产品管理的幸福与痛苦 | Noam Lovinsky(Grammarly、FB、Thumbtack、YT)
The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, FB, Thumbtack, YT)
Introducing the Guest
Lenny: You’ve worked at so many great companies. At YouTube, when you joined, my understanding is YouTube was losing a lot of money.
Noam Lovinsky: There were many times where Google leadership reconsidered the acquisition and, “Should we sell YouTube?” if you can believe it or not.
Why I Stay Offline
Lenny: At Thumbtack, it looks like you went from 1 to -1 and then back to 1.
Going Your Own Way
Noam Lovinsky: I remember in a board meeting, the new model really started to show legs and one of the board members, Brian Schreier at Sequoia, said it was the prettiest smile graph that he had ever seen.
Lenny: When you were at Facebook, you built what is called the New Product Experimentation team trying to create a startup within a startup.
Career Journey Overview
Noam Lovinsky: You’re thinking on a different time horizon. If you’re a large organization and you do some performance management process twice a year and you’re 0 to 1 incubator, you’ve already killed it. It’s the wrong incentive.
Lenny: As the chief product officer of Grammarly, I’m curious what word you most often misspelled?
Time at YouTube
Noam Lovinsky: The.
An Atypical Career Path
Lenny: You do T-E-H?
Prioritization in Two-Sided Markets
Noam Lovinsky: T-E-H. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
When to Kill a Project
Lenny: Oh man.
Today my guest is Noam Lovinsky. Noam is currently chief product officer at Grammarly. Previously, he was an early PM at YouTube where he spent five years leading the creator product experience and then the broader YouTube consumer product experience. He then went on to take on the chief product officer role at Thumbtack, which involved helping the company reignite growth after a downturn caused by some changes Google made in SEO. He then went on to Facebook where he created the New Product Experimentation team whose charter was to incubate big new ideas protected from the larger Facebook org.
Noam has such a unique set of experiences taking products from 0 to 1, from -1 to 1, from 1 to 100, and even starting his own companies. He’s never really been on a podcast before and he rarely ever tweets or post anything online, which we actually talk about. In our conversation, we walk through the lessons that he’s learned through his amazing career at YouTube, Facebook, Thumbtack, and at Grammarly. We talk about when it makes sense to kill your project at a company, when it makes sense to ask to be layered at a company, why you should be keeping a nose out for which products matter most at a business and to find those products, why you need to diversify your growth channels at your business, why you should be finding work that is going to most stretch you to help you advance in your career, a bunch of advice for creating space for innovation within a large company and so much more. Noam is such a gem and I’m really excited to share his wisdom with you.
If you enjoy this podcast, don’t forget to subscribe and follow this podcast in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It’s the best way to avoid missing feature episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Noam Lovinsky after a short word from our sponsors.
Noam, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
Noam Lovinsky: Thanks for having me, Lenny.
Time at Thumbtack
Lenny: It’s absolutely my pleasure. I’ve heard so many great things about you from so many people. I think you’re friends with a lot of guests that have been on this podcast. Something that I find really interesting about you and really respect about you is that you’ve worked at so many great companies and you’ve done so many big things in your career, but you barely ever tweet. You don’t have a newsletter. I don’t see many things on LinkedIn. I don’t think you’ve even been on a podcast before. I think the only evidence I can find that you exist is you have this YouTube channel that’s just like you go-karting and kids and people wishing you a happy birthday.
Noam Lovinsky: Oh gosh, I should go monitor that. I forgot about that.
How to Turn Things Around
Lenny: You might want to go find it now.
Core Product Experience Issues
Noam Lovinsky: Yeah, yeah, yeah that’s funny. Yeah, it’s funny. I think about that a lot, like am I doing something wrong? Should I be putting more effort in that? I mean, it’s funny that you mentioned newsletter. I spend a lot of time with the Substack team’s. I’ve been a very active advisor there. The team is fantastic by the way. And I think about it. Am I doing something wrong in my career by not doing that? But just to be honest, it doesn’t come authentically to me. It doesn’t come naturally to me. I get really focused on the thing that I’m working on and get really deep in the thing that I am working on and I have a hard time kind of multitasking a lot outside of that to be totally honest. The way that I kind of get to know the industry and other teams or whatnot is just through working with people.
I’m not a very big networker. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with that. I wish I were better at that. I get to know people by doing work with them, by helping them. And it doesn’t necessarily scale in the same way that Twitter does, but it’s served me well so far and it’s more kind of authentic and it’s what comes more natural to me. And so that’s how I do it. So I’m doing a lot of coffees. I’m meeting people that way. I’m not doing a lot of tweeting or writing of newsletters. Maybe one day, but that’s not me today.
Rebuilding Core Loop and Instant Quotes
Lenny: So I think this is an awesome example of you can be incredibly successful as a product manager and as anyone in tech not investing time posting online. I am going to incriminate myself here, but I feel like the advice I always share with people is the best people are not spending time tweeting and talking online and sharing on LinkedIn. They’re just doing the work. They don’t have time for that sort of thing. And I think you’re a great example of that. Is there anything along those lines that you share with folks that are just like, “Hey, should I be investing time here?”
Don’t Rely on One Growth Channel
Noam Lovinsky: I think everyone can chart their own path and has a way that is sort of authentic to them and leans on their strengths. What I often coach people is, do what you like. You’re generally going to be a lot better at the things that really fill you up that really get you excited. Life is short. There’s so many things to be doing out there. We’re so lucky. The number of interesting waves of technology that I’ve experienced, it just makes me feel like it’s going to keep happening for a long time. We’re very fortunate to be born in the time that we are and have the opportunities that we are. So why spend your time doing something that doesn’t feel good because you think that it might lead to some success, where if you lean on what’s authentic to you and what makes you happy, chances are you’re going to be one of the best people at those things?
Lenny: I love that advice. And I think it’s so important. I think there’s a lot of pressure on people too. “I need to do this, I need to do that.”
Leadership and Product Strategy
Noam Lovinsky: Totally.
Facebook’s New Product Experimentation Team
Lenny: “I need to tweet, I need to share content to be successful.” This comes up a lot in this podcast, that the more you could just stick close to what gives you energy and what you enjoy doing, oftentimes that leads to things you wouldn’t expect in a lot of success.
Speaking of that, looking at your career arc, I noticed a really interesting pattern and a really diverse set of experiences. So just kind of talking through places you’ve been. At Facebook, you worked on 0 to 1 stuff. At YouTube, the way I see it as you almost went from -1 to 1. At Thumbtack, it looks like you went from 1 to -1 and then back to 1. So it’s like a really unique turnaround story. And then with Grammarly it feels like it’s like, I don’t know, 1 or I don’t know, 5 to 100, or wherever you end up taking it. So I thought it’d be fun to talk through each of these experiences because they’re such unique approaches or such unique experiences and see what lessons and wisdom we can extract from your journey.
Noam Lovinsky: That sounds great. Yeah.
Advice for Intrapreneurs
Lenny: Okay, sweet. So I’m thinking reverse chronologically, we start with YouTube, which the way I see it is it’s kind of -1 to 1. When you join, my understanding is YouTube was losing a lot of money. When you left, they were not losing money. And I was actually just looking, they’re valued apparently at $200 billion today, YouTube as a business. I know you haven’t been there for a while, but great work. What lessons did you take away from that journey? What stories come to mind from that part of your career that might be helpful to people?
Noam Lovinsky: Maybe first to start looking with why hop around these experiences. I always tell people I feel like I’m an IC trapped in a manager’s body sometimes. Fundamentally, I like to build, that’s why I do this. I like to make things. And so sometimes the more fun way to make things is to start something and sometimes the better way to make things in the situation that I’m in is to try to support teams and lead through teams.
And so I joined YouTube through an acquisition of a company I started. In the beginning, what I was doing there is just rebuilding that product on Google infrastructure and for YouTube customers. And maybe the first lesson was actually to look around at what the rest of the team was doing and be really honest and open about the relative priority of the thing that you’re working on even if it might lead to your project getting canceled.
So one of the things that I remember doing really on is actually talking to the leadership team and being like, “I don’t think we should be putting 50 engineers on this project. Looking at the rest of the roadmap and the rest of the priorities, excuse me, I think this team would likely be better served elsewhere.” Even though that was likely negotiating my way out of a job in month three, I don’t know, I kind of felt like that was the right thing for the team and for the business.
And then that started a very interesting journey because from there, basically the leadership was like, “You’re right. We’re going to wind that down and build some of those features into the existing product. And now you, you come and lead this focus area, we’re calling the creator focus area.” So I went from basically rebuilding the product that our startup had built to leading one of the three focus areas at YouTube. There was the viewer team, the creator team, and the advertiser team. And Hunter Walk, who’s amazing, was leading the viewer team. And Shishir Mehrotra, who’s also very amazing, was leading the advertising team.
Time at Grammarly
Lenny: What an alumni community.
Noam Lovinsky: There was me. I was sort of like 29-year-old startupy guy working with these guys who were awesome. And YouTube in general, and continues to be, an incredible team. And so I think that was a first really good lesson. That in the right organizations, even in large organizations, advocate for what’s best for the team, advocate for what’s best for the organization even if that means that it puts you at a particular difficult moment. If it is a healthy team that rewards those sorts of decisions and actions, good things will happen. If it’s not, that’s good to know too. That’s good to know early. So that’s one thing that comes to mind.
Maybe one other I would say atypical career choice that I made shortly thereafter is then when I was put in that role, I really struggled in that role. I was reporting to the CEO at the time, a guy named Salar Kamangar, who’s also awesome, Google’s 6th employee and just learned a ton from him, like an incredible strategic thinker. But he was asking me questions that I felt like they were from a different planet. I was like, I didn’t know what they meant and he just thought in a different way, a different level or different scale and that’s still something that I was learning. Eventually I figured it out, but I was really struggling in that moment. I had a really good relationship with both Hunter and Shishir and they really helped me through that. And eventually, I went to Salar and said, “Hey, I think I should actually report to Hunter. I think this would work better if we kind of combined the organizations this way and then we divided and conquered this way.”
And again, very atypical, no one has ever come to me in my career and said, “I would like you to layer me in this other person.” But in that moment I was just like, “This is how I will do better work. This is how I will get better support. I will be happier and more productive and it’ll be better for the team.” And you know what? For me anyway, I was right. We made that change. Hunter was a fantastic manager and support at YouTube. I learned a ton, grew a lot. And then eventually when he moved on, Shishir took over the organization and then I moved into the viewer part of the organization, which is where I spent the rest of my time there, which was leading and supporting the viewer PM team at YouTube.
Scrappy Startup DNA
Lenny: These stories are amazing. It connects to your point that you’re kind of an, I see, an inner child I see, where you keep trying to kill your career by accident. Like, “Now, let’s kill this project I’m working on. I’m going to demote myself a little bit.” But clearly it’s worked out. Is there anything that you saw that gave you that confidence that, “This is actually going to be okay”? Because again, people don’t normally think this is how you get ahead in your career, is you kill your team and you layer yourself.
Noam Lovinsky: Yeah, I mean I think having a broader view of the company strategy, having an instinct for what we should be doing and why and how I might prioritize all of these investments if I were given the opportunity to do that, I think internalizing that and understanding that and then trying to align whatever is under your influence towards that overall goal is very helpful and made me feel like, “I’m pretty confident this is going to be okay because it will lead to better results for the organization given what we’re trying to do. And so as long as I’m trying to push decisions or actions that actually lead to better results, if it’s a healthy culture and organization, I should be okay.”
I think that the other thing is, just over the years, I got extremely lucky. The first job that I got out of school was an incredible group of people and it gave me a nose for talent. It gave me a nose for what great feels like and what a high functioning team feels like. It’s hard to know that without experiencing that. And so in the moments, YouTube was also one of those teams, Grammarly is one of those teams, Thumbtack was one of those teams. Being able to sniff that out when you’re trying to choose the next team is very important. But I think that’s another thing that gave me confidence. I learned these people well enough, Hunter, Shishir, et cetera, to have the instinct that the right thing will happen, like this will be better for me and the broader team.
The Ukrainian Team
Lenny: Got it. So the key there is just you have to trust that the team around you is good enough, that you’re not going to be pushed off into a corner. I think you made a really profound point here that a lot of people don’t get about the job of a product leader and a product manager, that a big part of your job is to think about what is best for the business and work backwards from that. Not necessarily what’s the best thing for the user is the highest priority, not necessarily what’s the best thing for my team and how do I hit the goals that I’m obsessed with. It’s what is going to be best for the business broadly and then make decisions there. Is there anything more you can say there about just how powerful that is as a way of thinking about prioritization and decisions as a product manager?
Noam Lovinsky: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, I think ideally, things that are best for the customer, there’s high overlap with that with things that are best for the business, but not always, right? And I think figuring out some principles that help guide those sorts of conflicts can be really, really helpful. At Thumbtack, we had principles about which sides of the marketplace we wanted to serve in which order and when we serve Thumbtack. So it was customers first, pros second, and then Thumbtack last. And that’s actually the first two… Saying Thumbtack last is the easy thing to say. Actually doing it in action I think is a very different thing. But that first one of like, should we… Especially when you’re starting a marketplace, as you know well, Lenny, supply is so critical. Many marketplaces live and die by the quality and liquidity and supply. And so why would you focus on customers first and the Thumbtack perspective and supply are the pros, the people that you hire?
Well, we always just felt that what the pros need from us is more customers. What the pros need from us is high quality customers. And so if we really try to make a great customer experience that attracts more customers, helps them find the right pros, provides the highest quality customers, then that will therefore be better for the pros. And so that’s how we should prioritize. If we do those things right, then the business will benefit, right? And so doing things like raising prices because we think it’s good for the business, even though it causes liquidity issues in the marketplace might be a little bit of a local maxima, locally optimizing rather than globally optimizing. So I think sometimes in these sorts of questions, trying to establish some set of guiding principles that help navigate some of these more ambiguous or thorny questions can be really helpful.
General Career Advice
Lenny: I want to circle back to this first point you made, an experience you had convincing people that your first project shouldn’t be something you work on. How long do you stick with something that isn’t going well and then decide, “Okay, let’s convince people this is something I should move on from,” versus you don’t want to give up on a project quickly, you want to give it a shot?
Noam Lovinsky: I mean, look, I don’t know that it’s a perfect answer, but I think the reality is just that what kills most projects most early companies is stamina. And I think that we all need to work on being more resilient about kind of like, I remember at Thumbtack, Marco, the CEO, we used to say that it feels like we’re running uphill and chewing glass, and you’re kind of like, “That’s right, we want to do that. That’s good for us. Take our medicine.” So you want to practice that sort of resiliency. But ultimately, I think that what starts to happen is you start to lose the stamina and you’re just not bringing your best self to the situation.
And so many of these things that are so high ambiguity where you don’t know exactly what to build or you don’t know exactly, you’re not getting the signal you need or the feedback you need to be able to hone it in and know that you’re doing something well. They require just an ungodly level of faith and stamina. And so that’s sort of what I look to. When you see a team that is motivated, that is building something like they’re really excited about, I mean just the inertia, the quality, it’s like a whole different game where when you see a team that’s sort of down and out and they’ve really been hitting their head against the wall for a long time, sometimes they just need a change of scene, a change of pace, and they get to a much better situation. So my honest answer is, yeah, it’s the, when do you run out of steam is usually the question. I think that happens usually like in the startup case, a lot of times before you run out money or these other things.
Staying Grounded Amid Challenges
Lenny: We’ve talked about Thumbtack a couple of times now, so let’s talk about that. I love this description of running a pill, chewing glass. My understanding is when you joined, things were going well, and then things started to go much less well, and then you helped turn things around. Talk about that part of your journey and what you learned from that time.
Do What Makes You Happy
Noam Lovinsky: Yeah, sure. Again, really fantastic team and really strong founders. That company was just on the bleeding edge of things like SEO and growing by SEO. It was one of the best organizations that are driving growth through that channel. But I think a thing that I learned really early, which Lenny with your background you probably know as well, SEO is a sort of a live by the sword, die by the sword channel of growth. I think that one channel growth company is always a no-no. And so that’s a little bit of what we had at Thumbtack.
So it was funny, because I remember when I joined and Marco and I had an agreement where it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to do my three months of onboarding, listening to our new leader inheriting a team.” I’ve always gotten advice that that’s what you should do. And Marco being an entrepreneur and a hard running founder is like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure.” And then a month in, it’s like, “All right, we got to run 2024 planning. Go.” Or not 2024, sorry, at the time it was. And yeah, in the early days when I was there, Thumbtack was seeing triple digit growth. Then we had a couple SEO hits that got us down to double-digit growth. And then not too long after that, we were actually, for the first time in the company’s history, seeing negative year-over-year growth and Google was just really coming down on our category as we were, by the way, trying to rebuild the whole product and change the monetization model and everything in between.
So it was a really a tough moment of how much do we kind of spend to reinforce the old model while we’re sort of building the new model, kind of changing the engine while the plane is flying. I think I remember in a board meeting, once we kind of turned that around and over time and also the new model really started to show legs and really started to work, one of the board members, Brian Schreier at Sequoia, said it was the prettiest smile graph that he had ever, ever seen. It was obviously a really proud moment there.
But I think that the thing that I took away from that, which I tell PMs quite a bit, is growth masks all problems. You don’t really have a, I think, true understanding of what is working well and what is not working well when you have incredible growth. YouTube was a great example of that. And at Thumbtac, it had incredible growth for quite some time, but it was essentially burning through a lot of demand. It was just dropping a lot of demand on the floor because there wasn’t sufficient liquidity on the supply side to really meet that demand. The team knew and was trying to work on that problem, but it wasn’t as urgent or high priority because you’re having triple digit growth. What’s wrong? Everything’s going great, right?
And then the moment growth starts to slow or certainly when growth starts to be negative, all of a sudden the tenor in the organization really changes and you start looking at things very differently and trying to understand what’s actually going on. And so I think it’s actually a very healthy thing for businesses to go through as they turn into long-term sustainable businesses to have those sorts of moments, because I think otherwise it’s just really challenging to identify where the true issues are. And I think as a PM, if you’ve only ever worked on things that grow and you’ve never felt the other side of that and how to help turn that around with your team, I think you lose a lot in your career if you don’t experience that.
I’m kind of naturally paranoid. And especially as I manage growth, I often look at things and ask myself like, “Okay, what do I do right now if it went negative? How would I prioritize things if it went negative?” Having gone through that experience, I just look at things in a different way of urgency. I look at things at different levels of priority having gone through that experience.
Lightning Round: Book Recommendations
Lenny: With this Thumbtack story, I think it’s rare that a business gets the smile graph that you described, this prettiest smile graph that this board member has ever seen. I think that is rarely the case. Usually, it doesn’t come back up. Can you share what you did to help Thumbtack turn things around? I know it’s very particular to Thumbtack in the business, but just anything there that would be useful to people?
Noam Lovinsky: Sure. First of all, this is very much the team. It’s not just things that I did. So I mean, first was turning on multiple channels of growth. Up until then, Thumbtack had tried and stopped paid channels, other organic channels like referrals, all of the typical things. And so, we just went back to first principles on a lot of that and also just kind of reformed a team around that and basically got an amazing team together. One of them, Whitney Steele is running marketing at Descript now. Another one, David Schein is running a product at HIMSS. But basically I went back to first principles on some of those growth channels and experiment on our way to much, much better results.
I think that one of the things that we were doing incorrectly at Thumbtack is Thumbtack is actually a marketplace that is actually made up of thousands of marketplaces, right? Like DJs in Philadelphia is one marketplace, DJs in Atlanta is another marketplace, contractors in Sonoma is another marketplace. And then Thumbtack is obviously the container of all of those marketplaces. I think we were just bifurcating our targeting and our growth efforts a little too narrowly, assuming we had to grow in that way market by market rather than targeting more broadly, providing the more aggregate data to Google and others, and then optimizing from there. The fact that we already had really good showing in SEO and really good patriarch and SEO helped to bolster things like SEM and then eventually Facebook as well.
Those were kind of the growth levers, but the core issue with the Thumbtack product was that it was just a very high friction customer experience that really left customers waiting. So the way that Thumbtack worked basically was a customer would find them through a search query, they would come in and they would answer a number of questions about the job they needed done, and then Thumbtack would say, “Okay, great, we’ll get back to you in 24 hours.” And this is a modern day experience, right?
And then what Thumbtack would do is they would take that job and they would federate it out to as many of the pros that might match the criteria, and then the pros would pay to quote to show up as a potential provider for that job. Now, I don’t want to take anything away from that team because that worked phenomenally well for a really long time. And actually it’s a perfect case study in like, “|Just do the scrappy thing that works to grow.” And they did that very well, but the stage and size of the business when I joined it had kind of outgrown that. And the team knew that. That’s obviously a very high friction experience. The idea that the customer, they’re super excited, they want to hire someone, and at that moment you’d be like, “Cool, talk to you soon,” not the best experience.
And the fact that you’re asking your supply to put up money to even show up to customers in the first place, well, what the customers want to see is the supply. Like, “Tell me who I can hire.” Also, a lot of friction on that side and also in some cases some unfair revenue on that side because if folks are paying to be seen and maybe they’re looked at, but there’s not really high intent, then they’re not going to get the customers they want, they’re going to be spending revenue, they’re not going to be getting revenue back. It turns into just a bad loop obviously.
So the main thing we did is to rebuild that whole loop, change the monetization model, build a system where essentially pros could provide instant quotes. Lenny, I’m sure from Airbnb, this is very familiar, the move from request to book to instant booking. It was a very similar thing in a different kind of category of service and supply obviously. But that shift and doing that shift across those thousands of marketplaces and then finding the right friction point for monetization and when and what to charge people for and all of that change, that is what really, at its core, turned the growth engine around at Thumbtack. And it’s just a real testament to those founders that they believe that, saw that, and were willing to run a pill and chew glass to get to that point. I don’t know the details of the business anymore. And if I did, I wouldn’t speak to it. But from what I hear, things are going well, so I think that that served the company well.
Lightning Round: Favorite Shows and Movies
Lenny: Yeah, as you were talking about that, that’s exactly an experience Airbnb went through. I actually led that effort at Airbnb. It took three years of my life.
Lightning Round: Interview Questions
Noam Lovinsky: Oh my gosh, we should talk about that one day.
Lightning Round: Recent Product Discoveries
Lenny: Yeah, I’ve written about it here and there, but honestly very quietly is one of the biggest transformations Airbnb went through, shifting from I’m going to go request a book to basically every book now on Airbnb is instant. And that was a very difficult and painful journey. But looking back, I don’t think Airbnb would’ve made it if not for that. And unlike Thumbtack, we did it before things were starting to fall apart. And actually, I was going to say the lens that we used that I find really helpful here is, you should be asking yourself, “If somebody was to come into our space and disrupt us and start now to become the new Airbnb, what would they do?”
Noam Lovinsky: Yeah, totally.
Lightning Round: Life Mottos
Lenny: And it was obvious that it’d be be make it instant, just the way it works. Welcome to Airbnb disruptor. And so, yeah.
Noam Lovinsky: Another learning there is any product you work on that involves bits and atoms is exponentially harder than products that just involve bits. But it’s amazing how something as seemingly simple as make an instant ends up being so incredibly deep and complicated. And especially on an existing business, making that transition while still growing is just very, very complicated. Fantastic learning I’m sure you had as well.
Lightning Round: Most Misspelled Word
Lenny: Very difficult to change people’s expectations and behavior. This could be its own podcast episode, just changing marketplaces into an instant experience.
I wanted to circle back real quick to the first lesson you had there, which is adding new channels. I think this is a really interesting takeaway here. So essentially Thumbtack was reliant on SEO. Google slash the sword, as you described, started changing things so traffic stopped coming. I think a cool lesson here is just if you’re reliant on one growth channel, which I think most companies actually are, I think most companies have one main driver, I think a lesson here is potentially before things start to fall apart, especially if you’re SEO-driven, start to explore more practically paid referrals.
Wrapping Up the Episode
Noam Lovinsky: Totally. I mean I think maybe it’s, again, it’s kind of living through that. Now, anytime I look at a product or look at a team, it’s one of the first things that perks up the paranoia of just like, “Oh no. You don’t want to be in that situation. Let’s figure out now how you start to diversify because you just never know, like you say, when one of those might dry up.”
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Is there anything else from your time at Thumbtack that stands out as an interesting lesson or takeaway that you bring with you to the work you do now?
Noam Lovinsky: I would say this, I think especially at the leadership level, the team that reports to the CEO, that group doesn’t always have the opportunity to do a lot of project work together, right? You’ve got your CFO, you’ve got your head of sales, you’ve got your product and your engineering. There’s just not as often as natural ways for that group to work together. And then when something happens like growth goes negative, that group is very important. And that group’s ability to tackle hard things together is very important. I think that one important lesson from that is, no one can be a bystander on product strategy. Just because you’ve got product in your title doesn’t mean you’re the only one that should be thinking about product strategy certainly at that level. Certainly not in engineering.
The CFO, the head of people, everyone needs to have a seat at the table when it comes to product strategy, what the company’s doing and what they’re going to do to grow out of the situation that they’re in. Because otherwise, in those hard times it can kind of be like a, “What have you done for me lately?” sort of a dynamic. And that’s just not the right dynamic to have on that team. I’m not saying that at Thumbtack we had the right dynamic, but I think it was a really important learning in that moment of how that team, even if they didn’t typically get as involved in things like product strategy and what we’re building, how everyone had to be all hands on deck and really thinking about those sorts of problems because it’s the only way I think you can get a whole company and team out of those situations by everyone getting involved in doing their part and pulling on the levers that they have in their area in order to do that well. I don’t think it can work in any other way.
Lenny: So there’s a lesson there. Build a relationship with the leadership team before things start to go awry.
Noam Lovinsky: That, yes. Certainly that, but I think it’s also incumbent for people in our roles and engineering roles to bring strategy to that discussion, to that group, in a way that it is possible for everyone to engage and everyone to internalize and understand what it means for their area and to even have obviously a say in because they’re on the leadership team at the end of the day. They should feel like their fingerprint is also on the company strategy, and as soon as it starts to feel like that’s their world, that’s our world. And I think that’s true for any of the functions. It’s true for what’s happening in sales, it’s true for what’s happening in marketing. As product managers, we naturally need to be the connective tissue across all of that, but I think the whole leadership team at that level should feel like connective tissue across all of those functions.
Lenny: Okay. Let’s transition to Facebook. This is I think an example of 0 to 1. So when you were at Facebook, you built what is called the New Product Experimentation team. I actually thought it was called the New Product Experiment Experience team, but I think it’s New Product Experimentation team. My understanding is the idea there is, instead of Facebook having to buy the next Instagram and WhatsApp and all the things basically incubate startups within Facebook in a stabled concept, a startup within a startup, create all these startups within a startup. And as an outsider, it feels like it was really fun for a while, but it hasn’t let any amazing new businesses for Facebook. Correct me if I’m wrong. I’m curious what that experience was like, what you took away from it, how it went, what you think about when you look back at that part of your journey.
Noam Lovinsky: I was one of the few folks that kind of joined that team early and help build that team. How it ended up and how it closed down, I am not familiar with because I wasn’t there. But I think in terms of was it a success or not because it didn’t build the next Instagram I think is a little bit of the wrong bar to set for things like that. To some extent, it’s like, “Did the group win the lottery or not? And let’s judge there. Let’s judge their success.” Obviously I’m not saying that discovering something like Instagram is just winning the lottery, but you get what I mean in terms of the rarity of those sorts of discoveries and those sorts of products.
I think that that team was very realistic about what I would say would be the champagne level outcomes and/or more like the kind of beer, nice dinner kind of level outcomes.
Lenny: Your wine.
Noam Lovinsky: Yeah, the wine. Yeah, thank you. That’s a better analogy. I think we built knowing those sorts of outcomes would also be very beneficial to the organization. So as an example, one of them is, at Facebook scale, doing things that don’t scale or doing things that start out small was just a muscle that was really hard to come by, right? It’s like any community product that you build, any kind of social where there’s community density that’s important early on, any product that you build that way, starting with a million users is a really hard way to do that. At places like Facebook and Google, it’s like it’s hard to run an experiment with a hundred people. It’s not hard, it’s impossible, right? And so this idea that you would have to get real small, that you would have to start very targeted, that you would have to start with things that clearly don’t scale and don’t have a chance of being big from the get-go is really, really hard in an organization like that.
And so creating that space for NPE to be able to do that, to be able to help remind the organization what are the mechanisms we need to be able to build and learn that way was very beneficial. Even simple things. At an organization of Facebook size, maybe experiences at an Airbnb, it is really hard for product managers, engineers and designers to talk directly with customers. It is basically impossible. You’re almost always talking through some third party, some recruiting agency and getting reports and you’re not always in the room. Imagine building a startup, like a product from day one and not being able to sit right next to your customer and being like, “Show me how you do this or show me how you do that.’ It’s incredibly hard. You’re looking for such faint signal.
The idea that you would try to get it through layers of indirection and games of telephone is crazy, but at that scale, that’s what you have to do because there’s all of these legal concerns and many other realistic concerns about what you can say to who and who you can talk to and what you can tell them about what you’re doing and all of these things. So creating an environment where those sorts of constraints were lifted and were different was very beneficial, I think, to the organization and started to shed a light on some of the things that were broken that make it hard to build 0 to 1 in those sorts of environments.
I also think it was a really fantastic recruiting tool. It did build a really great group of folks, many of which have left to go start interesting companies. But I guess what I’m trying to say is I think when you’re an organizational leader, and Schrep was the org leader that was supporting NP at the time and he’s fantastic and really did a good job of firewalling that team, I think you’re looking at a set of objectives and a number of ways that you might help the company and the organization. Even if you set that light on the hill to be like, “Go find the next Instagram,” many of the things that you would do along the way to find the next Instagram end up being very beneficial to the broader organization. We saw a lot of that in PE.
Lenny: That’s a really interesting perspective. There’s a lot of other goals with something like this, it’s not just find the next massive business. It’s the way I think what I’m getting from this is shine almost a mirror on the organization, like, “Here’s the things we can’t do with the regular business and we have to do something. We have to set this up in order to try something totally new and radical recruiting tool” I think is interesting.
There’s actually a team at Airbnb, the way I described it was, I don’t know how many people know about Burning Man and how it works, but there’s this trash fence around the side that catches all the trash so it doesn’t go into the desert. And I feel like there’s teams sometimes that are the trash fence of the company.
Noam Lovinsky: That’s funny, yeah.
Lenny: Where someone’s about to leave and they’re like, “No, go work on this coal stuff over here in the fringe,” which is really interesting. But just instill within the company and maybe help with that. Just keep people that are awesome at Meta. [inaudible 00:45:16].
Noam Lovinsky: Yeah. You’re right that the team didn’t discover the next Instagram. For what it’s worth, things like Threads and ideas like Threads were in that team all of the time. I think that if that team caught the wave of generative AI and all of the opportunities and new technologies there, I think things could have also… Because those are certain moments where you having small, really motivated, dedicated teams that aren’t thinking about anything mainline can lead to faster discoveries, I think that can also help. But there were a number of things that basically ended up becoming features in other products and they were just easier, faster ways of validating and building them because you didn’t have the constraints of the mainline product development organization, right?
Lenny: For someone that is thinking about trying to create a startup within a startup, something a lot of big companies are trying to do, is there a piece of advice or two that you’d share for helping this be effective? Maybe one is just the goal may not be build the next big business. There’s these sub goals also. What comes to mind?
Noam Lovinsky: God, there’s so many. Schrep did a really fantastic job of removing a lot of these constraints. So one is I would say think really hard about the incentive system. Smart, good people, even if they’re not trying to, they end up kind of gaming things towards the incentive system. And so think long and hard about that. So for instance, if you’re a large organization and you do some performance management process like twice a year and that’s how you’re going to evaluate and incentivize people in your 0 to 1 incubator, you’ve already killed it. It’s the wrong incentive, it’s the wrong timeframe. It creates adverse selection, problems for the sort of people that you bring in. And so it’s hard in an existing organization to say, “We’re going to take all these company processes around even how we level people and pay them and motivate them. And we’re going to throw them out the window for this group.”
How you build the infrastructure you use, this is something that the NP team did really well. Everyone got to do their own thing from an infrastructure perspective. Just do what is best for the problem you’re trying to solve in this moment, knowing that you’re likely going to throw away a lot of this code anyway. Being able to do that in an organization like Facebook or Google, if you ask anyone that works on those things, is really hard. It takes someone like a Schrep to be like, “Nope, they’re going to get to do this. Sorry.” And so I think that’s really helpful.
For what it’s worth, one of the organizations that we talked to that I felt like was doing this in one of the best ways was Nike. Nike has this incubation lab. It’s a completely different operating model. They recruit a completely different type of person, very different incentive system. And essentially, where they end up plugging them into Nike is that when they have something into the distribution marketing kind of growth arms of Nike. But for the product discovery process, they’re doing their whole different thing. Once they find some fit, then kind of Nike comes in and goes, “Boom. I’m going to help you explode your fit.” But I think that the number one thing I would think about would be the incentive system and the adverse selection that that can cause.
Lenny: To me, the most important element of the incentive system, and maybe I’m reading between the lines, is you’re basically competing against them starting their own thing. And having upside if things go super well feels really important versus, “I’m just going to get a cool salary at Meta and work on this thing.” That doesn’t lead to the same experience as a startup where everything’s on the line.
Noam Lovinsky: Yeah. And also what time horizons, right? When you’re starting a company, you’re not thinking like, “In the next six months, I’m going to get a promo and I’m going to get a good rating and things are going to go well.” You’re thinking on a different, excuse me, time horizon, and you’re thinking about an outsized impact or an outsized incentive. And so I would think about that if you’re starting things internally as well.
Lenny: Awesome. Okay. Let’s move to the final bucket, Grammarly, which is where you’re at now. The way I’m thinking about it is this kind of like a one, two rocket ship or I don’t know, 10. It’s further along than one, but that’s where you’re at now. To me, Grammarly is interesting because it’s one of the very few successful B2C subscription businesses. There’s almost none. There’s Duolingo, Grammarly. And I know you’re doing B2B also, but there’s so few. There’s so many dead bodies trying to build a business on top of consumer subscription. And so I’m just curious. What the current state of Grammarly? How are things going? What do you think has been the key to it being successful all this time and continuing to grow? And what lessons have you learned? I know you just joined relatively recently, but anything you’ve taken away from that journey so far?
Noam Lovinsky: We don’t talk about it often, but Grammarly is a much bigger company from a revenue perspective than I think people realize. The company has been around for 15 years and was profitable from day one, and continues to be quite profitable. So it’s a very, very healthy business that is much larger than folks might realize. And that is actually quite intentional because the company was trying not to be noticed for a long time, very intentionally. The fact that you would have grammar and spell checking in Google Docs or grammar and spell checking in Word. People would often write off the company that like, “How is that a business? How is that a feature? These products already have it.” And that was very convenient for Grammarly because they could kind of navigate between these giants in tech and grow a very phenomenal business on this use case that people had written off.
Now, come the advent of LMS, it’s no longer a use case that people are writing off and sort of the dream of the founders that machines can assist us in communication in this way that they’ve had for 15 years, I feel like now the whole industry is like, “Well, this is obviously how we’re going to communicate and machines are going to do all these things for us.” And Grammarly is now sort of in the center of that hurricane. And again, I think it’s a similar thing where it’s like, “Well, there’s ChatGPT. There’s Microsoft Copilot. How is Grammarly going to have a chats?” But yet things still seem like there’s the future. The future is bright.
And so to your question, I think what has made it work, I’ve only been here for 10 months so please kind of take this with a grain of salt, but my instinct is that people really love Grammarly because of how it works and where it works. And what I mean by how it works is Grammarly is one of the few products where you just install it and it makes you better. You don’t have to configure it, you don’t have to manipulate it, you don’t have to change anything about what you’re doing. You carry on and across all of your applications, across all of your tabs, you’ll start getting pushed assistance to you in the right moment. You could ignore it if you want, no big deal, but it takes a very, very small amount of effort to tap on one of those things, get some value and keep going.
I think that a product that is that easy to use, that easy to extract value from, but then also that prevalent, how many different text boxes do you write in a given day? I mean, it is not less than 10, it is tens or potentially hundreds, right? And so it is everywhere and it is very, very low effort to get real value from it. And then the where we work is what I said, you don’t have to change anything about your workflow. Grammarly meets you where you are and you get value from it. Doing that really well at this level of quality for a user base of this scale, essentially it’s like a huge AI achievement masquerading as a little UX innovation, right? But that experience, that UX that sort of brings AI to the masses has obviously served Grammarly really well. I think those are some of the strengths that we’re going to continue to lean on to now provide a very different type of assistance and value that we can because of where the technology has moved.
Lenny: The other thing I’ve heard a lot about Grammarly, and Yuri was on the podcast and who led growth for a long time at Grammarly, is just how scrappy the business has been and the founders have been from the beginning, the fact that they’ve been profitable from the beginning. That feels like one of the threads through all of the successful consumer subscription companies, is super scrappy, not raising money for a long time. Is there anything there that you found to be really interesting or helpful for other folks that are maybe building the space?
Noam Lovinsky: When you’re a team that kind of starts out of Ukraine and you’re not thinking that there’s any chance that you’re going to raise money and why would you do that, I mean it really… Back to our previous conversation of what happens when growth goes negative, it really forces you to focus on the important things. And so, like many of the early engineers who are still here because the company has done so well over the years, they think in like, “How is this work going to translate into revenue?” They think about the impact on the business from even very deep technical work that they’re doing because I think they were brought up in this culture where the business doesn’t really invest ahead of its profitability because it was a bootstrap business from day one. So that enforces everyone to think about their projects and their prioritization and how is what they’re doing over the next two months going to actually turn into more revenue and keep the company growing and sustaining. So I think that culture is prevalent and help Grammarly get to where it is.
Now, I just want to be really honest that in moments that we’re in like today, that can also be detrimental because the business gets to a certain size, you start getting to law of large numbers. You need to start thinking about are there other products? Are there other use cases? Are there other channels of growth? How do you invest ahead of some of that growth and start to diversify? Because at the scale and size that we are and aspire to be, we’re going to have to do many more things and service many more different types of customers. And as you mentioned, we’re going to have to pull off the motion of B2C to B, kind of get that product-led sales motion going. So all of those things are happening. And thankfully the business is as strong as it is where we can invest ahead now in those things while still maintaining profitability and a really strong business.
Lenny: That’s amazing that they’re still team members and maybe I think you said engineers from the beginning, 12 years later. I think that says a lot about the business. And before we started recording, they’re based in Ukraine and you were saying that they’re going to Zooms, there’s bombs going off, they have to go into bomb shelters and then jump on a meeting. It’s incredible that team continues to operate and the business continues to do this well in spite of all that.
Noam Lovinsky: Yeah, the team in Ukraine at Grammarly is… I mean, it’s something else. It’s a really fantastic team. When you speak to many of them, I think actually the work provides sometimes a very useful distraction, but they obviously feel a lot of pride in the business. They built a lot of this business. There aren’t yet many businesses of this size that kind of come from Ukraine. I think that that team is incredible and continues to deliver a ton of impact to the company even in the circumstances that they’re in. I know for the founders, a lot of why they want Grammarly to succeed and be the generational company that it can be is for Ukraine, and especially in this moment and it’s awesome to see how that motivates them and 15 years on the same project is not nothing. That’s some serious resilience. And so I think even in moments like that, using them as a way to motivate and strive for something greater I think says a lot about the founders and the team in Ukraine.
Lenny: Absolutely. Hopefully there’s a happy resolution soon there. I don’t know if you know this, I was actually born in Ukraine.
Noam Lovinsky: Oh wow.
Lenny: I know Odessa.
Noam Lovinsky: Oh, nice.
Lenny: I don’t want to talk about that much, but it’s true. And I just realized we both have skys in our last name. Lovinsky and Rachitsky.
Noam Lovinsky: So for what it’s worth, my dad was born in Ukraine. He is from Kiev. My mom was from Lithuania, so yeah, I also have some Ukrainian background here.
Lenny: All right, so Ukrainian episode.
Noam Lovinsky: Yes.
Lenny: Let me zoom out a little bit and get to the final couple questions. So thinking about your career broadly, I’m just curious if there’s any general advice you share with people to help them have a more successful career. Anything that just generally you find is really important to do well or mistakes they make. And this is a big broad question, but anything come to mind of like, “Here’s something you should really try to do more of or less of?”
Noam Lovinsky: Look, when you’re thinking about career opportunities and what job to take, it’s really, really hard to sniff out really well in a high degree of certainty like success. I think that having a good nose for people and the sort of people that you can be successful with is something that you can develop. What I found is I always try to prioritize putting myself in positions that are going to cause a lot of growth and learning. And growth and learning can be very painful. And you kind of got to be okay with that and go into that because on the other side of that pain I think is the promised land.
And that’s just served me really well, is I can’t necessarily predict with high degree of certainty that this thing’s going to hit, but I can get a sense of the people around me and I certainly can find situations that are going to stretch me, that are going to force me to do things that I haven’t done where I’m going to grow and learn significantly. And over sort of the arc of my career, I feel like that’s served me well. So that’s usually what I tell people, is focus on on that if you can.
Lenny: I love that advice. I’ve used this quote a number of times on this podcast, but something I always come back to is this line, “The cave you fear contains the treasure you seek.” I’m curious if there’s something you have found about when the pain is too much, that you shouldn’t pursue that. A lot of people get into these places where their mental health gets hit, their physical health is hit, they’re just doing work they should not, it’s too much. Is there anything there that you find it’s just like, “Okay, maybe this is too much of discomfort”?
Noam Lovinsky: I mean, I think about a couple of things. I think in any situation you should be able to lean on one or two things that you’re really strong at. That can be the foundation that keeps you going while you learn the other things. So just be wary of situations that are too net new.
There should be one or two important things as part of that job going into where you’re like, “I got this. I know how to do this portion of it.” So as an example, if you’ve never inherited a very large team and you work through how that works, but the product area that you’re working on is one you’re very familiar with what’s necessary to be good in that product, whether it’s really good sense of design or really good sense of analytical thinking, recommendation systems, what have you, there should be a couple of those things where you’re like, “I got this. These things are going to be a stretch, but these things, I feel like I’ve got a handle on how to do this. I can always get better, but I feel like they’re in my wheelhouse.” And I think that tends to allow you to balance the pain with the areas that you already know and manage through in a more balanced and healthy way.
Lenny: It reminds me of that chart I think from flow of you want it to be challenging but not too challenging, and that’s where you end up being most successful. Is there anything else, Noam, you want to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?
Noam Lovinsky: Yeah, I just think that maybe going back to where we first started, Lenny, work on the things that make you happy, that fill you up. Life is short. We’re all very lucky to be in this moment. There’s no reason to spend time on things that don’t give you energy. There’s so much to do out there. I think that’s the main thing I would focus on.
Lenny: Amazing. And even though there will be things that you have to do, I think it’s important to try to find as much of that as you can because not everyone can just like, “Nah, I’m not going to do this work thing. I’m just going to go on a walk.” But I think that’s such an important point. And we’ve talked about this actually a bunch on recent podcasts of just doing this energy audit where you pay attention to what gives you energy and what doesn’t and try to do more and more [inaudible 01:03:54]-
Noam Lovinsky: Totally.
Lenny: … willing to do that again. With that, we reached a very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?
Noam Lovinsky: Yeah, I’m ready.
Lenny: First question, what are two or three books that you’ve recommended most to other people?
Noam Lovinsky: I’m going to cheat on this one and I’m only going to give you one. I’m only going to give you one because I don’t want to cloud with any other. I recommend Build by Tony Fidel. Other than it being a good book, one of the main reasons I recommend it is that my wife wrote it. So she wrote it together with Tony. And I got to see that experience. She’s a fantastic writer and Tony has a lot to learn from, so I recommend that book. I think that the part of it that was particularly inspiring to me to hear even more of the details that are in the book is just how many times he met failure before he made discoveries that are now driving so many of the things that we do. It’s just a good reminder to keep at it and do the thing that really gives you that energy because eventually you can make that incredible discovery.
Lenny: Next question, do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you’ve really enjoyed?
Noam Lovinsky: I really like For All Mankind, if you’ve seen that on Apple TV. And then I just finished the last season of Fargo. Every single season of that series I think is fantastic.
Lenny: Amazing. For All Mankind though, last season, not as amazing a consensus that I agree with, but worth watching.
Next question. Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates?
Noam Lovinsky: I generally like interview questions that allow us to kind of do some work together, so I’m a little bit less on the behavioral “tell me about a time when” sort of stuff and more on the “Let’s work a product problem together.” It could be anything from like, “Let’s design an alarm clock for children.” Or lately I’ve been using one. “Given where technology is at, if we were to rebuild email, how might we do that?” I just feel like getting into it and getting into the details and really watching each other exercise our craft I think is really important. I have a whole podcast one time, if you’re ready, about how most people don’t know how to do leadership recruiting. And I feel like as I’ve advanced in my career, the interviews for some reason get easier and actually I can evaluate less about who I am as a product leader and whatnot. But yeah, those are the sorts of interview questions that I typically like.
Lenny: Amazing. Is there favorite product you’ve recently discovered that you really love?
Noam Lovinsky: It’s not recent, but I was a very early user of Arc and I really love Arc.
Lenny: Your window right now is inside Arc. I also love Arc. We had Josh on the podcast.
Noam Lovinsky: Nice.
Lenny: Just watching the onboarding experience of Arc alone as a product person is worth your time.
Noam Lovinsky: Totally. I love the animation when you download something. I mean just like all of the little things. And if Josh is listening, we would like to get Grammarly to work better with Arc, so please hit me up because I think there’s a few things that the Arc browser is doing that make it hard to get Grammarly to work either on the client or in the browser.
Lenny: Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often repeat to yourself, share with friends or family either in work or in life that you find useful?
Noam Lovinsky: Gosh, for those that know me, this is going to share so much of my personality. I think the first thing that comes to mind is, we are meant to struggle. I just feel like through struggle is how we get better, how good things happen, how bonds form, and so I don’t shy away from that kind of life experience.
Lenny: I’m going to guess that you’re Jewish. I’m also Jewish. That feels like a very Jewish thing to say. I love it.
Noam Lovinsky: How would you guess, Lenny? It’s literally written on my face. Yeah.
Lenny: Perfect. Last question. As the chief product officer at Grammarly, I’m curious what word you most often misspell?
Noam Lovinsky: The.
Lenny: You do T-E-H?
Noam Lovinsky: T-E-H. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lenny: Oh, man. Well, I find I misspell every word.
Noam Lovinsky: Oh, that’s funny.
Lenny: I’m a terrible speller. I’m thankful for my… Oh, sorry. Go ahead.
Noam Lovinsky: I was about to say I have a product for you that can help with your spelling if you want.
Lenny: I am an active Grammarly user. Not only that. I use every product you’ve worked on, I realize.
Noam Lovinsky: Oh, nice.
Lenny: Obviously, Meta and mostly Instagram of the Meta products. And obviously Grammarly now and YouTube. I have a YouTube channel. Check it out. Subscribe and follow. And Thumbtack. My wife is a big Thumbtack user. We found many pros on Thumbtack from all kinds of parts of the world.
Noam, thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and how can listeners be useful to you?
Noam Lovinsky: Yeah. I’m pretty much @noaml everywhere online, so Twitter is probably the easiest. My DMs are open. And then how people can be useful to me is please use Grammarly, provide any feedback that you might have. And honestly, if I can be helpful in almost any way, feel free to reach out. I often will take those conversations and build those connections, and that is always very helpful for me as well.
Lenny: No, thank you again so much for being here.
Noam Lovinsky: Of course. Have a good one, Lenny.
Lenny: Bye everyone.
Noam Lovinsky: Bye.
Lenny: 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.
Glossary
| English | 中文 |
|---|---|
| adverse selection | 逆向选择 |
| Arc | Arc(浏览器产品) |
| bits and atoms | 比特和原子 |
| bootstrapped / bootstrap business | 自力更生(不依赖外部融资) |
| Brian Schreier | Brian Schreier(红杉资本合伙人,Thumbtack 董事会成员) |
| Build | 《Build》(Tony Fadell 所著书籍) |
| Burning Man | Burning Man(火人节) |
| ChatGPT | ChatGPT |
| CPO (Chief Product Officer) | 首席产品官 |
| David Schein | David Schein |
| Descript | Descript(公司名) |
| Duolingo | Duolingo |
| Fargo | 《Fargo》(冰血暴,电视剧) |
| first principles | 第一性原理 |
| flow | 心流 |
| For All Mankind | 《For All Mankind》(为全人类,Apple TV 剧集) |
| Google Docs | Google Docs |
| Grammarly | Grammarly |
| HIMSS | HIMSS(公司名) |
| Hunter Walk | Hunter Walk |
| IC (Individual Contributor) | IC(独立贡献者) |
| instant booking | 即时预订 |
| Josh | Josh(Arc 浏览器联合创始人 Josh Miller) |
| law of large numbers | 大数法则 |
| layered | 被管理层覆盖(指在组织架构中被加一层上级管理) |
| LLM | LLM(大语言模型) |
| local maxima | 局部最优 |
| Marco | Marco(Thumbtack CEO) |
| Microsoft Copilot | Microsoft Copilot |
| New Product Experimentation | 新产品实验团队 |
| newsletter | newsletter |
| NPE | NPE(新产品实验团队的缩写) |
| pipeline | 销售管线 |
| PM (Product Manager) | 产品经理 |
| product-led sales | 产品驱动销售 |
| pros | 服务方(平台上的专业服务提供者) |
| request to book | 请求预订 |
| Salar Kamangar | Salar Kamangar |
| Schrep (Mike Schroepfer) | Schrep(Mike Schroepfer,时任 Facebook CTO) |
| SEM | SEM(搜索引擎营销) |
| SEO | SEO(搜索引擎优化) |
| Shishir Mehrotra | Shishir Mehrotra |
| smile graph | 微笑曲线(指先下降后回升的曲线图) |
| studio | 创业工作室 |
| Threads | Threads |
| Tony Fadell | Tony Fadell(iPod 之父、Nest 创始人) |
| Whitney Steele | Whitney Steele |
| Word | Word |
Reformatted by reformat_english.py
产品管理的幸福与痛苦 | Noam Lovinsky(Grammarly、FB、Thumbtack、YT)
访谈文字稿
Lenny: 你在那么多优秀的公司工作过。YouTube 那边,据我所知你加入的时候 YouTube 还在大量亏损。
Noam Lovinsky: 事实上有好多次,Google 的领导层都重新考虑过这笔收购,“我们要不要把 YouTube 卖掉?“——不管你信不信。
Lenny: 在 Thumbtack,看起来你经历了一个从 1 到 -1 再回到 1 的过程。
Noam Lovinsky: 我记得在一次董事会上,新模式真的开始展现出势头,红杉资本的董事会成员 Brian Schreier 说那是他见过的最漂亮的微笑曲线。
Lenny: 你在 Facebook 的时候,组建了所谓的 New Product Experimentation 团队,试图在大公司内部创建一个创业公司。
Noam Lovinsky: 你的思考周期完全不同。如果你是一个大型组织,每年做两次绩效评估,而你同时是一个 0 到 1 的孵化器,那你其实已经把它扼杀了。激励机制是错的。
Lenny: 作为 Grammarly 的首席产品官,我很好奇你最常拼错的词是什么?
Noam Lovinsky: “The”。
Lenny: 你会拼成 T-E-H?
Noam Lovinsky: T-E-H,没错。对对对。
Lenny: 天哪。
嘉宾介绍
Lenny: 今天的嘉宾是 Noam Lovinsky。Noam 目前是 Grammarly 的首席产品官。此前,他是 YouTube 的早期 PM,在那里工作了五年,先是负责创作者产品体验,后来负责更广泛的 YouTube 消费者产品体验。之后他加入 Thumbtack 担任首席产品官,帮助公司在 Google SEO 变更导致的下滑后重新点燃增长。随后他加入 Facebook,创建了 New Product Experimentation 团队,其使命是在大组织之外孵化重大的新想法。
Noam 拥有非常独特的经历——将产品从 0 做到 1、从 -1 做到 1、从 1 做到 100,甚至创办过自己的公司。他以前几乎没上过播客,也很少发推文或在网上发布任何内容,这一点我们后面也会聊到。在这次对话中,我们梳理了他在 YouTube、Facebook、Thumbtack 和 Grammarly 的精彩职业生涯中积累的经验教训。我们谈到在公司里什么时候应该砍掉项目、什么时候应该主动要求被管理层覆盖(layered)、为什么你需要留心哪些产品对业务最重要并找到那些产品、为什么需要多元化增长渠道、为什么应该寻找最能拓展自己能力的工作来推动职业发展,还有大量关于在大公司中为创新创造空间的建议,以及更多内容。Noam 真是一块瑰宝,我非常兴奋能把他的智慧分享给大家。
如果你喜欢这档播客,别忘了在你常用的播客应用或 YouTube 上订阅和关注。这是避免错过后续节目的最好方式,也对播客帮助极大。话不多说,短暂广告之后,我为你带来 Noam Lovinsky。
(广告段落已跳过)
为什么不在线上发声
Lenny: Noam,非常感谢你的到来,欢迎来到播客。
Noam Lovinsky: 谢谢邀请我,Lenny。
Lenny: 这是我的荣幸。我从很多人那里听到了关于你的好评。我想你和这档播客的很多嘉宾都是朋友。关于你,我觉得非常有趣也非常敬佩的一点是——你在那么多优秀的公司工作过,职业生涯中做了那么多大事,但你几乎从不发推文。你没有写 newsletter。我在 LinkedIn 上也看不到你发什么内容。我想你甚至从没上过播客。我能找到你存在的唯一证据就是一个 YouTube 频道,上面全是你开卡丁车、带孩子、别人祝你生日快乐之类的视频。
Noam Lovinsky: 天啊,我应该去看看那个频道。我都忘了。
Lenny: 你可能现在就想去找找看。
Noam Lovinsky: 哈哈,确实好笑。嗯,这事我经常想——我是不是做错了什么?我是不是应该在这方面多花些精力?你提到 newsletter 其实挺有意思的。我和 Substack 团队相处的时间很多,一直在那里做非常活跃的顾问。顺便说一句,那个团队非常棒。我也会想,我不做这些是不是对我的职业发展不利?但说实话,这对我来说不够真实、不够自然。我会非常专注于手头的事情,深深地投入其中,说实话,我很难在这之外同时处理太多事情。我了解行业、了解其他团队的方式,就是通过和人们一起工作。
我不是一个很擅长社交的人。不是说社交有什么不好,我也希望自己更擅长一些。我通过和人们一起做事、帮助他们来认识人。这种方式不像 Twitter 那样可以规模化,但到目前为止对我很有效,而且更真实,也更符合我的本性。所以我就这么做。我会喝很多咖啡、通过这种方式认识人,但不会发很多推文或写 newsletter。也许有一天会,但现在的我不是这样的。
Lenny: 所以我觉得这是一个极好的例子,说明你完全可以不花时间在网上发帖,照样成为一名极其成功的产品经理——或者说科技行业中的任何人。我要来自我揭短一下:我总觉得我跟人分享的建议是,最优秀的人不会花时间在 Twitter 上发言、在网上聊天、在 LinkedIn 上分享。他们就是在埋头做事,没时间搞那些。我觉得你就是一个很好的例证。关于这一点,你有没有什么类似的建议分享给那些在问”我是不是应该在这方面花时间”的人?
走自己的路
Noam Lovinsky: 我觉得每个人都可以走出自己的路,找到一种忠于自我、发挥自身优势的方式。我经常给人们的建议是:做你喜欢的事。那些真正让你充实、让你兴奋的事情,你通常会做得好得多。人生短暂,世上有太多事情可以做。我们非常幸运——我经历过的那些技术浪潮让我觉得,这样的浪潮还会持续很久。我们能出生在当下的时代、拥有这些机会,是非常幸运的。所以为什么要把自己时间花在那些感觉不对的事情上,仅仅因为你觉得那可能通向某种成功呢?而如果你依靠那些真正属于你的、让你快乐的事,你很可能成为那个领域里最出色的人之一。
Lenny: 我很喜欢这个建议,我觉得它真的很重要。我觉得人们也面临很大的压力,“我需要做这个,我需要做那个。”
Noam Lovinsky: 完全同意。
Lenny: “我需要发推文,我需要分享内容才能成功。“这个话题在播客里经常出现——越是能够贴近那些给你能量、让你享受的事情,往往越能带来意想不到的收获和很多成功。
职业经历概览
说到这里,回顾你的职业轨迹,我注意到了一个非常有趣的模式,以及一组非常多元的经历。我们来聊聊你待过的地方:在 Facebook,你做的是从 0 到 1 的事情。在 YouTube,我看来你几乎是从 -1 到 1。在 Thumbtack,看起来你是从 1 到 -1,然后再回到 1,这是一个非常独特的扭亏为盈的故事。而在 Grammarly,感觉像是从 1 或者从 5 到 100,或者不管你最终把它带到哪里。所以我觉得逐一聊这些经历会很有意思,因为它们都是如此独特的经历,看看从你的旅程中我们能提炼出什么经验和智慧。
Noam Lovinsky: 听起来很棒。
Lenny: 好。我想按时间倒序来,从 YouTube 开始。我看来它是从 -1 到 1——你加入的时候,我的理解是 YouTube 在大量亏损;你离开的时候,他们已经不亏了。我刚才还查了一下,据说 YouTube 作为一项业务目前估值 2000 亿美元。我知道你已经离开一段时间了,但干得漂亮。你从那段经历中学到了什么?你职业生涯的那部分有什么故事可能对大家有帮助?
YouTube 经历
Noam Lovinsky: 也许首先聊聊为什么要在这些不同的经历之间跳来跳去。我经常跟人说,我觉得自己有时就像一个困在管理者身体里的 IC(Individual Contributor,独立贡献者)。从根本上说,我喜欢创造,这就是我做这行的原因。我喜欢做东西。所以有时候,创造东西更有趣的方式是自己从零开始;而在某些情境下,更好的方式是去支持团队、通过团队来领导。
我加入 YouTube 是通过我创办的一家公司被收购的方式。最初我在那里做的就是把我们原来的产品在 Google 的基础设施上重新构建,服务于 YouTube 的用户。也许第一个教训其实是:去环顾团队其他人在做什么,对你正在做的事情的相对优先级保持真正的诚实和开放,哪怕这可能导致你的项目被砍掉。
我记得很早做的一件事,就是去找领导团队说,“我觉得我们不应该在这个项目上放 50 个工程师。看看整体路线图和其他优先事项,我觉得这个团队放在别的地方可能会发挥更大的作用。“尽管这在第三个月就等于是在把自己的工作谈没了,但我觉得那对团队、对业务来说才是正确的事。
然后这就开启了一段非常有意思的旅程,因为领导层基本上说,“你说得对。我们会把这个项目收掉,把其中一些功能整合到现有产品里。现在你来领导这个重点方向,我们叫它创作者重点方向。“于是我基本上从重建我们初创公司的产品,变成了领导 YouTube 三个重点方向之一。三个方向分别是:观众团队、创作者团队和广告主团队。Hunter Walk 负责观众团队,他非常厉害;Shishir Mehrotra 负责广告团队,也非常厉害。
Lenny: 这是什么级别的校友圈啊。
Noam Lovinsky: 然后就是我。当时大概就是一个 29 岁的创业型小青年,跟这些非常厉害的人一起工作。YouTube 整体上,现在依然如此,是一支令人难以置信的团队。所以我觉得这是第一个很好的教训:在正确的组织中,即使在大型组织里,也要为对团队最好的事情发声,为对组织最好的事情发声,哪怕那会让你陷入某个艰难的境地。如果这是一个健康的团队、会奖励这类决定和行动,好事就会发生。如果不是,那也是好事——你能早点知道这一点。这是浮现在脑海中的一件事。
非典型的职业选择
之后不久,我还做了一个我觉得比较非典型的职业选择。当我被放到那个角色后,我在那个角色里真的很挣扎。我当时汇报给当时的 CEO,一个叫 Salar Kamangar 的人,他也非常厉害,Google 的第 6 号员工,我从他那里学到了很多东西,是一个极其出色的战略思考者。但他问我的问题,我感觉像是来自另一个星球的。我完全不知道那些问题是什么意思,他的思维方式就是不一样,不在一个层级或一个尺度上,而那也是我一直在学习的东西。最终我搞明白了,但当时我真的很挣扎。我和 Hunter、Shishir 的关系都很好,他们帮了我很多。最终,我找到 Salar 说,“嘿,我觉得我应该汇报给 Hunter。如果我们把组织这样整合一下,然后这样分头推进,效果会更好。”
再说一次,这非常非典型——在我的职业生涯中,从来没有人来找我说,“我想让你把我被管理层覆盖到你手下。“但在那一刻我就是觉得,“这样我才能做得更好。这样我能得到更好的支持,我会更开心、更高效,对团队也更好。“你知道吗?对我来说,我是对的。我们做了那个调整。Hunter 在 YouTube 是一位非常出色的管理者和支持者。我学到了很多,成长了很多。后来当他离开时,Shishir 接管了整个组织,然后我转到了观众这边,这也是我在 YouTube 剩余时间所做的——领导和支持 YouTube 的观众产品经理团队。
Lenny: 这些故事太精彩了。这让我想到你之前说的,我觉得你内心住着一个小孩——你一直在试图不小心毁掉自己的职业生涯。“来,把我正在做的项目砍了吧。我要给自己降一级。“但很显然,这一切都奏效了。你有没有看到什么让你确信”其实这样没问题的”?因为毕竟人们通常不会觉得,砍掉自己的团队、让自己被管理层覆盖,是职业发展中往上走的路径。
Noam Lovinsky: 是的,我的意思是,我觉得拥有对公司战略更全局的视角,对”我们应该做什么、为什么做、如果有机会我会如何排定这些投资的优先级”有一种直觉,把这些内化、理解清楚,然后努力让处于你影响力范围内的一切都朝着那个总体目标对齐——这非常有帮助,也让我觉得,“我相当确信这样做没问题,因为考虑到我们想要做的事情,这会给组织带来更好的结果。所以只要我在推动那些确实能带来更好结果的决策或行动,如果这是一个健康的文化和组织,我应该不会有事。”
另外一个原因是,这么多年下来,我确实非常幸运。我毕业后的第一份工作就遇到了一群非常出色的人,这让我培养了对人才的嗅觉,让我知道”卓越”是什么感觉,一个高效运转的团队是什么感觉。没有亲身体验过是很难知道的。而在关键时刻,YouTube 也是这样的团队之一,Grammarly 是,Thumbtack 也是。当你在选择下一个团队时,能够嗅出这种特质非常重要。但我觉得这也是另一件给了我信心的事情。我对这些人足够了解——Hunter、Shishir 等等——以至于我有一种直觉,正确的事情终会发生,这样做对我和更广泛的团队都更好。
Lenny: 明白了。所以关键在于你要相信身边的团队足够优秀,你不会被挤到角落里。我觉得你在这里提出了一个非常深刻的观点,很多人没有意识到产品负责人和产品经理的工作本质——你工作的很大一部分是思考什么对业务最好,然后从那里倒推。不一定是什么对用户最好就最高优先,不一定是什么对我的团队最好、我如何达成我执念中的目标。而是什么对整体业务最有利,然后在此基础上做决策。关于这种思维方式在产品经理做优先级排序和决策时有多大的威力,你还能再多说一些吗?
双边市场中的优先级原则
Noam Lovinsky: 好问题。我的意思是,理想情况下,对客户最好的事情与对业务最好的事情之间有很高的重叠度,但并不总是如此,对吧?我觉得确立一些原则来帮助引导这类冲突,会非常有帮助。在 Thumbtack,我们有关于市场双边要以什么顺序来服务的原则——什么时候我们优先服务 Thumbtack 平台自身。顺序是:客户第一,服务方(pros)第二,Thumbtack 平台自身最后。前两条先不说……说”Thumbtack 最后”很容易,但在实际行动中做到完全是另一回事。但第一个问题,比如我们是否应该……特别是当你开始做一个双边市场的时候,正如你很清楚的,Lenny,供给端至关重要。许多市场平台的生死取决于供给端的质量、流动性和供应量。那为什么要优先关注客户呢?而从 Thumbtack 的角度,供给端就是那些 pros——也就是你平台上那些专业服务提供者。
因为我们一直觉得,服务方需要我们从这里得到的是更多的客户。服务方需要我们从这里得到的是高质量的客户。所以如果我们真正努力打造一个出色的客户体验,吸引更多客户,帮助他们找到合适的服务方,提供最高质量的客户,那么自然会对服务方更好。这就是我们应该排优先级的方式。如果我们把这些事情做好了,业务就会受益,对吧?所以,做一些比如涨价的事情——仅仅因为我们觉得对业务好——即使这会导致市场流动性问题,这可能只是一种局部最优(local maxima),是局部优化而非全局优化。所以我觉得在面对这类问题时,尝试建立一套指导原则来帮助你应对那些更模糊或更棘手的问题,会非常有帮助。
什么时候该放弃一个项目
Lenny: 我想回到你最初提到的那一点,你说服大家你的第一个项目不应该继续做的经历。一件事你不顺利的时候会坚持多久,然后才决定”好吧,让大家相信我应该从这个项目上转走”?毕竟你也不想太快放弃一个项目,你想给它一个机会。
Noam Lovinsky: 我的意思是,我不知道是否有一个完美的答案,但我觉得现实就是,大多数项目、大多数早期公司失败的原因是耐力。我觉得我们都需要锻炼更强的韧性。我记得在 Thumbtack,CEO Marco,我们常说感觉就像在跑上坡路、嚼碎玻璃——你就是那种,“没错,我们就是要这样做。这对我们有好处。把苦药吃下去。“你想培养那种韧性。但最终,我认为会发生的是你的耐力开始耗尽,你无法再以最好的状态投入。
而这些事情中有太多是高度模糊的——你不确定到底要做什么,你得不到你需要的信号或反馈来帮你校准方向、确认你在做正确的事情。它们需要一种匪夷所思程度的信念和耐力。所以这就是我会关注的。当你看到一个团队充满动力,正在构建他们真正兴奋的东西时——光是那种惯性、那种质量,完全是另一个层面的体验。而当你看到一个团队士气低落、长期碰壁的时候,有时候他们只是需要换个场景、换个节奏,就能走到一个更好的境地。所以我坦诚的回答是,你什么时候”油尽灯枯”,通常就是那个时刻。我觉得在创业公司的情境下,这往往发生在资金耗尽或其他问题出现之前。
在 Thumbtack 的经历
Lenny: 我们已经提到好几次 Thumbtack 了,那就聊聊它吧。我很喜欢那个”跑上坡路、嚼碎玻璃”的描述。我的理解是,你加入的时候情况还不错,然后情况开始变得不太好了,然后你帮忙扭转了局面。聊聊你那段经历以及你从中学到了什么。
Noam Lovinsky: 好的。同样,非常出色的团队,非常强的创始人。那家公司在 SEO 以及通过 SEO 增长方面确实走在了最前沿。它是在通过那个渠道驱动增长方面最优秀的组织之一。但我很早就学到了一个东西,Lenny 以你的背景你应该也很清楚——SEO 是一种”成也萧何,败也萧何”的增长渠道。我觉得单一渠道增长的公司始终是一个禁忌。我们在 Thumbtack 就多少有些这样的情况。
这挺有意思的,因为我记得刚加入的时候,Marco 和我达成了一个共识:“好,我先用三个月时间进行入职学习,了解团队,接手新团队的领导者。“我一直听到的建议就是应该这样做。而 Marco 作为一个创业者、一个雷厉风行的创始人,说:“嗯嗯嗯,当然当然。“结果一个月后就变成了:“好了,我们得启动年度规划了,上吧。“——不好意思,当时还不是 2024 年。总之,我刚到的那段早期,Thumbtack 还在经历三位数的增长。后来我们遭遇了几次 SEO 打击,增长降到了两位数。再之后不久,公司历史上第一次出现了同比负增长——Google 对我们这个品类进行了严厉打击。与此同时,我们还在试图彻底重建整个产品、改变商业化模式,以及处理一大堆其他事情。
所以那真的是一个非常艰难的时刻——在搭建新模式的同时,还要花多少精力去加固旧模式?真的是在飞机飞行过程中更换发动机。我记得有一次董事会会议上,当我们最终扭转了局面,而且新模式也开始展现出生命力、真正跑通的时候,红杉的董事会成员 Brian Schreier 说,那是他见过的最漂亮的微笑曲线。那显然是一个非常自豪的时刻。
增长掩盖一切问题
但我从中学到的一点——我也经常跟产品经理们讲——就是增长会掩盖所有问题。当增长非常迅猛的时候,你其实很难真正理解哪些东西做得好、哪些做得不好。YouTube 就是一个很好的例子。在 Thumbtack,它在相当长一段时间内增长惊人,但实质上是在大量浪费需求——很多需求直接被丢在了地上,因为供给侧没有足够的流动性来承接这些需求。团队知道这个问题,也在试图解决,但这并不那么紧迫或高优先级,因为你的增长是三位数的。有什么问题吗?一切都很好,对吧?
而一旦增长开始放缓,尤其是当增长变成负数的时候,整个组织的氛围会突然发生真正的变化,你开始用完全不同的眼光看待事情,试图搞清楚到底发生了什么。所以我认为,对于企业在成长为一个长期可持续的业务的过程中,经历那样的时刻其实是件很健康的事,因为否则你真的很难识别真正的问题出在哪里。而且我觉得作为产品经理,如果你只做过增长的项目,从未感受过另一面——不知道如何与团队一起扭转局面——我觉得你的职业生涯会缺少一些重要的东西。
我骨子里算是比较偏焦虑的那种人。特别是当我管理增长的时候,我经常审视各种事情并问自己:“如果现在变成负增长了,我该怎么办?如果增长变成负的,我会怎么排优先级?“经历过那次体验之后,我看待事情的紧迫感不一样了。我排优先级的层级也不一样了,因为有过那样的经历。
扭转局面的具体做法
Lenny: 关于 Thumbtack 的故事,我觉得一个企业能走出你所描述的微笑曲线——那位董事会成员说这是他见过的最漂亮的微笑曲线——我觉得这种情况其实很罕见。通常情况下,它是回不来的。你能分享一下你们做了什么来帮助 Thumbtack 扭转局面吗?我知道这在很大程度上是 Thumbtack 这个业务特有的,但有什么是对其他人有用的吗?
Noam Lovinsky: 好的。首先要说明,这完全是团队的功劳,不只是我做了什么。第一步是开启多个增长渠道。在那之前,Thumbtack 尝试过付费渠道、推荐等有机渠道等所有常见的做法,但都停掉了。所以我们回到第一性原理,重新梳理了很多东西,也重新组建了团队,基本上把一支非常强的团队聚到了一起。其中一位是 Whitney Steele,她现在在 Descript 负责市场。另一位是 David Schein,他现在在 HIMSS 负责产品。基本上我对那些增长渠道重新回到第一性原理,一边实验一边向好得多的结果迈进。
我认为我们在 Thumbtack 做错的一件事是——Thumbtack 实际上是一个由成千上万个市场组成的市场平台,对吧?费城的 DJ 是一个市场,亚特兰大的 DJ 是另一个市场,索诺玛的承包商又是一个市场。而 Thumbtack 显然是所有这些市场的容器。我觉得我们在目标定位和增长策略上拆分得太细碎了,假设必须一个市场一个市场地去增长,而不是更广泛地去定位,向 Google 等平台提供更聚合的数据,然后从那个层面进行优化。而事实上我们已经在 SEO 方面有了很好的表现和深厚的积累,这帮助了我们支撑 SEM,后来也包括 Facebook 渠道。
核心产品体验问题
这些都是增长方面的杠杆,但 Thumbtack 产品的核心问题在于,它是一个摩擦极高的客户体验,真的让客户干等。Thumbtack 的运作方式基本上是这样的:客户通过搜索查询找到他们,进来后回答一系列关于他们需要完成的工作的问题,然后 Thumbtack 会说:“好的,我们会在 24 小时内回复您。“而这是一个现代的体验,对吧?
然后 Thumbtack 会把那个工作需求分发给尽可能多的、可能符合条件的 pros,然后 pros 需要付费报价才能作为该工作的潜在服务方出现。我不想否定那个团队,因为那种模式在很长一段时间内运作得非常出色。实际上它是一个完美的案例研究——“就做那个粗糙但有效的、能带来增长的事情。“他们做得非常好,但我加入时那个业务的阶段和规模已经超出了那个模式的适用范围。团队也清楚这一点。那显然是一个摩擦极高的体验——客户非常兴奋,想雇人,而在那个时刻你却说:“好的,回头聊。“——这不是最好的体验。
而且你的供给端需要掏钱才能出现在客户面前,但客户想看到的就是供给端——“告诉我能雇谁。“这对供给端来说也是很大的摩擦,在某些情况下对他们来说也是不公平的收入——因为如果服务方付费被展示,也许被看到了,但客户并没有很高的意向,那他们就得不到想要的客户,花钱出去却赚不回来。这显然就变成了一个恶性循环。
重建核心循环与即时报价
所以我们做的最主要的事情就是重建了整个循环,改变变现模型,构建了一个让 pros 可以提供即时报价的系统。Lenny,你在 Airbnb 肯定对这非常熟悉——从”请求预订”到”即时预订”的转变。显然这是在不同类型的服务和供给场景下,但本质上是非常相似的事情。而做出这个转变——在数千个本地市场中间完成这个转变,然后找到合适的变现摩擦点,何时收费、收什么费,所有这些变化——这才是真正从根本上扭转 Thumbtack 增长引擎的关键。这充分证明了那些创始人们相信这一点、看清了这一点,并且愿意忍受痛苦、嚼碎玻璃走到那一步。我已经不清楚那门生意的细节了。就算清楚,我也不方便谈。但从我听说的情况来看,发展得不错,所以我认为那次转型对公司起到了很好的作用。
Lenny: 你说的时候我就在想,那完全就是 Airbnb 经历过的事情。实际上我在 Airbnb 主导了那项工作,花了三年时间。
Noam Lovinsky: 天哪,我们哪天一定要聊聊这个。
Lenny: 是的,我零零散散写过一些,但说实话,那是 Airbnb 经历的最重大变革之一,虽然非常低调——从”我要去请求预订”转变到现在 Airbnb 上基本上所有预订都是即时的。那是一段非常艰难痛苦的过程。但回头看,我觉得如果没做那次转型,Airbnb 可能撑不到今天。和 Thumbtack 不同的是,我们在事情开始崩塌之前就做了这件事。实际上,我想说的是我们当时用的一个思考框架,我觉得在这里也很有用——你应该问自己:“如果有人要进入我们的领域颠覆我们,从现在开始成为新的 Airbnb,他们会怎么做?”
Noam Lovinsky: 完全同意。
Lenny: 答案显而易见——做成即时的,就应该是那样的运作方式。“欢迎来到颠覆版 Airbnb。“所以,是的。
Noam Lovinsky: 另一个学到的经验是,任何同时涉及比特和原子的产品,都比只涉及比特的产品难上指数级。但令人惊叹的是,像”做成即时”这样看似简单的事情,到头来却如此深入和复杂。特别是在一个已有的业务上,在还要保持增长的同时做这种转型,真的非常非常复杂。我相信你也有同样的深刻体会。
Lenny: 改变用户的期望和行为是非常困难的。就”把市场平台转变为即时体验”这个话题本身,都可以单独做一期播客了。
不要过度依赖单一增长渠道
我想快速回过头聊聊你提到的第一个教训——增加新渠道。我觉得这是一个非常有意思的要点。本质上 Thumbtack 过度依赖 SEO,而 Google——如你所描述的那把双刃剑——开始改变规则,流量就不再来了。我觉得一个很有价值的教训是,如果你依赖单一增长渠道——我认为大多数公司实际上都是这样的,大多数公司都有一个主要驱动力——那么教训就是,在事情开始崩塌之前,尤其是如果你的业务是 SEO 驱动的,就要开始务实地探索付费渠道、推荐等更多元的方式。
Noam Lovinsky: 完全同意。我觉得也许,再一次,这是因为亲身经历过那种处境。现在每次我看一个产品或一个团队,这是最先引起我警觉的事情之一——“哦不,你可不想落到那种境地。我们现在就想办法开始做渠道多元化,因为你永远不知道其中一个渠道什么时候会枯竭。”
(以下为广告内容,已跳过)
Lenny: 在 Thumbtack 的经历中,还有没有其他突出的经验教训或收获,是你带到现在的工作中的?
领导团队与产品战略
Noam Lovinsky: 我想说的是,尤其是在领导层这个级别——向 CEO 汇报的那个团队——这个群体并不总是有很多机会一起做项目,对吧?你有 CFO,有销售负责人,有产品和工程负责人。这个群体天然能一起协作的场景本身就不多。然而当增长变成负数这种事情发生时,这个群体就变得极其重要,他们一起攻克难题的能力就变得极其重要。我认为一个重要的教训是,在产品战略上,没有人可以袖手旁观。不能因为你的头衔里有”产品”两个字,就意味着你是唯一应该思考产品战略的人,在那个层级上肯定不是,在工程方面也肯定不是。
CFO、人力负责人,每个人都需要在产品战略的讨论桌上有一席之地——了解公司在做什么、要做什么来走出当前的困境。因为否则的话,在那些艰难时刻,很容易演变成一种”你最近为我做了什么?“的动态,而在那个团队里,这不是正确的相处方式。我不是说在 Thumbtack 我们有完美的动态,但我认为那是一个非常重要的学习——那个团队,即使他们平时不怎么参与产品战略和我们在构建什么这类事情,但在那个时刻,所有人都必须全力以赴,真正去思考那些问题,因为我认为这是唯一能让整个公司和团队走出那种困境的方式——每个人都参与进来,各司其职,在各自的领域拉动自己能拉动的杠杆。我不认为还有其他方式能行得通。
Lenny: 所以这里的教训是——在事情开始出问题之前,就要先和领导团队建立起关系。
Noam Lovinsky: 是的,当然是这样。但我认为,身处我们这类角色以及工程角色的人,也有责任把战略带到那个讨论桌上,带到那个团队中去,而且要以一种所有人都能参与、都能消化理解、都能明白这对各自的领域意味着什么的方式呈现,同时显然也要让他们有发言权——因为他们归根结底是领导团队的成员。他们应该感觉到公司战略上也有自己的印记。一旦开始出现”那是他们的世界,这是我们的世界”这种割裂感,就出问题了。我认为这对任何职能部门都是如此。销售那边发生的事是这样,营销那边发生的事也是这样。作为产品经理,我们天然需要成为连接所有这些的纽带,但我认为整个领导团队在那个层级上都应该觉得自己是连接所有职能的纽带。
Facebook 的新产品实验团队
Lenny: 好。我们转到 Facebook 的话题吧。我认为这是一个从 0 到 1 的例子。你在 Facebook 时,组建了所谓的 新产品实验团队。我之前一直以为叫 New Product Experiment Experience team,但应该是 新产品实验团队。我的理解是,这个想法的初衷是——与其让 Facebook 去收购下一个 Instagram、WhatsApp 之类的,不如在 Facebook 内部孵化创业公司,采用类似”创业工作室”(studio)的概念——一个创业公司里面的创业公司,在这个大创业公司里再创建一堆小创业公司。作为旁观者,我的感觉是一开始确实很有趣,但并没有为 Facebook 孕育出什么了不起的新业务。如果我说的不对请纠正我。我很好奇那段经历是什么样的,你从中收获了什么,进展如何,回首那段旅程你又是怎么看待的。
Noam Lovinsky: 我是最早加入那个团队、帮助建设那个团队的少数几个人之一。它最终的结果如何、怎么关闭的,我并不了解,因为那时我已经不在了。但我觉得,仅仅因为它没有做出下一个 Instagram 就来判断它成功与否,这个标准设得有点不太对。在某种程度上,这就像——“这个团队中彩票了吗?让我们据此来评判他们的成功与否。” 显然我不是说发现像 Instagram 这样的东西纯粹是中彩票,但你应该能理解我的意思——那种程度的发现和产品的稀缺性。
我认为那个团队对于什么是我所说的”香槟级别”的成果,什么是更接近”喝杯小酒、吃顿好饭”级别的成果,有着非常现实的认识。
Lenny: 品葡萄酒。
Noam Lovinsky: 对,葡萄酒。谢谢,这个比喻更好。我们在构建时就清楚,那些级别的成果对组织也会非常有价值。举个例子,在 Facebook 的规模下,做”不追求规模的事”或者从很小做起——这种能力是非常稀缺的。任何社区产品,任何社交类产品,早期社区密度都很关键——以一百万用户作为起点去做这类产品是非常困难的方式。在 Facebook 和 Google 这样的地方,用一百个人跑一个实验——不是难,是不可能。所以你必须真正缩小范围,必须从非常精准的目标切入,必须从那些明显不具备扩展性、从一开始就没有机会做大的事情起步——在这样的组织里,这真的非常、非常难。
所以为 NPE 创造这样一个空间,让它能够做到这些,能够帮助组织重新记住我们需要哪些机制来以这种方式构建和学习——这本身就非常有价值。甚至是一些简单的事情。在 Facebook 这种规模的组织里——也许在 Airbnb 的经历也是如此——产品经理、工程师和设计师直接与客户交谈是非常困难的,基本上不可能。你几乎总是通过某个第三方、某个招募中介来沟通,拿到一些报告,而你并不总是在现场。想象一下,从第一天起做一个创业产品,却不能坐在客户旁边说”给我看看你是怎么做的”——这极其困难。你在寻找的是那么微弱的信号。
你要通过层层间接和传话游戏去捕捉这些信号——这听起来很荒唐,但在那样的规模下,这就是你不得不做的,因为有各种法律顾虑,还有许多其他现实的顾虑——你能对谁说什么、你能跟谁谈话、你能告诉他们你在做什么,诸如此类。所以创造一个环境,让这些约束被解除或变得不同,我认为对组织非常有价值,也开始照亮了一些在大公司环境下做 0 到 1 时那些被破坏的东西。
我还认为 NPE 是一个非常出色的招聘工具。它确实聚集了一批非常优秀的人,其中很多人后来离开去创办了有趣的公司。但我想说的是,当你作为组织领导者——当时支持 NPE 的组织领导是 Schrep(Mike Schroepfer),他非常出色,在为那个团队建立防火墙方面做得很好——你会看到一组目标和多种可以帮助公司及组织的方式。即使你把”去找到下一个 Instagram”作为那个远大的灯塔目标,你在追寻下一个 Instagram 的过程中所做的很多事情,最终对更广泛的组织也非常有益。我们在 NPE 中看到了很多这样的例子。
Lenny: 这是一个非常有意思的视角。这种团队还有很多其他目标,不仅仅是找到下一个巨型业务。我从你说的中感受到的是——几乎像是在组织面前放一面镜子,“这些是我们用常规业务做不到的事情,我们必须做点什么,必须设立这样一个团队来尝试全新、激进的东西”。以及”招聘工具”——我觉得这一点也很有意思。
在 Airbnb 其实也有一个团队,我当时的描述是——我不知道有多少人了解 Burning Man 是怎么运作的——它周围有一道垃圾围栏,把所有垃圾拦住不让它们飘到沙漠里去。我觉得有时候公司里也有那种充当”垃圾围栏”的团队。
Noam Lovinsky: 哈哈,有意思。
Lenny: 就是有人快要走的时候,他们说”别走,去那边边缘地带做那些很酷的事吧”——这真的很有意思。但这种团队可以在公司内部培养这种精神,也许还能帮助留人。就是把那些很厉害的人留在 Meta。
Noam Lovinsky: 是的。你说得对,这个团队确实没有发现下一个 Instagram。但值得一提的是,像 Threads 这样的东西以及类似 Threads 的想法,在那个团队里一直都有。我觉得如果那个团队抓住了生成式 AI 的浪潮以及其中所有的机遇和新技术,事情可能也会……因为某些时刻,拥有小型、高度投入、专注的团队——他们不考虑任何主线产品——可以带来更快的发现,这也能有所帮助。而且确实有不少东西最终变成了其他产品中的功能,它们只是因为不受主线产品开发组织约束,所以能以更简单、更快速的方式去验证和构建。
内部创业的建议
Lenny: 对于那些想在现有公司内部尝试创建创业项目的人——这也是很多大公司正在努力做的事——你有什么建议吗?怎样才能让它真正有效?也许其中一点是,目标不一定非要是打造下一个大业务,还有一些子目标。你想到什么?
Noam Lovinsky: 天哪,太多了。Schrep 在消除很多约束方面做得非常出色。所以第一点,我觉得要非常认真地思考激励体系。聪明、优秀的人,即便不是故意的,最终也会不自觉地向激励体系靠拢。所以要深思熟虑。比如,如果你是一个大型组织,每年做两次绩效评估,然后用这种方式来评估和激励你 0 到 1 孵化器里的人,那这事基本就废了。激励不对,时间框架不对,还会导致逆向选择,影响你招进来的那类人。但在一个现有组织里说”我们要把公司所有的流程——甚至包括定级、薪酬、激励——都扔掉,对这个团队全都不适用”,这确实很难。
基础设施怎么搭建,这也是 NPE 团队做得非常好的一点。每个人都可以从基础设施的角度做自己的事。就按你当前要解决的问题,选最合适的方案去做,因为反正你大概率会把很多代码扔掉。在一个像 Facebook 或 Google 这样的组织里能这样做,你问任何做过这些事的人,都知道有多难。得有一个像 Schrep 这样的人站出来说,“不行,他们就是要这样做,抱歉。“我觉得这一点非常有帮助。
值得一提的是,我们交流过的组织中,我觉得做得最好的之一是耐克(Nike)。耐克有一个孵化实验室,完全是不同的运营模式。他们招募完全不同类型的人,激励体系也非常不同。基本上,当这些项目产出成果时,耐克会把它对接到自己的分发、营销和增长体系中。但在产品发现的过程中,他们完全是一套独立的玩法。一旦找到某种产品市场匹配,耐克就会介入,说”砰,我来帮你把这个匹配放大。“但我觉得最重要的一点,还是激励体系,以及它可能造成的逆向选择。
Lenny: 在我看来,激励体系中最关键的要素——也许我在字里行间读出了你的意思——就是你本质上是在和”他们自己出去创业”这个选项竞争。如果事情进展得非常好,他们要有真正的上升空间,这感觉非常重要。相比之下,“我在 Meta 拿一份不错的薪水,做做这个东西”,这种体验和创业完全不一样——创业是一切都在赌上的。
Noam Lovinsky: 对,还有时间视野的问题。当你创业的时候,你不会想”接下来六个月我要升职,我要拿到好绩效,一切都会顺利”。你思考的是完全不同的时间视野,你想的是超额回报、超额激励。所以如果你要在内部做这种事,也要考虑这一点。
Grammarly
Lenny: 太好了。好,让我们进入最后一个板块,Grammarly,也就是你现在所在的地方。我的理解是,这有点像一架已经起飞的火箭——我不知道该怎么量化,也许是十级?它比一级要成熟得多,但这是你现在的位置。Grammarly 让我觉得很有意思,因为它是极少数成功的 B2C 订阅业务之一。几乎没几个。Duolingo、Grammarly。我知道你们也在做 B2B,但真的太少了。有太多想在消费者订阅模式上建立业务的阵亡者。所以我很好奇,Grammarly 现在的状况如何?发展得怎么样?你觉得它这么多年来一直成功并持续增长的关键是什么?你学到了什么经验?我知道你刚加入不久,但到目前为止这段旅程中有什么体会?
Noam Lovinsky: 我们不常说这个,但从收入角度来看,Grammarly 是一家比人们想象的要大得多的公司。这家公司已经成立了 15 年,从第一天起就盈利了,而且一直保持着相当可观的利润率。所以这是一个非常非常健康的业务,规模比大家意识到的要大得多。而这其实是刻意为之的,因为公司长期以来一直有意地保持低调。你在 Google Docs 里有语法和拼写检查,在 Word 里也有语法和拼写检查。人们经常会不以为然地说,“这怎么是一门生意?这不就是一个功能吗?这些产品已经有了。“这对 Grammarly 来说反而很方便,因为它可以在这科技巨头之间穿行,在一个被人们看不上眼的用例上,成长为一个非常出色的业务。
现在,随着 LLM 的到来,这不再是一个被人看不上眼的用例了。创始人们 15 年来一直怀揣的让机器以这种方式辅助我们沟通的梦想,我觉得现在整个行业都在说,“嗯,这显然就是我们未来的沟通方式,机器会替我们做所有这些事情。“而 Grammarly 现在就处在这场风暴的中心。同样地,我觉得情况类似——“有 ChatGPT,有 Microsoft Copilot,Grammarly 怎么竞争?“但事情的发展似乎仍然表明,未来是光明的。
回到你的问题,我觉得是什么让它成功的——我只来了 10 个月,所以请对我说的打个折扣——但我的直觉是,人们之所以真的喜欢 Grammarly,是因为它的工作方式和它在哪工作。所谓工作方式,是指 Grammarly 是极少数你装上之后就能让你变得更好的产品之一。你不需要配置它,不需要操控它,不需要改变你正在做的任何事情。你照常工作,在所有的应用、所有的标签页里,你都会在恰当的时刻收到辅助提示。你可以忽略它,没关系,但只需要很少很少的力气,点一下其中一个建议,就能获得价值,然后继续。
一个产品如果能这么容易使用、这么容易获得价值,同时又如此无处不在——你一天会在多少个文本框里写字?不少于 10 个,是几十个甚至上百个,对吧?所以它无处不在,而从中获取真正价值的门槛极低。然后说到”在哪工作”,就像我说的,你不需要改变你的工作流程。Grammarly 在你所在的地方出现,你就能从中获得价值。在这个质量水平上、面向这样规模的用户群,把这些做到极致——本质上,这就像是一个巨大的 AI 成就,伪装成一个小小的 UX 创新。但那种把 AI 带给大众的体验和 UX,显然为 Grammarly 带来了极大的成功。我认为这些优势是我们接下来会继续依托的,在技术发展到今天这个地步,我们可以提供一种非常不同的辅助和价值。
精打细算的创业基因
Lenny: 关于 Grammarly 我还听到很多的一点——Yuri 也上过这个播客,他在 Grammarly 很长一段时间负责增长——就是这家公司从一开始就非常精打细算,创始人也是如此,他们从一开始就盈利了。这似乎贯穿了所有成功的消费者订阅公司的一条线索:超级精打细算,很长时间不融资。在这个方面,你有没有发现什么真正有趣的、对其他可能在这个领域创业的人有帮助的东西?
Noam Lovinsky: 当你的团队是从乌克兰起步的,你根本没想过自己有机会融到钱,为什么要那么做呢——这真的……回到我们之前聊的,当增长变成负数时会发生什么,它真的逼着你把注意力放在最重要的事情上。所以,很多还在公司的早期工程师——因为公司这些年来发展得非常好——他们的思维方式是,“我做的这些工作怎么转化成收入?“即使在做非常深层的技术工作时,他们也会思考对业务的影响,因为我觉得他们是在这样一种文化中成长起来的:业务不会在盈利能力之前进行超前投资,因为它从第一天起就是一家自力更生的公司。这就迫使每个人去思考自己的项目、自己的优先级,以及未来两个月做的事情如何真正转化为更多收入、让公司持续增长。所以我觉得这种文化很普遍,也帮助 Grammarly 走到了今天。
不过,我想坦诚地说,在像今天这样的时刻,这也可能成为一种不利因素。因为当业务达到一定规模,你开始面临大数法则的限制。你需要开始思考:有没有其他产品?有没有其他用例?有没有其他增长渠道?如何超前投资于某些增长,开始多元化?因为在我们目前以及期望达到的规模上,我们将不得不做更多的事情,服务更多不同类型的客户。而且正如你提到的,我们还必须实现从 B2C 到 B 端的跨越,把产品驱动销售的模式跑起来。所有这些事情都在发生。令人庆幸的是,业务依然非常强劲,我们可以在保持盈利和健康业务的同时,对这些方面进行超前投资。
乌克兰团队
Lenny: 太不可思议了,他们仍然是团队成员,而且我想你说过有些工程师从最初就在,12 年了还在。我觉得这很能说明这家公司的特质。我们开始录制之前你提到,他们在乌克兰,开 Zoom 的时候外面有炸弹爆炸,他们不得不躲进防空洞然后再来开会。这个团队在所有这些困难面前仍然在运转,业务仍然做得这么好,真的很了不起。
Noam Lovinsky: 是的,Grammarly 的乌克兰团队……怎么说呢,真的很特别,是一支非常出色的团队。你跟他们中很多人交流时,我觉得工作有时其实提供了一种很有用的分散注意力的方式,但他们显然对这家公司充满了自豪。他们亲手建造了这家公司的很大一部分。从乌克兰起步、做到这种规模的生意,目前还不多见。我觉得那个团队非常了不起,即使在目前的处境下,仍然在持续给公司带来巨大的影响。我知道对创始人来说,他们希望 Grammarly 成功、成为它有潜力成为的那家跨代公司,很大一部分原因是乌克兰,尤其是在当下这个时刻。看到这如何激励着他们,真的很让人动容——15 年坚持同一个项目,这不是小事,这需要极强的韧性。所以我觉得即使在那样艰难的时刻,以此为动力去追求更大的目标,很能说明创始人和乌克兰团队的品格。
Lenny: 完全同意。希望那里能尽快有一个好的结局。不知道你知不知道,我其实出生在乌克兰。
Noam Lovinsky: 哇。
Lenny: 我知道敖德萨。
Noam Lovinsky: 哦,不错。
Lenny: 不想多聊这个,但这是真的。而且我刚刚意识到,我们俩的姓氏里都有 sky——Lovinsky 和 Rachitsky。
Noam Lovinsky: 顺便说一句,我爸出生在乌克兰,他来自基辅。我妈来自立陶宛,所以是的,我也有一些乌克兰背景。
Lenny: 好吧,这集成乌克兰专场了。
Noam Lovinsky: 是的。
职业建议
Lenny: 让我稍微拉远一点,进入最后几个问题。回顾你的整个职业生涯,我很好奇你有没有什么通用的职业建议会分享给别人,帮助他们拥有更成功的职业。有没有什么你觉得真正重要的、需要做好的事情,或者人们常犯的错误。这是一个很大很宽泛的问题,但有没有什么浮现在脑海里的,比如”这个事情你真的应该多做”或者”少做”?
Noam Lovinsky: 你看,当你在考虑职业机会、该接受哪份工作时,想要有很高的把握判断出成功与否,真的非常非常难。我觉得对人有好的判断力,能识别出你可以与之共事成功的那类人,这种能力是可以培养的。我的经验是,我总是优先考虑把自己放到能带来大量成长和学习机会的位置上。成长和学习可能非常痛苦。你得接受这一点,迎着痛苦上去,因为我觉得痛苦的另一边就是应许之地。
这一直对我很有效——我未必能以很高的确定性预测某件事会不会成功,但我可以感知身边的人,我当然也能找到那些会拉伸我、迫使我做自己没做过的事、让我大幅成长和学习的环境。在我整个职业轨迹上,我觉得这条路走得不错。所以我通常告诉别人的就是:如果可以的话,专注在这上面。
Lenny: 我很喜欢这个建议。我在这个播客上引用过好几次这句话,但我总是会想到这句话:“你害怕的洞穴里藏着你追寻的宝藏。“我很好奇,你有没有发现什么信号表明痛苦已经过多了、不应该继续追下去?很多人会陷入这样的境地:心理健康受到影响,身体健康出问题,做的根本是不适合自己的工作,太多了。在这一点上,你有没有什么判断标准,觉得”好吧,也许这种不适已经过头了”?
Noam Lovinsky: 嗯,我会想到几点。我觉得在任何情境下,你都应该能依托一两件你真正擅长的事情。这些可以成为支撑你继续前进的基础,同时你去学习其他的东西。所以要警惕那些对你来说完全陌生的情境。
在挑战中保持立足点
在接手一份工作时,其中应该有一两件重要的事情是你觉得”这个我拿手,我知道怎么做这部分”的。举个例子,如果你从未接手过一个很大的团队,你在摸索如何应对,但你负责的产品领域是你非常熟悉的——你知道要在这个产品上做好需要什么,不管是出色的设计感、出色的分析思维能力、推荐系统等等——总要有那么几个你觉得自己拿手的东西。你会觉得:“这些方面会有挑战,但那些方面,我觉得自己能驾驭。我还可以做得更好,但它们在我的能力范围之内。“我觉得这样就能让你用自己已经熟悉、能够驾驭的领域来平衡那些痛苦的部分,以一种更平衡、更健康的方式来度过。
Lenny: 这让我想起那张图,好像是”心流”理论里的——你希望它有挑战性,但不要太过挑战,那正是你最容易取得成功的地方。Noam,在我们进入非常精彩的快问快答环节之前,你还有什么想分享或留给听众的吗?
做让你快乐的事
Noam Lovinsky: 有的,我想回到我们最初开始聊的地方,Lenny——去做那些让你快乐、让你充实的事情。人生短暂。我们都很幸运能身处此刻。没有理由把时间花在不给你能量的事情上。这个世界上有太多事情可以做。我觉得这是我最想强调的。
Lenny: 说得太好了。虽然总会有些你不得不做的事情,但我觉得尽可能多地去寻找那些能给你能量的东西很重要,因为不是每个人都能直接说”不干了,我去散步了”。但我觉得这一点确实非常重要。我们最近在好几期播客里都聊过这个话题——做一个”能量审计”,留意什么事情给你能量、什么不给你能量,然后尽量多做那些给你能量的事——
Noam Lovinsky: 完全同意。
Lenny: ……愿意再去做的那些事。说到这里,我们终于到了非常精彩的快问快答环节。准备好了吗?
Noam Lovinsky: 准备好了。
快问快答:推荐的书籍
Lenny: 第一个问题,你有两三本最常推荐给别人的书吗?
Noam Lovinsky: 这道题我要耍个赖,只给你一本。我只给一本,因为我不想用其他的来分散注意力。我推荐 Tony Fadell 写的《Build》。除了它本身是一本好书之外,我推荐它的一个主要原因是——我太太参与了写作。所以她是和 Tony 一起写的。我亲眼见证了那个过程。她是一个非常棒的写作者,而 Tony 也有太多值得学习的地方,所以我推荐这本书。书中特别让我受启发的部分,是他经历了多少次失败之后才做出那些发现——而这些发现如今正在驱动我们做的许许多多的事情。这是一个很好的提醒:坚持下去,做那些真正给你能量的事情,因为最终你可能会做出令人难以置信的发现。
快问快答:喜欢的影视作品
Lenny: 下一个问题,你最近有没有特别喜欢的电影或电视剧?
Noam Lovinsky: 我很喜欢 Apple TV 上的《For All Mankind》(为全人类),你看过吗?然后我刚看完《Fargo》(冰血暴)的最后一季。这部剧每一季都非常精彩。
Lenny: 太好了。不过《For All Mankind》最新一季,大家普遍觉得没那么惊艳,我也同意这个看法,但还是值得一看的。
快问快答:面试问题
下一个问题。你有没有最喜欢的、喜欢问候选人的面试题?
Noam Lovinsky: 我一般喜欢那种能让我们一起做点事的面试题,所以我对那种行为类的”请告诉我一次……”之类的问题不太感冒,更倾向于”我们来一起解决一个产品问题”。比如可以是”我们来给儿童设计一个闹钟”。或者最近我常用的一个是——“考虑到当前的技术水平,如果我们重新构建电子邮件,我们会怎么做?“我觉得这样直接深入细节,真正看着彼此展示各自的专业能力,是非常重要的。如果你准备好了,我可以专门做一期播客来聊聊大多数人是多么不擅长做领导力招聘。我发现在我的职业生涯中越往上走,面试反而变得越来越简单,而实际上我能评估出的关于对方作为产品领导者到底怎样的信息反而越少。但总之,这类就是我通常喜欢的面试题。
快问快答:最近发现的产品
Lenny: 太棒了。你最近有没有发现什么你特别喜欢的产品?
Noam Lovinsky: 不是最近的,但我是 Arc 的非常早期的用户,我真的很喜欢 Arc。
Lenny: 你现在的窗口就在 Arc 里。我也很喜欢 Arc。我们请 Josh 上过播客。
Noam Lovinsky: 太好了。
Lenny: 光是观察 Arc 的引导体验,作为产品人就值得你花那个时间。
Noam Lovinsky: 完全同意。我特别喜欢下载东西时的那个动画。就是那些小细节,所有那些小东西。对了,如果 Josh 在听的话,我们希望 Grammarly 能在 Arc 上运行得更好,所以请联系我,因为我觉得 Arc 浏览器做的一些事情导致 Grammarly 不管是在客户端还是在浏览器里都很难正常工作。
快问快答:人生格言
Lenny: 还有两个问题。你有没有最喜欢的人生格言,经常对自己重复、或分享给朋友和家人的,不管是工作中还是生活中的?
Noam Lovinsky: 天哪,了解我的人听了这个,会觉得这太能代表我的性格了。我脑海中浮现的第一句话是——我们注定要经历挣扎。我就是觉得,通过挣扎,我们才能变得更好,好事情才会发生,纽带才会形成。所以我不会回避那种人生经历。
Lenny: 我猜你是犹太人。我也是犹太人。这感觉是非常犹太式的一种说法。我很喜欢。
Noam Lovinsky: Lenny,这还用猜吗?都写在我脸上了。是的。
快问快答:最常拼错的词
Lenny: 完美。最后一个问题。作为 Grammarly 的首席产品官,我很好奇你最常拼错的词是什么?
Noam Lovinsky: “The”。
Lenny: 你会拼成 T-E-H?
Noam Lovinsky: T-E-H。对,就是这样。
Lenny: 天哪。其实我觉得我每个词都会拼错。
Noam Lovinsky: 哈哈,有意思。
Lenny: 我的拼写很差。我很感谢我的……哦,抱歉,你先说。
Noam Lovinsky: 我正要说,我有一个产品可以帮你改善拼写,你要不要试试。
Lenny: 我是 Grammarly 的活跃用户。不仅是这样,我发现你做过的每一个产品我都在用。
Noam Lovinsky: 哦,太好了。
Lenny: 显然,Meta 的产品里我主要用 Instagram。当然还有 Grammarly,以及 YouTube——我有一个 YouTube 频道,欢迎大家去看看,订阅关注。还有 Thumbtack——我太太是 Thumbtack 的重度用户,我们在上面找到了来自世界各地的很多服务方。
尾声
Noam,非常感谢你来做客。最后两个问题。大家如果想在网络上找到你、联系你,去哪里找?听众可以怎样帮到你?
Noam Lovinsky: 好的。我在几乎所有平台上都是 @noaml,所以 Twitter 应该是最方便的。我的私信是开放的。至于大家怎么帮到我——请使用 Grammarly,提供任何反馈。说实话,如果我能在几乎任何方面帮到你,尽管联系我。我经常会接受那些对话、建立那些连接,这对我来说也一直非常有帮助。
Lenny: 再次非常感谢你来参加这期节目。
Noam Lovinsky: 当然。保重,Lenny。
Lenny: 大家再见。
Noam Lovinsky: 再见。
Lenny: 非常感谢你的收听。如果你觉得这期节目有价值,可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你喜欢的播客应用上订阅本节目。另外,也请考虑给我们评分或留下评价,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 |
|---|---|
| adverse selection | 逆向选择 |
| Arc | Arc(浏览器产品) |
| bits and atoms | 比特和原子 |
| bootstrapped / bootstrap business | 自力更生(不依赖外部融资) |
| Brian Schreier | Brian Schreier(红杉资本合伙人,Thumbtack 董事会成员) |
| Build | 《Build》(Tony Fadell 所著书籍) |
| Burning Man | Burning Man(火人节) |
| ChatGPT | ChatGPT |
| CPO (Chief Product Officer) | 首席产品官 |
| David Schein | David Schein |
| Descript | Descript(公司名) |
| Duolingo | Duolingo |
| Fargo | 《Fargo》(冰血暴,电视剧) |
| first principles | 第一性原理 |
| flow | 心流 |
| For All Mankind | 《For All Mankind》(为全人类,Apple TV 剧集) |
| Google Docs | Google Docs |
| Grammarly | Grammarly |
| HIMSS | HIMSS(公司名) |
| Hunter Walk | Hunter Walk |
| IC (Individual Contributor) | IC(独立贡献者) |
| instant booking | 即时预订 |
| Josh | Josh(Arc 浏览器联合创始人 Josh Miller) |
| law of large numbers | 大数法则 |
| layered | 被管理层覆盖(指在组织架构中被加一层上级管理) |
| LLM | LLM(大语言模型) |
| local maxima | 局部最优 |
| Marco | Marco(Thumbtack CEO) |
| Microsoft Copilot | Microsoft Copilot |
| New Product Experimentation | 新产品实验团队 |
| newsletter | newsletter |
| NPE | NPE(新产品实验团队的缩写) |
| pipeline | 销售管线 |
| PM (Product Manager) | 产品经理 |
| product-led sales | 产品驱动销售 |
| pros | 服务方(平台上的专业服务提供者) |
| request to book | 请求预订 |
| Salar Kamangar | Salar Kamangar |
| Schrep (Mike Schroepfer) | Schrep(Mike Schroepfer,时任 Facebook CTO) |
| SEM | SEM(搜索引擎营销) |
| SEO | SEO(搜索引擎优化) |
| Shishir Mehrotra | Shishir Mehrotra |
| smile graph | 微笑曲线(指先下降后回升的曲线图) |
| studio | 创业工作室 |
| Threads | Threads |
| Tony Fadell | Tony Fadell(iPod 之父、Nest 创始人) |
| Whitney Steele | Whitney Steele |
| Word | Word |
此文档由 AI 分片翻译(translate_long_document)