Five unexpected (and essential) jobs of a manager of PMs:

βœ‹ Stop stupid sh*t from happening
πŸͺ“ Unblock, unblock, unblock
πŸ† Preserve (and improving) the PM team quality bar
🧐 Preserve (and improving) the product quality bar
🀝 Build a strong leadership group

Thread πŸ‘‡
1/ βœ‹ Stop stupid stupid sh*t from happening

You are now in a higher echelon of influence and visibility. As such, your team (and the company) are relying on you to have an active hand in shaping what gets done. Use this newfound power! ...
1b/ When you see stupid sh*t happening, within your team or anywhere in the company, push back and ask direct questions.

You’ll be surprised by how much impact your opinion now has.
2/ πŸͺ“ Unblock, unblock, unblock

How do you help your teams become more effective? Not by doing IC PM work (e.g. roadmapping, creating 1-pagers, running every meeting). Instead, it’s by leveraging your newfound influence and authority to unblock your teams at every level...
2b/ Short-term (e.g. making sure decisions are made), medium-term (e.g. hiring quickly to fill gaps), and long-term (e.g. aligning everyone around a winning vision and strategy).

Anything that slows your team down or leads to wasted work is now your fault.
3/ πŸ† Preserve (and improve) the PM team quality bar

At larger companies, you’ll now be included in the performance review and calibration process. This means you’ll have a hand in determining what great performance looks like at every level. The default path is to...
3b/ make everyone feel good by letting OK work slide. The more courageous path is to push everyone around you to keep that bar as high as possible.

Rage against the dying of the light.
4/ 🧐 Preserve (and improve) the product quality bar

Your teammates will now be coming to you for design reviews, strategy feedback, goal setting, etc. The natural tendency will be to make everyone happy by going with the flow β€” letting good enough work through...
4b/ Don’t let this happen. You are now the torch-bearer for the quality, ambition, and innovation that happens within your team, (and adjacent teams).

Without micromanaging and telling everyone exactly what to do, push your team to think deeper and go further.
5/ 🀝 Build a strong and united leadership group

As an IC PM, your team was your cross-functional IC peers (e.g. engineers, designers, DS, researchers, etc). As a manager, your team is now your peer managers (e.g. EM, design manager, DS manager, etc). It’s essential that you...
5b/ ...work as one unit because your team will be looking to you each of you for a clear direction and confidence. Put just as much, if not more, effort into building a strong relationship with this new team than you did with your IC team. Sit together, ...
5c/ have a weekly leads meeting, and constantly be checking in with each other on priorities, blockers, and personnel issues. The more cohesive your leadership team, the more cohesive your entire time will be.
6/ Much more, including how to get promoted and how to be successful in the job in the full post
lennyrachitsky.com/p/moving-from-…

β€’ β€’ β€’

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
γ€€

Keep Current with Lenny Rachitsky

Lenny Rachitsky Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @lennysan

20 Oct
Early-stage bottom-up SaaS founders – this thread is for you

Below πŸ‘‡
πŸ”¬ Most important metrics to track
πŸ›  Tools to track these metrics
🎨 How to best visualize and share these metrics
1/ πŸ”¬ What metrics should early-stage bottom-up SaaS founders focus on?

✨ Pre-revenue ✨

1. Retention:
βœ” User: % of new users who are still active 3-6 months later
βœ” Logo: % of new companies who are still active 3-6 months later
βœ” L7/L30: # of days that users are active
2/ Virality within an organization:
βœ” Invite rate: % of new users who sent at least one invite in the first X days
βœ” Invite conversion rate: % of users who receive an invite that sign-up in the next X days
βœ” Virality factor: % of new users who have come from an invite
Read 15 tweets
13 Oct
This week's post (for paid subscribers): Moving from IC Product Manager to manager of Product Managers

Inside:
βœ… Unexpected jobs of a PM manager
βœ… Ways to get promoted to PM manager
βœ… Tips for being successful as a PM manager

Summary in thread πŸ‘‡
lennyrachitsky.com/p/moving-from-…
1/ Top 5 unexpected jobs of a PM manager:
βœ‹ Stopping stupid sh*t from happening
πŸͺ“ Unblocking, unblocking, unblocking
πŸ‘ Preserving (and improving) the PM team quality bar
🧐 Preserving (and improving) the product quality bar
🀝 Building a strong and united leadership group
2/ Top 5 ways to get promoted to PM manager:
πŸ‘ Demonstrate that you can lead people
πŸ“ˆ Demonstrate that you can deliver
πŸ§˜β€β™€οΈ Demonstrate that you can handle complexity
πŸ‘Œ Demonstrate that you develop a winning vision and strategy
☝️ Ask for it
Read 5 tweets
8 Oct
As someone working on growth at Airbnb, I've always been fascinated by Booking.com –– a tiny startup in the Netherlands that became one of the greatest acquisitions of all time through world-class growth.

Read on for rare insights into their early growth strategy πŸ‘‡ Image
1/ Their performance marketing team drove their supply strategy

"When paid marketing is just a function, optimizing campaigns in a cubicle, it doesn’t inform the rest of the business and the funnel doesn’t work. There just isn’t much you can do to optimize paid ad campaigns." Image
2/ The performance marketing team was only two people, even past $100m/year spend

"It was actually only two guys: one banker and one coder. Peter (the banker) was extremely competitive. He would scream and shout when he was losing his #1 position." Image
Read 7 tweets
7 Oct
Looking back at the most successful consumer startups of the last 10 years β€” most companies achieved initial scale by excelling at just one of three growth "lanes":

1. Performance marketing (e.g. FB ads)
2. Virality (e.g. WOM, invites)
3. Content (e.g. SEO)

πŸ‘‡ Read on πŸ‘‡
1/ There are other tactics to boost growth (e.g PR, conversion, brand marketing), and other growth lanes (sales and partnerships), but these three lanes have been the only reliable paths for long-term and sustainable consumer business growth.
2/ Why are there so few ways to grow? Because there very few ways for people to find out about new products. You hear about it from a friend (i.e. virality), you come across it while doing something else (i.e. content, perf marketing), or you get contacted directly (i.e. sales).
Read 25 tweets
30 Sep
The clearest sign of finding product-market fit is feeling "pull" from the market.

But what does "pull" look like?

πŸ‘‡ Read on πŸ‘‡
1/ Sign 1: A sudden inflection in organic growth

Netflix: "Where before we were struggling to get traffic, all of sudden we couldn’t keep up." - @mbrandolph

Tinder: "Downloads started to skyrocket" – @badeen

Uber: "Word of mouth was uncontrollable" – @ryangraves
2/ Sign 2: Customers ask to pay for the product before you ask

Carta: "I've been trying to get to your sales people for weeks!!! Why won't you take my money???" – @henrysward

Github: "To our surprise, users started writing to us asking β€˜Can we pay for this??’" – @mojombo
Read 11 tweets
29 Sep
πŸ”₯ New post: The moment 25 of today's most interesting companies realized they found product-market fit

Stories from @netflix @Uber @Airbnb @Superhuman @SubstackInc @Tinder @Instacart @stripe @Dropbox @datadoghq and many more

Takeaways in thread below πŸ‘‡
lennyrachitsky.com/p/what-it-feel…
1/ The three most common signs of finding PMF:

πŸ”₯ Sudden and significant pull from the market
🎒 Gradual but compounding pull from the market
πŸ₯³ Hitting a meaningful milestone that proves the idea is working
2/ What market "pull" looks like:

βœ”οΈ An inflection in organic growth
βœ”οΈ Customers ask to pay before you do
βœ”οΈ Users flip from being excited about what you have to mad about what you don’t
βœ”οΈ People using the product even if it’s broken
βœ”οΈ Complaints when you're down
βœ”οΈ Low churn
Read 19 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!