Product manager is an unfair role. So work unfairly.How to thrive in “the great flattening” by redefining work norms
👋 Welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. For more: Hire your next product leader | Favorite Maven courses | Lennybot | Podcast | Swag I believe the future of product management looks like Tal Raviv. He’s an individual contributor (IC) PM who leverages AI tools and a suite of productivity systems to get more done with fewer resources (and management layers). Throughout his more than 10-year career, Tal has actively chosen to stay an IC and, over that time, has honed a set of productivity practices that give him tremendous leverage and impact—beyond what many traditionally believe ICs can achieve. In other words, he’s become a “super-IC.” Below, Tal shares seven of the unique productivity tactics that have gotten him to where he is today—and might help you become a super-IC too. Tal was an early PM at Patreon, Riverside, Wix, and AppsFlyer. He now teaches one of the fastest-growing courses on Maven, Build Your Personal PM Productivity System, which includes 40 in-depth lessons and 23 projects across 8 modules and 6 live sessions. The course is live, cohort-based, and hands-on, with small-group learning and accountability, and direct WhatsApp and email access to Tal for help unblocking as you implement your productivity system. To get a taste of the course, check out his free 30-minute lightning lesson, “Build Your Personal PM AI Copilot,” scheduled for November 22.
Product management is unfair. We’re expected to be on both a maker and a manager’s schedule. Nothing is planned around “PM capacity.” We can’t hire or fire but are expected to make things happen (and fast). We are the cushion for organizational dysfunction. Any PM reading this could add a dozen more reasons. And this is in the best-case scenario—assuming you’re on an empowered product team with a clear strategy, inside a business that’s growing. Unfortunately, it’s only going to get harder from here. In the past few years, we’ve seen the “great flattening” of tech: rising expectations of fewer ICs to own larger swaths of the product and manage multiple teams while staying hands-on. Rapid advances in AI are only accelerating expectations of what one PM can handle. “Fairness” isn’t coming. The good news is that great PMs are making it work. In this newer, flatter tech industry, PMs who thrive will be the ones who build their own systems, methodologies, and tools to make the job work for them, not the other way around. They’ll start working “unfairly” today to lead successful teams without sacrificing their own well-being. Some of these strategies and boundaries may seem selfish or weird. Remember: keeping you healthy, engaged, and committed to the job is essential for the success of your entire team—and the product and company too. 1. Get out of tasks before they even reach your to-do list (or anyone else’s)😑 Unfair: I’m staying late because even though my meetings are done, I have a bajillion tiny tasks that are both urgent and important as a result of all those meetings. 🤠 Work unfairly: Instead of adding action items from meetings to a to-do list, do the action items live in the meeting. With everyone watching. While screensharing. Let’s use “sending out a meeting summary” as an example action item from a meeting. Instead of spending valuable time after the meeting reviewing notes and drafting a summary, do the work in the meeting itself. In the screenshot below, I am screensharing my Slack, open to the channel of this initiative so everyone in the meeting can see. And I’m drafting the bullet points of my summary and action items. When the meeting has come to an end, I ask everyone to take a look at the screen and make sure that I got it right. Once we have a consensus, I hit “enter” on the spot and stop the screen share.
Sounds selfish to do this in front of everyone, right? Turns out colleagues and stakeholders appreciate it. From their point of view, you’re taking the lead, bringing clarity, getting it done immediately, and aligning with them—all before hitting enter. Extend this approach to other meeting action items:
2. Cheat your way out of meetings with “59-second Looms”😑 Unfair: People throw 30-minute meetings on your calendar whenever a decision, communication, or collaboration gets too complex for Slack. 🤠 Work unfairly: Half of those meetings can be pivoted into an asynchronous communication. The other half can be fast-forwarded by setting up attendees to enter the meeting with context and prepared thoughts. Use a Loom (or a Slack video clip) when the reason for a meeting is to communicate a nuanced, high-bandwidth concept. Treat your audience like, well, an audience; be intentional about converting them to view and click. Remember that receiving a Loom can initially feel like a burden.
Most PMs still don’t do Looms outside of major announcements or bug reports. I get it. Treat this as a core PM communication skill. Whoever gets over the awkwardness will have a huge productivity advantage. 3. Hide, ignore, and automate Slack😑 Unfair: In my experience, PMs get tagged on Slack far more than any other role in a startup. (OK, maybe we tie with engineering team leads.) To anyone outside the product team, we are design, engineering, QA, data, knowledge team, and often marketing. And in the chaos of a fast-growing company, it’s hard to follow which PM owns what. It’s easier to reach out to “that PM you know” than keep track of who owns that feature now—so we also wear the hat of “phone operator.” 🤠 Work unfairly: Implement Slack rituals and norms to create boundaries and make sure you don’t spend your entire day playing digital Whac-A-Mole.
4. Cultivate a team that operates without you😑 Unfair: Because the PM’s responsibility is to close any gaps on the team, it’s easy for someone to throw up their hands and say, “That’s product’s job” or “I’m waiting on product.” And it’s never a good look for a PM to directly disagree with that. 🤠 Work unfairly: Create a self-reliant team by empowering your teammates as experts in their disciplines, encouraging them to think like PMs and keep initiatives moving when you’re not in the room. As PM, you might be the orchestra conductor, but your teammates are the star musicians. I have no problem telling new teams I lead that:
When people ask you for decisions, use the opportunity to remind them that they are the expert and ask what context they need from you to make their recommendation. Did somebody on your team just do something that’s technically your job (e.g. QA doing data analysis, support agent proposing a feature, designer going right to a stakeholder, data analyst identifying a problem to solve, engineer directly interacting with a customer)? Shower them with positivity. Make it clear how much you welcome that proactivity. In the words of Max Eulenstein, co-head of product at Instagram: “Turn everyone into a mini-PM. That’s the way that you maximize leverage from your entire team. Don’t view your cross-functional peers as stepping on your toes as a PM.” For example, if a UX writer identifies an impending design conflict and corrals multiple product teams to reconcile it, make sure they know how much you appreciate their leadership. Or when a data analyst comes back with experiment results and several ideas for follow-up A/B tests, make sure they know you’re seriously considering those ideas—and hungry to hear more. Use these “micro-interactions” to shape a culture where product isn’t a role; it’s a team. This even hinges on the words we choose, like in this story I shared with Lenny:  Since so much happens in Slack, it’s a huge lever for promoting team autonomy. As much as it makes you feel special and needed, remember: DMs are the devil. Anytime somebody sends you a direct message (and it’s not confidential), your reflex should be to ask them to repost the same message in a public channel. Not only are public channels more transparent, collaborative, drive faster resolutions, and easier to find later—it also serves as a cultural example for others to do the same.
Yes, this can be uncomfortable. But imagine this: it’s been hours of back-to-back meetings, the sun has already set, and you exhaustedly pull up Slack. Would you prefer to see: (a) A bunch of direct messages collecting dust, where you are the bottleneck (and probably weren’t the right person anyway) or (b) A bunch of vibrant threads in public channels where teammates and stakeholders have already jumped in, added context, raised tradeoffs, and distilled the precise decisions they need from you (if any)? Putting our own productivity aside, the team in (b) is at least half a day ahead of the team in (a). 5. Get a head start on discovery with product scrapbooking😑 Unfair: Every founder and product leader wants their product managers to do discovery and strategic planning, gathering clear-cut customer evidence for every recommendation. That said, they don’t want it to take any time. 🤠 Work unfairly: Save insights, ideas, and evidence way in advance by “product scrapbooking.” Company roadmaps might be linear, but customer insights from outside the building are (rightfully) a jungle. So I keep a Notion database of feedback screenshots, charts, support tickets, links to Gong calls, Slack threads, you name it. These are all organized by swim lanes (e.g. monetization, onboarding, internal tooling, virality, technical debt. . . ). Every time something comes up in the regular flow of work, I “scrapbook” it for future planning. I keep the notes lightweight, I collect clues from all over, and I don’t invest a lot of time in organizing the document, because I don’t know if an idea will ever get prioritized. I mainly make sure to give each “scrap” a good title so that future me can find it easily.
If someone suggests a solution and it reminds me of something I’ve already been tracking, I can share real-world context on the spot. If this idea becomes a prioritized initiative, I already have the juiciest bits of a kickoff presentation. Over time, product scrapbooking pays dividends. When kicking off a new initiative, onboarding new PMs to opportunities, or getting research off to a running start—I save so much time when I start with a broad set of customer clues (instead of a blank document). If I scrapbook consistently, I’ll have a head start on quarterly planning too. Say leadership hands me a theme: I head to my initiatives database, filter by swim lane, and quickly get in the mental context from raw customer signals. This helps me think way more clearly and strategically in very little time. Bonus: Your stakeholders quickly pick up on the fact that you’re that PM who’s truly listening, which makes them excited to send more insights your way. 6. Let AI write for you (but don’t let it read for you)...Subscribe to Lenny's Newsletter to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Lenny's Newsletter to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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Product manager is an unfair role. So work unfairly.
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