Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside)
Tall Raviv, a 12-year IC PM, shares insights on IC career paths, leveraging AI for productivity, cultivating self-reliant teams, and making "street smart" product decisions. He also candidly discusses his career failures and lessons learned.
Deep Dive Analysis
16 Topic Outline
Choosing the Individual Contributor (IC) Product Manager Path
Compensation and Value of Long-Term IC Roles
Creating Career Paths for ICs in Companies
The Rise of Super ICs and AI's Impact on PM Productivity
Leveraging AI for Product Management Tasks
Designing Your Day for Deep Work and Focus
Cultivating Self-Reliant Teams to Increase IC Leverage
The Two Departments That Truly Matter in a Tech Company
Understanding Book Smart vs. Street Smart Decision-Making
The Importance of Customer Perception in Product Changes
No One Right Way to Build Products or Run a Company
Lessons from Wasting a Quarter Due to Poor User Research
Learning to Disagree and Commit with Leadership
Navigating Career Challenges and the Power of Vulnerability
The Dangers of Skipping AB Tests on Sensitive Flows
Reflections on Living Through Conflict and Seeking Normalcy
6 Key Concepts
Super ICs
Super ICs are highly experienced individual contributor product managers who remain hands-on, often achieving the impact of a director-level organization. This role is becoming more prevalent as companies flatten orgs and seek senior, do-it-yourself talent, with AI further enabling this productivity.
Product Scrapbooking
Product scrapbooking is the practice of actively collecting and organizing every piece of evidence, opportunity, or insight (e.g., support tickets, Slack threads, data points) into a central database like Notion. This creates a rich repository of real-world clues to inform future product decisions and demonstrate customer understanding.
Product as a Team
This mental model shifts the perception from 'product' being a specific role (the PM) to 'product' being the collective responsibility of the entire team (design, engineering, PM). It fosters a culture where everyone feels ownership and contributes to improving the product, rather than relying solely on the PM as a central hub.
Book Smart Decision-Making
Book smart decision-making in product management relies on data, design principles, technology, strategy frameworks, and logical analysis. While crucial, it can sometimes overlook the human element and customer perception.
Street Smart Decision-Making
Street smart decision-making involves taking all the 'book smart' analysis and then deeply considering something from someone else's point of view, especially the customer's perception. It gives as much weight to how a change *feels* or *looks* to the customer as it does to the underlying logic or numbers.
Culture Over Process
While process is important as a scaffold, the ultimate goal is to build a strong team culture that is self-reliant and resilient. This means investing in cultivating habits and mindsets where team members collaborate, solve problems independently, and are less dependent on the PM as a bottleneck.
8 Questions Answered
Many IC PMs prioritize excitement and passion for their daily work over traditional career progression into management. They find the IC role offers high autonomy, continuous mastery due to the evolving nature of product management, and a strong sense of purpose in building products they deeply care about.
IC PMs need to genuinely believe in their value and impact. Tactically, during compensation negotiations, they can explicitly state their intention to remain an IC and emphasize that, given the industry's traditional undervaluation of IC roles, it's crucial for their compensation to reflect their worth upfront.
Companies should establish clear, progressive titles (e.g., Senior, Principal, Distinguished Product Manager) and develop transparent career levels and rubrics for ICs, similar to those for managers. Openly recognizing and respecting the IC path helps foster a sense of growth and value for these roles.
PMs can use AI tools like ChatGPT to automate tedious tasks, such as generating detailed user stories and Gherkin format specifications from spoken descriptions. By dictating kickoff information or project details, AI can quickly draft documentation that would otherwise take significant time, allowing PMs to scale their output.
Cultivate a culture where 'product is a team,' not just a role, encouraging all members (engineering, design) to contribute ideas and problem-solve. Actively seek to make yourself less of a bottleneck by encouraging direct communication within the team and moving conversations from DMs to public channels, providing reasons for transparency and searchability.
Book smart decision-making relies on data, frameworks, and logic. Street smart decision-making takes this logical analysis and adds the crucial element of understanding and prioritizing the customer's perception and emotional response to a product change, even if the underlying numbers suggest a positive outcome.
PMs should not assume that tactics successful elsewhere will work in their specific context. It's crucial to conduct thorough qualitative user research, even in areas traditionally seen as quantitative (like checkout flows), to deeply understand customer motivations and mindsets before investing heavily in development.
The best way to learn is by doing really good work at a successful company with talented people, solving difficult and unique problems. This hands-on experience in a dynamic environment will inevitably lead to new insights and skills, allowing you to contribute to and even define best practices.
24 Actionable Insights
1. Empower Team, Reduce Bottlenecks
Cultivate self-reliant teams by shifting from a hub-and-spoke model where you are the bottleneck; instead, encourage team members to figure things out among themselves and involve you at the very end.
2. Shift DMs to Public Channels
Actively encourage team members to move direct messages into public channels, explaining that this promotes transparency, discoverability, and broader team input for decisions. This creates a snowball effect as others see and adopt the practice.
3. Reward Team Initiative
Shower team members with positivity and excitement when they take on tasks typically done by a PM or bring new ideas, encouraging them to be more bold and self-reliant. This fosters a culture where people feel comfortable taking things off your plate.
4. Solve Problems Live with Team
When a team member asks for data or a task, do it live with them instead of promising to get back to them, demonstrating how easy it is. This encourages them to naturally want to do those things themselves over time.
5. Design Your Deep Work Days
Strictly block off mornings for deep work by avoiding Slack and meetings until noon, reserving afternoons for ‘ping pong’ communication. This helps prevent your brain from feeling like ‘scrambled eggs’ and allows for focused thinking.
6. Batch Slack Messages
Keep a running list of Slack messages in your to-do list and send them all at once after your deep work block, rather than sending them as they come to mind. This prevents constant interruptions and maintains focus.
7. Establish Urgent Contact Protocol
Provide key colleagues with your phone number and tell them to call or WhatsApp for truly urgent matters if you’re not on Slack. This creates a high barrier for interruptions, ensuring only critical issues break your deep work.
8. Practice Product Scrapbooking
Maintain a massive Notion database of every product opportunity and piece of customer evidence (support tickets, Slack threads, data) by actively filing screenshots or notes. This allows you to quickly retrieve real-world clues to start new projects or persuade stakeholders to dig deeper.
9. Dictate User Stories with AI
Use AI (like ChatGPT with Whisper) to dictate detailed user stories and epics based on a specific template after a kickoff meeting. This significantly reduces the tedious paperwork and bottleneck of writing detailed specifications.
10. Identify Two Key Departments
Research a company’s growth model and what customers truly pay for to identify the two departments that matter most for its success. This helps understand where the company’s biggest levers for growth and impact lie.
11. Align Your Role with Core Drivers
Position yourself within the departments that are the primary drivers of company growth to maximize your career impact and value. Being in a core department will lead to career-defining work and attract the best colleagues.
12. Weigh Customer Perception Equally
When making decisions, give customer perception and narrative as much weight as logical, data-driven analysis to avoid negative reactions, even if changes are technically beneficial. A logically sound change can still fail due to poor perception.
13. Deep Dive into Customer Raw Data
Develop ‘street smart’ intuition by spending time in customer communities and support tickets, noticing patterns in feedback and customer suspicions. This helps you understand your target persona’s sensitivities and thought processes.
14. Assess Sales Demo Impact of UX
Before launching UX changes, consider their impact on the sales demo, as logical optimizations might inadvertently make it harder to communicate product value. A smoother user experience could hinder the initial ‘aha’ moment for prospects.
15. Invest in Qualitative Research
Conduct thorough qualitative user research, especially with non-users, to understand motivations and mindsets, even in areas traditionally seen as quantitative. This can save significant development time by preventing failed AB tests based on incorrect assumptions.
16. Practice ‘Disagree and Commit’
Once leadership makes a decision you disagree with, commit fully and support the initiative, trusting that if it fails, the team will adapt, and if it succeeds, you’ll learn. It’s more important to be supportive than to be proven right.
17. Be Vulnerable in Tough Situations
When facing career challenges or misunderstandings, proactively and vulnerably share your perspective, including your perceived mistakes, to build trust and resolve issues. This often brings people closer and clarifies unspoken concerns.
18. Run AB Tests for High Stakes
Always run AB tests for sensitive product flows with high stakes, even if changes seem logically safe, to prevent significant negative impact. Failing to test can lead to major issues like tanking new payments for a week.
19. Build Trust to Take Risks
Consistently demonstrate diligence and seriousness in your work to build a ’trust bucket’ with leadership. This provides the confidence needed to take creative risks or make occasional mistakes without severe repercussions.
20. Embrace Life’s Unstoppable Waves
Adopt the motto ‘You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf’ to navigate inevitable emotional and organizational challenges. This mindset encourages adaptation and learning rather than resisting uncontrollable circumstances.
21. Believe in IC Value
Genuinely believe that an individual contributor PM can have significant scope, ownership, and impact, as the industry increasingly recognizes this value. This self-belief is crucial for pursuing a long-term IC career path.
22. Advocate for IC Compensation
When discussing compensation, clearly state your intention to remain an IC and emphasize that your desired salary reflects the value of an experienced IC, not future management promotions. This helps secure fair compensation for the IC role.
23. Create Clear IC Career Ladders
Companies should establish clear titles (e.g., Principal, Distinguished PM) and rubrics for IC product managers to provide a recognized path for growth and respect. This formalizes the IC career path and acknowledges its progression.
24. Seek Challenging Work for Growth
To become a leading expert, focus on doing really good work at a successful company with good people, solving novel and difficult problems. This hands-on experience is the most effective way to learn, grow, and eventually share your own insights.
6 Key Quotes
My strategy is not to have a strategy. For the longest time, I've gone by, am I excited to wake up in the morning? And what's going to make me excited to wake up in the morning?
Tal Raviv
I'm glad you mentioned that I actually have no intention of going into management, or rising up, you know, in those ranks. And I know that, you know, you and I know that the industry traditionally undervalues the IC role. So it's really important for me to, you know, have that number now.
Tal Raviv
You can imagine what might have taken, you know, 10 years ago, five years ago, a director organization, like a director level organization, and everybody reporting to that director to achieve something could probably be achieved with an IC now.
Tal Raviv
I believe in cultivating very self-reliant teams. And I think that's really key to being, having a lot more leverage as an IC, uh, being able to manage multiple teams if needed, uh, on much bigger areas of the product.
Tal Raviv
The best networking is just to do really good work at a successful company and like everything else will work out. So I think the same goes for like learning, right? The best learning is to just do really good work at a really good company with really good people and solve problems that have never been solved before in this way, which will inevitably happen, right? That's what we're all doing. And everything else will work out. Like you'll be the one writing the blog posts, not just reading them.
Tal Raviv
You can't stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf.
Tal Raviv
3 Protocols
Tal Raviv's Daily Productivity Design
Tal Raviv- Strictly split days between 'deep work' and 'ping pong' (reactive tasks).
- Block off mornings for meetings.
- Do not open Slack before noon.
- Keep a section on the to-do list for messages to send when Slack is opened.
- Provide key colleagues with a phone number for truly urgent matters, creating a barrier for non-urgent communication.
Leveraging AI for Scrum Documentation (User Stories)
Tal Raviv- Open a new thread in ChatGPT and define the desired user story template (e.g., Gherkin format).
- Confirm ChatGPT understands the template and its role as an expert PM/product owner.
- Use a dictation tool (like Whisper AI built into ChatGPT) to verbally describe the project background and specific changes, speaking naturally as if to a developer.
- Allow ChatGPT to generate the user stories in the specified format, including cases.
- Review and edit the generated stories as needed, focusing on logical breakdown of large changes (which still requires human input).
Cultivating Self-Reliance in Teams
Tal Raviv- Use language that emphasizes 'product is a team' (e.g., 'I found a way to improve the product' instead of 'I found a case you didn't think about').
- Seek to not be needed, but to be valuable, identifying and eliminating bottlenecks where your attention is required.
- Encourage conversations to move from direct messages to public team channels, explaining the benefits of transparency and searchability.
- Shower team members with positive feedback when they take initiative or perform tasks typically associated with the PM role.
- Perform tasks (e.g., data analysis, Jira ticket creation) live with team members to demonstrate ease and encourage them to do it themselves over time.