Hadar's Newsletter #4 - 08/23/2020
And a framework for ramping up as a Product Manager in a new team or company
Hello! It's been a while since I've written one of these. I fell out of the habit after starting at Facebook and moving homes (again). Hopping back on today and planning to return to the weekly habit!
I'll keep today's short, though I also wrote a separate post today that I'll include at the bottom of today's update.
Life
I'm writing this from Hawaii, where I am living indefinitely! My partner and I moved here last week and are in a small beach town named Kailua on Oahu. Everyone who arrives here must do a strict 14 day quarantine, so we haven't left our apartment at all yet. I'm glad to see Hawaii taking COVID seriously and hope it'll help keep the island(s) safe for everyone.
The past two months before moving here, we were both living in Sunnyvale with my parents and siblings. It was a beautiful experience getting to reconnect with everyone at once - COVID is terrible in so many ways but I'm grateful for how it got our whole family to live under one roof for the first time since I was in high school.
It was weird for a few weeks being back from Argentina and adjusting to being in a relatively similar situation compared to before starting my hiatus, but overall I'm glad to have had that experience and am excited to now continue exploring new parts of the world that I'm able to safely be a part of during this time.
My career
It's now been almost two months since I started at Facebook! It's been a really great experience so far; even better than I had anticipated. I was wary of joining such a large company, worried that might feel too bureaucratic and slow, but so far it's felt more similar to the startups I've worked at throughout my career than to a company with tens of thousands of employees. In some ways, it's even less structured and process-driven than Lyft was.
The Integrity work so far has been incredibly fulfilling. It's too early to say that I've had a significant impact quite yet, but I feel motivated by the org's mission and feel good about my progress towards understanding the space and contributing.
I wrote up a post on how I think about ramping up on a new team/company, which I'll paste into the bottom of this update as well.
What I'm reading
Currently reading the book Why We're Polarized, by Ezra Klein. Started off strong with lots of historical context on America's political system and how it's changed over the past couple of decades, but overall starting to feel too similar to a lot of the punditry I've already been reading about identity politics and social media's impact on how we consume news.
If there's an afterlife, I hope it's the one described by The Egg, by Andy Weir
How Countries Around the World Fund Music—and Why It Matters (especially now with COVID making it harder to make ends meet as an artist)
The New Yorker wrote an article called Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media which I thought was a great and thorough account of the rift growing between silicon valley elites and news publications
Probably not everything, but a decent summary of the context around Section 230, the law governing internet moderation **
Music
Whitney's new cover album Candid holds up to their title in my mind as the greatest indie rock band of all time 🙂
Film
Absolutely loved The Killing of a Sacred Deer, by Yorgos Lanthimos
Rewatched Darjeeling Limited, by Wes Anderson, and it's just as good the second time!
Palm Springs, by Max Barbakow, has easily become my new favorite comedy. Already watched it twice and probably will many more times
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Also posted here:
A framework for ramping up as a Product Manager in a new team or company
Just 2 months ago, I joined Facebook as a Product Manager in a team working on Civic and Health Integrity. After 9 years working as a Product Manager so far, this is the 15th or so team I've supported in my career. Each team has been a new group of people to meet, set of relationships to build, subject matter to learn about, and problem space to make sense of and set clear goals around.
This amount of context switching is more typical than it may seem for a Product Manager's career. Between team rotations early in your career, supporting multiple contiguous teams as you earn more influence, going through reorgs, switching companies, and so on, you quickly get exposure to many different configurations of people to work with and problems to work on.
Hitting the ground running with each new team can feel like a daunting task. Especially when you join a new company, but even within the same company as you start to support new teams. After all, getting this right early on is important if you want to effectively contribute to the team's strategy and impact!
Here are some tactics that I've developed throughout my career to hit the ground running as quickly as possible on a new team:
People
Whenever I join a new team, my first goal is to meet everyone I'll be working with and talk through the below 4 things. I take notes on everything that I learn in a private "1:1s" doc that I keep to myself.
A) Context
"What should I know about our team, the broader org, and the company as a whole?"
This is story time. Let the person guide the way - history of the team, current priorities, technical details of key products that the team contributes to, etc.
I always leave this open-ended early on and over time as I get more context, I start to develop a set of specific knowledge gaps that I try to fill with subsequent conversations.
B) Advice
"What advice do you have for me to be successful in my role?"
Everyone on the team, no matter how long they've been on it or what their role is, will have something valuable here.
Advice isn't only tactics or mental models to be more effective at my job. Advice is also a window into how they view their work and our team, how they (and possibly the company at large) view the role of the Product Manager, and what they think the team needs most support on.
C) Help
"How can I be most helpful to you? Anything I can, starting this week or later on, to make your life easier?"
Anything at all that's a reasonable time investment on my end and genuinely helpful to my teammate is a great candidate to build rapport early on and establish trust.
This also helps to quickly pick up on recurring themes throughout the team. Is there not enough documentation of what the team's goals and key projects are? Is there a relationship with an XFN partner that needs some extra love? Does the team's org leadership not understand or believe in the team's current direction? Any of the above or more become key areas to focus on for fast impact.
D) What else?
"Who else should I meet? What else should I read?"
I'll then go talk to all those people, and repeat #1-4 until there's no one else left to talk to and no major docs to add to my reading list.
At this point I can PageRank which people are going to be most relevant to my role to build close relationships with and which docs are going to be most important to prioritize reading first.
Product
Understanding of the product (what the goals are, current state of the world, how things work, etc.) has hopefully already started to come together through conversations with teammates. Beyond that, I focus on:
Going through all the key docs that were recommended to me
Doing longer deep dives with leaders on the team about the tech stack, key operations and support flows, and retrospectives of recent key projects
Get in front of our users by participating in some user research sessions, answering customer support tickets, etc.
I add all of this to a doc titled "Hadar's ramp up doc for {New Team}", and share this out with everyone I've been meeting with. Here's the template I use: hadardor.com/ramp-up-template
I ask folks to comment in liberally, correcting my understanding of things and adding more context or resources to read. This helps me over a quick period of time to make sure that I have context on all the most important areas to my team
Impact
Driving impact early on depends on the needs of your team, so naturally isn't as clear cut. Here's how I approach this on every new team:
Set clear expectations with my leadership team (manager, org leaders, etc.) on what is most important to focus on early on, how to quickly grow into the overall scope I've been hired for, and how we'll measure the success of my ramp up.
Solve people and process problems as early as possible. If the team needs their execution streamlined, if there are stakeholder relationships that could be more productive, etc., that's an immediate area where I try to add value so that everyone else around me can be more productive.
Take on some starter tasks based on my leadership team's priorities and the answers from teammates on how I could best make their lives easier. These can be defining scope for the next project on the roadmap, aligning expectations on a current workstream with partner teams, etc.
Figure out with my function leads counterparts (engineering manager, data science manager, ops manager, etc.) how I can best partner to facilitate the career growth of all the people in our team
After the above are under control, start to think more proactively about what the team's next big bets could be. Start to socialize this with teammates and refine it over time. This will come in handy soon enough when it's time to plan the continuation of the team's strategy :)