因为它能让你的整个团队以一种非常健康、高效、有绩效的方式运转,让所有人都更开心——包括那些可能在当时并不太适合这个角色工作的人。
Lenny: 你有没有一个例子,是你对某人出人意料地坦诚,或者给了某人关于质量方面的硬性反馈,让人觉得”哇,原来我应该这样做”?
Claire Vo: 我的组织里曾经有两位领导者,我不会说是谁,也不会说是什么时候,但组织里有两位领导者,一个是产品方向的,一个是工程方向的,搭档关系,他们就是搞不到一块儿去。他们无法合作。他们在优先级和战略上存在分歧,无法沟通,在团队面前发生冲突。
他们的上级管理者采取了非常温和的方式,“你需要在你的跨职能利益相关者方面改进一下”,然后期望所有这些绩效管理的事情会自动发生。我分别给他们打了电话,说:“你们现在的做事方式没有达到我们对领导者的期望。如果不改变,你们就不能继续留在这个组织里。我相信你们可以用不同的方式行事。我确实相信。“我确实相信。我相信这些都是非常有才华的人,能够做出改变。“我相信你们可以改变,但这是你们自己的责任,我需要从明天开始看到变化。”
我希望他们成功。事实上,他们也做到了。他们一下子醒悟过来了,其中一位在大概六到九个月的时间里,变成了我们团队中最有影响力、最有效的管理者之一。我认为就是清楚地告诉他们:“你没有达到期望。如果你继续这样下去,你在这里不会成功。我相信你能做到,但这是你的责任。“这个对话是清晰的、善意的,坦白说在大多数情况下都非常有效。
Lenny: 这是一个很棒的例子。如你所说,清晰即是善意。这让我想起 Kim Scott,她来过播客,分享过一个关于 Bob 的故事。我不知道你还记不记得那个故事,就是他们公司有一个人做得很差,大家都知道他做得很差,然后他们不得不解雇他。解雇他的时候,他就说:“为什么你们不告诉我?为什么没有人告诉我大家都觉得我做得不好?”
Claire Vo: 坦白说,我认为直接说”你做得不好”,比”我觉得你可以在这个方面或那个方面改进一下”,或者”我收到一些反馈说你可以在某方面做得更好”——那才是真正的不善意,因为这既没有帮助他们在你的组织里成功,也没有帮助他们在其他地方成功。
作为科技行业中的女性
Lenny: 好,我们换个方向。来聊聊作为科技行业中的女性。
Claire Vo: 哦,好的。
Lenny: 这在类似的播客中不常被谈论。我知道你有很多想法。显然,你经历了很多,有很多经验。可能有很多故事你还没有在其他地方分享过,所以我想给你一个机会,分享你的经历、你的所见,以及你可能有的任何建议。
Claire Vo: 好的,我很乐意谈这个。我知道很多人不想被定义,或者不想总是被问到作为 C-level 领导层中的女性或母亲是什么体验。咱们别再搞”科技行业女性”圆桌论坛了。但我最近在反思这件事,因为我刚从医疗健康行业回来几年,在那里,根据我的经验,领导层中有更多女性。我有点被惯坏了,甚至在我们的技术团队里也是如此。而现在,我又回到了创业公司和科技行业,比例完全相反,尤其是在工程这样的团队——这正是我管理的团队。
你看,这就是数学。Carta 的数据显示去年大概 13% 多一点的创始人是女性,而且这个比例逐年下降。全女性创始团队只拿到了至少 2% 的风险投资,女性占高级管理职位的 30%,占软件工程团队的 30%。这就是数据,就是事实。我们没有以同等比例出现在这些房间里。而作为一个尽管面对这些数字、至今仍在科技行业取得了相当成功职业生涯的人,我觉得我有义务对这个行业说:这条路并不容易,而且即使在我现在这个层级,依然不容易。
我想说清楚的是,因为这在这种场合经常被谈论——这不是冒名顶替综合征的问题。我有什么资格有冒名顶替综合征呢?我已经证明了自己。我做过创始人,融过风险投资,有过成功的退出。如你所说,我在越来越大的团队中担任过 CPO。我投资创业公司,我在董事会任职。我能上这个播客。我是 TikTok 网红。这不是关于觉得自己是个冒牌货的问题。这真的是关于——这条路确实很难,确实不一样,而且数据算下来的结果对女性是不利的。
如你所说,过去发生了很多事情,你现在看着我可能会说,“哦,她从 associate 一直做到了顶层”,但我曾经不得不为我的女子学校争取和男子学校一样自然就有的计算机科学课程。我在 2000 年代初的微型创业公司中成长,见过不少荒唐事。有风投在我面前说”别怀孕”——这些事情确实发生了。但我还是走到了这里,也挺好的。
我不是在抱怨。我只是觉得人们不理解的是,这些事情仍然在发生。我不需要去追究是谁、在哪里发生的。它仍然在发生。我已经到了这个位置,它仍然在发生。我之所以提这个,是因为我认为这应该成为行业反思的契机,我认为这对想要进入领导层的女性来说,也可以是一个非常有效的反思点。
我处理这个问题的方式是保持好奇。我想知道科技行业中什么是结构性的原因导致了这些现象?什么是文化性的?什么是外部的——发生在我身上或我周围的事情?什么是内部的——我带入了哪些对我不利的东西?所以我尽量保持好奇心。然后作为一个持续的产品思考者,我能利用哪些杠杆来推动事情向前发展——不仅仅是为我自己,而是为整个行业?我怎样影响人们的想法?哪些地方我无法影响?哪些地方我应该选择离开?
至于内部方面的因素,我认为这也是一件很有力量的事情,就是我努力让自己保持在一个有主体感的状态。我知道自己的价值。我没有时间留给冒名顶替综合征。它对我来说不是什么建设性的东西。但我确实认为,正如我之前说的,宇宙是可以被你的意志所塑造的。有些事情我们可以改变。我不认为这些数字是不可改变的。所以我的建议,也是我想对整个行业、尤其是对女性说的,就是:好奇心和主体感是我在这个有时复杂的行业中通往快乐的路径。我认为我们可以做得更好。我们还有一段路要走。
Lenny: 如果你愿意的话,有没有一个故事可以分享,关于你经历过或面对过的某件事,让人们看到”哦,原来她面对的是这些,其他女性面对的是这些,而我之前完全不知道”?
“你够不够技术”的质疑
Claire Vo: 我一直在试图想清楚一件事,那就是我不断被人问到”你够不够技术化”。甚至不是够不够技术化——先别说”够不够”。是”你是不是技术出身”。这件事让我觉得很不可思议,因为作为我创业公司的技术联合创始人,我在头12个月里独自编写代码。我领导了那里的工程团队。那些代码至今仍运行在非常大型的生产环境中。我管理过多达数百人的工程团队,而且很多年了,我每个周六周日都在写代码发布产品。这就是我做的事情。然而,大多数人对我的第一个问题居然是:“哦,但你不是技术出身啊,你是个做产品的。”
我一直在认真剖析这种偏见从何而来。我很难想象一个外表不同、名字不同、性别不同的人,拥有和我一样的背景,会被问到同样的问题。这件事一直萦绕在我脑海里。再说一次,这不是冒名顶替综合征的问题。我不需要向任何人证明什么,但我确实很好奇这种偏见取向从何而来。如果连我这样有过切实成功经历的人都会遇到这种情况,我知道这一定也在发生在其他人身上,我希望我能从自己的位置上做些什么,让这种情况有所改变。
Lenny: 这和你刚才分享的建议正好呼应——保持好奇心去探究事情发生的原因,也就是你刚才说的。这样做主要是为了帮助你不至于生气和沮丧吗?让自己去理解,为什么这种情况一次又一次地发生?
Claire Vo: 一方面,我确实认为安坐在自己的力量中是非常有效的。保持好奇意味着我掌控着局面,而我也确实认为在大多数情况下我是掌控者。这是其中一个原因。另一方面,我觉得这件事很复杂。它是结构性的,也是文化性的。它是你看到的和看不到的——不仅仅是在职场上。也是你在媒体中看到的和看不到的。我在给我7岁和4岁的孩子读书的时候,读到的是”我的奶奶是软件工程师”这样的故事吗?
有一本书叫《妈妈测试》,其实我觉得那是一本很好的书,但它有一个隐含的预设——谁是技术出身的,谁不是;谁懂这些东西,谁不懂。所有这些都层层叠加,最终影响到个人在这个驱动着巨大经济增长的行业中的体验。归根结底,这是关于经济参与的问题。它可以关乎个人和理想,但它也是关于经济参与的。
我之所以对此保持好奇,是因为我确实认为这很复杂,我也确实认为你可以获得成功,但我认为我们的成功率还没有达到我希望看到的水平。而且我认为,由于没有让那些了不起的、有技术能力的女性创办公司、领导组织,我们错失了大量的创新和经济增长。所以我认为我们所有人都在因此受损,我希望看到更多改变。
Lenny: 那么有没有一个答案——我们怎样做才能更好?你有没有看到什么行之有效的方法,帮助我们突破这个困境?
Claire Vo: 我认为要让它变得习以为常。所以谢谢你邀请我来上这个播客。但我确实认为,让这种场景变得正常化是最简单的方法之一。如果你闭上眼睛想象一位软件工程师,我的梦想是你脑海中浮现出一群多元的人,而不是某一种非常特定的形象。我认为,你必须先看到,才能相信,所以你越多地为多元化的声音提供平台,让她们讲述自己在科技领域的历程,越多地展示来自不同背景的领导者——技术背景、文化背景,所有这些——这个行业就越能想象出不同类型的领导者可以胜任不同类型的角色。
所以我想看到更多这样的展示。我想投入更多,提升女性创始人的声量。我想赞扬那些优秀的女性 CTO,诸如此类。我认为,只要你看到了,你就能开始瓦解那些根深蒂固的观念——谁是、谁不是技术领导者,谁是、谁不是技术出身的人。
Lenny: 太棒了,我喜欢这个建议。这也是我在这个播客中一直在努力做的事情。
把创业公司卖给 Optimizely 的故事
Lenny: 我知道你有一个很有趣的故事——你在怀着孕的时候把创业公司卖给了 Optimizely。你能分享一下这个故事吗?我其实还没听过完整版。
Claire Vo: 好的,这个故事确实很有意思。这又是一个”宇宙可以被你的意志所塑造”、发挥你自身力量的故事。当时我在运营 Experiment Engine,这是一个面向企业的高规模实验项目平台。不一定是底层的 A/B 测试技术,而是围绕假设收集、洞察、聚合、运营、让一切保持正轨的所有外围工作。因为我非常清楚,正如你也知道的那样,高规模的实验项目可以对企业产生巨大的影响。
话虽如此,这在行业内更像是一个细分领域,而不是一个大的 TAM(Total Addressable Market,总可寻址市场)问题。所以我们从根本上触及了 TAM 的天花板。我们有一个出色的产品,面向一个很好的市场,但那个市场非常窄。运营公司三四年之后,我认识到了这一点,也清楚我们作为更大组织的一部分会发展得更好,而这些组织之一可能就是一家大型测试公司。我记得这件事一直在我的脑海里盘旋,同时我们也确实在努力向企业客户推销。
我听说 Microsoft——我们最大的客户之一——要和 Optimizely 一起举办一个实验日活动,而我知道 Optimizely 是一个天然的收购方。我知道我必须进入那个房间。于是我打电话给 Microsoft 说:“嘿,Microsoft 的朋友们,我这周要在西雅图拜访我们的另一个客户,一家非常大的西雅图公司,正好是实验日这一周。我们能不能顺便过来一下?“他们说:“哦,当然可以。“然后我又去找西雅图的其他大公司说:“嘿,另一家西雅图大公司,我要去 Microsoft 参加他们的实验日活动。你们要不要……”
我把这两个会议相互牵引到一起了。然后我走进那个实验日活动,一眼就看到了 Optimizely 的 CFO,我就坐在他正前方,开始展示产品,同时编写代码。我就想:“我要坐在他前面那一排,我要这么做,我要让他看到我的屏幕。“然后我上去做了一个演示。我不是说就是这件事促成了收购,但我可以说,在那之后很快,我们就成了非常紧密的合作伙伴,最终他们收购了我。
Claire Vo: 我把这个建议给创业者和 PM,因为——我非常看重的一个特质就是 scrappiness(拼劲)。我认为你必须能用有限的资源做出很多事,必须清楚自己要到哪里去,然后不管遇到什么困难,都要想办法到达。这就是一个非常有趣的例子:我设法进入了正确的房间,为自己想要的成功创造了条件,而且我有扎实的工作、出色的产品、实实在在的成果来赢得这一切。但你首先得让自己进入那个房间。
Lenny: 你当时怀孕几个月了?
Claire Vo: 我当时非常显怀了。一个随时可能”爆炸”的大肚子在谈判中真的是一个很好的策略。我记得我们在谈最终的条款清单时,我大概怀孕 34 周左右,他们说:“你能飞来旧金山吗?“我当时在奥斯汀。我说:“说真的,你们可以今天就把我飞过去,明天就飞回来,之后我就不能上飞机了。“事情就是这样。非常有意思。整个经历很有趣,多么令人愉快的收购。我可以讲一整天这件事有多棒。非常好的经历。
Lenny: 我很喜欢,这又是你反复提到的那句话的另一个例子——让世界按照你的意志来……我不确定是不是这么说的。
Claire Vo: 让宇宙按照你的意志弯曲。
Lenny: 宇宙?更大了。我很喜欢。感觉这里有一个反复出现的主题,就是在你的职业和人生方向上主动掌控、发挥能动性。这个例子完美地诠释了如何想尽办法进入一个对大多数人来说很难进入的房间。
CPTO 角色的兴起
Lenny: 你提到了 CPTO 这个角色,我之前了解不多。我知道这是你关注的一个大话题,而且我感觉产品和技术合并可能正在成为一种趋势。你能谈谈这个角色,以及你认为它为什么正在兴起吗?
Claire Vo: 好的,很多人问我这个问题,因为这个角色不算特别罕见,但也不太常见,而且我认为它可能会越来越多。我用 CPTO 来简称产品和工程、设计在职能上的统一管理。这非常不同。我两个角色都做过,这和纯粹的产品角色或 VP of Product 角色非常不一样。
首先,我之前谈到过我是如何进入这个角色的。我确实认为你必须具备技术背景才能胜任这样的角色。很多人看我的职业履历,可能会以为我靠的是广泛的管理领导力,加上一位优秀的 SVP 来维持工程团队的运转。但实际上不是这样的,我在工程方面花了相当多的时间,因为作为对产品商业结果负责的人,推动价值最好的方式之一就是拥有一支高性能的工程团队,构建一个可扩展的平台。
所以我花了很多时间确保我们做出正确的架构决策,基础设施满足团队需求,工程团队以推动速度的方式运作。我认为如果你不了解软件在技术层面是如何构建的,你就无法胜任这份工作。我是那种在做产品评审时,PRD 和 GitHub 都打开着、两边对照着看的人,因为我认为两边都很重要。
Claire Vo: 我认为这个角色的另一个不同之处在于它非常偏运营层面,你必须真正了解运营和组织设计。工程团队天然就比产品组织大得多。想想经典的人员比例就知道,工程部门的人比产品部门多得多。工程方面的人才挑战也截然不同——大量招聘、文化建设方面的挑战都不一样。你必须认真思考组织设计。所以在 CPTO 角色中,你需要在组织设计和运营方面有一种不同层次的思维方式。
你要参与 on-call 轮值。凌晨一点服务出了故障,系统宕机了,你就会被呼叫。这不是产品领导者通常要面对的。所以你必须清楚自己要进入的是什么局面,并且你必须具备技术背景。还有一点我不得不说——这个角色中,P 和 T 获得了大量关注,产品和工程占据了大量讨论空间。但设计、数据这些同样非常重要、非常有价值的职能组织也不应被忽视。这才是这个角色的全貌,以及你如何才能做好它、它是否适合你的能力。
关于为什么要有这样的角色,我认为有两个原因。第一个是显而易见的战略原因——它们本质上是一回事。它们都在建造”产品”(大写的 Product),它们都是建造者,都是同类人。把这些人放在同一个屋檐下,可以让你从整体上去优化,而不是优化某个单一职能。如果你能找到一位有效的领导者来统领全局,我认为可以创造很大的价值。坦率地说,第二个原因是,它在很多方面为 CEO 提供了巨大的杠杆。归根结底,R&D 是公司做出的一个非常昂贵且复杂的投资,在高管层有一个人专门负责 R&D 投资是相当重要的,尤其是当你在这一块投入很大的时候。
所以我认为就是这两点。第一,这是一个团队。不应该争论什么对产品最好、什么对工程最好、什么对设计最好,而应该关注什么对整个组织最好。我们的客户需要什么,我们的业务需要什么。第二,就是对这个重大投资在商业目标上的问责——由一个人来负责看护这笔投资。
Lenny: 听起来很棒,所有这些职能只需要对接一个人。
Claire Vo: 既是也不是。我想说的是,我两种都做过。我做过 CPO 与 SVP of Engineering 并肩工作,也做过统一管理两者。创始人可以承担这个角色。再次强调,这就是为什么我说你必须围绕人才来优化你的组织。如果你的 CEO 有这个能力、带宽等等,他们可以做这件事。你可以让组织保持分离,由他们来统领。如果他们的专业领域不同,如果他们从未做过这件事,如果在运营上就是行不通,如果他们有更广泛的关注领域,那就把它交给一个人统一管理。我认为不存在完美的组织架构。这只是一种在我们这种需要像我这样一个人的组织形态中运行良好的方式。
围绕人才设计组织
Lenny: 同样关于围绕人来设计组织,我猜同时具备深厚工程背景、又非常擅长产品、还能做设计的人应该不多。要在每个职能上深入到什么程度才能在这个角色上取得成功?因为感觉这种人真的很稀缺。
Claire Vo: 在某种程度上,创办一家公司,你就不得不全部做一遍。我的两位老板都跟我说过——他们都说过:“我不是创始人,但我是 CEO。“我就说:“没问题。我是运营者,但我会带着创始人的心态来做事。”
我认为作为创始人,尤其在早期阶段,这一切你都要做。你会看到所有这些职能如何汇聚在一个人身上——说实话,有时候确实就是一个人,有时候那个人就是你自己。所以我确实认为,在非常小的初创公司工作能让你有机会体验各种职能技能,并发展广泛的能力,为你在未来承担这类角色奠定基础。我认为早期初创公司的经历,是获得这种全局视野的捷径之一。
Claire Vo: 另一件事是,我前面也说过,很多人会把自己框在职能孤岛里——“我是 PM,所以我的工作是这个,不是那个。我只能做这个,如果需要设计,我就被卡住了,我就等着。“而我做的事情就是给大家一个许可,让他们可以放手去做……我们团队内部有一条领导力原则:“没有车道。“我们的车道是虚线的,不是实线——你可以跨过去,随手画个设计稿,工程师也可以写需求文档。这些都是正常的、自然的,而且我认为非常健康。正是这种思维方式,才能培养出能够胜任 CPTO 这类角色的领导者。
Lenny: 很棒。这让我想到 GitLab。我之前采访过他们的产品负责人,也就是 CPO,他们有一个核心价值观叫”短脚趾”。别担心踩到别人的脚趾。脚趾要短。别担心别人进入你的领域,都没关系。
Claire Vo: 没错。
ChatPRD 的诞生
Lenny: 好。你提到了 AI,正好完美衔接到我接下来想聊的话题。你做了一个工具叫 ChatPRD。我猜它是目前最流行的、专门面向 PM 的 AI 工具,除了某些大公司的产品之外。首先,ChatPRD 到底是什么?你为什么做了这个工具?
Claire Vo: ChatPRD 的由来,同样跟设定节奏有关。我可以告诉你 ChatPRD 真正的起源——在之前的一家公司,我们需要做一个相当技术化的产品。我们资源紧张、条件有限,平台 PM 们正在做一件很重要的事情,但这个也很关键,必须完成。而我们又没有一个平台技术 PM 来写需求文档。这个需求相当复杂。
于是我举手说:“我来亲自做 IC。我觉得我知道需要什么。“从会议开始到会议结束这段时间,我已经用 ChatGPT 和一个提示词,为这个非常技术化的产品写出了一份相当可用的 PRD 需求文档。然后我把这个提示词和那条长期使用的 ChatGPT 对话线程保留下来,精心打磨出了”Claire 版本”的产品领导者或产品人——它能够非常稳定地产出产品需求文档、给出高质量反馈、制定计划、建立追踪机制和目标。
所以虽然我说”她可能只是一个提示词,但她是一个精心打磨的提示词”——这是花了好几个月时间精心调校出来的。当 GPT Store 上线的时候,我对我团队说:“你们都知道我一直用 ChatGPT 写 PRD。“我做了一个 GPT,直接给了团队。我说:“给你们,想用就用。“他们很喜欢,其他团队的人也开始打听,最终我撞上了 GPT Store 目前的变现和访问权限壁垒。与此同时,我也重新开始享受写代码的乐趣,所以我想,这很简单——我们就搭一个独立应用,套一层壳——说到底就是个 wrapper,一开始就是 wrapper——把这些能力封装一下,发布出去,定一个相当合理的价格,看看会发生什么。
现在,ChatPRD 有数千名用户。每个月用户们都在创建几十份需求文档和 PRD。使用场景五花八门——有人是工程师,团队里 PM 太少,经常被卡住,于是自己来写需求;有人是独立创始人,需要把自己的想法结构化,交给团队;有人是 PM,这个工具确实帮他们省了好几个小时的基础工作,让他们可以把时间花在细节打磨上。后来我又在独立应用上增加了更多功能和能力。它是我的个人产品副驾驶,我把它开放给了全世界。
Lenny: 好,首先,大家在哪里可以看到这个工具?是 chatprd.com 吗?
Claire Vo: .ai。拜托。
Lenny: .ai,当然。
Claire Vo: 对,chatprd.ai。
Lenny: 我看到新闻说,.ai 所属的那个国家现在赚翻了。
Claire Vo: 太赚钱了。
Lenny: 所有这些域名。
那关于技术栈,先确认一下——它最初是一个 ChatGPT 提示词、自定义提示词,然后你迭代了一下,变成了一个 GPT、自定义 GPT,现在是你自己的独立应用,背后用的是 OpenAI 的 API——
Claire Vo: 是的,用的是 Assistants API。独立应用和 GPT 版本的区别在于,每个使用独立应用的人都会得到一个定制化的助手。它会学习你的具体内容、你的角色、你的公司。如果你用的是 GPT 版本,没有这种定制化。用独立应用才有。然后我又叠加了几项不同的能力——除了聊天形式之外,它还会帮你直接创建文档,在文档本身上面进行迭代,未来我还在开发一些额外的工具和集成。
Lenny: 好,最常见的使用场景是什么?再说一下,让大家有个概念——“哦,我可以用它来做这些事情。”
Claire Vo: 大约 60% 的用户是输入一个想法,然后得到一份 PRD 输出。就是拿到完整的需求规格——目标和用户目标是什么,用户故事有哪些,什么在范围之外,UX 流程 walkthrough。我们的标准模板里有一个我称之为”叙事”的部分,就是你怎么 pitch 这个产品。我觉得这是 PM 经常遗漏的一点——怎么定位和推销产品,然后是排期和里程碑、度量和目标,诸如此类。
当然,这是开箱即用的模板。如前所说,你可以在 ChatPRD 里自定义 PRD 模板,如果你的公司做法不同,或者你有不同的需求。大约 60% 的人用它做这个。30% 的人,我会说,是输入一份需求文档、PRD、策略文档或路线图,然后改进它。剩下的用来做头脑风暴、PM 内部工作——比如”怎么为某某会议设计一个好的议程”这类事情。
Lenny: 太棒了。好,我最近写了一篇文章,分享了一堆人们工作中如何使用各种 GPT 的例子,我觉得这激发了很多人的尝试兴趣。如果你能给一个想搭建 GPT 或者用 API 做自己应用的人一条建议,你会说什么?
Claire Vo: 提示词很重要。我们经历了这样一轮周期——提示词工程是回事、不是回事、微调才是关键——但提示词确实很重要。作为一个好 PM,我会做竞品分析。我用同样的输入去看不同的 GPT 或 ChatGPT——看 GPT Store 版本,看其他做这件事的 PM 工具,再看我的。我觉得我的确实更好。
现在我正进入一个阶段,可能会在后台做一些模型实验和调优,所以底层可能不一定是 OpenAI,可能是其他的东西,但这很关键。指令很重要,上下文很重要,它们直接影响输出质量——这是我想对构建这类产品的人说的。另一件事是,目前变现没有现成的解决方案。但愿好运,把它做出来,边走边看。如果我时间更多,也许我会基于我为 ChatGPT 做的东西搭建一个平台,让其他人也能变现他们的 GPT、叠加额外能力。但目前对大家来说这不是开箱即用的。我花了大量的工作才把它从那个阶段做到现在的程度。
Lenny: 你靠这个赚到真金白银了吗?这个想法会不会有一天成为你长期全职做的事情?
Claire Vo: 我最初的目标——我也在 X 上公开说过——就是每周能买一杯好酒。这就是我的目标。现在我都可以买整箱酒了。这对我来说非常令人兴奋。它正在赚取我认为算是真正意义上的钱。它是一个风险投资级别的东西吗?不是。它需要是吗?不需要。我有一个关于孩子教育费用的目标,我希望 ChatPRD 能覆盖一部分。我对 ChatPRD 有一个雄心勃勃但不至于离谱的目标。
另一个目标——先把变现放一边——这是我的快乐空间,我的天才区快乐空间。我对 ChatPRD 的目标是它对我来说必须百分之百有趣。这是我的爱好,所以我不做任何让它变得不好玩的事情。它对我来说是一个纯粹的幸福感空间。我可以在周末写代码,晚上做客户支持,构建我自己会用的东西。我可以学习新技术。我想让它保持在这个状态,因为它给我带来了很多快乐。钱先放一边,我就想让它好玩。
Lenny: 太喜欢了。好的,有些听众——尤其是 PM——可能会想,“Claire,你到底在搞什么?你是不是一两年后就要取代产品经理了?” 这联系到我一直在思考、也反复出现的一个话题——就是随着时间推移,PM 的哪些技能和工作会被 AI 大幅增强,哪些会被 AI 完全取代——如果有的话——这样大家就能了解应该投资哪些技能,哪些可能没那么重要了。
笼统来说,你有没有一个大致的判断——哪些技能会持续极其重要,AI 不会把这些技能和工作从你手上拿走?相对地,哪些会变得没那么重要,AI 会来做这些?
Claire Vo: 在最高层面上,我倾向于短期悲观——不过我会把它表述为短期悲观、长期极度乐观。我坚信技术总体上让社会变得更加富裕、更有财富、更幸福、更健康。我坚信技术的力量,对其对人类的影响持乐观态度。当然有很多事情不尽如人意,但我真心相信创新和技术——我对孩子的未来感到兴奋,我不害怕。
话虽如此,我确实满怀期待地认为这将极其迅速地改变公司内部的运作方式。构建 ChatPRD 的部分原因就是,作为技术领导者,我给自己设定的标准是——我需要在理解这项技术能颠覆什么方面走在最前沿,使用这些工具打造更好的团队,并根据我们周围的技术实际调整我的组织的规模和形态。它明年会消灭 PM 吗?大概不会。PM 与其他团队的比例会随时间变化吗?会的。所需的技能会转变吗?会的。这种转变会比我们所有人预期的都快得多吗?很可能。我认为大量变化即将到来,我想为此做好准备。
那么,我认为它取代什么、不取代什么?我反思过这个问题——小写的”沟通”(communication,lowercase C),我觉得这是会被取代的领域之一。我称之为小写的 C。它是为了让其他人完成工作而进行的功能性信息传递。我认为这些语言模型和工具非常擅长综合信息、组织沟通内容,并且可以协调沟通对象,以多种内容形态输出。
所以我确实认为 PM 作为跨职能关系的维护者和信息传递者,这个角色可能会发生重大变化。但大写的”沟通”(Communication,capital C)——你是否有影响力?是否有说服力?是否果敢?能否让这一群人跟随你走上一条路?——我认为这些会难取代得多。所以我一直在思考沟通的边界在哪里会变、哪里不会变。
Lenny: 这很有意思。我在 Twitter 上做了个小调查,问大家在沟通、执行、战略和产品感觉之间,哪些技能最可能被 AI 基本接管。沟通排第一,远远领先。但我有一个逆向观点。战略得票最少。我觉得——战略工作本质上是”这是我们关于世界、竞争对手、市场和自身优势所知道的一切,这是一个在市场中获胜的计划”——我觉得这正是 AI 极其擅长的事情。
Claire Vo: 我同意你。我完全同意。我觉得——再说回综合能力、好的决策和沟通——如果你能综合、提炼成一个计划,并把这个计划传达出去,我发现这些工具做得非常出色。用 ChatPRD 试一下就知道了。
不过我觉得,人的方面——果敢、以一种基于先验训练的事物无法做到的方式预见未来——这些我仍然认为难以替代。还有个人魅力、吸引所有人一起把事情做成,这些都很难复制。这正是我喜欢用 ChatPRD 的原因。我不需要想出最天才的方式来为某个场景做 Snowflake 的数据导出——那是一个已有解决方案的领域,我们应该直接搭起来,根据我们的情况定制,然后发布。这不是我作为人类的魔力能产生影响的地方。
但我认为很多 PM 并不这样看。我认为将会发生一次真正的身份认同转变——PM 目前认为自己的价值来自他们那些化为现实的创意,以及他们个人如何将这些创意落地。而我认为我们将转向:你做的东西是对的吗?做得快吗?交付了吗?不管工具链是什么。
Lenny: 对。我觉得你说的关于获得认可、让所有人对齐的那一点——我不知道 AI 机器人怎么做到这一点,除非每个人都有自己的小机器人,然后它们互相交流。
Claire Vo: 它们都彼此相处融洽。
Lenny: 成了。我把这个再往高处说一点。
Claire Vo: 对。
Lenny: 我确实列了一个清单。我觉得这可能成为整期播客的全部内容,但我做了一份简要清单,“以下是 PM 的工作”。挺有意思的。我不知道这算不算一个问题,但想想挺有趣的——这些工作中哪些未来某个 ChatPRD 可能会做?这份工作是什么感觉?你在写 PRD,你在设定目标,你在提出路线图,你在让团队围绕路线图对齐,你在制定战略,你在制定愿景,你在沟通时间线,你在发现阻碍并帮人消除阻碍,你在从高层获得认可,你在为团队争取预算资源,你在对产品和设计给出反馈。这些只是日常工作的一部分。我非常好奇这些里面哪些 AI 真的能直接做、不用再操心。
Claire Vo: 我觉得其中很多 AI 都能做。所以问题是,其中哪些你愿意把钥匙交给 AI 工具?哪些作为个人或团队智慧借助的工具会更有价值,帮你做得更好、更快、影响力更大?
AI 工具与人的能力放大
Claire Vo: 我再说一遍,我是相信技术的。我觉得当前这个时刻有意思的地方在于,每周我都会看到一些三年前我绝对想不到会成真的东西。每周都有新东西出现,不断刷新我对”可能”的认知。我认为所有这些工作,AI 在功能上都能做到 80% 的水平。问题在于,做到 80% 够不够好?还是说,我们可以找到某类具备特定技能的人,配上专门打造的工具链,让效果提升 3 倍、4 倍、10 倍?我觉得这才是更有意思的问题。
Lenny: 说到每天都在发生令人惊叹的事,SpaceX 发射了星舰,居然几乎没人提起。我们有了能带我们去火星的飞船,结果大家的态度是”嗯,没什么好聊的”。
Claire Vo: 我们把孩子们叫起来,在 YouTube 上看直播。
Lenny: 太棒了。
Claire Vo: 简直是魔法。我们生活在这个魔法般的时代。我觉得太迷人了。不过我同意,我们正在被创新惯坏了。
PM 与工程师的比例是否会改变
Lenny: 你之前提到 PM 和工程师之间可能有一个比例会发生变化。我很好奇是哪个比例,因为工程师的效率也在提升,所以如果工程师变得更高效、PM 也变得更高效,这个比例是否还能保持一致,这确实很有意思。
Claire Vo: 我在想,会不会整个角色被淘汰和替代,到时候连比例这个思考框架都不再适用了。以前说的比例是,一个 PM 配七到十个工程师,或者一个工程经理配多少人——是那种比例。
我觉得还有一个很有意思的转变:作为管理者、作为领导者,你如何在工具和人员之间分配预算,这个也会发生变化。我看到有人说,他们团队每申请一个新岗位,都必须先花一周时间尝试把这个岗位的工作自动化,然后才允许发布职位描述(JD)。就是这种非常有趣的做法……很多人觉得这很可怕,认为会减少工作岗位。确实如此,但我也认为可能会出现一些新的、非常有趣的工作岗位。
所以我不知道最终会怎样。我真的不知道。我确定的是,事情一定会变。而作为领导者,也作为关心大家长期职业发展的人,我宁愿超前思考,也不愿闭眼无视我们这个行业可能发生的剧烈变化。我在思考这些问题,在做各种实验,我希望在 LaunchDarkly 我们的团队能走在前面引领,而不是被动应对。
如何跟上 AI 浪潮
Lenny: 我想很多听众现在心里都在想,“好,我得跟上这波浪潮,我要走在前面,我想跟随 Claire 的做法。“你的建议就是创建 GPT、玩 ChatGPT 吗?还有没有其他建议?
Claire Vo: 我还认为 PM 需要开始培养产品技能,尤其是围绕这些非确定性产品的技能。这也是一直以来大家关注的焦点。我之所以做 ChatPRD,部分原因不仅是为了验证这些工具将如何改变产品职能,更因为它本身就是一种由新技术构建的新型产品,而且发展速度极快。学会如何构建这类产品——我回想移动互联网兴起的时候,那些迅速拥抱移动端的 PM,在选择优质创业公司的工作时简直是挑花了眼。
我认为我们现在正处于同样的时刻。如果你能沉下心来,专注钻研、掌握一种新技术,你实际上可以进入非常有趣的位置。我做 ChatPRD 的这两个动机就是这样:一是理解它如何影响我所领导的职能,二是理解如何用这些底层技术构建出色的产品——这些技术与我过去所使用的技术截然不同。
Lenny: 那对于不太偏工程背景的人,你建议团队里的人怎么探索这些东西?
Claire Vo: 我确实认为去研究市面上的产品非常有意思。我很推崇从外部做产品拆解(teardown)——这个产品好在哪?差在哪?如果是我,这份 PRD 会怎么写?我会衡量什么指标?我会怎么思考异常状态?我会怎么判断这是一款优秀的产品、还不错的产品、还是一般的产品?我觉得对一款外部产品做这种品鉴式分析,是一个非常容易上手的方式来检验自己在这方面的技能,并找出差距。
这是一件事。第二,我觉得现在有很多无代码、低代码的东西可以玩。即使你不能亲手敲代码,你也可以把各种东西拼接起来,试试无代码工具。这是另一种方式。还有就是找到好玩的领域。Midjourney 多好玩啊,一些偏创意的工具多有趣啊。所以找到一个让你觉得有意思的方向,用它来创作,以此作为学习的途径。不一定非要出于商业目的,不一定要和工作相关。就是找一个你个人感兴趣的领域,玩玩看市面上有什么。
ChatPRD 带来的效率提升
Lenny: 太好了。关于 ChatPRD 最后一个问题。GitHub Copilot 有各种数据,说让工程师效率提升了 50% 什么的。你对 ChatPRD 目前的效率提升有什么感觉吗?
Claire Vo: 我收到了一些使用过 ChatPRD 的 PM 的定性反馈。有人说,“这帮我省了几十个小时的文档撰写时间。“还有人说,“我是一个快速成长的团队里唯一的 PM,我觉得我们现在不需要再招一个 PM 了。“这两方面都有——从个人角度看是节省了时间,从团队角度看是提升了杠杆率:它帮助单个 PM 在面对一个较大的工程或建造团队时获得更高的杠杆,同时帮助他们更有效地分配时间。
Lenny: 很多人不想听到”不需要再招 PM”这种话。现在有很多人在找工作。
Claire Vo: 确实,但我们不能……我觉得过去几年我们已经看到了,低效地招人、在公司里累积不可持续的成本,不会给任何人带来成功。如果这是我教给任何人的一个教训,那就是——组织的可持续性是领导者的责任。是的,我很愿意给每个人一个职位。但确实没有那么多职位存在。我能为团队里的人做的最好的事,就是在这一点上非常负责任、非常深思熟虑,因为这能帮助我推动他们的成长,帮助他们维持长期的职业发展。
这确实非常复杂。但另一方面,这是一个很小的创业公司。他们负担不起再招一个 PM,而通过不扩张团队,他们延长了资金跑道,可以去做一些变革性的事情。所以,是的,人们希望扩大团队、保住这些岗位,但创业公司负担不起,他们依然有很棒的事情要做。
失败角 vs 异见角
Lenny: 回答得很好。我们的对话快要结束了,我有两个固定环节,“失败角”(Failure Corner)和”异见角”(Contrarian Corner),你可以选一个。你想分享一个你职业生涯中失败的经历和从中得到的教训吗?还是分享一个你相信但大多数人不太相信的观点?哪个角更有意思?
Claire Vo: 我选异见角。
Lenny: 那就去那个角吧。
Claire Vo: 好。
异见角:为销售驱动正名
Lenny: 这些角需要加点音效,欢迎分享。
Claire Vo: 我分享这个观点,是因为你刚刚又发布了和 Marty 一起录的那期播客。我毫不掩饰自己是销售驱动产品的拥护者——我认为倾听市场、在产品中保持商业导向是完全合理的,这种方式可能会让某些产品组织中的人感到不太舒服。我之所以这么认为,是因为我认为基于销售驱动模式已经诞生了许多了不起的企业。我不认同”销售驱动就意味着你不关心产品的工艺或用户体验”这种说法。我认为两者可以兼得。
我很喜欢销售。我说过,如果我不做现在的岗位,就给我定个业绩指标,让我去做西部企业客户销售。我热爱销售,但我认为产品团队……整个行业中我们对”销售驱动”的这种对立态度,我不确定在每个组织中都是健康的。我听了那期播客,你们好像在聊,你说”SAP 就是这样的。谁想成为 SAP?“天哪。外面有很多公司巴不得成为 SAP 呢——当然可以有更好的产品、更好的体验,或许还能获得行业更多的喜爱。但那是一家多么强大的公司。我认为我们作为 PM 太经常对这种巨头公司嗤之以鼻了,因为我们希望公司是产品驱动的,而不是销售驱动的。
Lenny: 精彩。我不想在这个话题上展开太多,因为我不想代表 Marty 的立场发言,但那期节目引发了大量讨论,我很高兴它能引出更多关于产品运作方式的观点分享。
我想确认一下你的核心观点:销售驱动的公司可以很棒,它们能打造出色的业务,在这样的公司做 PM 也可以很好。
Claire Vo: 对,而且它们也能打造出优秀的产品。
帮助他人求职
Lenny: 好。Claire,在我们进入激动人心的快问快答环节之前,还有什么想和听众分享的吗?
Claire Vo: 我想说的是,因为我们聊了很多关于 AI 替代 PM 的话题——我喜欢销售,也喜欢帮人找工作。如果我能帮人们找到合适的公司,这是让我很有干劲的事情之一。我想把这一点说出来。这件事给我带来很多快乐。我经常收到人们的消息,“能帮我进入这家公司吗?能帮我争取那个机会吗?“如果有一种可行的方式,我能帮你对接到一个你觉得非常适合的公司或岗位,那对我来说很有趣,我完全乐意帮忙。
Lenny: 大家该怎么联系你寻求帮助呢?
Claire Vo: 我当然在 LinkedIn 上。我也在 X 上,账号是 ClaireVo,一个词。如果你想深挖我的存档,我还有一个非常精彩的 TikTok,账号是 ChiefProductOfficer,也是一个词。
Lenny: 太棒了。我们会在节目备注里附上所有这些链接。在播客结尾我们还会再回顾这些信息,因为我反正都会问到。在此之前,欢迎来到我们激动人心的快问快答环节。准备好了吗?
Claire Vo: 我准备好了。
快问快答
Lenny: 好。第一个问题:你向别人推荐最多的两三本书是什么?
Claire Vo: 我很喜欢《High Growth Handbook》,还喜欢《Scaling People》。推荐这两本书的原因是,它们对日常领导力和团队扩张中 80%、90% 的问题都有扎实的、可直接操作的答案。它们就是很好的参考书,展示了我认为优秀的创业公司领导力应该是什么样子,而且帮你解决了那些不需要重新发明轮子的问题。虚构类方面,我最近在推荐的是《Circe》,它从 Circe 的视角重新讲述了她的故事。非常值得一读,我推荐给过的每个人都非常喜欢。
Lenny: 是《权力的游戏》里的吗?
Claire Vo: 不是,是《奥德赛》里的 Circe。奥德修斯遇到的那位。她把男人变成猪。
Lenny: 看来是我没文化了。
Claire Vo: 这本书很棒。我的孩子们非常喜欢希腊神话,所以这也是我跟他们在这方面的一种交流方式。
Lenny: 太好了。前两本书都是 Straight Press 出版的。向 Straight Press 致敬。
Claire Vo: 对,Straight Press。
Lenny: 我背后书架上有这两本书,我的笔记本电脑其实就搁在《Scaling People》上面。
下一个问题:你最近最喜欢的电影或剧集是什么?
Claire Vo: 我有孩子,所以没机会去看电影。看电影简直是一场冒险,基本等于度假。我看了《Poor Things》,如果你喜欢大写的”奇怪”加大写的”艺术”,强烈推荐《Poor Things》。剧集方面,我向人推荐的是《Mythic Quest》。大家总引用《Silicon Valley》,但《Mythic Quest》更贴近我的一些经历——我曾经在游戏行业待过——它更好地呈现了我在科技组织中的一些体验。它有一位技术背景的女性主角,我觉得很有趣。我喜欢《Mythic Quest》。
Lenny: 你有没有最喜欢的面试问题,喜欢问候选人的?
Claire Vo: 我喜欢问候选人如何改进我们的商业模式。我觉得太多 PM 来面试时对产品和目标市场有自己的观点,但并不真正理解我们赚钱的底层机制、我们的单位经济模型是什么,以及如何改进。而那些确实对商业模式有强有力观点的候选人,在我们组织中通常都相当成功。
Lenny: 那什么样的回答会让你觉得”哇,这个候选人很棒”?
Claire Vo: 是沿着价值链思考:我们如何识别市场中的潜在客户?我们的定价模式是什么样的?他们能否对我们的底层单位经济或成本做出假设?然后在整个漏斗中,杠杆点在哪里?关键在于——他们是否有一套思考商业模式的思维框架?他们有没有认真想过我们如何赚钱,无论是收入还是利润率方面?然后他们能否识别出可以改进的地方?
Lenny: 很棒。核心就是真正理解业务本身。
你有最近发现的、特别喜欢的产品吗?
Claire Vo: 好,我说一个让你笑的——你之前收到了好多车对吧?
Lenny: 对,我收到的都是特别贵的车。
Claire Vo: 你收到了豪车。我的不新——我爱我的迷你面包车。我是迷你面包车的忠实粉丝。正如我朋友说的,“就像开着你的客厅到处跑。“当你有两个孩子的时候,你猜我想做什么?我就想开着我的客厅到处跑,Bluey 也一起。所以不是 Rivian,不是 Mercedes-Benz,我真的很喜欢我的 Pacifica。
Lenny: Pacifica?我正想问是什么车。
Claire Vo: 但说到我真正喜欢的汽车产品,我喜欢 Waymo。我们在旧金山,有这些自动驾驶车辆。从上到下,它就是一个令人愉悦的产品体验——从 App 到车到达的那一刻,声音设计很棒,车辆舒适,车内显示屏也很好。现在每次有游客来、有朋友来旧金山拜访,我都让他们坐一趟机器人汽车的往返。甚至我有过一次和 Waymo 团队的客服体验——我朋友落了一部 iPhone——客服体验也很棒,24 小时服务。从上到下,出色的产品设计,出色的服务设计。
Waymo 与未来出行
Lenny: 我最近终于从候补名单里排进了 Waymo,特别期待能亲自试试。其实很早以前我作为媒体受邀坐过一次 Waymo,当时有公司的人陪同,就是体验一下。之后我就再也没拿到过使用权限。现在终于可以试试了。
Claire Vo: 好好享受。真的很棒。那是我的首选出行方式。
Lenny: 这就是未来。我们聊了很多世界正在改变的方式,这又是一个很好的例子。
人生信条
Lenny: 还有两个问题。你有没有一个特别喜欢的人生信条,经常回来翻看的,会分享给朋友或家人,在工作或生活中觉得有用的?
Claire Vo: 快比对赢。每次当我纠结是花一千年反复琢磨试图找到完美方案,还是果断做个决定、朝着我有信念的方向开始执行时,我一贯看到也相信的是,归根结底,快会赢。快比对赢。
TikTok 创作心得
Lenny: 最后一个问题。你之前提到了 TikTok,你在上面发了不少很棒的内容。从你的经验来看,有没有什么建议或技巧可以分享给想在 TikTok 上取得成功的人?
Claire Vo: 最近因为新工作加上冬天孩子老生病,我有点冷落了我的 TikTok。我的建议是——我觉得你也知道——持续输出推动受众增长。当我每天在 TikTok 上发帖的时候,粉丝和互动都会增长,算法也会眷顾你。不发了,就没了。我觉得几乎所有事情上,坚持都赢。
另外一条我觉得对任何规模的所谓”创作者”、任何野心水平都很有用的建议是:把内容创作当成记录,而不是创意生产。我就是喜欢聊我在工作中想的东西——一次有趣的会议,一次有趣的互动,记录一下为什么我觉得有趣,或者什么地方可以做得更好。这对我来说就成了一个很自然的内容流。这个策略对我非常有效,也让我能在空闲时间产出内容。
Lenny: 太棒了。考虑到最近 TikTok 的各种新闻,也许该开始探索一下 Instagram 了。
Claire Vo: 我知道。是的。
结语
Lenny: Claire,在这次播客开始之前,我问过你这次的目标是什么,你说希望能帮到大家。我觉得我们在方方面面都百分之百做到了。再次非常感谢你来。
最后两个问题。我们之前已经聊过,但帮大家回顾一下——大家想联系你的话在网上哪里能找到你?听众怎样才能帮到你?
Claire Vo: LinkedIn、X,我是 ClaireVo,一个词。然后 TikTok 上——帮我重新活跃起来吧,给我个关注,也许我会开始再发一些精彩内容。账号是 @ChiefProductOfficer。
Lenny: 好的。那大家怎样能帮到你呢?
Claire Vo: 互相帮助。这是我最希望看到的。我真的能看到,现在科技行业正经历一段艰难时期,很多人在找工作。第一,互相帮助。另外,如果我能对你们的听众提一个请求的话——如果你有一份工作,你的工作就是对着一个互联网输入框打字,凭空创造出产品来,请真正意识到这份工作所代表的特权和快乐,尽量享受其中。因为很多人想坐在你现在坐的位置上。好好享受。珍惜你拥有的。享受这一切。善待彼此。
Lenny: 非常好、非常重要的建议作为结束语。Claire,非常感谢你来。
Claire Vo: 谢谢你。
Lenny: 大家再见。
感谢大家的收听。如果你觉得这期节目有价值,可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你喜欢的播客 App 上订阅。也请考虑给我们评分或留下评论,这真的能帮助更多听众发现这个播客。你可以在 lennyspodcast.com 找到所有往期节目或了解更多关于本节目的信息。下期再见。
术语表
| 原文 | 中文 |
|---|---|
| anti-pattern | 反模式(源自软件工程,指常见的不良实践模式) |
| builder time | 建造者时间 |
| career ladder | 职业阶梯 |
| CFO | 保留原文(Chief Financial Officer,首席财务官) |
| ChatPRD | 保留原文(AI 驱动的产品需求文档工具) |
| Claire Vo | 保留原文(科技高管,曾任职于 LaunchDarkly、Color、Optimizely,ChatPRD 创始人) |
| clock speed | 时钟频率(比喻组织的运营节奏频率,源自计算机术语) |
| Color | 保留原文(健康科技公司) |
| Contrarian Corner | 异见角 |
| CPO | 保留原文(Chief Product Officer,首席产品官) |
| CPTO | 保留原文(Chief Product and Technology Officer,首席产品与技术官) |
| CTO | 保留原文(Chief Technology Officer,首席技术官) |
| Dan | 保留原文(LaunchDarkly CEO) |
| Experiment Engine | 保留原文(Claire Vo 创办的实验管理平台) |
| Failure Corner | 失败角 |
| GM | 保留原文(General Manager,总经理) |
| GPT Store | 保留原文(OpenAI 的 GPT 应用商店) |
| IC | IC(Individual Contributor,个人贡献者,这里指亲自下场执行具体工作) |
| LaunchDarkly | 保留原文(功能发布管理平台) |
| Lenny | 保留原文(Lenny Rachitsky,播客 Lenny’s Podcast 主持人) |
| 保留原文 | |
| narrative | 叙事(PRD 中用于描述产品定位和推销方式的部分) |
| non-deterministic | 非确定性的 |
| on-call / pager duty | on-call 轮值(随叫随到的值班制度) |
| Optimizely | 保留原文(A/B 测试与体验优化平台) |
| PM | 保留原文(Product Manager,产品经理) |
| R&D | 保留原文(Research and Development,研发) |
| runway | 资金跑道(创业公司在耗尽资金前可运营的时间) |
| scrappiness | 拼劲(用有限资源做出非凡成果的能力) |
| SLA | 服务等级协议(Service Level Agreement) |
| SVP | 保留原文(Senior Vice President,高级副总裁) |
| TAM | 总可寻址市场(Total Addressable Market) |
| tear-down / product tear-down | 产品拆解 |
| VP | 保留原文(Vice President,副总裁) |
| wrapper | 保留原文(指在现有模型 API 外层封装一层应用界面的软件架构) |
| zone of genius | 天才区 |
此文档由 AI 分片翻译(translate_long_document)