Today is my last day as a PM at Facebook/Meta! 🙌🏽
While bittersweet, I’m grateful that I learned a ton from from some of the best PMs in the world.
Here are the most consequential ideas I learned about leading product teams:
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1/ Ask more from your team, not less 💪
Giving low-skill tasks to high-skilled teammates is a waste of their talents.
Use their full skillset by giving them bigger challenges.
This lets your team have more impact and increases the your own leverage.
Example:
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2/ Let fires burn 🔥
Great PMs are comfortable with persistent fires. They can't solve everything.
Instead, they find higher-leverage ways of tackling more than one problem at a time.
Here's how Brian Chesky does it:
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Brain Chesky’s High Leverage To-Do List
1. Make an exhaustive list of tasks
2. Group them by their root cause
3. Ask what one action can take care of these 3? These 5?
4. Do it again and again.
This brings 20 to-dos to 3-5 high leverage actions. Think calling the fire dept:Show this thread
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3/ Create the truth 📜
When you first join a team, write a "State of the Union".
This lets you:
1/ create context for their team
2/ show that they understand the team's problems
3/ build credibility
Here's a template modeled after a SOTU I wrote:
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4/ Execute perfectly 🎯
Imagine starting a diet and cheating mid-way.
At the end of the diet, do you know if the diet/strategy worked? No.
Key idea: you can only debug or evaluate strategies if they are executed well.
Here's how to do that:
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5/ Always make decisions with objective criteria ✅
This lets you show their thought process and remain objective.
Here are three examples of varying fidelity (note: fidelity varies with complexity of the decision):
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6/ Create scope 🔎
PM seniority is tied to the size, ambiguity and impact of your scope.
Great PMs create meaningful scope for their teams. You do this by:
1/ building capacity
2/ finding new areas
3/ capturing with a plan
Here's how to do this:
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7/ Meta-Execute 👏
Often, it’s in the best interest of teams for the PM to step back from execution to:
- define long-term plans
- make sure you’re working on the right things
To do this, you need to meta-execute.
This is a big idea, I unpack it here:
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8/ Your team should decide what they build 🛣
If you're worried they'll chose the wrong things, the PM hasn't given them
1/ the right context
2/ the right prioritization framework
3/ an ownership culture
Here's how to create "bottoms-up" roadmaps:
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My new team at Facebook has a great process for creating roadmaps.
Here is our six-week timeline:
Wk 1: Socialize Your Charter
Wk 2: Understand Share-outs
Wk 3: Ideation
Wk 4: Longlist to Shortlist
Wk 5: Prioritization and Goals
Wk 6: Consolidate
Let's break it down 
Show this thread
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To recap:
💪 Ask more of yout team
🔥 Let fires burn
📜 Create the truth
🎯 Execute perfectly
✅ Decide with criteria
🔎 Create scope
👏 Meta-Execute
🛣 Team decides what to build
I documented more lessons I observed building products here, check em out:
Replying to
For all the flak that FB gets, I'm proud & lucky to have worked with some really smart people.
This job changed my trajectory and taught me so much.
I'm going to enjoy the holidays with my family and jump into a new role in the new year. Stay tuned. 👀
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