What it takes to become a top 1% PM

At our scale we got to hunt for bigger elephants... take a minute at the beginning to say, could this be bigger? Could this be a bigger thing and more impactful than the initial idea, even if the initial idea sounds big?

Most people operate within a box. There's a box of there's product management and these are the things that product managers do... you own it until you find somebody else to own it.

Trust is just built by repeatedly setting and meeting expectations. And I think that's a good mantra to think about as a PM. Am I meeting the expectations that I set?

Trust is the currency of a product manager and a product leader, especially if you're going to grow in your career.

Working backwards is all about the problem and starting there and obsessing about the problem and being guided by it to then go into the solution.

When teams that do it wrong is they don't do that. They don't work backwards. They have something they want to build... And so you're adding the problem after the solution. You're retrofitting the problem, retrofitting the customer.

"Working backwards" is Amazon's product development methodology where teams start by writing a press release and FAQ for the desired customer outcome before building anything.

The most common thing that I see that tips me off is when they talk about something, there's different pieces in the pantry and we have these ingredients, we could put them together... But that's not really working backwards.

Answer first and then explain, or sometimes answer and then shut up, that actually is a tactical thing you can do to get better at communicating.

Grade yourself after you communicate and try to just take a moment and after a while you'll just do it naturally to think about, 'Gosh, how would I have answered that question better?'