The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack)
Noam Levinsky, CPO at Grammarly and former PM at YouTube, Thumbtack, and Facebook, shares lessons from his diverse career, including turning around businesses, fostering innovation, and personal growth strategies.
Deep Dive Analysis
10 Topic Outline
Noam's Approach to Online Presence and Networking
Lessons from YouTube: Prioritizing Business Needs and Self-Layering
Deciding When to Discontinue a Project
Thumbtack's Turnaround: Diversifying Growth and Product Transformation
Lessons from Facebook's New Product Experimentation Team
Creating Space for Innovation in Large Companies
Grammarly's Success as a Profitable B2C Subscription Business
The Resilience and Motivation of Grammarly's Ukraine Team
General Career Advice: Prioritizing Growth and Happiness
Lightning Round
5 Key Concepts
Growth Masks Problems
When a business experiences incredible growth, it can obscure underlying issues in the product or operations. It's only when growth slows or becomes negative that an organization truly understands what is working and what isn't, forcing a deeper examination of core problems.
One Channel Growth Risk
Relying on a single growth channel, such as SEO, makes a business vulnerable to external changes or algorithm updates. Diversifying growth channels is crucial for long-term sustainability and resilience against sudden downturns in any one area.
Startup within a Startup
This model aims to incubate new ideas within a large company, often by creating a separate team (like Facebook's NPE team). Its success isn't solely measured by creating the 'next big thing,' but also by fostering innovation, enabling direct customer interaction, and highlighting organizational constraints that hinder small-scale experimentation.
Community Density
For social or community products, achieving critical mass or 'community density' early on is vital. Large organizations often struggle with this because their default is to launch to millions of users, making it hard to start small and nurture a dense, engaged initial community.
Grammarly's 'How & Where it Works'
Grammarly's success stems from its seamless integration and low-effort value extraction. Users install it once, and it provides assistance across all applications and tabs without requiring workflow changes or configuration, making it easy to get value from its AI-powered communication assistance.
8 Questions Answered
Noam finds that putting effort into an online presence doesn't come authentically or naturally to him. He prefers to focus deeply on his work and build relationships through direct interaction and collaboration rather than through social media or newsletters.
Product leaders should think about what is best for the business broadly, not just what's best for the user or their immediate team's goals. Establishing guiding principles, like prioritizing customers first, then providers, then the company, can help navigate conflicts and ensure global optimization.
Projects often die when the team loses stamina and is no longer bringing their best self to the situation. While resilience is important, if a team is consistently hitting a wall and not getting the signal or feedback needed, a change of scene or pace might be necessary before complete exhaustion.
Relying on a single growth channel, like SEO, makes a company vulnerable to external changes (e.g., Google algorithm updates) that can drastically reduce traffic and lead to negative growth. It's crucial to diversify growth channels proactively to build a more resilient business.
To foster innovation, large companies must rethink incentive systems, performance management, and infrastructure. They need to allow small teams to operate with different time horizons, use flexible infrastructure, and enable direct customer interaction, free from the constraints of the mainline product development organization.
Grammarly's success is attributed to its seamless 'how it works and where it works' approach: it's easy to install, makes users better without configuration, and provides low-effort, high-value assistance across numerous text boxes and applications in a user's workflow.
Noam advises prioritizing career opportunities that promise significant growth and learning, even if they involve pain or struggle, as this leads to long-term development. He also emphasizes focusing on work that genuinely makes you happy and gives you energy.
In any challenging situation, you should be able to rely on one or two core strengths that provide a foundation while you learn new things. If a role is 'too net new' and doesn't allow you to leverage any existing strengths, it might lead to an unbalanced and unhealthy experience.
20 Actionable Insights
1. Prioritize Growth & Learning
Always prioritize career opportunities that promise significant growth and learning, even if they involve pain or discomfort, as this ultimately leads to long-term career advancement and success.
2. Advocate for Business Needs
Prioritize the organization’s best interests, even if it means suggesting your project be canceled or asking to be layered, especially in healthy teams that reward such decisions.
3. Understand Company Strategy
Internalize and understand the broader company strategy to align your influence and decisions towards overall goals, leading to better results for the organization.
4. Prioritize Authentic Work
Focus on work that genuinely excites and energizes you, as this leads to greater success and happiness than conforming to external pressures like extensive online posting.
5. Trust Your Team
Develop a “nose for talent” and choose teams with high-functioning people you trust, as this confidence allows you to make unconventional career moves knowing the right outcome will happen.
6. Cultivate Project Stamina
Recognize that most projects and early companies fail due to lack of stamina; cultivate resiliency and be prepared to “run uphill and chew glass” to push through difficult periods.
7. Recognize Loss of Stamina
If a team loses motivation and stamina, or is no longer bringing their best self due to prolonged struggle, a change of scene or pace might be necessary to regain productivity and excitement.
8. Diversify Growth Channels
Avoid relying on a single growth channel (e.g., SEO) as it can dry up unexpectedly; proactively explore and invest in multiple channels like paid ads, referrals, and other organic methods.
9. Growth Masks Problems
Understand that rapid growth can hide underlying issues; proactively identify and address true problems even when growth is strong, rather than waiting for it to slow or turn negative.
10. Plan for Negative Growth
As a product manager, proactively consider what actions and priorities you would implement if growth went negative, fostering a different sense of urgency and perspective.
11. Reduce Product Friction
Identify and rebuild high-friction points in the core product experience, especially those causing delays or requiring users/suppliers to pay without immediate value, to improve growth and user satisfaction.
12. Leadership Owns Strategy
Ensure all members of the leadership team, regardless of function (CFO, Head of People, etc.), are actively involved in and contribute to product strategy, especially during challenging times, to foster collective ownership and problem-solving.
13. Create Innovation Space
For large organizations, create dedicated spaces (like New Product Experimentation teams) that lift constraints on direct customer interaction, small-scale experimentation, and infrastructure choices to foster zero-to-one innovation.
14. Align Innovation Incentives
When building an internal incubator, fundamentally rethink the incentive system (performance management, compensation, time horizons) to align with the long-term, high-risk nature of zero-to-one work, avoiding adverse selection.
15. Design for Effortless Value
Create products that are easy to install, require minimal configuration, and provide value with very low effort (e.g., one tap), meeting users where they are in their workflow.
16. Embrace Bootstrap Mentality
A bootstrap culture, focused on profitability from day one, forces everyone to think about how their work translates into revenue, leading to a strong focus on important things and business impact.
17. Invest Ahead Strategically
While a bootstrap mentality is valuable, recognize that at a certain scale, businesses need to strategically invest ahead of profitability in new products, use cases, and growth channels to diversify and sustain long-term growth.
18. Balance New Role Challenges
When taking on new, challenging roles, ensure there are one or two core strengths or familiar areas you can lean on as a foundation, balancing the pain of new learning with existing competence.
19. Seek Better Support
If struggling in a role, consider asking to report to a different manager who can provide better support and help you be more productive, even if it means being “layered.”
20. Prioritize Customer First
When establishing guiding principles, prioritize customers first, then supply (e.g., pros in a marketplace), and finally the business, as serving the first two well ultimately benefits the business.
6 Key Quotes
Growth masks all problems.
Noam Lovinsky
No one has ever come to me in my career and said, I would like you to layer me, you know, in this, in this, in this other, in this other person.
Noam Lovinsky
It was the prettiest smile graph that he had ever seen.
Brian Schreier (quoted by Noam Lovinsky)
If you're a large organization and you do some performance management process twice a year and you're zero to one incubator, you've already killed it.
Noam Lovinsky
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
Lenny Rachitsky
We are meant to struggle.
Noam Lovinsky