如何提出正确的问题、展现自信并说服质疑者 | Paige Costello(Asana)
How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana)
Paige’s Role and Team
Lenny: You’re often the youngest person in the room. What have you learned about how to garner trust and win over skeptics?
Paige Costello: The thing I would say is bring the insight. Know thy customer. Know thy market. Know thy competitors. Know thy numbers. Know thy product.
Evolution of Asana’s Product Process
Lenny: I’m curious, what you find most holds back new PMs?
Paige Costello: Your brain is so accustomed to having a scarcity mindset as opposed to creating alternative options or seeing a different path. Effectively, there’s this notion of, “How might the opposite be true?” The moment I challenged myself and said, “How might the opposite be true?” my shoulders dropped. I felt more relaxed. I was like, “Oh, yeah, I can do both. It will be fine.”
Defining Pillars and Domains
Lenny: Welcome to Lenny’s Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today’s most successful products. Today, my guest is Paige Costello. Paige is a product lead at Asana overseeing teams responsible for the core product experience of Asana. Before Asana, she was Director of Product at Intercom, and prior to that, she was a group product manager at Intuit where she spent five and a half years. In our wide-ranging conversation, we dig into strategies for building trust with people who are more experienced than you or older than you, we talk about coaching product managers, including why leading by example is often the most effective strategy, we talk about Asana’s product development process and how it’s evolved over the years as the company has scaled, plus some of Paige’s product and career missteps, and what she’s learned from those moments. To prep for this interview, I got input from some of Paige’s colleagues and former colleagues, and everyone I talked to loved Paige. You’ll soon see why. Enjoy this episode with Paige Costello after a short word from our sponsors.
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Paige, welcome to the podcast.
Paige Costello: Thanks, Lenny. Great to be here.
Adjusting Planning Horizons
Lenny: So you don’t know this, and I’ve been telling you this, but I asked a bunch of people that you worked with and maybe currently work with for questions, suggestions of things to ask you. So this is going to be really fun.
Paige Costello: Wonderful. Now, I want to know who you talked to, but we’ll find out.
Quarterly Planning and Sprints
Lenny: I’ll tell you right now. Big thank you to Jackie Bavaro, Yasmin who’s on your team, and Montgomery and Steve Morin who is currently at Asana.
Paige Costello: Ooh, fun.
Example: Domains and Metrics
Lenny: So thank you to all of those folks for giving me a bunch of great questions, suggestions.
Paige Costello: Looking forward to it.
The Double Diamond Process
Lenny: Maybe just to settle a context, can you just talk about… At Asana, what do you work with? What is your team? What do you work on, and what is your team responsible for broadly?
Review Gates in Double Diamond
Paige Costello: Yeah. Absolutely. So I lead the product organization that’s responsible for our desktop, web, and mobile apps at Asana. The teams are composed of all the people in San Francisco and New York who are focused on creating clarity for individuals, teams, and organizations. Effectively, our goal is to help teams work together more efficiently and drive the outcomes they’re going for. So you can think about the feature sets if you’re an Asana user like goals, portfolios, projects, tasks, reporting, all of that. But really, we want to help people answer the question at work, “Who is doing what by when, and why?” So that notion of clarity of purpose, clarity of plan, progress, and responsibility are often so painful in people’s work lives. When there is certainty there and clarity there, people can be much more efficient in getting the work done. So that’s where my focus is every day. I’m a product leader for that group.
Office and Remote Work Policy
Lenny: Cool. So, basically, like the core. When people think of Asana, it’s all of that stuff is what it sounds like.
Paige Costello: Yeah, yeah. There’s another group that’s focused on our process management, but a lot of the core work in project management, core is in my group, and then we have a growth and enterprise scale team.
Winning Trust and Converting Skeptics
Lenny: You’ve been at Asana for about four years now, right?
Getting Close to Customers
Paige Costello: Yes, four years this summer.
On Confidence and Communication
Lenny: Cool. So something I’m always curious about companies that are at this scale is just the evolution they’ve gone through in terms of how they develop product, and so I’m curious, just in the time you’ve been there, how has the product development process at Asana changed, and maybe even simpler, what are some of the bigger changes that have been made to the way product is built at Asana over the years?
Paige Costello: I would talk a little bit about how we set strategy and our planning process, and how that’s changed in this time as well as how we actually ship product has changed in this time. On the planning front, we have really changed what altitudes we’re planning at, the time horizon we’re planning at. Some of the inputs have gotten a lot more precise and opinionated. So, for example, we have always had pillar plans and team plans, but maybe we didn’t have an intermediary layer of an area perspective. Well, what’s an area perspective? Well, as your organization grows, we’ve had to reorganize to create more agency and accountability close to teams that are focused on specific target customers and problems. So if you think about the way Asana is organized, we’ve got our R&D, the pillar structure, the areas within them, and then the working teams.
Leading by Example and Mentoring PMs
Lenny: It might actually help if you even describe what is a pillar, what is an area in product development.
Paige Costello: Yeah. Absolutely. So when I said I’m responsible for that core product pillar, that’s one pillar, but then there’s also the adoption and enterprise scale pillar and the workflow pillar. Within each of those, there are subgroups, and we call those areas. Each of those areas has a very specific target customer and problem space they’re solving for. We’ve often also dialed up the clarity of the metric at that level. So while we have an R&D set of metrics, we have pillar metrics, we have area metrics, and then at the team level, there’s often one or two that they’re really driving forward. So you can think of it as a nested structure around our product strategy as well as how we measure success.
When I joined, we didn’t have areas. We were organized around projects and around locations, and then we worked to make sure that the thinking was more durable and problem-focused so that our roadmaps were not about features, but were instead about what was most meaningful to tackle for our business growth. So that’s a big thing that has changed is the altitude of planning and how that nests. Another thing that has changed is the time horizon. So, before, we planned annually primarily. Now, we plan every six months, but for a rolling 12 months. So we have higher confidence in the immediate half, lower confidence in the following half, but we just plan every 12 months, every six months because it gives our business more confidence in what’s coming and a better opportunity to align our go-to-market and product planning.
Key Pieces of Advice
Lenny: Amazing. So I just actually was talking to one of the heads of product at Shopify, and they went through a similar transition where they used to plan yearly, and now they plan for the next six months. So it’s interesting that I’m hearing this more and more, and you’re saying that every six months, you revisit the plan for the next year. So it’s an interesting hybrid of those two.
Awareness in Remote vs. In-Person
Paige Costello: Yeah. Absolutely. I think the more you try to do things in a joined up way where you have a single target customer with sales and marketing, and you want to make sure that the impact of your releases hit their mark, the more it’s important to reflect on it frequently and to be able to pivot quickly because our strategy, even when we think we have a two-year vision, something will change, and then we say, “Wow, we made so much faster progress on this than we thought, and we actually believe that there’s a new opportunity or a new technology that we should be leveraging. Let’s go bigger on that.” So it reduces the feeling of churn and thrash. It makes us all more principled, and it helps us just make sure we’re making the best use of our teams.
Lenny: I like that it also admits you’re not going to actually have a yearly plan, like everyone plans for year, and then halfway through, they’re like, “No. Let’s start rethinking everything again.”
Progress on the Clarity Pillar
Paige Costello: Yeah, yeah.
Investment Strategy for AI Exploration
Lenny: So I like that you’re upfront about that.
Paige Costello: Yeah.
Training Experience at Intuit
Lenny: Okay, and then within the plan, do you have quarterly plans and sprints? Is there anything more fine-grained with a detailed roadmap just while we’re on the topic?
Paige Costello: Yeah, not really. I mean, teams know approximately when are they expecting to do the work, but if you ask too much for a particular quarter, a particular week, or date, you will make strange choices about scope. So, really, we align on what success looks like, and the teams do their best job to ship as quickly as possibly, as iteratively as possibly, and we really encourage prototyping. So we added into our product process a notion that we might pivot or cut from stuff that we put on our roadmap because it felt like once it was on the roadmap, it had to be done, and that’s just not smart.
New PM Hurdles and Success Factors
Lenny: Got it. So, essentially, there’s a six-month roughly detailed plan of what each team is going to work on?
Paige Costello: Yeah, yeah.
Lessons Learned: Learning from Mistakes
Lenny: Got it. Interesting.
Paige Costello: Yeah.
Career Planning: Prioritize Learning Over Titles
Lenny: Maybe just a couple more things just to make them super concrete for folks that might be listening. What’s an example of an area? What’s an actual team that would be an area? Then, the other question I have just while I’m saying questions is, are there some metrics you could share of just what some of these teams might be gold on just as examples of how you think about metrics?
Paige Costello: The area that came to mind when you asked about one of our areas is something called Coordinate, and their job is effectively making sure that the slice of Asana that helps teams work together is working effectively. So that’s projects, and tasks, and the data that you might put into tasks, and all of the back and forth that is required when people use Asana for their core working team. Some of the metrics that they care about are like org paying weekly active users as well as really thinking about healthy project use. So we make sure that we understand what does good look like and what is a dynamic that we want to be creating in terms of people getting real value from using the product, and we build that into our metrics to have as a guardrail to ensure that we’re not driving one metric at the expense of people really getting what they need out of Asana.
The Lightning Round
Lenny: Just a couple more questions along these lines.
Paige Costello: Yeah.
Favorite Interview Questions
Lenny: I’m nerd-sniped about process.
Paige Costello: Yeah.
Small Changes to Product Processes
Lenny: I think you use a process called the Double Diamond Process at Asana. Okay. Cool.
Paige Costello: We do.
Lenny: I’ve seen images of this in various places, but I don’t know of any company that’s actually using it as the process. Can you just describe what the Double Diamond Process is and how you use it?
Paige Costello: So you might be familiar with lean startup concepts and Double Diamond as it relates to going broad, and then going narrow. So you go broad when you ask like, “What customer should I solve for?” and then you pick one, and then that’s the narrowing. Then, you go broad, and you say, “What are the problems this customer has?” and you narrow, and you say, “This is the problem they have.” Then, you go broad, and you say, “What solution should we do to this?” and then you go narrow, and you say, “This is the solution that we should start with.” That process of going broad, and going narrow, and going broad, and going narrow forces people to get out of their opinion-driven lens because so often, we need to be curious quantitatively and qualitatively about what we’re doing and why, and be more systematic and rigorous about getting there. It doesn’t take long, but it just breaks the frame.
The Double Diamond Process that Asana effectively… Each of our typical reviews or artifacts sit at different inflection points on the Double Diamond. So we actually ask people to do a kickoff where they collect different information at different scale depending on the size of the problem and the ambiguity they’re solving. Some people have already done enough customer selection and research that they’re starting with, “What are the possible solutions to this problem?” and then they’re bringing the spec, and that’s the narrowing alongside design, et cetera. But it’s really mapping our artifacts against this notion to make sure that the product thinking has that quality of decision-making. Yeah.
Lenny: The way you described it is it was very customer-target-oriented. Is that that the actual framework? Is it around who to build this for, and then what to build, or is it more… It is. Okay. You’re not ahead?
Paige Costello: It is. Yeah.
Lenny: Okay.
Paige Costello: It’s really important because then you also know what success looks like because if you pick your success metrics as using a feature, that’s it. You’re teaching to the test. It’s not actually driving the outcome. So while our planning process is around effectively defining category and how we win, and making sure that customers receive certain benefits from using work management, the through line to the individual project that a team might be leading is they need to know who they’re solving for and what it means to have that problem solved. So it always starts with enough customer insight such that we can creatively do what they’re trying to do. I mean, really inventing on behalf of customers.
Lenny: Can you maybe repeat if there’s terms for each of those phases?
Paige Costello: Yeah. Absolutely.
Lenny: Then, is there an example of a feature or product that went through this that you could share? If nothing comes to mind, that’s okay.
Paige Costello: The inflection points are the kickoff, which is that going broad, and then customer and direction selection. So this is both the target as well as of the 10,000-foot views of how you might pursue solving this problem. Which path are you broadly going to take? Then, going broad within that path on different concepts, and then there’s a design concept review. Then, the products spec. Then, the full experience review or design crit of the end-to-end experience and launch. So that launch review is often just, “Hey, here’s the thing. Here’s what we said. Here are the fast-follows.” Most of the time, by that time, it’s already been dogfooding internally for some time, and it’s more of a formal, “Do we have the right metrics in place? Are we ready to ship?”
Lenny: Awesome. Do these reviews happen in person, on Zoom, or asynchronous?
Paige Costello: It depends. So it depends on the complexity of the work, and it depends how much we want to talk about it. A lot of our crits happen in person on the design side. A lot of spec reviews are more asynchronous, and then we’ll say, “Depending on the number of questions people have, we call a meeting.” Otherwise, we do mostly async, but it’s a mix. It really depends on the complexity and ambiguity of the solution and how much people have questions about asynchronously beforehand.
Lenny: I’m going to take a tangent with my questions here and talk about work from home policy at Asana. This is something that I’ve been wondering more and more about how it’s changing because it feels like there’s been a shift back to the office. So what is the current policy at Asana, and what’s changed maybe over the past couple years?
Paige Costello: Well, we were fully remote during the pandemic, and then we came back to the office in an office-centric hybrid format. So we’re in the office Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and then work from home mostly on Wednesdays and Fridays. That dynamic has been designed from the start. We wanted to make sure that we took advantage of what’s great about working together as teams, and so it’s been the standard. So I would say what’s unique about maybe Asana is we knew we would do that from the very beginning instead of hemming and hawing about would we be a remote workplace or not, and what would that mean, and how would we come together, and how would we budget for it. We’re like, “No, this is going to be an office-centric hybrid,” because we wanted to create spaces for people to work together and move quickly.
It’s been interesting watching people get back into the swing of things. Even though we knew, it didn’t mean that on day one, people were great at being in the office. People were taking standups sitting down. Whereas before, you would walk through our office, and you could hear people at standup because there were standup chants, and people would be out on the floor. Now, people are more likely to do their standup in a room, and we’re trying the next level of standing up during a standup, but it’s… I’m sure it’s a shared experience for other people who are working in offices to get used to using the whiteboards again, to get used to standing up during your meetings. It’s bizarre that we could lose a muscle that we had that was so innate so quickly, and I think even in the last month, I would say, and it’s in June of 2023, there’s more vibrancy in the office, more conversation, more casual… someone eating alone at the cafeteria, and someone sitting down next to them. So it didn’t happen overnight.
Lenny: I’ve been seeing a lot of tweets of founders just being like, “Work from home has failed. It’s time to go back at the office.” I’m curious if that ends up rolling into more and more companies, or if it’s just a few founders here and there.
Paige Costello: I think it’s a real thing for mental health. I do think that having social casual relationships as well as more opportunities to talk strategy with people you’re not forced into a meeting room with has been super beneficial. I can say that just today, I was having lunch and sat down with my head of data science, and we had an impromptu chat about how we review our experiments and how to evaluate whether we had ROI on learning, not just the metrics. It was one of those things where if we had to schedule it, it might not have happened, and if it did happen, it would have been a couple weeks from now.
Lenny: It feels like just coming into the office once or twice… or sorry, being at home once or twice a week is not that different from how things used to be where there was a day of no meetings and a lot of people stayed from home. So it feels like it’s almost reverting back to that.
Paige Costello: Exactly, and people are better at it than they used to be.
Lenny: Right.
Paige Costello: So I would say our remote days are more impactful than the days we’re together where we’re getting into the swing of things.
Lenny: Yeah. I feel like as a PM, the only day I was productive and getting real deep work done was the No-Meeting Wednesday. It was at Airbnb.
Paige Costello: Yes. I would encourage you to know your chronotype and to lock that time where you have the most head space to do that work. So, for me, it’s mornings.
Lenny: Say more on chronotype. What is that?
Paige Costello: I’m a morning person, and so I try to make sure that I don’t have any meetings before 10:00, sometimes before 11:00, and that’s when I do my hardest task for the day.
Lenny: I also just thought about standups while I was at Airbnb and how not only how much energy they brought, but almost too much energy sometimes where there’s like another team doing a standup, and they’re just laughing and clapping, and we’re just like, “Shh, we’re trying to work over here.” I feel like we need more of that again.
Paige Costello: Totally. Yep, yep.
Lenny: Okay. So, moving in a slightly different direction, something I heard about you is that you’re often the youngest person in the room, and you often lead people with decades more experience than you. I want to ask, what have you learned about how to garner trust and win over skeptics, especially when they’re maybe more experienced or older, and especially in other functions, I don’t know, execs or designers, engineers, what have you figured out there?
Paige Costello: The thing I would say is bring the insight. Know thy customer. Know thy market. Know thy competitors. Know thy numbers. Know thy product. If you can be the person in the room who has watched customers use the product and has a point of view about why one tool is significantly better or worse in a given dimension, and you can do that with confidence and clarity, and you don’t need to know the other person’s functional domain, and you don’t need the expertise in what they’re experts at, you can bring insight that makes people curious, and trust you, and just immediately believe that there’s an opportunity that you’re not advocating for that just is true. But I think that’s a really tricky and unique thing is not to pretend like you have more experience than you do, but to be willing to ask great questions, and then be curious enough that you’re bringing insight to every meeting that people may or may not have, but you’re always willing to share.
Lenny: That’s such a good answer because it’s like there’s not a trick to it. It’s just do the work, spend the time to become the person that has answers that people value and obviously, that will respect you, value your opinion, want to hear from you.
Paige Costello: Yeah. Yeah. Our former board member, Anne Raimondi, and now our head of business wrote an article on First Round that was really great about the trust equation, and it really resonated with me. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, but she said that trust is equal to credibility plus reliability, plus authenticity, divided by or over perception of self-interest. I think when you’re met by someone who doesn’t know you, doesn’t know your work, your job is to create credibility, and that’s where I said bringing the insight is where you can really tip the scales here. Reliability, this is all about your say-do ratio. Authenticity is just being vulnerable, being yourself, and then making sure that people know that you’re not in it for some other outcome or cause that perception of self-interest really can change whether people… how much they trust you.
Lenny: In terms of knowing the insight and knowing thy customer, putting the time, I imagine, is a big element of that. Is that how you do that, or is there anything else along those lines that’s just like, “Here’s how I get really good at this?”
Paige Costello: When you take a new role, become best friends with a researcher, and spend time watching customers use the product firsthand because what they maybe report on or are trying to do a study about might be very different from what you observe, but you really just need that front row seat with customers, and so asking, “How do I actually set up time with customers? How do I compensate them? How do I read the tickets?” Whatever. It’s amazing how little you have to do to quickly catch up to understanding who the organization is solving for well and poorly, and how people really use your product versus how your teams use your product, especially in organizations where there are heavy dogfooding cultures. It’s really risky to become less sensitive to the needs and behaviors of customers because people think they are their customer, and it also becomes very navel-gazey. So I think the more you get out and break up how people are having conversations about what we should do and why, and what we shouldn’t do and why, and it’s not about your opinion, it’s about asking questions, and then bringing insight can really change the nature of the conversation and build trust.
Lenny: I love that. In terms of confidence, you talked about the importance of communicating these things confidently. Is there anything you’ve learned about how to be more confident? The managing part of it is like having the answer, but is there anything there that you maybe coach your PMs around or other folks of just like, “Here’s how you communicate confidence?”
Paige Costello: It’s a great question. I think being brave and courageous in little moments is just what you have to do. You have to show up, and say it before you’re ready to say it, and ask for forgiveness, and be vulnerable. I think when you’re vulnerable, people actually trust you more than if you come with all of this armor and say, “I know this, and this is how we’re going to do it.” So real confidence is often conveyed by being willing to ask the question or to say, “I don’t know what you mean by that. Can you say that again?” It’s also just how you communicate, looking people in the eye, your body position, your body language.
So much of this, I think people forget about because it’s really easy to be in a meeting, and looking at your computer, and going through Slack messages. So one of the best things you can do is if you’re in a meeting, be in that meeting. Continually scan the faces of everyone in the room, see if someone has a question, pause at the beginning, and welcome people, and chit-chat while people land, and then close asking questions like, “Did I get all of that? Is there anything you would’ve expected to cover that we missed?” It’s really about being open, and that conveys confidence more than being assertive and advocating 100% of the time.
Lenny:
From my chats with folks that you work with, it’s really clear that you put a lot of time and energy into mentoring and coaching PMs, and your team, and I think probably broadly at Asana. One thing specifically that came up is that you’re very big on leading and teaching by example, not just, “Here’s how you do this thing.” So, if that’s true, I’m curious where that came from for you and why you think that ends up being a lot more successful than like, “In a meeting, you should do X, Y, Z,” versus doing it, and then letting them see.
Paige Costello: I think the main thing is repetition. We’re all students of repetition. If you see something done a few times, you’re more likely to remember it and internalize it, and so it’s also something that… a way that I learn, and so I think that’s probably part of it. I remember hearing about a framework called the three Es: experience, exposure, and education. I think it was helpful for me to hear that as a way of growing your career or being more purposeful about your growth because I think when people are earlier in their careers, they tend to think, “Education, education, education,” and then they started to think, “Experience, experience. How do I get the experience of being a manager? I need to read about it, and then be a manager.” It’s very linear.
Exposure was such an important one where I thought like, “Okay. So you’re not in the driver’s seat, but you’re in the car, and you hear what’s happening, and you’re evaluating how this is… what the impact is.” This goes back to being really present and analytical, and being a learner because if you can be a learner, not just in an education or experience context, but in an exposure context, you can really grow so much more quickly and in so many more directions than you will get from just what does your day entail from what work is directly required of you.
Lenny: Is there an example of that happening either to you or you saw a manager leader do this, and you’re like, “Oh, I get it now,” or you doing that and it helped?
Paige Costello: So I’ll give two examples. I mean, the way I run my meetings are the kind of meetings I want to be a part of. So I try to make sure that I start with a clear agenda, and I move quickly, but give time for conversation and that it’s not fully just sharing information, but debating where appropriate. I think knowing how to manage the conversation and courteously pausing people who are going on too long or taking the group in a different direction than was intended, and just think about the experience of everyone there, and create the experience that you hope that they’re creating in the rooms that you’re not a part of.
An example that I have in terms of experience is sometimes the experience is you doing the thing and getting that experience firsthand. Other times, you need an education, you need a mentor, you need a coach who will tell you what they’re saying or give you advice. I was in a really high-stakes product review at Intuit, and at the end of it, everyone else had left, and the leader of the business unit as she was leaving the room said, “Always answer the question that they should have asked.” “Always answer the question they should have asked.”
I was pretty surprised by that advice because it was very profound in the moment because I think when you’re a student and you are accustomed… If you’re an achiever, you like to get As. You’re probably going to hear a question and answer it. You’re like, “One-to-one, one-to-one, one-to-one.” But what I learned from that was that there’s actually another altitude, another point of strategy when you’re in a meeting or in a conversation to make sure that you’re covering the more important point, the bigger picture, the alternative that the person asking the question maybe didn’t see or consider. So I think the mix of experience, exposure, and education really helps you make sure that you’re consciously moving forward on each of those fronts or finding people who can help you there.
Lenny: I love that piece of advice, and it makes me want to ask, are there other pieces of advice that have been really impactful to you, or are there common pieces of advice you give to your team that just is a recurring theme of advice that maybe people even make fun of like, “Oh, Paige is always saying this?”
Paige Costello: There are a few ways to think about advice, and my advice often meets some mark when it’s for a particular person in a particular time in their career. So I would say advice I love giving to people who are early in their career is don’t self-select because I think it’s really easy to say, “I don’t have the experience,” or, “I’m not X, Y, Z enough,” and not apply. So I really push people not to self-select, and I try to remind myself where that’s appropriate to do the same thing. Other advice I often give is just think big, ship small. “Think big, ship small.” What’s the smallest thing you can do to do that thing? But let’s not, because we’re trying to ship all the time and in small chunks, start thinking in small ways because it’s really easy to get a little too incremental, a little too wrapped around the axle around optimizing a metric and miss the bigger picture, and so think big ship small is another piece of product advice I give.
The last piece of advice that I would say that I like is more of a way of thinking. So this is a little abstract, but when employees join Asana, they get a book called The 15 Commitments of a Conscious Leader. It’s led by the Conscious Leadership Group. They also get two-day training on some language and tools for how to effectively work with other people, and it’s a really… For me at least, it was transformational because I learned some vocabulary and methods that I could share with my peers. One of the things that you learn is to be above or below the line, and something that is this concept of like, “Where are you? Are you above the line? Are you below the line?” If you’re above the line, you’re committed to learning. You’re open and curious. Things are funny here, more playful. If you’re below the line, you’re committed to winning. You’re committed to being right. Things are more black and white.
All of us have days where we’re having a conversation and we’re really in that below line space where it’s like, “No, it just is this way. There’s no two ways around it.” That concept of understanding your personal head space, and then being mindful of how you’re operating when you’re in that place really was great advice for me and also recognizing where other people were when it related to decisions we were making or context. It also helped me think about rejecting false trade-offs and challenging like… Effectively, there’s this notion of how might the opposite be true, and that’s a piece of advice that I give myself like this morning.
I think it was yesterday, actually. I was like, “How am I going to do tomorrow? Tomorrow, I have to deliver the clarity pillar brief to the area leads and make sure they understand our stack ranked metrics, and they need to know exactly what our strategic priorities are and why, and they need nudges, and they need to be able to translate our voice of business and usability lists into those plans. I need to establish a perspective and make sure this is all written down and they really understand it, and I have a great conversation with them where I get open questions and they feel like they can really challenge my thinking. I also am having a podcast with Lenny in the afternoon. Ugh.” Right?
At first, it was like, “This is just too much. I should try to move or cancel one of these.” Then, I asked myself, “How might the opposite be true?” I was like, “I can do both.” It was just enough to pop the balloon because sometimes your brain is so accustomed to having a scarcity mindset as opposed to creating alternative options or seeing a different path. The moment I challenged myself and said, “How might the opposite be true?” my shoulders dropped. I felt more relaxed. I was like, “Oh, yeah, I can do both. It will be fine. We’ll have a great conversation. I’m ready to show up, and be curious, and really engage with you on the topics that you’ve found interesting, and we’ll just do that. So, “How might the opposite be true?” has been a really helpful piece of advice or line of questioning that I use with myself to make sure that I’m not taking myself away.
Lenny: Wow. What a fruitful question that ended up being. That was amazing. How does clarity pillars strategy go? Are people into it? Is it working?
Paige Costello: Yeah. I’m pumped. It’s a really interesting time to be a product leader, especially with all of the tech transform… Truly, the technological transformation on LLMs is astonishing, the pace of development, the ability of our teams to just ship quickly and ship really intelligent things. We’re not in an operational “figure it out” land. We’re not in a place where we’re trying to decide how to do a better job and get it out to customers. We really have lots of interesting paths forward and are trying to make sure that we’re on the cutting edge while really looking at like, “What does it mean to serve the companies and organizations that we want to serve with new ways of serving them?” So it was a really fun conversation, and I also had to be honest with people and say, “This is a 70% cut. 30% of this is missing or incorrect, and that’s why I’m coming to you early.” So I think it went really well, and it’s the start of our 12-month rolling planning conversation.
Lenny: Let me pull on this AI thread because it’s clearly top of mind for a lot of people.
Paige Costello: Yeah.
Lenny: How do you think about splitting up investment in AI exploration within the product team? Are you like, “Hey, team. Everyone should be thinking about AI as part of their product,” or is it there’s a team where they’re going to think about AI and LLM integrations and, “Everyone else, keep doing what you’re doing?”
Paige Costello: We’ve had an ML team for quite some time, making sure that we have test prioritization models and notification prioritization models, and are making our product less work for people to use. But when it came to the massive leap forward in LLMs recently, we staffed a team to really prototype quickly, and discover what was possible, and just apply hypotheses outside of the typical norms of how we work. So they went straight to prototyping instead of going through that Double Diamond I was explaining earlier. What that meant was that we were really quickly able to say, “Wow, this is just so much better than we imagined and would never have prioritized it because we thought it would take so much longer.” Then, in other cases, “That sounded good in theory.”
So skipping a lot of that to just really try it on for a size has been key, and then what we’re doing is giving the teams with the most expertise in the customer problems. For example, status and progress reporting, the keys to that car and saying like, “Here’s the starter. Here’s the hypothesis. Here’s how far we got with it. It’s dogfooding. What do you want to do?” So we’re able to nudge people without wasting time and build the skills locally within the teams that then move those experiences forward.
Lenny: I want to come back to the coaching topic. I had a few questions there that I moved off of, but I feel like that’s a rich area of exploration. You mentioned Intuit. You worked at Intuit. Intuit is famous for having a really good APM program and really good training for product managers. What did you take away from that experience that you bring with you to coaching or even I think there’s an APM program at Asana, too?
Paige Costello: Intuit had excellent training programs, the APM program and their manager training. So, on the PM front, the biggest thing that they taught was around customer centricity, and it really started with the founding of the company. For anyone who works at Intuit or has worked at Intuit, they know that there’s this story about Scott Cook watching his wife balancing her checkbook at the kitchen table, and staring at it, and saying, “There’s got to be a better way, a software.” So it was very typical for the product training at Intuit to be all about like, “How do you actually watch customers using your product or just doing the things they do, collecting the artifacts, knowing the workarounds, and using that experience to build opportunities for surprise and insight that then you can capitalize and create products around?” They also are very specific about how they define durable advantage and think about, overall, the product process from a place of customer insight through to the market landscape. So the PM program there was absolutely super thoughtful, especially for taking someone who has never PMed into being a super skilled PM.
They also have a wonderful manager training program, and I think the biggest thing that I took away from their manager training was really on the feedback slide. So delivering feedback is something that I think everyone benefits from, but for managers, it’s so much more critical because if you don’t do it, and you don’t say what you mean, and you don’t do it in a way that it can be internalized and acted upon, you really don’t set up your teammates, your teams for growth or success in their careers. So their program for helping you think about like, “Okay. I’m going to convey this feedback as situation, behavior, impact. The situation is on Tuesday in that meeting at 3:00. Behavior, you interrupted me while I was saying this thing. Impact, made me feel like you weren’t listening to me or made me feel like your voice was more important than mine, or impact, blah, blah, blah.”
It doesn’t matter what the impact is because the way you’ve set it up is it’s a subjective observation. It’s not what the camera recorded, it’s what you experienced. Therefore, it is true and valuable feedback, and it gets the conversation started such that you can then talk about next steps. That format and framing really helped me understand that delivering feedback isn’t about being right or about getting the right information to the other person. It’s about sharing the impact of different decisions that they’re making. So, especially if you have to give feedback about, God forbid, what someone wears to the office, or how do you feel their work is, or how they’re communicating or their body language, having an enough support where you can be really clear about what you’re intending and the spirit behind that, but that it’s formalized enough that people can really engage with it has been enormously helpful, and I still use it today.
Lenny: It’s interesting how some of the most impactful training is such soft skills.
Paige Costello: So basic.
Lenny: Basic. Yeah.
Paige Costello: Yeah.
Lenny: It’s just how to give someone some feedback, but it’s like, “Know how to prioritize, how to do a meeting, how to give a presentation.”
Paige Costello: No. Yeah.
Lenny: It’s like, “Here’s how you give feedbacks.”
Paige Costello: Yep.
Lenny: So you’ve worked with a lot of early product managers. I’m curious what you find most holds back new PMs and help them being successful in their career, and even on the flip side, what most helps new PMs be successful in terms of skills or behaviors, habits, things like that?
Paige Costello: I would say this illusion that you have to be all-knowing and super confident sets you up to be in a place of advocacy instead of inquiry. So PMs who are newer in their careers or who are in a different space than they’re accustomed to working really want to be pro really fast. What pro means is trying to cut that straight path, and that can reduce information and conversation that makes you smarter. So some of the challenges that some PMs face are feeling like they need to be the expert, they need to be the smartest person in the room, or God forbid, they think they’re the smartest person in the room.
Then, what happens is they’re really doing that customer, or product discovery, or spec in a little dark room. Then, they show up, and they say, “This is it. This is right. I know it’s right, and let’s do this as quickly as possible.” Everyone else says, “Wait. What? I don’t know. I have a question,” or they don’t, and they still have a question, which is even worse. So I would say something that really holds PMs back is not being collaborative from a place of true curiosity like performative collaboration where they’re not in a room or want to do a review, but ultimately, they don’t really want the questions or the feedback.
I think trying to make sure that you can be in a place of curiosity and openness because that will make your experience more successful is really important. Other people aren’t always going to be right, but if you’re present for it, you can ask clarifying questions. You can ask the question behind the question. You can hear the feedback, and then say, “Was that something that I must do, that I should do, or that I should consider?” You can actually develop a conversation that will move your relationship forward, and so I would say that’s something that I think holds PMs back.
PMs tend to be so ambitious and career-centric. There are so many good things about that, but I would say don’t let the sound of your wheels drive you crazy. If you’re present in your job, and you actually have fun with it and solve the problems, people will come out of the woodwork, say, “You’re great, and tell your boss you should be promoted.” You don’t need to ask for a promotion. Your outcomes should speak for themselves. Yes, you should have sponsors and people who advocate for you, but a lot of that just comes from that raw connection to the work and to your team.
Lenny: Everyone I talked to about you is like, “Oh my god, I love Paige.” I could see why, but I want to ask you a question. I imagine you’ve made some mistakes either with a product or your career. I’d love to hear a story of something that went wrong and what you learned from that experience. This might be the last question, depending where you take it.
Paige Costello: I would say that all of the advice I’ve given so far is directly related to things I’ve learned the hard way. So, especially as an IC moving into a management role, you aren’t supposed to have all the answers. You need to ask better questions. You need to be thoughtful about direction and agency. So I would say one of the missteps here is knowing how to give guidance or direction in a way that doesn’t feel like micromanagement because what you’re trying to do is to teach a repeatable pattern instead of giving a precise instruction that can be used once, and then disposed of.
So I think that’s a pretty common manager path issue, but I think the faster you learn it, and observe it, and use techniques to manage it, the better. So, for example, I would go to my meetings with a stack of Post-Its, and I would write what I wish I was saying on Post-Its and see if someone else would say it first. Then, if by the end of the meeting, I had decided that I still had a Post-It or two that was worthwhile, I would say them. But you’ve got to police yourself because no one else will do it because no matter how accessible you think you are, other people know that you’re the boss. They’re not going to necessarily speak over you or challenge you directly.
Another challenge I had is I’m a very optimistic person, and I like to look on the bright side. I’m very positive, and I think depending on the culture you’re working with or depending on your team, sometimes they need to hear what’s really bad, and they need you to be really real, and they need you to tell them like it is. Something I realized was that I had an experience where I didn’t realize that people didn’t think I was being authentic because they thought something was bad, and I wasn’t talking about it, but it wasn’t because I didn’t think it was bad or didn’t see. It was just because my nature was to say, “Well, I’m not going to talk about bad things because we’re doing the things we need to do.” As long as the plan is good, I wasn’t really highlighting all the problems I saw or really pushing on those head on with my team, and so they felt like they didn’t know what I was seeing or if we were saying the same things. That was really an interesting experience. Yeah, there were just so many. Yeah.
Lenny: With that second lesson, is there something you’ve changed in the way you lead and operate where you now found a way to communicate, “Here’s wrong,” in a way that’s still maybe optimistic and productive?
Paige Costello: I try to be more real with myself and others. I try to show up and say like, “Hey, this is incomplete.” For example, even the thing I did this morning, the clarity brief. I said, “This is 70% finish. The 30% that I don’t believe is there yet are these three things. I don’t feel confident in this piece of it, and hopefully, we’ll have more clarity by next week.” So that’s an example of just being as real with the small things as with the big things so that people can balance their perspective of you and your work, and the organization and the environment you’re creating.
Lenny: I’m curious how you think about your career going forward. How far out do you think where you want to be, and how do you plan out the future of Paige’s career?
Paige Costello: I try to be really intentional about staying as much as leaving a role. When I think about my career as a whole, I try to think about skills or experiences I want to have as opposed to roles, or companies, or specific problems. So something that I think about is… Effectively, I evaluate whether I’m in a healthy role and in a good setup by asking myself about my learning curve like, “Is the steepness of my learning curve doing me a favor here?” because sometimes you might love the organization, love the problem, and feel like you’re just not learning, or learning fast enough, or being challenged.
That’s something that I think is really important. So thinking about the learning curve, thinking about whether the environment is positively impacting your ability to grow your career and make an impact. So, environmentally, you might have not enough staffing or tooling, or have someone in the management team who is toxic, or have a peer who is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That stuff matters, and I think people don’t talk about it or take it seriously enough that your environment should include people who are advocating for you, and it should just be a place where you feel you’ve got the right ingredients to set you up to do the good work.
Then, the third piece is really around just the problem, the problem your product is solving. Is it fun? Is it interesting? I often like to think about passions are made, not found because I think people… We do this with nine-year-olds. We say, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” They look cross-eyed, and they say, “An astronaut. Just getting a vet. I don’t know.” There’s this moment of panic, and I would say that being comfortable, saying like, “Go try different things, and see if the problem is interesting to you and if the problem is fun or interesting to you.” It doesn’t mean it has to be sexy. It doesn’t mean the company needs to have a brand name. It just has to be something that you’re curious about so that you do a better job at your job. So I would say learning curve environment and problem are things that I use to assess like, “Am I still on the right path, or should I consider an alternative?” But when I think about my own career, I really think about skills and experiences as opposed to roles. So I would say that that’s more my frame of reference because otherwise, I think I am living in the future and not enough trying to make the most out of the career I’m living right now.
Lenny: Well, with that, we’ve reached our very exciting lightning round. I’ve got six questions for you. Are you ready?
Paige Costello: Yeah. Let’s do it.
Lenny: What are two or three books that you’ve recommended most to other people?
Paige Costello: My go-to book recommendation for other PMs is inspired by Marty Cagan. I think it’s a classic. The other books that I have enjoyed and recommended lately are The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood and The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.
Lenny: What is a favorite recent movie or TV show?
Paige Costello: Ooh, I’m very much enjoying The Diplomat right now, and then TV show or movie. Let’s see. I just watched the Fire of Love documentary, which is about a couple who study volcanoes, and that was a great change of pace.
Lenny: I saw the trailer for that. I think I got to watch that, and I finished The Diplomat. It’s awesome. It ends really well.
Paige Costello: I’m not done. Don’t spoil it.
Lenny: But it’s just good. I’m just saying it’s good. That’s not spoiling.
Paige Costello: Okay.
Lenny: Okay. Next question. What’s a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates?
Paige Costello: The good news is I can tell you this and still keep asking it because the answer has always come up differently. So I like to ask, “Tell me about a time something went wrong. What was it? What did you do about it? Yada, yada.” Effectively, the question gets that, “When the product failed,” When something about the team didn’t work,” just things that go wrong because that’s what happens when you’re doing this work, and evaluating people’s mindset, and the way they talk about it, and the way they relate to evaluating the situation. I think it’s a great question. Really tells you a lot about how people think and how they perceive themselves when things are not working well.
Lenny: What is a favorite product that you’ve recently discovered that you love?
Paige Costello: I’ve been playing a lot with Poe.com lately. Yeah, just an opportunity to learn more about LLM capabilities in a firsthand way. It’s been fun to create little bots. I’m playing with making a page bot. I can’t say that the page bot could have had this conversation yet, but maybe next year at this time, you can have a conversation with the other me.
Lenny: That’s what the page bot would say if this was the page bot talking right now.
Paige Costello: I would say though that the advice, bits and bobs, I gave you earlier are absolutely things that I’ve been thinking about feeding, but I think the page bot would probably say, “Ship it.”
Lenny: Poe. It’s the Quora founder’s LLM chat bot?
Paige Costello: Yeah, and so you can try the different models. So you can do four, and you play five, and Claude, and a few others. Yeah.
Lenny: There’s also a lennybot.com for folks that haven’t seen this. Actually, there’s a whole post on my newsletter of how it was built, and you get a lennybot.com. It is trained on all of my newsletter posts, and I think… not yet podcasts, but someday it will have podcasts.
Paige Costello: Ooh.
Lenny: By the way, someone listening to this, we’re looking for someone to maintain this bot and evolve it. So if you’re really into this stuff and have done this sort of thing, please DM me on Twitter. I’m looking for someone to take over lennybot.com, make it more… Moving on. Enough about me. Next question. What is something relatively minor you’ve changed in your product development process that has had a big impact on your team’s ability to execute?
Paige Costello: One of the biggest ones is just, once again, being real about how many reviews and approvals it takes for something to get done and who’s actually responsible for reviewing and approving work. So we got really aggressive about, functionally, who is in charge and at what level for a given review, and pushed to say to actually have limits on the number of people per meeting, on the number of sub-task reviews for a given body of work. What this did is it created a lot more agency and pace within given working teams. So what we did was we said, “We actually don’t care. We don’t want a daisy chain of approvals. We just want one person with whom the buck can stop with them, and they can be responsible for how the work moves forward such that the knowledge is known and we could have connected the dots more effectively than we do or did.” So that’s the logic there, and it really changed the pace and quality of our work.
Lenny: I love that. Is there any more you could share, a number? What is the maximum? Is there anything that other people maybe can take as a-
Paige Costello: Yeah. So no more than three reviews on a given piece of work where people are blocking one approver. If a meeting has more than 10 people on it, we ask the person hosting the meeting to kick out the other people and write better decision notes.
Lenny: The three reviews is three meetings looking at the product as it’s coming together, basically?
Paige Costello: The three reviews are three people who are assigned a task to look at something, but only one person is blocking whether it moves to the next stage.
Lenny: Got it. Informed people? Stakeholders?
Paige Costello: Yeah.
Lenny: Decision-makers? Okay. Great. Final question. You work at Asana. What is your favorite Asana pro tip?
Paige Costello: I use Asana to run all my meetings and assign pre-reads. So I use the multi-assign feature in subtasks all the time where I make a task with a due date that says, “Read this thing by this date,” and then I assign it to a team or a set of individuals like that really quickly. Then, when I’m in the meeting, I take notes live in a task, and then highlight parts of those notes, and convert them into subtasks so that none of the action items get lost.
Lenny: Wow. You need to make a video or blog post about this. Not only is it using Asana to build Asana, it’s using Asana to run teams within Asana.
Paige Costello: Yeah. It definitely does that, but-
Lenny: Asana all the way down.
Paige Costello: People know who’s responsible for what they want.
Lenny: Amazing. Paige, you are awesome. Thank you so much for doing this. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and learn more, and how can listeners be useful to you?
Paige Costello: You can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter, Paige Costello, and on Twitter, @paigenow. Listeners, well, I’d love to hear how you think AI is going to shape the future of software for knowledge workers, but in particular, if you and your team use Asana, I’d love to know where you’d like to see AI playing a bigger role to drive efficiency alignment for your team. So, as you know, we offer a ton of goal management, work management pieces that help teams and orgs do their work together, and I’d love to hear from you about where you see the opportunity.
Lenny: Awesome. Paige, again, thank you so much for being here.
Paige Costello: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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.
Glossary
| English | 中文 |
|---|---|
| above the line / below the line | 线上/线下(Conscious Leadership Group 的意识状态模型) |
| APM | APM(Associate Product Manager,助理产品经理项目) |
| area | 领域 |
| area perspective | 领域视角 |
| Asana | Asana(知名项目管理软件公司) |
| chronotype | 生理节律类型 |
| clarity | 清晰度 |
| Conscious Leadership Group | Conscious Leadership Group(有意识领导力组织) |
| Coordinate | Coordinate(Asana 内部领域名称) |
| design crit | 设计评审 |
| dogfooding | 吃自己的狗粮(内部试用) |
| don’t self-select | 不要自我淘汰 |
| Double Diamond Process | 双钻流程 |
| false trade-offs | 虚假的权衡取舍 |
| Fire of Love | 《Fire of Love》(纪录片名,保留原文) |
| goals | 目标(Asana 功能名) |
| How might the opposite be true | 相反的情况怎么可能是对的 |
| inflection point | 拐点 |
| Inspired | 《Inspired》(Marty Cagan 著书,保留原文) |
| Intuit | Intuit(美国财务软件公司) |
| lean startup | 精益创业 |
| lennybot.com | lennybot.com(Lenny 的 newsletter 训练的聊天机器人,保留原文) |
| Marty Cagan | Marty Cagan(硅谷产品集团创始人,产品管理领域知名作者,保留原文) |
| navel-gazey | 自我审视的怪圈 |
| No-Meeting Wednesday | 无会议周三 |
| pillar plans | 支柱计划 |
| PM | PM(Product Manager,产品经理) |
| Poe.com | Poe.com(Quora 创始人创建的 LLM 聊天平台,保留原文) |
| portfolios | 项目集(Asana 功能名) |
| say-do ratio | 说到做到比 |
| scarcity mindset | 稀缺心态 |
| Scott Cook | Scott Cook(Intuit 联合创始人,保留原文) |
| ship it | 先上线再说(产品开发中的快速交付理念) |
| situation, behavior, impact | 情境、行为、影响(反馈框架) |
| stack ranked | 堆叠排序 |
| The 15 Commitments of a Conscious Leader | 《The 15 Commitments of a Conscious Leader》(有意识的领导者的十五个承诺,书名) |
| The Alchemist | 《The Alchemist》(Paulo Coelho 著小说,保留原文) |
| The Blind Assassin | 《The Blind Assassin》(Margaret Atwood 著小说,保留原文) |
| The Diplomat | 《The Diplomat》(美国政治题材电视剧,保留原文) |
| the three Es | 三个 E(experience, exposure, education) |
| think big, ship small | 想大的,做小的 |
| trust equation | 信任方程式 |
Reformatted by reformat_english.py
如何提出正确的问题、展现自信并说服质疑者 | Paige Costello(Asana)
如何提出正确的问题、展现自信并说服质疑者 | Paige Costello(Asana)
逐字稿
Lenny: 你通常是房间里最年轻的那个人。关于如何赢得信任、说服质疑者,你有什么心得?
Paige Costello: 我想说的是,要有洞见。了解你的客户。了解你的市场。了解你的竞争对手。了解你的数据。了解你的产品。
Lenny: 我很好奇,你觉得什么最能阻碍新 PM 的成长?
Paige Costello: 你的大脑太习惯于稀缺心态(scarcity mindset),而不是去创造替代选项或看到不同的路径。实际上,有这样一个概念:“反过来怎么会成立呢?“当我挑战自己,问出”反过来怎么会成立呢?“的那一刻,我的肩膀就放下来了。我感觉更放松了。我心想,“哦,对,我可以两者兼顾。没问题的。”
Lenny: 欢迎收听 Lenny’s Podcast,在这里我采访世界级的产品负责人和增长专家,从他们打造和发展当今最成功产品的宝贵经验中学习。今天的嘉宾是 Paige Costello。Paige 是 Asana 的产品负责人,管理着负责 Asana 核心产品体验的团队。在加入 Asana 之前,她曾担任 Intercom 的产品总监,更早之前她是 Intuit 的集团产品经理,在那里工作了五年半。在我们这次广泛的对话中,我们深入探讨了如何与比自己更有经验或更年长的人建立信任的策略,谈到了指导产品经理,包括为什么以身作则往往是最有效的策略,我们还聊了 Asana 的产品开发流程以及随着公司规模化这个流程这些年来的演变,还有 Paige 在产品和职业上的一些失误,以及她从那些时刻中学到了什么。为了准备这次访谈,我征求了 Paige 的一些同事和前同事的意见,我交谈过的每个人都非常喜欢 Paige。你很快就会明白为什么。享受这集与 Paige Costello 的对话吧。
Paige 的角色与团队
Lenny: Paige,欢迎来到播客。
Paige Costello: 谢谢,Lenny。很高兴来到这里。
Lenny: 你可能不知道,我一直在跟你说,我问了一堆和你共事过或正在共事的人,向他们征集问题和对你的采访建议。所以这会非常有意思。
Paige Costello: 太好了。现在我很想知道你跟谁聊过,不过我们到时候就知道了。
Lenny: 我现在就告诉你。非常感谢 Jackie Bavaro、你团队里的 Yasmin,以及 Montgomery 和目前在 Asana 的 Steve Morin。
Paige Costello: 哦,有意思。
Lenny: 所以感谢所有这些人给我提供了很多很好的问题和建议。
Paige Costello: 期待不已。
Lenny: 也许为了建立一个背景,你能谈谈……在 Asana,你负责什么工作?你的团队是什么样的?你具体做什么,你的团队大致负责哪些内容?
Paige Costello: 当然可以。我领导 Asana 负责桌面端、网页端和移动端应用的产品团队。团队由旧金山和纽约的所有成员组成,专注于为个人、团队和组织创造清晰度(clarity)。本质上,我们的目标是帮助团队更高效地协作,推动他们追求的成果。所以如果你是 Asana 用户,可以想到的功能集包括目标(goals)、项目集(portfolios)、项目(projects)、任务(tasks)、报告(reporting)等等。但我们真正想做的是帮助人们回答工作中的那个问题:“谁在什么时候之前做什么,以及为什么做?“所以目标清晰度、计划清晰度、进展清晰度和责任清晰度——这些在工作中往往是人们最痛苦的方面。当这些方面有了确定性和清晰度,人们就能更高效地完成工作。这就是我每天关注的重点。我是这个团队的产品负责人。
Lenny: 酷。所以基本上就是核心功能。当人们想到 Asana 时,就是所有这些东西,听起来是这样。
Paige Costello: 对,对。还有一个团队专注于我们的流程管理,但项目管理中的很多核心工作、核心功能都在我的团队,然后我们还有一个增长和企业规模化团队。
Asana 产品开发流程的演变
Lenny: 你在 Asana 已经大约四年了,对吧?
Paige Costello: 是的,今年夏天就四年了。
Lenny: 酷。对于这种规模的公司,我一直很好奇的是它们在产品开发方面经历的演变,所以我很好奇,在你任职的这段时间里,Asana 的产品开发流程发生了怎样的变化,或者更简单地说,这些年来 Asana 构建产品的方式有哪些较大的改变?
Paige Costello: 我会谈谈我们制定战略和规划流程的方式,以及这段时间里它如何发生了变化,同时也会谈谈我们实际交付产品的方式在这段时间里的变化。在规划方面,我们确实改变了规划的层级(altitudes)和规划的时间跨度。一些输入信息变得更加精确和有主见了。比如,我们一直有支柱计划(pillar plans)和团队计划(team plans),但可能缺少一个中间层——领域视角(area perspective)。那么,什么是领域视角呢?随着组织规模扩大,我们不得不进行重组,让更多的自主权和问责机制下沉到专注于特定目标客户和问题的团队附近。所以如果你看 Asana 的组织方式,我们有研发部门,支柱架构,支柱内的各个领域,以及各个工作团队。
支柱与领域的具体含义
Lenny: 也许你直接描述一下在产品开发中,支柱是什么、领域是什么,会更有帮助。
Paige Costello: 好的,当然。之前我说我负责核心产品支柱,那是一个支柱,但还有采用与企业级规模支柱,以及工作流支柱。在每个支柱内部都有子组,我们称之为领域(area)。每个领域都有非常明确的目标客户和他们要解决的问题空间。我们也经常在那个层级提升指标的清晰度。所以我们有研发层级的指标、支柱层级的指标、领域层级的指标,然后在团队层级,通常有一两个他们真正在推动的指标。你可以把它理解为一个嵌套结构——围绕我们的产品战略以及我们如何衡量成功。
我刚加入时,我们还没有领域的概念。我们按项目和按地理位置来组织,后来我们努力让思考方式更加持久、更聚焦于问题,这样我们的路线图就不再围绕功能,而是围绕对我们的业务增长最有意义的事项。所以这是发生重大变化的一点——规划的层级以及它们之间的嵌套方式。
规划时间跨度的调整
另一个变化是规划的时间跨度。之前我们主要以年度为单位做规划。现在,我们每六个月做一次规划,但覆盖的是滚动的十二个月。也就是说,我们对近期半年有更高的信心,对后半年信心较低,但我们每六个月重新规划十二个月的周期,因为这让我们的业务对接下来要做什么有更大的把握,也让我们更好地将推向市场的计划与产品规划对齐。
Lenny: 太棒了。我刚好在和 Shopify 的一位产品负责人聊,他们经历了类似的转变——以前按年规划,现在按接下来六个月来规划。所以很有意思,我越来越多地听到这种做法。你说的是每六个月重新审视接下来一年的计划,所以这是两者的有趣结合。
Paige Costello: 没错。我认为,越是试图以协同的方式做事——让销售、营销和产品面向同一个目标客户,确保你的发布真正命中目标——就越需要频繁地复盘并能够快速转向。因为我们的战略,即使我们认为自己有两年愿景,也总会出现变化。然后我们会说,“哇,我们在这个方向上的进展比预想的快得多,而且我们确实发现了一个新的机会或一项应该利用的新技术,那就在这个方向上更大胆一些吧。” 所以这减少了反复折腾和动荡的感觉。它让我们都更加讲求原则,也帮助我们确保团队的时间得到了最佳利用。
Lenny: 我喜欢的是,这也承认了你实际上不可能有一个真正的年度计划——每个人都做年度计划,然后过半就有人说,“不行,我们得重新考虑一切了。”
Paige Costello: 是的,是的。
Lenny: 所以我喜欢你们对此很坦率。
Paige Costello: 对。
季度计划与冲刺
Lenny: 好的,那在这个计划之内,你们有季度计划和冲刺吗?有没有更细粒度的详细路线图?趁我们聊到这个话题顺便问一下。
Paige Costello: 其实没有。团队大致知道他们预计什么时候做哪些工作,但如果你对某个季度、某一周或某个具体日期要求太多,你会在范围上做出奇怪的选择。所以,我们真正对齐的是成功是什么样的,然后团队尽最大努力尽快地、尽可能迭代地交付,我们非常鼓励做原型。所以我们还在产品流程中加入了一个理念——我们可能会转向或砍掉路线图上的内容,因为之前感觉一旦放上了路线图就非做不可,但这并不明智。
Lenny: 明白了。所以本质上,有一个大约六个月的较为详细的计划,说明每个团队要做什么?
Paige Costello: 是的,是的。
Lenny: 明白了,很有意思。
具体示例:领域与指标
Lenny: 也许再补充几点,让听众能有更具体的感知。领域的一个例子是什么?哪个实际的团队会是一个领域?还有,顺便再问一个问题——你能不能分享一些指标,这些团队可能以什么为目标,作为你们思考指标方式的例子?
Paige Costello: 你问到领域时我想到的是叫做 Coordinate 的领域,他们的职责实际上是确保 Asana 中帮助团队协作的那部分功能运行良好。所以那是项目、任务、你可能放入任务中的数据,以及人们在使用 Asana 进行核心团队协作时所需的各种来回沟通。他们关注的一些指标包括组织的付费周活跃用户,以及真正关注健康的项目使用情况。我们要确保理解”好的使用”是什么样的,以及我们希望创造什么样的动态——让用户真正从产品中获得价值。我们把这纳入指标体系,作为护栏,确保我们不会为了推动某个指标而牺牲用户从 Asana 中真正获得他们所需的东西。
双钻流程
Lenny: 沿着这个方向还有几个问题。
Paige Costello: 好的。
Lenny: 我对流程这个话题有点着迷了。我记得你们在 Asana 使用一种叫做双钻流程(Double Diamond Process)的方法,对吧?
Paige Costello: 是的,我们在用。
Lenny: 我在各个地方看到过这个流程的图示,但我不知道有哪家公司真的在用它作为实际流程。你能描述一下双钻流程是什么以及你们如何使用它吗?
Paige Costello: 你可能熟悉精益创业的概念,以及双钻中关于”先扩展、再聚焦”的思路。先扩展——你问”我应该为哪类客户解决问题?“然后选定一个,这就是聚焦。然后再扩展——你问”这个客户有什么问题?“再聚焦——你确定”这就是他们的问题。“然后再扩展——你问”我们应该用什么方案来解决这个问题?“再聚焦——你确定”这是我们应该着手推进的方案。“这个不断扩展、聚焦、再扩展、再聚焦的过程,迫使人们跳出以意见为导向的视角,因为我们太需要对自己的工作和原因保持定量和定性的好奇心,并且用更系统、更严谨的方式去得出结论。这个过程不需要太长时间,但它打破了原有的思维框架。
Asana 的双钻流程……我们典型的评审或交付物实际上都对应双钻的不同拐点。我们会要求团队做一个启动会,根据问题的规模和不确定性的程度,收集不同规模的信息。有些人已经做了足够的客户选择和研究,所以他们直接从”这个问题有哪些可能的解决方案?“开始,然后他们带着规格说明来,这就是与设计等环节一起进行聚焦的部分。但这实际上是让我们的交付物与这个理念对应起来,确保产品思考具备那种决策质量。
Lenny: 你刚才描述的方式非常以客户和目标为导向。这就是这个框架本身吗?是围绕”为谁构建”然后”构建什么”,还是说更……就是这样的,对吧?你不用继续了。
Paige Costello: 是的,没错。
Lenny: 好的。
Paige Costello: 这非常重要,因为这样你才知道成功是什么样的。如果你把使用某个功能作为成功指标,那就完了——你是在为考试而教,而不是真正在驱动结果。所以,虽然我们的规划流程围绕的是有效地定义品类和如何取胜,确保客户从使用工作管理工具中获得特定收益,但贯穿到团队可能负责的个别项目的核心线索是,他们需要知道自己为谁解决问题,以及”这个问题被解决了”意味着什么。所以一切始终从足够的客户洞察开始,这样我们才能创造性地完成他们想要做的事。我的意思是,真正代表客户去创新。
Lenny: 你能不能再重复一下,每个阶段有没有对应的术语名称?
Paige Costello: 当然可以。
Lenny: 那么,有没有一个经过这个流程的功能或产品的例子可以分享?如果没有一下子想不起来,也没关系。
双钻流程的评审节点
Paige Costello: 各个拐点分别是:启动会,也就是那个”扩展”的阶段;然后是客户和方向选择——这既包括目标客户,也包括从万英尺高空俯瞰你可能如何解决这个问题的概览。你大致要走哪条路?然后,在这条路径内扩展,探索不同的概念;接着是设计概念评审。然后是产品规格说明。再然后是全流程体验评审,或者叫端到端体验的设计评审,以及发布评审。所以发布评审通常就是:“嘿,这就是做出来的东西。这是我们当初说的。这些是快速跟进项。“大多数时候,到那个阶段,产品已经在内部吃自己的狗粮有一段时间了,评审更多是形式上的确认——“我们的指标到位了吗?准备好发布了吗?”
Lenny: 很棒。这些评审是线下进行、Zoom 上进行,还是异步的?
Paige Costello: 看情况。取决于工作的复杂程度,也取决于我们想讨论多少。我们的设计评审很多是线下进行的。规格评审更多是异步的,然后我们会说:“根据大家问题的多少,再决定是否开个会。“否则我们主要走异步,但两种方式都有。确实取决于方案的复杂度和模糊性,以及大家事先异步提出的问题有多少。
办公室与远程工作政策
Lenny: 我这里想岔开一下话题,聊聊 Asana 的居家办公政策。这个问题我越来越好奇它的变化,因为感觉有一种回归办公室的趋势。Asana 目前的政策是什么?过去几年有什么变化吗?
Paige Costello: 嗯,疫情期间我们是完全远程的,然后以”以办公室为中心的混合模式”回到了办公室。我们周一、周二、周四在办公室,周三和周五基本在家办公。这个模式从一开始就设计好了。我们想确保充分利用团队面对面协作的优势,所以这一直是标准做法。我觉得 Asana 可能比较独特的地方在于,我们从一开始就确定了这样做,而不是纠结来纠结去——要不要做远程办公,意味着什么,怎么聚在一起,怎么为此做预算。我们直接说:“不,我们就是要做以办公室为中心的混合模式”,因为我们想为人们创造协作和快速推进的空间。
重新适应这个节奏也很有意思。虽然我们早就知道要这样做,但这不代表第一天大家就很擅长在办公室工作。大家做站会的时候是坐着的。而以前,你走过我们的办公室,能听到站会的声音,因为大家会喊站会口号,站在工位区域里。现在大家更可能在会议室里做站会,我们正在尝试回到”站会是站着的”这个层面,但这确实需要过程……我相信在办公室工作的人都有类似的经历——重新习惯使用白板,重新习惯开会时站着。很奇怪,我们能这么快丢掉一个曾经那么本能的习惯。我觉得就在最近一个月,我敢说——现在是 2023 年 6 月——办公室里更有活力了,更多的对话,更多的随意交流……有人在食堂独自吃饭,有人坐到他们旁边。这一切不是一夜之间发生的。
Lenny: 我最近看到很多创始人在推特上说”居家办公失败了,该回办公室了。“我好奇这会不会蔓延到越来越多的公司,还是只是零星几个创始人。
Paige Costello: 我认为这对心理健康来说是真实存在的。我确实觉得,拥有社交性的随意关系,以及更多机会和那些不需要专门约会议室的人聊战略,是非常有益的。就说今天,我吃午饭的时候坐到了我们数据科学负责人旁边,我们即兴聊了聊怎么评审实验、怎么评估学习上的投资回报率,而不仅仅是看指标。就是这样一种情况——如果我们必须安排的话,这事可能就不会发生;就算发生了,也要等到几周之后。
Lenny: 感觉一周在家一两次……或者抱歉,一周在家一两次,跟以前也没太大区别——以前本来就有一个不开会的日子,很多人那天在家办公。所以感觉几乎是回到了那种状态。
Paige Costello: 没错,而且大家比以前更擅长利用这些时间了。
Lenny: 对。
Paige Costello: 所以我觉得我们的远程日比在一起的日子更有产出,在办公室的日子我们还在适应节奏。
Lenny: 是的。我记得做 PM 的时候,唯一能做真正深度工作的日子就是”无会议周三”。那是在 Airbnb。
Paige Costello: 对。我建议你了解自己的生理节律类型(chronotype),把你头脑最清醒的时间段锁起来做那类工作。对我来说是早上。
Lenny: 多说说生理节律类型,那是什么?
Paige Costello: 我是早起型的人,所以我尽量不在 10 点之前、有时候 11 点之前安排会议,那段时间做当天最困难的工作。
Lenny: 我刚才还想到 Airbnb 时的站会,不仅是它们带来了多少能量,有时候甚至能量太多了——旁边另一个团队也在做站会,又笑又鼓掌,我们这边就:“嘘,我们在工作呢。“我觉得我们需要更多这样的氛围回来。
Paige Costello: 完全同意。是的,是的。
赢得信任与说服质疑者
Lenny: 好,换个稍微不同的方向。我听说你经常是房间里最年轻的人,而且你经常领导比你多几十年经验的人。我想问,在赢得信任和说服质疑者方面,你学到了什么——尤其是当他们可能比你更有经验、更年长,尤其是在其他职能领域,比如高管、设计师、工程师?你在这方面有什么心得?
Paige Costello: 我想说的一点是:带上洞察。了解你的客户。了解你的市场。了解你的竞争对手。了解你的数据。了解你的产品。如果你能成为房间里那个亲眼看过客户使用产品的人,对某个工具在某个维度上为什么明显更好或更差有自己的判断,并且你能带着信心和清晰度表达出来——你不需要懂对方的职能领域,不需要具备他们擅长的专业知识——你就能带来让人好奇、信任你的洞察,让人立刻意识到存在一个你不是在为之辩护而是客观存在的机会。我觉得这是一件非常微妙而独特的事:不是假装自己比你实际拥有的经验更多,而是愿意提出好问题,然后保持足够的好奇心,把人们可能没有的洞察带到每一次会议中,并且始终乐于分享。
Lenny: 这个回答太好了,因为就好像没有什么窍门。就是去做功课,花时间去成为那个能给出别人看重的答案的人,自然而然,别人就会尊重你、重视你的意见、想听你说。
Paige Costello: 对,对。我们前任董事会成员 Anne Raimondi,现在是我们的业务负责人,在 First Round 上写过一篇关于信任方程式的文章,非常好,让我深有共鸣。不知道你有没有听说过,她说信任等于可信度加上可靠性,加上真实性,除以——或者说是除以——对自身利益的感知。我觉得当你面对一个不认识你、不了解你工作的人时,你的任务就是建立可信度,而我刚才说的带上洞察,就是你能真正扭转局面的地方。可靠性,这关乎你的说到做到比。真实性就是保持脆弱,做你自己,然后确保人们知道你不是为了某个其他结果或目的——对自身利益的感知真的会很大程度上改变人们对你的信任程度。
Lenny: 关于掌握洞察、了解客户,投入时间应该是其中很重要的一环。你是这样做的吗,还是在这方面还有什么别的——就是”我是怎么在这一块变得特别厉害的”那种方法?
深入客户一线
Paige Costello: 当你接手一个新角色时,和研究员成为好朋友,花时间亲眼观察客户使用产品,因为他们报告的内容或试图研究的方向可能和你观察到的大不相同。你真的需要那个与客户的近距离接触,所以要主动问:“我怎样才能和客户安排时间?怎么给他们补偿?怎么阅读工单?“诸如此类。令人惊讶的是,你其实不需要做太多就能很快跟上,理解组织在为谁解决问题、解决得好不好,以及人们真正怎么使用你的产品——对比你的团队怎么使用你的产品——尤其是在那些吃自己的狗粮文化很重的组织中。这其实很有风险,因为人们会变得对客户的需求和行为不再敏感,因为他们觉得自己就是客户,而且这也很容易陷入自我审视的怪圈。所以我觉得你越多走出去,打破人们讨论”我们该做什么、为什么”以及”我们不该做什么、为什么”的固有方式——关键不是你的观点,而是提出问题,然后带入洞察——这真的能改变对话的性质并建立信任。
关于信心与沟通
Lenny: 我很喜欢这一点。关于信心,你谈到了自信地沟通这些事情的重要性。关于如何更有信心,你学到了什么?管理层面的一部分是有答案,但在沟通信心这方面,有没有什么你会指导你的 PM 或其他人——比如”这是你传递信心的方式”?
Paige Costello: 这个问题很好。我觉得在一些小时刻里表现出勇气和胆量,就是你需要做的。你必须站出来,在准备好之前就说出来,请求原谅,保持脆弱。我觉得当你展示脆弱的时候,人们实际上比你全副武装地说”我知道这个,我们这样做”更信任你。所以真正的信心往往体现在你愿意提问,或者说”我不太明白你的意思,能再说一遍吗?“这也关乎你的沟通方式——看着别人的眼睛,你的身体姿态,你的肢体语言。
我觉得人们很容易忘记这些,因为在会议中盯着电脑、刷 Slack 消息太容易了。所以你能做的最好的事情之一就是:如果你在一个会议里,就真正待在这个会议里。不断扫视房间里每个人的表情,看看是否有人有问题,开始时停一下,欢迎大家,等人到齐了聊几句,结束前问:“我有没有遗漏什么?有没有你们预期会覆盖但我们没提到的内容?“这其实就是保持开放,而这比一直强势地主张观点更能传达信心。
(此处跳过一段赞助商广告)
以身作则与指导 PM
Lenny: 从我和与你共事的人的交流中,很清楚你在指导 PM、指导你的团队——可能在整个 Asana 范围内——投入了大量时间和精力。有一点特别被提到,就是你非常强调以身作则来领导和教学,而不是仅仅说”这是你做这件事的方式”。如果确实如此,我很好奇这对你来说源于何处,以及为什么你觉得这种方式比在会议中说”你应该做 X、Y、Z”更成功——对比实际去做,然后让他们看到。
Paige Costello: 我觉得核心是重复。我们都是重复的学生。如果你看到某件事被做了几次,你就更有可能记住它、内化它。而且这也是我自己的学习方式,所以我觉得可能跟这一点有关。我记得听过一个叫”三个 E”的框架:experience(经验)、exposure(接触)和 education(教育)。我觉得对我来说,听到这个框架对于如何发展职业或更有目的地规划自身成长很有帮助。因为我觉得人们在职业生涯早期往往倾向于认为”教育、教育、教育”,然后开始转向”经验、经验。我怎么获得做管理者的经验?我需要先读关于管理的东西,然后去做管理者。“这是一种非常线性的思维。
Paige Costello: 接触是一个非常重要的方面。我当时想,“好吧,你不在驾驶座上,但你在车里,你能听到发生了什么,你在评估这件事怎么回事、影响是什么。“这就回到了要真正活在当下、保持分析性思考,以及做一个学习者——因为如果你能做一个学习者,不仅是在教育或经验的场景中,而是在接触的场景中,你就能以快得多的速度、在多得多的方向上成长,远超你仅仅从日常工作、从直接要求你完成的工作中所能获得的。
Lenny: 有没有这方面的例子?无论是发生在你身上的,还是你看到某位管理者或领导者这样做然后你觉得”哦,我明白了”,或者你自己这样做并且起到了效果?
Paige Costello: 我举两个例子。首先,我主持会议的方式,就是我自己想要参加的那种会议。所以我会确保以一个清晰的议程开始,推进节奏快,但留出讨论的时间,而且不完全是单向的信息分享,而是在适当的地方进行辩论。我认为要懂得如何引导对话,礼貌地打断那些讲得太久或把讨论引向偏离预定方向的人,要考虑在场每个人的体验,创造出你希望他们在你不在的场合也能创造的那种体验。
关于经验的一个例子——有时候经验是你亲自去做那件事,获得第一手的经验。另一些时候,你需要的是教育,你需要一位导师、一位教练来告诉你他们看到的情况或给你建议。我曾在 Intuit 参加过一次非常高风险的产品评审,结束时其他人都离开了,那个业务单元的负责人在走出会议室的时候说了一句:“永远回答他们本应该问的那个问题。""永远回答他们本应该问的那个问题。”
我对这条建议感到相当惊讶,因为在那一刻它非常有深度。因为我觉得当你还是一个学生,你已经习惯了……如果你是一个追求优秀的人,你喜欢拿 A,你听到一个问题就会去回答它。你的反应是”一对一、一对一、一对一”。但我从中学到的是,在会议或对话中,实际上还有一个更高的层次、另一个策略角度——要确保你覆盖了更重要的要点、更大的图景、提问者可能没有看到或考虑到的替代方案。所以我认为经验、接触和教育的结合,确实能帮助你确保自己在每一个方面都有意识地向前推进,或者找到能在这些方面帮助你的人。
关键建议
Lenny: 我很喜欢这条建议。这让我想问,还有没有其他对你影响特别大的建议?或者你经常给团队的那些建议,某种反复出现的主题,以至于人们甚至可能会打趣说,“哦,Paige 又在说这个了”?
Paige Costello: 关于建议可以从几个角度来看。我给的建议往往是在特定的时刻、针对特定的人才能击中要害。我会说,我喜欢给职业生涯早期的人的一条建议是:不要自我淘汰。因为我觉得人们很容易说”我没有那个经验”,或者”我不够 X、Y、Z”,然后就不去申请。所以我真的会推动人们不要自我淘汰,也提醒自己在适当的时候自己也要这样做。我经常给的另一条建议就是:想大的,做小的。“想大的,做小的。“为了做那件事,你能做的最小的事情是什么?但我们不要因为一直在尝试以小块的方式交付,就开始以小的方式思考——因为很容易变得过于增量式,过于纠结于优化某个指标而错失更大的图景。所以”想大的,做小的”是我给出的另一条产品建议。
线上与线下的觉察
最后一条我想说的建议更像是一种思维方式。所以这有点抽象,但员工加入 Asana 时,会得到一本叫《The 15 Commitments of a Conscious Leader》(有意识的领导者的十五个承诺)的书。这是由 Conscious Leadership Group(有意识领导力组织)主导的。他们还会接受为期两天的培训,学习一些有效与他人合作的语言和工具。对我来说,这至少是变革性的,因为我学到了一些可以与同事分享的词汇和方法。你学到的东西之一是处于”线上”还是”线下”。这个概念是:“你现在在哪里?你在线上还是线下?“如果你在线上,你致力于学习,你开放而好奇。这里的事情更有趣、更有玩乐感。如果你在线下,你致力于赢,你致力于证明自己是对的。事情更非黑即白。
我们每个人都有这样的日子——在一场对话中,我们真的处于那个线下空间,“不,事情就是这样,没有商量的余地。“这个理解自己内心状态的概念,然后觉察你在那个状态下如何运作——对我来说真的是很好的建议,同时也能识别其他人在我们做决策或讨论上下文时处于什么位置。这还帮助我思考拒绝虚假的权衡取舍,去挑战……本质上,有一个概念叫”相反的情况怎么可能是对的”,这是一条我今天早上还在给自己提出的建议。
我想实际上是昨天。我在想,“明天我该怎么办?明天我要向领域负责人交付清晰度支柱简报,确保他们理解我们的堆叠排序指标,他们需要确切知道我们的战略优先事项是什么以及为什么,他们需要提醒,他们需要能够将我们的业务之声和可用性清单转化为那些计划。我需要建立一个立场,确保这一切都写下来了,他们真正理解了,并且我和他们有一次很好的对话,获得开放性问题,他们觉得自己可以真正挑战我的想法。我下午还要和 Lenny 录一期播客。唉。“对吧?
起初,我想的是,“这实在太多了。我应该试着挪走或取消其中一个。“然后我问自己,“相反的情况怎么可能是对的?“我就想,“两个我都能做。“这足以戳破那个气球——因为有时候你的大脑太习惯于处于稀缺心态,而不是创造替代选项或看到不同的路径。当我挑战自己并说出”相反的情况怎么可能是对的?“的那一刻,我的肩膀放松了下来。我感到更轻松了。我想,“哦,对,两个我都能做。不会有问题的。我们会有一次很棒的对话。我准备好了,会保持好奇,和你讨论你觉得有趣的话题,我们就这样做。“所以,“相反的情况怎么可能是对的?“一直是一条非常有帮助的建议或提问方式,我用它来确保自己不会把自己带偏。
Lenny: 哇,这个问题收获真丰富。太精彩了。清晰度支柱的策略进展如何?大家接受了吗?有效果吗?
清晰度支柱的进展
Paige Costello: 我很兴奋。现在做产品领导者是一个非常有意思的时期,尤其是随着所有的技术转型……说实话,LLM 带来的技术变革确实令人惊叹,开发的节奏,我们团队快速交付真正智能产品的能力。我们不是处在那种运营层面的”摸索”阶段。我们不是在试图想办法做得更好然后推给客户。我们确实有很多有趣的前进路径,正在努力确保自己站在前沿,同时真正思考的是,“用新的服务方式去服务我们想要服务的企业和组织,这意味着什么?“所以这是一次非常愉快的对话,同时我也必须对大家坦诚,“这是一个 70% 完成度的方案。30% 是缺失或不正确的,所以我才这么早就来找你们。“我觉得这次对话进行得非常好,这也是我们 12 个月滚动规划对话的起点。
AI 探索的投资策略
Lenny: 让我顺着 AI 这个话题展开一下,因为这显然是很多人都在关注的。
Paige Costello: 对。
Lenny: 你怎么看待在产品团队中对 AI 探索的投资分配?你是像”嘿,团队,每个人都应该把 AI 作为自己产品的一部分来思考”,还是说有一个专门的团队来思考 AI 和 LLM 的集成,然后”其他人继续做你们正在做的事”?
Paige Costello: 我们拥有 ML 团队已经很长时间了,负责确保我们有测试优先级模型和通知优先级模型,让我们的产品用起来更省力。但当最近 LLM 取得巨大飞跃时,我们组建了一个团队来快速原型验证,探索什么是可能的,并在我们通常的工作规范之外提出假设进行验证。所以他们直接跳到了原型制作,而不是走我之前讲的那套双钻流程。这意味着我们能够非常快地得出结论:“哇,这比我们想象的要好太多了,而我们之前绝对不会优先考虑它,因为我们以为要花更长的时间。“然后在其他情况下,“理论上听起来不错的东西”,实际一试却发现不然。
所以跳过大量流程、直接上手尝试一直是关键,然后我们做的是把这些交给在客户问题上最有专业知识的团队。比如状态和进展汇报相关的团队,把钥匙交给他们说,“这是起步方案,这是假设,这是我们目前的进展。现在是吃自己的狗粮阶段了,你们想怎么做?“这样我们就能在不浪费时间的情况下推动大家,并在各个团队内部培养技能,由他们来推进这些体验。
Intuit 的培训经验
Lenny: 我想回到辅导这个话题。我之前跳过了几个相关的问题,但我觉得那是一个很值得深挖的领域。你提到了 Intuit,你在 Intuit 工作过。Intuit 以拥有非常好的 APM 项目和非常出色的产品经理培训而闻名。你从那段经历中学到了什么,带到了辅导工作中?另外我记得 Asana 也有 APM 项目,对吗?
Paige Costello: Intuit 有非常优秀的培训项目,APM 项目和他们的管理者培训。在 PM 方面,他们教的最重要的是以客户为中心,而这确实源自公司的创立。对于任何在 Intuit 工作过或正在那里工作的人来说,他们都知道这样一个故事:Scott Cook 看着他的妻子在厨房餐桌旁结算支票簿,盯着看了很久,然后说,“一定有更好的办法,用软件。“所以 Intuit 的产品培训非常典型地围绕这样一个理念:“你如何真正去观察客户使用你的产品,或者做他们日常做的事情,收集他们留下的痕迹,了解他们的变通方法,然后利用这些经验来发现令人惊喜的洞察和机会,进而围绕这些来打造产品?“他们对于如何定义持久优势也非常明确,并从客户洞察出发,结合市场格局来全局性地思考产品流程。所以那里的 PM 项目确实非常用心,尤其擅长把一个从未做过 PM 的人培养成一个非常优秀的 PM。
他们还有一个很棒的管理者培训项目,我认为从中收获最大的是关于反馈的那部分。给予反馈这件事我觉得每个人都能从中受益,但对于管理者来说尤为关键,因为如果你不做,不能真实表达你的意思,不能用一种能被对方内化和采取行动的方式去传达,你就真的没有为你的队友、你的团队的成长和职业发展打好基础。他们的项目帮助你这样思考:“好,我要用情境、行为、影响(situation, behavior, impact)的方式来传达这条反馈。情境是周二下午三点那个会议上。行为是,我在说这件事的时候你打断了我。影响是,让我觉得你没有在听我说话,或者让我觉得你的声音比我的更重要,或者影响是,等等等等。”
具体是什么影响其实不重要,因为你搭建的方式决定了它是一个主观观察。它不是摄像头记录的内容,而是你的体验。因此,它是真实的、有价值的反馈,并且能开启对话,让你们可以讨论下一步。那种格式和框架真正帮助我理解到,给予反馈不是为了证明自己是对的,也不是为了把正确的信息传达给对方。它是关于分享对方不同决策对你产生的影响。所以,特别是当你需要给出关于某人穿什么来上班、你觉得他们的工作怎么样、他们的沟通方式或肢体语言这类反馈时——有一个足够好的支撑结构,让你能够非常清楚地表达你的意图和背后的出发点,同时又足够规范化,让对方能够真正参与进来——这帮助极大,我至今仍在使用。
Lenny: 很有意思的是,一些最有影响力的培训居然是这种软技能。
Paige Costello: 特别基础。
Lenny: 基础。对。
Paige Costello: 对。
Lenny: 就是怎么给别人反馈而已,但就像——“学会如何排优先级,如何开会,如何做演讲。”
Paige Costello: 不,是的。
Lenny: 就像,“以下是给反馈的方法。”
Paige Costello: 对。
新 PM 的常见障碍与成功要素
Lenny: 所以你带过很多初阶产品经理。我很好奇你觉得什么最阻碍新 PM 的发展、阻碍他们在职业生涯中取得成功?反过来,什么最能帮助新 PM 取得成功——无论是技能、行为还是习惯方面的?
Paige Costello: 我觉得那种你必须无所不知、超级自信的错觉,会让你陷入主张立场而不是探究问题的状态。职业生涯较早阶段的 PM,或者进入了自己不熟悉领域的 PM,真的很想快速成为专家。所谓专家意味着试图走那条最直的捷径,而这会减少那些能让你变得更聪明信息的获取和对话的发生。所以一些 PM 面临的挑战是觉得自己必须是专家,必须是房间里最聪明的人,或者更糟的——他们真的以为自己是房间里最聪明的人。
于是,他们就真的在那个小黑屋里独自做客户调研、产品探索或写需求文档。然后他们拿着成品出现,说:“就是这个。这就是对的。我知道它是对的,我们尽快执行吧。“其他人会说:“等等,什么?我不明白,我有问题。“或者他们嘴上不说,但心里仍有疑问——这更糟糕。所以我认为真正阻碍 PM 发展的是,他们并非出于真正的好奇心去协作——那更像是一种表演式协作,他们出现在会议室里,或者想做一次评审,但骨子里并不真正想要那些问题或反馈。
我认为努力让自己保持好奇和开放的心态非常重要,因为这会让你的工作更加成功。别人不一定总是对的,但如果你认真倾听,你可以提出澄清性的问题。你可以追问问题背后的问题。你可以听到反馈,然后判断:“这是我必须做的、应该做的,还是我应该考虑的?“你可以真正展开一场推动你的人际关系向前发展的对话。所以我会说,这也是我认为阻碍 PM 发展的一个因素。
PM 往往非常有野心,以职业发展为中心。这有很多好的方面,但我想说——别让车轮的噪音把你逼疯。如果你全身心投入工作,真正享受其中并解决问题,人们会主动冒出来说:“你很棒,去跟你的老板说你应该升职。“你不需要主动要求晋升。你的成果自己会说话。当然,你应该有赞助人和为你代言的人,但很多这样的支持其实就来自你与工作和团队之间那种最原始的联结。
经验教训:从错误中学习
Lenny: 我跟你认识的每个人聊,他们都像说”天哪,我好喜欢 Paige。“我能理解为什么,但我想问你一个问题。我想你肯定在产品或职业上犯过一些错误。我很想听一个出了问题的故事,以及你从中学到了什么。这可能是最后一个问题了,取决于你怎么回答。
Paige Costello: 我想说,到目前为止我给的所有建议,都直接来自我亲身经历中吃过苦头学到的教训。尤其是从独立贡献者转向管理角色时,你不需要拥有所有答案。你需要提出更好的问题。你需要在方向和自主性上深思熟虑。所以我认为一个常见的失误是,如何给出指导或方向而不让人觉得是在微操——因为你要做的是教一个可复用的模式,而不是给出一条只能用一次就丢弃的具体指令。
我认为这是管理者成长路径上相当常见的问题,但你越快学到它、观察到它,并运用技巧来管理它,效果就越好。举个例子,我以前开会时会带一叠便利贴,把我想说的话写在便利贴上,看是否有人会先说出来。等到会议结束时,如果我仍然觉得有一两张便利贴上的内容值得说,我才会说出来。但你必须自我约束,因为没有别人会替你做这件事——因为不管你觉得自己多么平易近人,别人心里清楚你是老板。他们不一定会打断你或直接挑战你。
我遇到的另一个挑战是,我是一个非常乐观的人,喜欢看事情光明的一面。我非常积极,但我觉得这取决于你共事的文化或你的团队,有时候他们需要听到真正糟糕的部分,需要你非常坦诚,需要你如实相告。我意识到自己有过这样的经历——我没有意识到人们觉得我不真诚,因为他们觉得某件事很糟,而我却没有谈论它。但这不是因为我不觉得它糟,或者没看到问题。只是因为我的天性是说:“好吧,我不去谈论糟糕的事情,因为我们正在做需要做的事。“只要计划没问题,我就不会特别去强调我看到的那些问题,也不会主动跟团队正面推进这些问题。所以他们觉得不知道我在想什么,不确定我们是否在看待同一件事。那真的是一次很有意思的经历。类似的经历还有很多很多。
Lenny: 关于第二个教训,你在领导和做事的方式上有没有做什么改变?比如现在找到了一种既能传达”这里有问题”,又依然保持乐观和建设性的方式?
Paige Costello: 我试着对自己和他人更真实。我试着在沟通时说:“嘿,这个还不完整。“比如今天早上我做的事情,那份 clarity brief。我说:“这个完成了 70%。我还没有信心的那 30% 是这三件事。我对这部分不太有把握,希望下周能有更多清晰度。“这就是一个例子——无论事情大小,都同样坦诚,这样人们才能对你和你的工作、对组织和环境有一个更平衡的认知。
职业规划:关注学习曲线而非职位
Lenny: 我很好奇你怎么看待自己未来的职业发展。你会规划多远的未来?你怎么规划 Paige 的职业未来?
Paige Costello: 我试着非常有意识地思考——在离开一个角色时,留下来同样重要。当我把职业当作整体来考虑时,我试着思考我想获得哪些技能或经历,而不是去追求具体的职位、公司或特定的问题。所以我会思考的是……实际上,我通过问自己关于学习曲线的问题来评估我是否处于一个健康的角色和良好的环境中——“我学习曲线的陡峭程度是否对我有利?“因为有时候你可能很喜欢这个组织、喜欢这个问题,但感觉自己就是没在学习,或学得不够快,或没有被挑战。
这一点我认为非常重要。所以要思考学习曲线,思考环境是否正在积极影响你成长职业和发挥影响力的能力。环境方面,你可能人员配备不足、工具不够,或者管理团队中有人有毒性,或者某个同级怎样怎样怎样。这些事情很重要,而我觉得人们对此讨论不够或不够重视——你的环境应该包括为你代言的人,应该是一个让你觉得拥有合适条件去做出色工作的地方。
Paige Costello: 然后,第三块就是关于问题本身——你的产品正在解决的问题。它有趣吗?它有意思吗?我常常喜欢这样想:热情是培养出来的,而不是发现的。因为我觉得人们……我们对待九岁小孩也是这样。我们问:“你长大后想做什么?“他们一脸茫然,然后说:“宇航员。要不兽医。我不知道。“会有一种恐慌的时刻,而我觉得我们应该坦然地说:“去尝试不同的事情,看看这个问题对你来说是否有趣,是否让你觉得好玩。“这不意味着它必须很酷炫,也不意味着公司必须是大品牌。它只需要是你好奇的东西,这样你才能把工作做得更好。所以我会说,学习曲线、环境和问题,是我用来评估”我是否还在正确的道路上,还是应该考虑换个方向”的几个维度。但当我想自己的职业时,我真正思考的是技能和经历,而不是职位。所以我会说那更像是我的参考框架,因为否则,我觉得自己就活在了未来,而没有充分地去经营当下的职业。
闪电问答环节
Lenny: 好了,说到这里,我们来到了非常令人兴奋的闪电问答环节。我准备了六个问题。准备好了吗?
Paige Costello: 好的,来吧。
Lenny: 你最常推荐给别人的两三本书是什么?
Paige Costello: 我最常推荐给其他 PM 的书是 Marty Cagan 的《Inspired》。我觉得它是一本经典之作。最近我读过的、也推荐的书还有 Margaret Atwood 的《The Blind Assassin》和 Paulo Coelho 的《The Alchemist》。
Lenny: 最近最喜欢的电影或电视剧是什么?
Paige Costello: 哦,我现在非常喜欢看《The Diplomat》,然后电影的话……我想想。我刚看了纪录片《Fire of Love》,讲的是一对研究火山的夫妇,节奏很不一样,很棒的体验。
Lenny: 我看了那个预告片,我得去看看。还有《The Diplomat》我看完了,非常棒。结尾非常好。
Paige Costello: 我还没看完,别剧透。
Lenny: 我只是说它很好,这不算剧透。
Paige Costello: 好吧。
最喜欢的面试问题
Lenny: 好,下一个问题。你最喜欢问候选人的一道面试题是什么?
Paige Costello: 好消息是,我可以告诉你这道题,但我还是可以继续用,因为每个人的回答从来都不一样。我喜欢问:“讲一个出了问题的时候。发生了什么?你做了什么?等等等等。“本质上这个问题问的就是”当产品失败的时候”、“当团队出了问题的时候”,就是那些出错的事情,因为做这份工作本来就会出问题。然后去评估人们的心态、他们谈论这件事的方式、以及他们评估情境的方式。我觉得这是一个很好的问题,真的能告诉你很多关于人们如何思考、以及当事情不顺利时他们如何看待自己。
Lenny: 最近发现并喜欢的一款产品是什么?
Paige Costello: 我最近一直在玩 Poe.com。是的,就是一个以亲身实践的方式了解更多 LLM 能力的机会。创建小机器人很好玩。我在试着做一个 Paige 机器人。我不能说这个 Paige 机器人目前能进行这样的对话,但也许明年这个时候,你就能和另一个我对话了。
Lenny: 如果现在就是 Paige 机器人在说话,它也会这么说的。
Paige Costello: 不过我想说的是,我之前给你的那些零散建议,确实都是我在考虑喂给它的内容,但我觉得 Paige 机器人可能会说:“先上线再说。”
Lenny: Poe,就是 Quora 创始人做的 LLM 聊天机器人?
Paige Costello: 对,你可以试用不同的模型。可以用 GPT-4,还有 GPT-5,还有 Claude,还有其他几个。是的。
Lenny: 另外还有一个 lennybot.com 给还没看过的朋友们。实际上,我的 newsletter 上有一整篇文章讲它是怎么构建的,你可以访问 lennybot.com。它是基于我所有 newsletter 文章训练的,我想……目前还没有播客内容,但总有一天会有的。
Paige Costello: 哦。
Lenny: 顺便说一句,正在听这期节目的朋友,我们在找人来维护和迭代这个机器人。所以如果你对这个领域很感兴趣,也做过类似的事情,请在 Twitter 上私信我。我在找人接手 lennybot.com,把它做得更好……好了,不多说我了。下一个问题。
产品开发流程中的小改变
Lenny: 在你的产品开发流程中,你做过什么相对较小的改变,却对团队的执行力产生了很大影响?
Paige Costello: 最大的改变之一,还是那个问题——要诚实地面对完成一件事到底需要经过多少次评审和审批,以及到底谁真正负责评审和审批工作。所以我们非常严格地明确了,在功能层面,对于一个给定的评审,谁负责、在什么层级负责,并且推动了以下做法:对每次会议的人数设限,对一项工作的子任务评审次数设限。这样做给各个工作团队带来了更多的自主权和更快的节奏。我们的做法是:“我们其实不在乎。我们不想要一串链条式的审批。我们只想要一个人,最终的责任到他就为止,他来负责工作的推进,这样确保知识被传递到位,我们可以比过去更有效地串联起各个环节。“这就是背后的逻辑,它确实改变了我们工作的节奏和质量。
Lenny: 我很喜欢这个。你能不能再分享一些具体的数字?上限是多少?有没有什么其他人可以直接拿去用的——
Paige Costello: 可以。一项工作最多三次评审,其中只有一个人是阻塞式的审批人。如果一个会议超过十个人参加,我们会要求主持人把多余的人请出去,然后写更好的决策笔记。
Lenny: 三次评审是指三次会议来查看产品逐步成型的过程吗?
Paige Costello: 三次评审是指三个人被分配了查看某件事的任务,但只有一个人能阻塞它是否进入下一阶段。
Lenny: 明白了。知情的人?利益相关方?
Paige Costello: 对。
Lenny: 决策者?好的。好。最后一个问题。你在 Asana 工作。你最喜欢的 Asana 使用技巧是什么?
Paige Costello: 我用 Asana 来管理所有的会议,并分配预读材料。所以我一直使用子任务中的多人分配功能——我创建一个带截止日期的任务,上面写”在这个日期之前读完这个”,然后把它分配给一个团队或一组人,非常快。然后,开会的时候,我在一个任务里面实时记录会议笔记,然后高亮笔记中的一部分,把它们转化成子任务,这样所有待办事项就不会遗漏。
Lenny: 哇。你需要做一个视频或写一篇博客来讲这个。不仅是用 Asana 来构建 Asana,还是用 Asana 来管理 Asana 内部的团队。
Paige Costello: 是的,确实是这样的,不过——
Lenny: Asana 一路到底。
Paige Costello: 人们知道谁负责什么。
Lenny: 太棒了。Paige,你太厉害了。非常感谢你来参加这次访谈。最后两个问题。大家想联系你、了解更多的话,在网上哪里可以找到你?听众们怎样能帮到你?
Paige Costello: 你可以在 LinkedIn 和 Twitter 上找到我,Paige Costello,Twitter 上是 @paigenow。听众朋友们,我很想听听你们认为 AI 将如何塑造知识工作者所使用的软件的未来,尤其是,如果你和你的团队在使用 Asana,我很想知道你希望看到 AI 在哪些方面发挥更大的作用,来提升你们团队的效率和对齐。如你所知,我们提供了大量的目标管理、工作管理功能,帮助团队和组织协同完成工作,我很希望听到你们的意见,看看你们觉得机会在哪里。
Lenny: 太好了。Paige,再次非常感谢你来参加这次访谈。
Paige Costello: 我的荣幸。谢谢你的邀请。
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 或你最喜欢的播客应用上订阅本节目。也请考虑给我们评分或留下评论,这真的能帮助其他听众发现这个播客。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 |
|---|---|
| above the line / below the line | 线上/线下(Conscious Leadership Group 的意识状态模型) |
| APM | APM(Associate Product Manager,助理产品经理项目) |
| area | 领域 |
| area perspective | 领域视角 |
| Asana | Asana(知名项目管理软件公司) |
| chronotype | 生理节律类型 |
| clarity | 清晰度 |
| Conscious Leadership Group | Conscious Leadership Group(有意识领导力组织) |
| Coordinate | Coordinate(Asana 内部领域名称) |
| design crit | 设计评审 |
| dogfooding | 吃自己的狗粮(内部试用) |
| don’t self-select | 不要自我淘汰 |
| Double Diamond Process | 双钻流程 |
| false trade-offs | 虚假的权衡取舍 |
| Fire of Love | 《Fire of Love》(纪录片名,保留原文) |
| goals | 目标(Asana 功能名) |
| How might the opposite be true | 相反的情况怎么可能是对的 |
| inflection point | 拐点 |
| Inspired | 《Inspired》(Marty Cagan 著书,保留原文) |
| Intuit | Intuit(美国财务软件公司) |
| lean startup | 精益创业 |
| lennybot.com | lennybot.com(Lenny 的 newsletter 训练的聊天机器人,保留原文) |
| Marty Cagan | Marty Cagan(硅谷产品集团创始人,产品管理领域知名作者,保留原文) |
| navel-gazey | 自我审视的怪圈 |
| No-Meeting Wednesday | 无会议周三 |
| pillar plans | 支柱计划 |
| PM | PM(Product Manager,产品经理) |
| Poe.com | Poe.com(Quora 创始人创建的 LLM 聊天平台,保留原文) |
| portfolios | 项目集(Asana 功能名) |
| say-do ratio | 说到做到比 |
| scarcity mindset | 稀缺心态 |
| Scott Cook | Scott Cook(Intuit 联合创始人,保留原文) |
| ship it | 先上线再说(产品开发中的快速交付理念) |
| situation, behavior, impact | 情境、行为、影响(反馈框架) |
| stack ranked | 堆叠排序 |
| The 15 Commitments of a Conscious Leader | 《The 15 Commitments of a Conscious Leader》(有意识的领导者的十五个承诺,书名) |
| The Alchemist | 《The Alchemist》(Paulo Coelho 著小说,保留原文) |
| The Blind Assassin | 《The Blind Assassin》(Margaret Atwood 著小说,保留原文) |
| The Diplomat | 《The Diplomat》(美国政治题材电视剧,保留原文) |
| the three Es | 三个 E(experience, exposure, education) |
| think big, ship small | 想大的,做小的 |
| trust equation | 信任方程式 |
此文档由 AI 分片翻译(translate_long_document)