Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You've worked at so many great companies at YouTube. When you join, my understanding is YouTube was losing a lot of money. There were many times where Google leadership reconsidered the acquisition and should we like sell YouTube if you can believe it or not. At Thumbtack, it looks like you went from one to negative one and then back to one. I remember in a board meeting, the new model really started to show legs. And one of the board members, Brian Schreier at Sequoia said it was the prettiest smile graph that he had ever seen. When you were at Facebook, you built what is called the new product experimentation team trying to create a startup within a startup. You're thinking on a do.

Starting point is 00:00:30 different time horizon. If you're a large organization and you do some performance management process twice a year in your zero to one incubator, you've already killed it. It's the wrong incentive. As the chief product officer, Gramerly, I'm curious what word you most often misspelled. The. T.E. Do T.E.H. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Today, my guest is Noam Levinsky. Noam is currently chief product officer at Gramaly. Previously, he was an early PM at YouTube, where he spent. five years leading the creator product experience and then the broader YouTube consumer product experience.

Starting point is 00:01:07 He then went on to take on the chief product officer role at Thumbtack, which involved helping the company reignite growth after a downturn caused by some changes Google made in SEO. He then went on to Facebook, re-created the new product experimentation team whose charter was to incubate big new ideas protected from the larger Facebook org. Noam has such a unique set of experiences, taking products from zero to one, from from negative one to one, from one to a hundred, and even starting his own companies. He's never really been on a podcast before and he rarely ever tweets or post anything online,

Starting point is 00:01:41 which we actually talk about. In our conversation, we walk through the lessons that he's learned through his amazing career at YouTube, Facebook, Thumb Tech, and our Grammarly. We talk about when it makes sense to kill your project at a company, when it makes sense to ask to be layered at a company, why you should be keeping a nose out for which products matter most at a business and how to find those products. Why you need to diversify your growth channels at your business? Why you should be finding work that is going to most stretch you to help you advance in your career? A bunch of advice for creating space for innovation within

Starting point is 00:02:14 a large company. And so much more, Noam is such a gem and I'm really excited to share his wisdom with you. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow this podcast in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Noam Levinsky, after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Wimzical, the iterative product workspace.

Starting point is 00:02:41 Wimzical helps product managers build clarity and shared understanding faster with tools designed for solving product challenges. With Wimzical, you can easily explore new concepts using drag-and-drop wireframe and diagram components, create rich product briefs that show and sell your thinking, and keep your team aligned with one source of truth for all of your build requirements. Wimzical also has a library of easy-to-use templates from product leaders like myself,

Starting point is 00:03:08 including a project proposal one-pager and a go-to-market worksheet. Give them a try and see how fast and easy it is to build clarity with Wimzicle. Sign up at Wimzical.com slash Lenny for 20% off a Wimzicle pro plan. That's Wimzical.com slash Lenny. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC2, ISO-27,1, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market-leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risks.

Starting point is 00:03:56 Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use VANTA to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com slash Lenny. That's V-A-N-A-com slash Lenny. Noam, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me, Lenny. It's absolutely my pleasure.

Starting point is 00:04:28 I've heard so many great things about you from so many people. I think you're friends with a lot of guests that have been on this podcast. And something that I find really interesting about you and really respect about you is that you've worked at so many great companies and you've done so many big things in your career. But you barely ever tweet. You don't have a newsletter. I don't see many things on LinkedIn. I don't think you've even been on a podcast before.

Starting point is 00:04:52 I think the only evidence I can find that you exist is you have this YouTube channel It's just like you go-karting and kids and people wish you a happy birthday. Oh, gosh. I should go monitor that. I forgot about that. You might want to. Yeah, yeah. People are going to go find it now.

Starting point is 00:05:09 Yeah, that's funny. Yeah, you know, it's funny. I think about that a lot. Like, am I doing something wrong? Should I be putting more effort than that? I mean, it's funny that you mentioned newsletter. Like, I spend a lot of time with the substack team's been a very active advisor there. The team is fantastic, by the way.

Starting point is 00:05:24 And I think about it. am I doing something wrong in my career by not doing that? But just to be honest, it's just not, it doesn't come like authentically to me. It doesn't come naturally to me. I get really focused on the thing that I am working on and get really deep in the thing that I am working on. And I have a hard time kind of multitasking a lot outside of that, to be totally honest. And the way that I kind of get to know the industry and, you know, other teams or whatnot is, just through working with people.

Starting point is 00:05:56 I'm not like a very big networker. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that. I wish I were better at that. I get to know people by doing work with them, by helping them, and it doesn't necessarily scale in the same way that Twitter does, but it's served me well so far, and it's more kind of authentic,

Starting point is 00:06:16 and it's what comes more natural to me. And so that's how I do it. So, like, I'm doing a lot of coffees. I'm like, you know, meeting people that way. I'm not doing a lot of tweeting or writing newsletters, maybe one day, but that's not me today. So I think this is an awesome example of you can be incredibly successful as a product manager. And as anyone in tech, not investing time, posting online. And I'm going to incriminate myself here, but I feel like the advice I always share with people is the best.

Starting point is 00:06:45 People are not spending time tweeting and talking online and sharing on LinkedIn. They're just doing the work. They don't have time for that sort of thing. And I think you're a great example of that. Is there anything along those lines that you share with folks that are just like, hey, should I be investing time here? I think everyone can chart their own path and has a way that is sort of authentic to them and leans on their strengths.

Starting point is 00:07:05 What I often coach people is, like, do what you like. You're generally going to be a lot better at the things that, like, really fill you up, that really get you excited. And like life is short. There's like so many things to be doing out there. We're so lucky. Like the number of interesting waves of technology that I've experienced, It just makes me feel like it's going to keep happening for a long time.

Starting point is 00:07:27 We're very fortunate to be born in the time that we are and have the opportunities that we are. So why, you know, spend your time doing something that doesn't feel good? Because you think that it might, you know, lead to, you know, some success where if you lean on what's authentic to you and what is, you know, makes you happy, chances are you're going to be one of the best people at those things. I love that advice. And I think it's so important. I think there's a lot of pressure on people too. I need to do this. I need to do that.

Starting point is 00:07:54 You need to tweet. I need to share content to be successful. This comes up a lot on this podcast that the more you could just stick close to what gives you energy and what you enjoy doing. Oftentimes that leads to things you wouldn't expect and a lot of success. Speaking of that, looking at your career arc, I noticed a really interesting pattern and a really diverse set of experiences. So just kind of talking through places you've been. At Facebook, you worked on zero to one stuff at YouTube, the way I said. see it as you almost went from negative one to one.

Starting point is 00:08:26 At thumbtack, it looks like you went from one to negative one and then back to one. So it's like a really unique turnaround story. And then with Grammarly, it feels like it's like, I don't know, one or I don't know, five to a hundred or wherever they end up taking it. So I thought it'd be fun to talk through each of these experiences because there's such unique approaches or such unique experiences and see what lessons and wisdom we can extract from your journey. Sounds great. Okay. So I'm thinking reverse chronologically. We start with YouTube, which the way I see it is it's kind of negative one to one. When you join, my understanding is YouTube was losing a lot of money. When you left, they were not losing money. And I was actually just looking. They're valued apparently at $200 billion today, YouTube as a business. So I know you haven't been there for a hell, but great, great work. What lessons did you take away from that journey? What stories come to mind from that part of your career that might be helpful to people? Maybe first to start kind of like why hop around these experiences.

Starting point is 00:09:25 I've always tell people I feel like I'm an IC trapped in a manager's body sometimes. Like fundamentally I like to build. That's why I do this. I like to make things. And so sometimes the more fun way to make things is to start something. And sometimes the better way to make things in the situation that I'm in is to try to, you know, support teams and lead through teams. And so, you know, I joined YouTube through through an acquisition of a company I started.

Starting point is 00:09:55 And in the beginning, what I was doing there is just, you know, rebuilding that product on Google, on Google infrastructure and for YouTube customers. And maybe the first lesson was actually to look around at what the rest of the team was doing and be really like honest and open about the priority, the relative. priority of the thing that you're working on, even if, you know, it might lead to, you know, your project getting canceled. So one of the things that I remember doing really on is actually, like, talking to the leadership team and being like, I don't think we should be putting 50 engineers on this project. Like, looking at the rest of the roadmap and the rest of the priority, or the rest of the priorities, excuse me, I think this team would likely be better served elsewhere. even though that was likely negotiating my way out of a job in like months three,

Starting point is 00:10:51 I don't know, I just, I kind of felt like that was the right thing for the team and for the business. And then that started a very interesting journey because, you know, from there, basically, you know,

Starting point is 00:11:04 the leadership was like, you're right. You know, we're going to wind that down and, and build some of those features into the existing product. And now you, you come and lead this, this focus area.

Starting point is 00:11:15 We're calling the creator, focus area. So I went from basically rebuilding the product that our startup had built to leading one of the three focus areas at YouTube. There was the viewer team, the creator team, and the advertiser team. And Hunter Walk, who's amazing, was leading the viewer team. And Shishir Marotra, who's also very amazing, was leading the advertising team. What a one in my community. There was me. And I was like, you know, I was sort of like, you know, 29, year old startupy guy working with these guys who were awesome and YouTube in general was was and continues to be an incredible team and so that I think that was like a first like really good

Starting point is 00:11:59 lesson that in the right organizations even in large organizations advocate for like what's best for the team advocate for what's best for the organization even if that means that it puts you at a you know particular you know difficult moment if it is a health team that rewards those sorts of decisions and actions, like, good things will happen. If it's not, that's good to know too, you know, and that's good to like know early. So that's one one thing that comes to mind. Maybe one other, I would say, like, atypical, you know, career choice that I made shortly thereafter is then when I was when I was put in that in that in that role you know I really struggled in that role I was reporting to the CEO at the time a guy named Salakamongar who's also awesome

Starting point is 00:12:54 Google's sixth employee and just learned a ton from him like an incredible strategic thinker but he was asking me questions that I felt like they were from a different planet like I was like I I didn't know what they meant. And he just thought in a different way, a different level of different scale. And that's still something that I was learning. Eventually, I figured it out. But I was really struggling in that moment. And I had a really good relationship with both Hunter and Shashir, and they really

Starting point is 00:13:25 helped me through that. And eventually I went to Salar and said, you know, hey, I think I should actually report to Hunter. Like, I think this would work better if, you know, we kind of combined the organizations this way and then we we divided and conquered this way. And again, like very atypical. 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 other, person. But, you know, in that moment, I was just like, this is how I will do better work. This is how I will get better support. I will be kind of like happier and more productive. And it will be

Starting point is 00:14:01 better for the team. And you know what? For me anyway, I was right. And we made that change. And Hunter was a fantastic manager and support at YouTube. I like learned a ton, grew a lot. And then eventually when when he moved on, you know, Shashir took over the organization. And then I moved into the, into the viewer part of the organization, which is where I spent, you know, the rest of my time there, which was leading and supporting the viewer PM team at YouTube. these stories are amazing. It connects to your point that you're kind of an I see, an inner child, I see where you keep trying to kill your career by accident. Like, now let's kill this project. I'm working on. I'm going to demote myself a little bit.

Starting point is 00:14:44 But clearly, it's worked out. Is there anything that you saw that gave you that confidence that this is actually going to be okay? Because, again, people don't normally think this is how you get ahead in your career as you kill your team and you layer yourself. Yeah, I mean, I think having a broader view of the company strategy, having an instinct for like what we should be doing and why and how I might prioritize all of these investments if I were given the opportunity to do that. I think like internalizing that and understanding that and then trying to align whatever is under your influence, you know, kind of towards that that that overall goal is very helpful and made me feel like I'm pretty confident

Starting point is 00:15:30 this is going to be okay because it will lead to better results for the organization given what we're trying to do. And so as long as I'm trying to push decisions or actions that actually lead to better results, if it's a healthy culture and organization, I should be okay. And I think that the other thing is just over the years, I got extremely lucky. The first job that I got out of school was an incredible group of people. And it gave me a nose for talent. It gave me a nose for like what like great feels like and and what like a high functioning team feels like.

Starting point is 00:16:12 And it's hard to like kind of like know that without like experiencing that. And so in the in the moments like in YouTube was also one of those teams like Gramer is one of those teams. The Thumbtack was one of those teams being able to sniff that out when you're trying to kind of choose the next team is very important. But I think that's another thing that gave me confidence. Like I learned, you know, these people well enough, you know, Hunter, Shashir, etc. To have that kind of the instinct that the right thing will happen.

Starting point is 00:16:44 Like this will, this will be, you know, better for me and the broader team. Got it. So the key there is just you have to trust that the team around you is good enough, that you're not going to be pushed off into a corner. I think you made a really profound point here that a lot of people don't get about the job of a product leader and a product manager. That a big part of your job is to think about what is best for the business and work backwards from that. Not necessarily what's the best thing for the user is the highest priority. Not necessarily what's the best thing for my team and how do I hit the goals that I'm obsessed with.

Starting point is 00:17:19 It's what is going to be best for the business broadly and then make decisions there. Is there anything more you can say there about just how powerful that is, as a way of thinking about prioritization and decisions as a product manager. Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think ideally, you know, things that are best for the customer, there's high overlap with that with things that are best for the business, but not always, right? And I think, like, figuring out some principles that help kind of guide those sorts of

Starting point is 00:17:49 conflicts can be really helpful. Like at Thumbtack, we had principles about, which sides of the marketplace we wanted to serve in which order and kind of when we serve thumbtack, right? So it was customers first, pros, second, and then thumbtack last. And that's actually the first two, saying thumbtack last is like the easy thing to say, actually doing it an action, I think is a very different thing. But that first one of like, should we, you know, especially when you're starting a marketplace, as you know well, Lenny, like supply is so critical, like, many marketplaces live and die by the quality and liquidity and supply.

Starting point is 00:18:31 And so why would you focus on customers first in the Thumbtack perspective? And supply are the pros, the people that you hire. Well, we always just felt that what the pros need from us is more customers. What the pros need from us is like high quality customers. And so if we really try to make a great customer experience that attracts more customers, helps them find the right pros, provides the highest quality customers, then that will therefore be better for the pros. And so that's how we should prioritize.

Starting point is 00:19:02 And so if we do those things right, then the business will benefit, right? And so doing things like raising prices because we think it's good for the business, even though it causes liquidity issues in the marketplace, might be a little bit of a local maxima, right? locally optimizing rather than globally optimizing. So I think sometimes in these sorts of questions, trying to establish some set of guiding principles that help navigate some of these more ambiguous

Starting point is 00:19:34 or thorny questions can be really helpful. I want to circle back to this first point you made and experience you had convincing people that your first project shouldn't be something you work on. How long do you stick with something that isn't going well and then decide, okay, let's convince people, this is something I should move on from versus like you don't want to give up on a project quickly, right? You want to give it a shot. I mean, look, I don't know that it's a,

Starting point is 00:19:57 that it's a perfect answer, but I think the reality is that what kills most projects, most early companies is, is stamina. And I think that you, you know, we all need to work on, you know, kind of being more resilient about kind of like, I remember at Thumbtack, Marco, the CEO, We used to say that it feels like we're running uphill and chewing glass. And you kind of like, that's right. Like we want to do that. That's good for us. We're take our medicine.

Starting point is 00:20:28 So you want to practice that sort of resiliency. But ultimately, I think that what starts to happen is you start to lose the stamina and you're just not bringing your best self to the situation. And so many of these things that are like so high ambiguity where you don't know exactly what to build or you don't know exactly, you're not getting the signal you need or the feedback you need to be able to hone it in and know that you're doing something well. They require just an ungodly level of faith and stamina. And so that's sort of like what I look to. When you see like a team that is motivated that is building something like they're really excited about, I mean just like the inertia, the quality, like just everything. It's just it's like a whole.

Starting point is 00:21:17 different game or when you see a team that's sort of like down and out and they've you know they've they've really they've been hitting their head against the law for a long time sometimes they just need like a change of scene a change change change of pace and they get to like a much better situation so my my honest answer is is yeah it's the when do you run out of steam is usually the question and i think that happens usually before you you know like in the startup case a lot of times before you run out of money or you know these other things We've talked about Thumbtack a couple times now, so let's talk about that. I love this description of running uphill, chewing glass.

Starting point is 00:21:55 My understanding is when you join, things were going well, and then things started to go much less well. And then you helped turn things around. Talk about that part of your journey and what you learned from that time. Yeah, sure. Again, really fantastic team and really strong founders. You know, that company was just on the bleeding edge of things like SEO and growing by SEO and there's like one of the one of the best organizations at driving growth through through that channel but i think a thing that i learned uh really early which lenny you know with your background

Starting point is 00:22:28 you probably know as well as ceo is a sort of like a live by the sword die by the sword you know channel of growth um and i think that uh one channel growth company is like always a no no um and so that that's a little bit of kind of what we what we had at at thumbtack so um it was funny because i remember when I joined and, you know, Marco and I had had an agreement where it's like, okay, I'm going to take, you know, do my, you know, several, three months of like onboarding, listening to a new leader, inheriting a team, you know, I've always gotten advice. Like, that's, that's what you should do. And, you know, Marco being an entrepreneur and a hard running founder is like, yeah, yeah, sure, sure. And then like a month in, it's like, all right, we got to run like

Starting point is 00:23:09 2024 planning. Go. Or not 2024. Sorry, at the time was. And yeah, like in that, in the, Early days, like when I was there, Thumbtack was seeing triple-digit growth. Then we had some, you know, a couple SEO hits that got us down to double-digit growth. And then like, you know, not too long after that, we were actually for the first time in the company's history seeing negative year-over-year growth. And Google was just like really coming down on our category as we were, by the way, trying to rebuild the whole product. and change the monetization model and everything in between. So it was a really a tough, tough moment of, you know, how much do we kind of spend to reinforce the old model

Starting point is 00:23:58 while we're sort of building the new model, kind of changing the engine while the plane is flying? And I think I remember in a board meeting, once we kind of like turn that around and over time and also the new model really started show legs and really started to work. One of the board members, Brian Schreier at Sequoia, said it was the prettiest smile graft that he had ever, ever seen.

Starting point is 00:24:20 And it was a really, you know, obviously a really proud, proud moment there. But I think that the thing that I took away from that, which I tell PMs quite a bit is, you know, growth masks all problems. Like, you don't really have, I think, true understanding of, like, what is working well and what is not working well when you have, like, incredible growth. YouTube was a great example of that. And at Thumbtack, it had incredible growth for quite some time, but it was essentially burning through a lot of demand. It was just dropping a lot of demand on the floor because there wasn't sufficient liquidity on the supply side to really meet that demand.

Starting point is 00:24:58 And the team knew and was trying to work on that problem, but it wasn't as like urgent or high priority because you're having like triple digit growth. Like what's wrong? Like everything's going great. right? And then the moment growth starts to slow or certainly when growth starts to be negative, all of a sudden the tenor in the organization really changes and you start like looking at things very differently and trying to understand like what's actually going on. And so I think it's actually a very healthy thing for businesses to go through, you know, as they kind of turn into long term sustainable businesses to have those sorts of moments because I think otherwise it's just really challenging to identify where the true issues are. And I think as a PM, you know, if you've only ever

Starting point is 00:25:45 worked on things that grow and you've never like felt the other side of that and how to kind of help turn that around with your team, I think you're, you lose a lot in your career if you don't experience that. You know, I'm like kind of naturally paranoid and as I, especially as I manage growth, I often look at things and ask myself like, okay, what do I do right now if it went negative? You know, how would I prioritize things if it went negative? Like having gone through that experience, I just look at things in a different way of urgency. I look at things at, you know, different levels of priority given, you know, having gone through that experience. With this Thumbtack story, I think it's rare that a business gets the smile graph that you describe this pretty smile graph that this board member has ever seen.

Starting point is 00:26:33 I think that is rarely the case. usually doesn't come back up. Can you share what you did to help ThumbTac turn things around? I know it's very particular to ThumbTac in the business, but just anything there that would be useful to people. Sure. First of all, this is very much the team. It's not just things that I did. But so, I mean, first was, you know,

Starting point is 00:26:55 turning on multiple channels of growth. You know, up until then, Thumbtack had kind of tried and stopped paid channels, you know, other organic, channels like, you know, referrals, you know, all of all of the, all of the typical things. And so we just went back to first principles on a lot of that and also just kind of reformed a team around that. And basically got an amazing team together. One of them, Whitney Steele is, is running marketing at Descript Now. Another one, David Shine is running product at Hymns.

Starting point is 00:27:33 But basically went back to first principles on some of those growth channels and experiment our way to much, much better results. And, you know, I think that one of the things that we were doing incorrectly at Thumbtack is Thumbtack is actually a marketplace that is actually made up of thousands of marketplaces, right? Like DJs in Philadelphia is one marketplace. You know, DJs in, you know, Atlanta is another marketplace. Contractors in Sonoma is another marketplace. And then Thumbtack is obviously the container of all of those marketplaces.

Starting point is 00:28:06 And I think we were just bifurcating our targeting and our growth efforts a little too narrowly, assuming we had to sort of grow in that way market by market, rather than targeting more broadly, providing sort of the more aggregate data to Google and others. And then optimizing from there, the fact that we already had really good showing in SEO and really good page rank and SEO help to, you know, bolster things like SMEM and then eventually Facebook as well. But I think that the core issue, those were kind of the growth, the growth levers, but the core issue with the Thumbtack product was that it was just a very high friction customer experience that really like left customers waiting. So the way that Thumbtack worked basically was

Starting point is 00:28:59 a customer would find them through a search query. They would come in and they would answer a number of questions about the job they needed done. And then Thumbtack would say, okay, great, we'll get back to you in 24 hours. And this is like a modern day experience, right? And then what Thumbtack would do is they would take that job and they would federate it out to as many of the pros that might kind of like match the criteria. and then the pros would pay to quote to show up as a potential, you know, provider for that job. Now, I don't want to take anything away from that team because that worked phenomenally well for a really long time. And it's actually, it's a perfect case study and like just do the scrappy thing

Starting point is 00:29:41 that works to grow. And they did that very well. But the stage in size of the business when I joined it had kind of like outgrown that. And the team knew that. That's obviously a very high friction experience, right? Like the idea that the customer, they're super excited, they want to hire someone. And at that moment, you'd be like, cool, talk to you soon, not the best experience. And the fact that you're asking your supply to put up money to even show up to customers in the first place where what the customers want to see is the supply. Like, tell me, tell me who I can hire.

Starting point is 00:30:17 Also, like a lot of friction on that side. And also, in some cases, some unfair revenue on that. that side because if folks are, you know, paying to be seen and maybe they're looked at, but there's not really like high intent, then you're going to start, they're not going to get the customers they want. They're going to be spending revenue. They're not going to be getting revenue back. It turns into a little, like just a bad, a bad loop, obviously. So the main thing we did is to rebuild that whole loop, change the monetization model, build a system where essentially pros could provide instant quotes. Like Lenny, I'm sure like from

Starting point is 00:30:52 Airbnb, this is very familiar. the move from request to book to like instant booking. It was a very similar thing in a different kind of category of service and supply obviously. But that shift and doing that shift across those thousands of marketplaces and then finding the right friction point for monetization and when and what to charge people for and all of that, all of that change. That is what really, you know, at its core turned the growth engine around at Thumbtack. And it's, It's just a real testament to those founders that they kind of believe that, like saw that, and were willing to kind of like, you know, run a pill and chew glass to get to that point.

Starting point is 00:31:35 Like, I don't know the details of the business anymore. And if I did, I wouldn't speak to it. But from what I hear, things are going well. So I think that that served the company well. Yeah. As you were talking about that, that's exactly an experience Airbnb went through. I actually led that effort at Airbnb. I took three years of my life.

Starting point is 00:31:53 Oh, my gosh. We should talk about that one day. Yeah, I've written about it here and there, but honestly, very quietly is one of the biggest transformations Airbnb went through, shifting from, I'm going to go request a book to basically every booking now on Airbnb is instant. And that was a very difficult and painful journey. But looking back, I don't think Airbnb would have made it, if not for that. And unlike them, we did it before things were starting to fall apart.

Starting point is 00:32:19 Like, we're like we, and actually I was going to say, the lens that we used that I find really helpful here is you should be asking yourself, if somebody was to come into our space and disrupt us and start now to become the new Airbnb, what would they do? And it was obvious. They'd be make it instant. Just this the way it works. Welcome to Airbnb disruptor. And so, yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:40 Another learning there is any product you work on that involves like bits and atoms is exponentially harder than products that just involve bits. But it's amazing how something as like seemingly simple as, make an instant, ends up being so incredibly deep and complicated, and especially on an existing business, like kind of making that transition while still growing is just very, very complicated. Like, fantastic learning, I'm sure you had as well. Very difficult to change people's expectations and behavior. This could be its own podcast episode, just changing marketplaces into an instant experience. I wanted to circle back

Starting point is 00:33:15 real quick to the first lesson you had there, which is adding new channels. I think this a really interesting takeaway here. So essentially ThumbTech was reliant in SEO. Google slash the sword, as you described, started changing things. So traffic stopped coming. And I think a cool lesson here is just if you're reliant on one growth channel, which I think most companies actually are. I think most companies have one main driver.

Starting point is 00:33:38 I think a lesson here is potentially before things start to fall apart, especially if your SEO-driven start to explore more practically paid referrals. Totally. I mean, I think maybe it's, again, it's kind of like, living through that. Now, anytime I look at a product or look at a team, it's like one of the first things that perks up the paranoia. I'm just like, oh, no, you don't want to be in that situation.

Starting point is 00:34:01 Let's figure out now how you start to diversify because you just never know, like you say, when one of those might dry up. Imagine a place where you can find all your potential customers and get your message in front of them in a cost-efficient way. If you're a B2B business, that place exists and it's called LinkedIn.

Starting point is 00:34:20 LinkedIn ads allows you to build the right relationships, drive results, and reach your customers in a respectful environment. Two of my portfolio companies, WebFlow and Census, are LinkedIn success stories. Census had a 10x increase in pipeline with a LinkedIn startup team. For Webflow, after ramping up on LinkedIn in Q4, they had the highest marketing source revenue quarter to date. With LinkedIn ads, you'll have direct access to and can build relationships with decision makers, including 950 million members, 180 million senior execs, and over 10 million C-level executives. You'll be able to drive results with targeting and measurement tools built specifically for B2B. In tech, LinkedIn generated a 2-5X higher return on ads spend than any other social media platforms.

Starting point is 00:35:06 Audiences on LinkedIn have two times the buying power of the average web audience, and you'll work with a partner who respects the B2B world you operate in. Make B2B marketing everything it can be and get $100 credit on your next campaign. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash podlennie to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com slash pod lenny. Terms and conditions apply. Is there anything else from your time at Thumbtack that stands out as an interesting lesson or takeaway that you bring with you to the work you do now?

Starting point is 00:35:37 I would say this. I think especially at the leadership level, you know, in the team that reports the CEO, that group doesn't always have the opportunity to do a lot of project work together, right? You've got your CFO, you've got your head of sales, you got your product and your engineering, and there's just not as often as sort of like natural ways for that group to work together. And then when something happens like growth goes negative, that group is very important. and that group's ability to like tackle hard things together is very important.

Starting point is 00:36:22 And I think that one one important lesson from that is no one can be a bystander on product strategy. If you've got, just because you've got product in your title doesn't mean you're the only one that that should be thinking about product strategy, certainly at that level. Certainly not in engineering. Like the CFO, the head of people, everyone needs to have a seat of the table when it comes to product strategy, what the company is doing and what they're going to do to kind of, you know, grow out of the situation that they're in. Because otherwise, like in those hard times,

Starting point is 00:36:55 if it's kind of, it can kind of be like a, you know, what have you done for me lately? Sort of, sort of a dynamic. And that's just not, not the right dynamic to, to have on, on that team. And I'm not saying that at Thumbtack, we had the right dynamic, but I think it was a really important learning in that moment of how that team, you know, even if they didn't typically kind of get as involved in things like product strategy and what we're building, how everyone had to be like all hands on deck and really thinking about

Starting point is 00:37:22 those sorts of problems. That's the only way I think you can get a whole, like, company and team, you know, out of those situations that's why everyone getting involved in doing their part and pulling on the levers that they have in their area in order to do that well. I don't think it can work in any other way. So there's a lesson there. Build a relationship with the

Starting point is 00:37:40 leadership team before things start to go right. That, Yes. Certainly that. But I think it's also incumbent for like people in our roles and, you know, in engineering roles to bring strategy to that discussion, to that group in a way that it is possible for everyone to engage and everyone to internalize and understand what it means for their area and to even, you know, have a, obviously a say in because they're in the leadership team at the end of the day. Like they should feel like their fingerprint is also on the company strategy.

Starting point is 00:38:16 And as soon as it starts to feel like that's their world, that's our world. And I think that's true for any of those, any of the functions. It's true for what's happening in sales. It's true for what's happening in marketing. You know, as product managers, we naturally need to be the connective tissue

Starting point is 00:38:31 across all of that. But I think the whole leadership team at that level should feel like connective tissue across all of those functions. Okay. Let's transition to Facebook. And this is, I think, an example of zero to one. So when you were at Facebook, you built what is called the new product experimentation team.

Starting point is 00:38:50 I actually thought it was called the new product experience team, but I think it's new product experimentation team. And my understanding is the idea there is instead of Facebook having to buy the next Instagram and WhatsApp and all the things, basically incubate startups within Facebook and this fabled concept, a startup within a startup, create all these startups within a startup. And as an outsider, it feels like it was really fun for a while, but it's, it was really fun for a while, but it hasn't let any amazing new businesses for Facebook, correct me from wrong. I'm curious what that experience was like, what he took away from it, how it went,

Starting point is 00:39:24 what you think about when you look back at that part of your journey. It was one of a few folks that kind of joined that team early and helped help build that team. How it ended up and how it closed down, I'm not familiar with because I wasn't there. But I think in terms of, was it a success or not because it didn't build the next Instagram, I think is a little bit of the wrong bar to set for things like that. You know, to some extent, it's like, did the group win the lottery or not? And let's judge their success. Obviously, I'm not saying that, you know, discovering something like Instagram is just like winning the lottery.

Starting point is 00:40:04 But you get what I mean in terms of like the rarity of those. sorts of discoveries and those sorts of those sorts of products. I think that that the that team was very realistic about sort of the what I would say or be like the champagne level outcomes and or more like the you know kind of beer like nice dinner kind of like level level out. Yeah, the wine. Yeah, the wine. Yeah, thank you. That's a better analogy. And I think we we we built knowing those Those sorts of outcomes would also be very beneficial to the organization. So, like, as an example, you know, one of them is, you know, at Facebook scale, doing things that don't scale or doing things that start out small was just a muscle that was, you know, really hard to come by, right? It's like any community product that you build, any kind of social where like there's community

Starting point is 00:41:06 density that's important like early on. Any product that you build that way, starting with a million users is really a really hard way to do that. And at places like Facebook and Google, it's like it's hard to run an experiment with 100 people. It's not hard. It's impossible. Right. And so this idea that, you know, you would, you would have.

Starting point is 00:41:29 to like get real small, that you would have to start very targeted, that you would have to start with things that like clearly don't scale and aren't, you know, kind of don't have a chance of being kind of big from the get-go is really, really hard in an organization like that. And so creating that space for NPE to be able to do that, to be able to help remind the organization, what are the mechanisms we need to be able to build and learn that way? was very beneficial. Even simple things, you know,

Starting point is 00:42:02 like at an organization of Facebook size, maybe you experienced this at Airbnb, like it is really hard for product managers, engineers, and designers to talk directly with customers. It is like basically impossible. You're almost always like talking through some third party, some recruiting,

Starting point is 00:42:22 you know, agency, you know, like in getting like reports and you're not always in the room. And imagine like building a startup, like a product from day one and not being able to sit right next to your customer and being like, show me how you do this or show me how you do that. You know, it's like it's incredibly, it's incredibly hard. You're looking for such faint signal. The idea that you would try to get it through like layers of indirection and games of telephone is is crazy.

Starting point is 00:42:56 But at that scale, that's what you have to do. is there's all of these legal concerns and many other realistic concerns about what you can say to who and who you can talk to and what you can tell them about what you're doing and all of these things. So creating an environment where those sorts of constraints were lifted and were different was very beneficial, I think, to the organization and kind of started to shed a light on some of the things that were broken that make it hard to kind of build zeroed one in those sorts of environments. I also think it was a really fantastic recruiting tool. You know, it did build a really great group, group of folks, many of which have left to go start, you know, interesting companies. But I guess what I'm trying to say is I think when you're an organizational leader and

Starting point is 00:43:52 Shrep was the org leader that was supporting NPR at the time, and he's fantastic and really did a good job of, of, you know, firewalling that team. I think you're looking at a set of objectives and a number of ways that you might help the company and the organization. And even if you set that kind of like that light on the hill to be like, go find the next Instagram, many of the things that you would do along the way to like find the next Instagram end up being very beneficial to the broader organization. We saw a lot of that in P. That's right. That's right. really interesting perspective. There's a lot of other goals with something like this. It's not just find the next massive business. It's the way I think you just, what I'm getting from this is

Starting point is 00:44:37 like shine almost a mirror on the organization. Like here's the things we can't do with the regular business and we have to do something. We have to set this up in order to try something totally new and radical recruiting tool you think is interesting. There's actually a teammate Airbnb. The way I described it was, I don't know how many people know about Burning Man and how it works, but there's this trash fence around the side that catches all the trash, so it doesn't go into the desert. And I feel like there's teams sometimes that are the trash fence. That's funny, yeah.

Starting point is 00:45:04 Or someone's about to leave and they're like, no, go work on this cool stuff over here in the fringe, which is really interesting, but it's still within the company and maybe help with that just keep people that are awesome at meta. And you're right that the team didn't kind of discover the next Instagram. For what it's worth, you know, things like threads and ideas like threads were in that team all of the time. I think that if that team caught the wave of generative AI and all of the opportunities and sort of like new technologies there, I think things could have

Starting point is 00:45:40 also, because those are certain moments where you, like having small, like really motivated, dedicated teams that aren't thinking about anything mainline can lead to like faster discoveries. I think I think that can also help. But there were a number of things that basically end up becoming features in other products and they were just easier, faster ways of validating and building them because you didn't have the constraints of like the mainline product development organization, right? For someone that is thinking about trying to create a startup within a startup, something a lot of big companies are trying to do, is there a piece of advice or two

Starting point is 00:46:16 that you'd share for helping this be effective? Maybe one is just the goal may not be build the next big business. There's these sub goals also. what comes to mind. God, there's there's so many. And Shrepp did a really fantastic job of removing a lot of these constraints. So one is I would say, think really hard about the incentive system. You know, smart, good people, you know, they, even if they're not, they don't, even if they're not trying to, they end up kind of gaming things towards the incentive system.

Starting point is 00:46:49 And so think long and hard about that. So for instance, if you're a large organization and you, you do some performance management process like twice a year and that's how you're going to evaluate and incentivize people in your zero to one incubator, you've already killed it. It's just like it's the wrong incentive. It's the wrong time frame. It creates adverse selection problems for the sort of people that you bring in. And so it's just, it's hard in an existing organization to say, we're going to take all

Starting point is 00:47:17 these company processes around even how we like level people and pay them and motivate them. and we're going to throw them out the window for this group, right? How you build, the infrastructure you use. This is something that the NP team did really well. Like everyone got to kind of cut to do their own thing from an infrastructure perspective, just do what is best for the problem you're trying to solve in this moment, knowing that you're likely going to throw away a lot of this code anyway. Like being able to do that in an organization like Facebook or Google,

Starting point is 00:47:49 if you ask anyone that works those things, is really hard. And, you know, it takes someone like a Shrep to be like, nope, like they're going to get to do this. Sorry. And so I think that's really helpful. For what it's worth, one of the organizations that we talked to that I felt like was doing this in one of the best ways was Nike. And Nike has this, you know, incubation lab. And they just, they just, it's a completely different operating model. They recruit a completely different type of person, very different incentive system.

Starting point is 00:48:21 And essentially, like, where they end up plugging them into Nike is that when they have something into the kind of the distribution, marketing, kind of growth, like arms of Nike. But for the product discovery process, they're doing their whole, whole different thing. Once they find some fit, then kind of Nike comes in and goes, boom, I'm going to help you explode your fit. But I think that the number one thing I would think about would be the incentive system and the adverse selection that that can cause. to me the most important element of the incentive system and maybe I'm reading between the lines is you're basically competing against them starting their own thing and having upside if things go super well feels really important versus I'm just going to get a cool salary meta and work on this thing and that doesn't lead to the same experience right as a startup or like everything's on the line yeah and

Starting point is 00:49:11 and also what time horizons right like when you're when you're starting a company you're not thinking like in the next six months I'm going to get a promo and I'm going to get a good rating and you know things are going to go well. You're thinking on a different, excuse me, time horizon, and you're thinking about an outsized impact or an outsized incentive. And so I would think about that if you're starting things internally as well. Awesome. Okay. Let's move to the final bucket, Grammarly, which is where you're at now. And the way I'm thinking about it is this kind of like a one to rocket ship or, I don't know, 10. It's further along than one, but that's where you're at now. to me, Grammarly is interesting because it's one of the very few successful B2C subscription businesses.

Starting point is 00:49:57 There's almost none. There's like Duolingo Grammarly. I know you're doing B2B also, but there's so few. There's so many dead bodies trying to build a business on top of consumer subscription. And so I'm just curious, what the current state of Grammarly are things going? What do you think has been the key to it being successful all this time and continuing to grow? and what lessons have you learned? I know you're,

Starting point is 00:50:21 you just joined relatively recently, but anything you've taken away from that journey so far? We don't we don't talk about it often, but you know, grammarly is a much bigger company from a revenue perspective than I think people realize, you know,

Starting point is 00:50:35 the company has been around for 15 years and was profitable from day one and continues to be quite profitable. So it's a very, very healthy business. that is much larger than folks might realize. And that is actually quite intentional because the company was trying not to be noticed for a long time, like very intentionally.

Starting point is 00:50:58 The fact that, you know, you would have, you know, grammar and spell checking in Google Docs or grammar and spell checking in, you know, Word, people would often write off the company that, like, how is that a business? How is that a future? Like, these products already have it. And, you know, that that was very convenient for grammarly. because they could kind of navigate between these giants and tech and grow a very, a very phenomenal business, kind of on this, on this use case that people had kind of written off. Now, you know, come the advent of LLMs, and it's no longer a use case that people are,

Starting point is 00:51:36 are writing off. And sort of the dream of the founders that machines can assist us in communication in this way that, you know, they've had for 15 years. I feel like now the whole industry is like, well, this is obviously how we're going to communicate. And, you know, machines are going to do all these things for us. And Gramley is now sort of in the center of that hurricane. And again, I think it's a similar thing where it's like, well, you know, well, there's chat GPT. There's, you know, Microsoft co-pilot. Like, how is how is Gramerly going to have a chat?

Starting point is 00:52:08 But yet, you know, things still seem like there's the future. The future is bright. And so to your question, I think. to what has made it work. You know, I've only been here for 10 months, so please kind of take this with a grain of salt. But my instinct is that people really love Gramerly because of how it works and where it works.

Starting point is 00:52:32 And what I mean by how it works is grammarly is one of the few products where you just install it and it makes you better. Like you don't have to configure it. You don't have to manipulate it. You don't have to change anything about like what you're doing. You carry on and across all of your applications across all of your tabs, you'll start getting pushed assistance to you in the

Starting point is 00:52:53 right moment. You could ignore it if you want, no big deal, but it takes a very, very small amount of effort to tap on one of those things, get some value, and keep going. And I think that a product that is like that easy to use, that easy to extract value from, but then also that prevalent, like, how many different text boxes do you write in in a given day? I mean, it's a it is not less than 10. It is tens or potentially hundreds, right? And so it is it is everywhere and it is very, very low effort to get real value from it. And then the the where we work is is what I said. You don't have to change anything about your workflow. You know, grammarly meets you where you are and you get you get value from it. Doing that really well at this level of course.

Starting point is 00:53:44 quality for a user base of this scale. Essentially, it's like a, you know, a huge AI achievement masquerading as like a little UX innovation, right? But that like experience, that like that UX that sort of like brings AI to the masses has obviously, you know, served grammarily really well. I think those are some of the strengths that are going to continue to lean on to now provide, you know, a very different type of assistance and value that we can because of where the technology has moved. The other thing I've heard a lot about Grammarly and Yuri was on the podcast and who led growth for a long time at Gramerley is just how scrappy the business has been and the founders have been from the beginning. The fact that they've been profitable from the beginning, that feels like one of the threads

Starting point is 00:54:34 through all of the successful consumer subscription companies is super scrappy, not raising money for a long time. is there anything there that you found to be really interesting or helpful for other folks that are maybe building the space? When you're a team that kind of like starts out of Ukraine and you're not thinking that there's any chance that you're going to like raise money and why would you do that? I mean, it really, you know, back to our previous conversation of what happens when like growth goes negative, you know, really forces you to focus on the important things. And so, like, many of the early engineers who are still here, because the company has done so well over the years, you know, they think in, like, how is this work going to translate into revenue, right? Like, they, they think about sort of like the impact on the business from, you know, even kind of like, you know, very deep, you know, technical work that that they're doing because I think they were kind of brought up in this culture where the business doesn't really invest ahead of its. its profitability, right? Because it was a bootstrap business from day one. So that enforces like everyone to think about their projects and their prioritization and how is like what they're

Starting point is 00:55:47 doing over the next two months going to actually turn into more, you know, revenue and keep the company growing and sustaining. So I think that that culture is is prevalent and help help grammarly get to, you know, where it is. Now, I just want to be really honest that, you know, in moments that we're like in, like today, that kind of also be detrimental, right? Because like the business gets to a certain size. You start getting to kind of like law of large numbers. You need to start thinking about, you know, are there other products? Are there other use cases? Are there other channels of growth? You know, how do you kind of invest ahead of some of that growth and start to diversify? Because, you know, at the scale and size that we are and aspire to be,

Starting point is 00:56:31 we're going to have to do many more things and service many more different types of customers. And as you mentioned, we're going to have to pull off the motion of B to C to B, kind of get that product-led sales motion going. So all of those things are happening. And thankfully, the business is, you know, as strong as it is where we can invest ahead now in those things while still maintaining profitability and like a really strong business. That's amazing that they're still team members and maybe I think you said engineers. from the beginning 12 years later. I think that says a lot about the business. And before we started recording, they're based in Ukraine.

Starting point is 00:57:09 And you were saying that they're like going to Zooms. There's bombs going off. They have to go into like bomb shelters and then jump on a meeting. It's incredible that team continues to operate and the business continues to do this well in spite of all that. Yeah. The team in Ukraine at Gramerly is, I mean, it's something else. It's a really fantastic team. And when you speak to many of them, I think actually that the work provides, you know,

Starting point is 00:57:38 sometimes a very useful distraction. But, you know, they obviously feel a lot of pride in the business. They built a lot of this business. There aren't yet, you know, many businesses of this size that, you know, kind of come from Ukraine. And yeah, I think that the, you know, that that team is, is incredible and continues to deliver a ton of impact to the company even in the circumstances that they're in. And I know for the founders, you know, a lot of like why they want, you know, grammarly to succeed and be the generational company that it can be is for Ukraine. And especially in

Starting point is 00:58:18 this moment. And it's, it's awesome to see how, how that motivates them. And, you know, 15 years on the same project is, is, you know, not nothing. That's like, that's some serious resilience. And so I think even in moments like that, using them as a way to motivate and, and, you know, strive for something greater, I think, says a lot about the founders and the team in Ukraine. Absolutely. Hopefully there's a happy resolution soon there. I don't know if you know this. I was actually born in Ukraine. Oh, wow. Nice. In Odessa. I don't want to talk about that much, but it's true. And I just realized we both have skis in our last. Levinsky and Ritchitsky. So for what it's worth, my dad was born in Ukraine. He was, he's from Kiev. My mom was from Lithuania. So, yeah, I also have some Ukrainian background here. All right. This is our Ukrainian episode. Yes. Let me zoom out a little bit and get to the final couple questions. So thinking about your career broadly, I'm just curious if there's any general advice you share with people to help them have a more successful career.

Starting point is 00:59:25 anything that is generally you find is really important to do well or mistakes they make. And this is like a big broad question, but anything come to mind of like, here's something you should really try to do more of or less of. Look, when you're thinking about like career opportunities

Starting point is 00:59:40 and what job to take, it's really, really hard to sniff out really well and a high degree of certainty, like success. I think that like having a good nose for people and the sort of like people that that you can be successful with is is something that you can develop. What I found is I always try to prioritize putting myself in positions that are going to cause a lot of

Starting point is 01:00:08 growth in learning. And growth and learning can be very painful. And you kind of like got to like be okay with that and go into that because on the other side of that pain, I think is is the promised land. And that's just served me really well. I can't necessarily. predict, you know, with high degree of certainty that this thing's going to hit, you know, but I can get a sense of the people around me and I certainly can find situations that are going to stretch me, that are going to force me to do things that I haven't done where I'm going to grow and learn significantly. And over sort of the arc of my career, I feel like that's, that's served me well. So that's usually what I tell people is, is focus on that if you can.

Starting point is 01:00:52 I love that advice. I've used this quote a number of times on this podcast, but something I always come back to is this line, the cape you fear contains the treasure you seek. Yeah. I'm curious if there's something you have found about when the pain is too much, when that you shouldn't pursue that. A lot of people get into these places where their mental health gets hit,

Starting point is 01:01:15 their physical health is hit. They're just like doing work. They should not. That's like too much. Is there anything there that you find is just like, Okay, maybe this is too much a discomfort. I mean, so I think about a couple of things. I think in any situation, you should be able to lean on like kind of one or two things that

Starting point is 01:01:30 like you're really strong at. That can kind of be the foundation, you know, that kind of keeps you going while you learn the other things. So just be wary of situations that are like two net new. There should be one or two kind of important things as part of that job going into where you're like, I got this. I know how to do this portion of it, right? So like as an example, if you've kind of never inherited a very, a very large team and you're

Starting point is 01:02:03 going to work through like how that works, but the product area that you're working on is one you're very familiar with, what's necessary to be good in that product, whether it's like really good sense of design or really good sense of, you know, analytical thinking, you know, you know, recommendation systems, like what have you. There should be like a couple of those things who are like,

Starting point is 01:02:25 I got this. These things are going to be a stretch, but these things, I feel like I've got a handle on how to do this. I can always get better, but I feel like they're in my, in my wheelhouse. I think that tends to allow you to sort of like balance the pain

Starting point is 01:02:39 with the, you know, with the areas that you already know and kind of, you know, manage through in a more balanced and healthy way. I'm going to do that chart, I think from flow of you want it to be challenging, but not too challenging.

Starting point is 01:02:54 And that's where you end up being most successful. Is there anything else, Noam, you want to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning room? Yeah, I just, I just think that, you know, maybe going back to our war, where we first started, Lenny, like, work on the things that make you happy, that fill you up. Life is short. we're all very lucky to be in this moment, you know, there's no reason to spend time on things that don't, don't give you energy. There's so much to you out there. I think that's the main thing I would focus on. Amazing. And even though there will be things that suck, that you have to do, I think it's important to try to find as much of that as you can, right? Because

Starting point is 01:03:37 not everyone can just like, nah, I'm not going to do this work thing. I'm just going to go on a walk. But I think that's such important point. And we talked about that's actually a bunch on a recent podcast of just doing this energy audit where you pay attention to what gives you energy and what doesn't and try to do more and more. Totally. We'll link to that again. With that, we reached a very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

Starting point is 01:03:59 Yeah, I'm ready. First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? You know, I'm going to cheat on this one, and I'm only going to give you one. I'm only going to give you one because I don't want to cloud with any other. I recommend Build by Tony Fidel. And other than it being a good book, one of the main reasons I recommend it is that my wife wrote it. So she wrote it together with Tony and I got to see that experience. And she's a fantastic writer and Tony has a lot to learn from.

Starting point is 01:04:32 So I recommend that book. I think that the part of it that was particularly inspiring to me to hear like even more of the details that are in the book is just, you know, how many times he met failure before he, you know, made discovery. that are now driving like, you know, so many of the things that we do. It's just like a good reminder to like keep at it and do the thing that really gives you that energy because eventually, you know, you can make that that incredible discovery. Next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoy?

Starting point is 01:05:05 I really like for all mankind. I've seen that on Apple, Apple TV. And then I just finished the last season of Fargo and every single. season of that of that series I think is fantastic. Amazing. For All Mankind, though, last season, not as amazing consensus that I agree with. But worth watching. Next question.

Starting point is 01:05:27 Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates? You know, I generally like interview questions that allow us to kind of like do some work together. So I'm a little bit less on the behavioral, tell me about a time when sort of stuff. And more on the like, let's work a product problem together. And it could be anything from like, let's design an alarm clock for children or, you know, lately I've been using one like, you know, given, you know, where technology is at. Like if we're to rebuild email, like how might we do that? I just feel like kind of getting into it and getting into the details and really kind of watching each other, you know, kind of exercise our craft, I think is really important. And I have a I have a whole podcast one time if you're ready about how most people don't know how to do leadership recruiting. And I feel like as I've, you know, advanced in my career, like the interviews for some reason, like, get easier and actually like evaluate less about, like, you know, who I am as a product leader or whatnot.

Starting point is 01:06:26 But yeah, those are the sorts of interview questions that I typically like. Amazing. Is their favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? It's not recent, but I was a very early user of ARC and I really love ARC. Your window right now is inside Arc. I also love Arc. We had Josh on the podcast. Nice.

Starting point is 01:06:48 Just watching the onboarding experience of Arc alone as a product person is worth your time. I love the animation when you download something. I mean, just like all of the little things. And if Josh is listening, we would like to get Gramerly to work better with Arc. So please hit me up because I think there's a few things that the Arc browser is doing that, make it hard to get Gramley to work either on the client or in the browser. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto?

Starting point is 01:07:12 that you often repeat to yourself, share with friends or family, either work or in life, they find useful. Gosh, for those that know me, this is going to share so much of my personality. I think the first thing that comes to mind is, like, we are meant to struggle. I just feel like through struggle is, you know, how we get better, how good things happen, how bonds form. And so I don't shy away from that kind of life experience. I'm going to guess that you're Jewish.

Starting point is 01:07:40 I'm also Jewish. That feels like a very Jewish thing to say. I love it. How would you guess, Lenny? It's literally written on my face. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect.

Starting point is 01:07:49 Last question. As the chief product officer, Grammarly, I'm curious what word you most often misspell. The. T-E-D-H. T-E-H. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Well, I find I misspell every word.

Starting point is 01:08:06 That's a terrible spell. I'm thankful for my... Oh, sorry. I would say I have a product for you that can help your speech. following if you want. I'm an active grammarly user. Not only that, I use every product you worked on. I realized, obviously meta and mostly Instagram of the meta products.

Starting point is 01:08:21 And obviously Grammarly now and YouTube. I have a YouTube channel. Check it out, subscribe and follow up. And Thumbtack. My wife is a big Thumbtack user. We found many pros on Thumbtack from all kinds of parts of the world. Noam. Thank you so much for being here.

Starting point is 01:08:37 Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out? And how can listeners be useful to you? Yeah, I'm pretty much no ML everywhere online. So Twitter is probably the easiest to my DMs are, my DMs are open. And then how people can be useful to me is please use grammarly, provide any feedback that you might have.

Starting point is 01:08:54 And honestly, if I can be helpful in almost any way, like feel free to reach out. I often, you know, we'll take those conversations and build those connections. And that is always very helpful for me as well. Noam. Thank you again so much for being here. Of course.

Starting point is 01:09:08 Have a good one, Lenny. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.