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Ian McAllister

Episode #123

Senior Director of Product for Vehicles

Uber

🚀Career & Leadership🎯Product Strategy

📝Full Transcript

13,291 words
Ian McAllister (00:00:00): If you forget about everything else, forget about politics, forget about promotion, or having a bigger org or whatever, if you simply wake up every day trying to have the biggest impact you can, or if you're a leader trying to use your team to have the biggest impact you can in the company, how you do every part of your day, that's a really good guiding light. Lenny (00:00:22): Welcome to Lenny's podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. Today my guest is Ian McAllister. Ian is the author of one of the most classic posts on product management, What Separates a Top 1% PM from a Top 10% PM, amongst many other pieces of writing that he shared online. Ian has managed over 100 product managers in his career. He spent 12 years at Amazon where he built Amazon Smile and led the team responsible for growing Alexa internationally. He also worked at Airbnb with me and now he's at Uber leading global product for the vehicles platform, which includes making Uber's fleet increasingly electric and autonomous. In our conversation, we focus primarily on two topics. What separates a top 1% PM from everyone else, specifically for new PMs and also for senior PMs. And we also dig deep into the working backwards process. We get into how you can implement the process on your team and how you might be doing it wrong. There's also a bunch of links to templates and guides in the show notes, so if you want to follow along, definitely check those out. With that, I bring you Ian McAllister. Lenny (00:01:32): This episode is brought to you by Mixpanel. Offering powerful self-serve product analytics. If you listen to this podcast, you know that it's really hard to build great product without making compromises. And when it comes to using data, a lot of teams think that they only have two choices. Make quick decisions based on gut feelings or make data driven decisions at a snail's pace. But that's a fa...

💡 Key Takeaways

  • 1Junior PMs must master three basics: Communication, Prioritization, and Execution.
  • 2Senior PMs differentiate themselves by Thinking Big, Earning Trust, and Driving Impact.
  • 3Trust is the currency of product leadership; you earn it by meeting the expectations you set.
  • 4The 'Working Backwards' process is about starting with the customer problem, not your existing tech stack.
  • 5Avoid 'Pantry Cooking': Don't build products just because you have the ingredients (tech/assets) to combine them.
  • 6Use the Press Release (PR) and FAQ mechanism to validate if an idea is worth building before writing code.
  • 7Communication hack: Always answer with the data or date first, then explain the context.
  • 8Focus on impact over promotion; high impact usually forces promotion to happen.

📚Methodologies (3)

🚀 Career & Leadership

A tiered framework for skill development. New PMs should focus on the 'mechanics' of the job, while Senior PMs must shift focus to 'influence' and 'vision'.

Core Principles

  • 1.Stage 1 (Foundation): Master Communication (clarity), Prioritization (leverage), and Execution (shipping).
  • 2.Stage 2 (Growth): Shift to Thinking Big (expanding scope), Earning Trust (social capital), and Driving Impact.
  • 3.The Trust Equation: Consistently forecast outcomes and hit them to build the 'currency' needed to ask for resources later.
  • +1 more...

"If you simply wake up every day trying to have the biggest impact you can... that's a really good guiding light."

#competency#ladder#career
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Amazon Working Backwards

by Ian McAllister

🎯 Product Strategy

A product definition process that starts with the customer outcome and works backward to the technology, enforced by writing the launch documents before development starts.

Core Principles

  • 1.Start with the Problem: Define the specific customer pain point before discussing features.
  • 2.The Press Release (PR): Write a 1-page fake press release including the problem, solution, and a fictional customer quote.
  • 3.The FAQ: Create a 'legitimate plan to succeed' by answering tough questions on feasibility and P&L.
  • +1 more...

"If you don't have a problem paragraph, maybe there's not really a problem."

#amazon#working#backwards
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The Pantry Cooking Trap

by Ian McAllister

🎯 Product Strategy

A metaphor for the mistake of looking at existing internal assets (ingredients in the pantry) and trying to combine them into a product, rather than shopping for what the customer needs.

Core Principles

  • 1.Ingredient Bias: Just because you have two technologies (e.g., AI and a database), combining them doesn't create value.
  • 2.The Combination Fallacy: Avoid saying 'We could add X to Y'. Instead ask 'What does the user need?'.
  • 3.Force the Problem Paragraph: If you cannot articulate the pain point without mentioning your technology, you are pantry cooking.

"If you say 'we could' and it's not grounded in a customer problem... you're adding the problem after the solution."

#pantry#cooking#strategy
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