Natalia Baryshnikova

“So we try to work with founders and CMOs to get them to come through that process with us, and I think what we find then is once they know the process, the process is great, the process is cool, but we will then suggest some pretty differentiated and unique stories that they could be telling, and that’s when the rubber hits the road. Are they comfortable being this ambitious? Are they comfortable stretching to having a strong opinion on this or that, or do they kinda want to just play it safe and get all the goodwill from branding without doing some of the hard work of taking a stand? That’s where it gets dicey.” Quote of the Day with Shannon Deep and Kevan Lee in conversation with Leah Tharin about brand marketing. Some of the best brand marketing experiences I’ve had was doing rapid press response, in which a journalist would reach out writing a breaking story and I would provide a paragraph quote for them to cite. Whenever I took a definite stand on an issue - not veering into controversy for controversy's sake - it would always be published in the article and we would see the benefit. I find a lot of material on LinkedIn to be bland and samey and safe, and frankly that bores me. Even though I too have the pull to ‘play it safe’ at times, if I have a strong opinion, that may even run counter to the prevailing opinion, I try to be true to myself. There was a question asked the other day: Can you build a successful personal brand, if you have no personality? I don’t think so. I’m an introvert, so it’s not about having a gregarious extravert personality, but it’s definitely about having an opinion, calling it as you see it, even if you’re wrong. I’m certainly more engaged with brands that have opinions. But I find most to be bland and filled with safe corporate speak. What’s your opinion?

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Please join me in congratulating my client for getting a YES from Meta as IC6 PM! ✨✨✨ They had previously passed the Meta PM loop as IC5 in 2022 so they were already polished in Product Sense and Execution; we mainly worked on their leadership and behavioral stories to target IC6. As always, we worked on both mindset and tactics. Mindset wise, we worked leadership principles around navigating chaotic dynamics while showcasing empathy, feedback handling while showing grace, balancing a collaborative environment while holding the team accountable, and working with difficult individuals while maintaining professionalism. Tactic wise, we worked on using my go-to method: BLUF (bottom line up front), which is different from the traditional STAR. BLUF (bottom line up front) is the practice of beginning a message with YOUR unique perspective (the "bottom line"), providing the interviewer with the most important information first. BLUF differs from an abstract or executive summary in that it is simpler and more concise, similar to a thesis statement, and it resembles the inverted pyramid practice in journalism. When we target IC6+, we need to leverage storytelling to demonstrate leadership and not just simply answering questions. This means communicating with clarity and strategic insight that comes from you thinking DEEPLY about organizational behavioral. Traditionally, many believe that the best way to demonstrate their capabilities in an interview is through detailed storytelling, using the STAR method. Unfortunately, STAR does not enable you to communicate strategically and succinctly. This is why the Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF) approach is my go-to method and what I coach my clients on. Interested in learning more about BLUF? See my article here: https://lnkd.in/gCtDiD2W Do you need help acing your L6+ (Director/GPM/Staff/Principal) PM interviews? Our program is not a cohort, it has an open enrollment model so you can enroll any week without waiting for a specific start date. Would you like to join us? #bluf #leadership #joboffer #interviewtips

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Reader feedback for my latest post about how to use AI and my PRD template to never have to write a PRD from scratch again. Read the full post here: https://lnkd.in/eJjVXJUJ

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Hiring your first Product Manager One of the hardest roles to hire for young companies (10-15 engineers), is their first PM. Every founder wants a unicorn candidate: an experienced IC PM with 5+ years of experience in the same/adjacent domain. The challenge is that most top candidates: (a) don't want to take a career risk working at a no-name company, and if they do, (b) want to come in as Head of Product or lead a team from the get-go. It's a source of endless frustration for founders, but it's the reality. I recommend accepting this reality and evaluating four alternate paths / archetypes to hiring your first PM: (a) "Failed founder": Find a failed startup in your space (or in an adjacent space, or even in the same broad space, eg B2B SaaS or DevOps) and hire the founder as your first PM. These people have shown the agency to manifest talent and capital, build a product, get some customers, and do this all scrappily. These are the attributes you need in your first PM. (b) "Junior PM": Sacrifice your desire for product experience and target PMs with ~2 years of product experience. Offer them the opportunity to become the first product person at your company and work closely with you, the founder. This has a higher success rate than going after more experienced candidates, but the risk is they might flounder after joining your startup. (c) "Second year MBA": There are many PMs with 2-3 years of experience, who are in business school, getting their MBA. Bring on a second year MBA (with prior PM experience, or maybe even prior Engineering, Design, Marketing or Analyst experience) as a Product Intern, several months before they graduate. They might have the same inexperience risks as path (b) above, but you get a chance to try before you buy, and can slowly ramp them up over a few quarters to build trust and take on fulsome projects. With top b-schools having an employment rate of ~40-50%, this could be a powerful option. (d) "Existing Employee": Convert an existing employee (Engineer, Designer, Marketer, Business Analyst) into a PM. Here's an article I wrote on this option: https://lnkd.in/gXYN5ETj tldr Founders of young companies need to think different when trying to hire their first PM. Just going after the ideal candidate will likely not work for most startups. FWIW, my order of preference among the alternatives above is (d) > (a) > (c) > (b).

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After 10+ years working with early-stage startups it’s fair to say I’ve seen I’ve seen some things (& some things I will never unsee), learned some things, earned some stripes, some scars, and some measure of expertise (one hopes) helping more than a dozen startups find product-market fit. While I’ve enjoyed year-long runways at well-funded startups that were eventually acquired, or went public, or very publicly imploded—what really taught me the real meaning of Lean startup was working with self-funded founders who had ten compelling concepts but resources to build one. When you don’t have a year to be wrong; you learn to get it right very fast. If you are a founder facing your own set of high stakes decisions & tradeoffs; we can help. For free. You can book a 1 hour chat with us to talk through all the things racing through your head. We know what’s involved in getting something tested, validated, and built; this is what we do every day all day. We might not have all the answers but there is a good chance we can give you some clarity, some calm, some options. Call us at 1.844.4FLAGRANT or DM me. And if you want to get a sense of what we are like as hoomans- check out our Delightful Reveal series. It’s all the things we have been reading, watching, listening to, & enjoying. https://lnkd.in/gfrz9tQS #startups #entrepreneurship #socialentrepreneurs #innovation

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Strategic alignment across product and field is complex and not easy to get right, but it's a pleasure to work alongside Brett Crane, Trevor Jett (Childers), and Jarod Greene. It's wonderful to be in conversation with them, sharing what we have learned, in this webinar: https://lnkd.in/gc-qp7Hk

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Hey LinkedIn Team & LinkedIn PMs fam! Hope you're all doing well as H2'24 kicks off, bringing in the season of festivity and higher revenue. 🎉 As a Product Leader, I love exploring premiumness or loyalty driving products myself to refine my Product thinking nuggets for user retention. In that context, I had subscribed to LinkedIn Business Premium couple of years back, which renews every year. I have been and am still a LinkedIn Premium Subscriber (as I write this). Interestingly, despite being a Premium member, I continue to receive a barrage of ads and messages prompting me to upgrade... to Premium. 🤔 It makes me wonder if there's a disconnect somewhere within the system - perhaps a hiccup in the CDP or Sales pipelines not syncing with the CRM or DMP? I'm curious to learn from fellow LinkedIn PMs about the best practices they follow to ensure real-time data consistency across different platforms. Specifically for ads or growth campaigns! Additionally, I wonder if there's a possibility, dear LinkedIn PMs fam, to introduce a "Don't show me ads" toggle for dedicated Premium customers? 🤔 This is not a rant, just a request :) Edge cases exist, and I understand your roadmap might be full! Let's keep building great features :) #ProductManagement #DataConsistency #UserExperience #Product

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My team has been hard at work building the next generation developer experience at Stripe—so proud of them for unveiling a step change for people building on Stripe. Today, we're introducing three big new features: 1) Sandboxes: the next-generation of Stripe test mode. You can *finally* create multiple, isolated environments—handy for building a new feature, or just playing around with something new safely. 2) Workbench: our reimagined developer space, available everywhere in the Stripe dashboard. Inspect anything on the dashboard and get under the hood with the raw JSON in just one click. 3) Event Destinations: our webhook tools are evolving to make it easier to get just the events you need, and now delivering to cloud destinations for the first time. Check out the next generation of Stripe—and get early access—here: https://beta.stripe.dev

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I'm often asked about the difference between full-time and fractional product work. Here's one of the things I always tell folks -- fractional is all about impact, impact, impact 🔥 This means that the ability to develop context quickly, ramp up (and get educated) around new problem spaces & industries and sniff out potential challenges for a product and team are crucial...and also what makes the role so damn fun and dynamic. Side-note: This is not to say this isn’t the case with full-time work. The best full-time folks certainly adopt this mindset. But I know this to be *particularly* the case with fractional work and what you should expect when working with a stellar fractional professional.

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Half of LinkedIn has already weighed in on Paul Graham's recent essay Founder Mode, which criticized the approach of running large companies with "efficient managers." The discussion was sparked by Brian Chesky, who, during an event at YC, lamented that hired management nearly destroyed his company. Everyone in attendance nodded in agreement. Let’s set aside the fact that guys in Patagonia vests may not be the best sample for assessing the success of "Founder Mode." The success of some of these individuals is hard to replicate, not just in other countries, but even in the U.S. under high-interest-rate conditions. Survivorship bias in action. The key question here is: are motivation and accountability for the company’s mission the critical factors for a startup's success? In my opinion, they come second, right after the ability to continuously learn and adapt to changes in the company. For example, the founders of Instagram stepped aside at the right time (maybe unwillingly), allowing efficient managers to build the second-largest social network in the world and a huge cash cow for Meta. An efficient manager, Imran Khan, came to Snapchat from Alibaba, helping the company make a great IPO and improving a lot as a CSO. Bill Gates handed over management to one of his early employees, Steve Ballmer, who in turn passed it to Satya Nadella, allowing Microsoft to become one of the world’s largest companies. Steve Jobs long resisted the necessity of releasing the iPhone and was ultimately convinced by multiple managers, who saved the company, which at the time was relying on a single product line. My conclusion from the stories above: one must constantly learn and evolve to align with the product's tempo. If you fall short due to a lack of skills, motivation, or health, it's better to let more flexible and competent people handle these challenges. You can't blame failure in people management on an inherent flaw in the hired management system.

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Love how Steve Jobs talks about conflict resolution. For many years at Google, the notion of "disagree and commit" didn't exist. When there were differences of opinion, we duked it out (with words and vigorous debate). Looking back, it seems to me that if the culture has the following attributes, then you have the capacity to reach consensus: - Humility: being open to "maybe I don't have the best answer" - Curiosity and Respect for peers: "I see some merits in my peer's ideas" - Drive to find the optimal path: "let's huddle till we sort this out" Very often, when evaluating two options, the vigorous debate would lead to a new third option that was better than the original options. PS. Having internal mobility within the company was helpful too. If someone felt so strongly that they couldn't get onboard with the team consensus, they could go work on a different problem :-) https://lnkd.in/gkjun3KE

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In my experience of interviewing and working with many product leaders, a common trait among the great ones is treating their craft more as a science than an art. Delighting users, creating magical experiences, and ultimately developing software that users love to use is a science. An immediate red flag during interviews is when product leaders can't express details beyond "talking to customers" on how they build lovable products. While talking to customers is paramount, I listen for the structure and tools they use to become customer-centric and experts in the users they serve. Here’s what I look for: Methods to Listen For When Evaluating How Product Leaders Create Lovable Products: 🗺️ Journey Mapping: Understand what users do before and after they interact with your product or attempt to accomplish their job. 🔑 Key Moments Identification: Reveal the key moments that matter in the user journey. 😌 Emotional State Awareness: Understand the emotional states of users and how they change as they progress through the journey. 📊 Data Collection and Analysis: Collect and analyze data to understand funnels, drop-off rates, attrition, etc. I’m also on the lookout for specific techniques on how the product leader builds high-performing product teams. Here are some of the practices to listen for: 🏆 Recognition and Rewards: Establish clear KPIs that define success, create accountability, and drive alignment. Implement a system for recognizing and rewarding team achievements and individual contributions. 🤝 Consistent 1-on-1s: Conduct regular one-on-one meetings to mentor and guide the career and development of the product management team. 👥 Team Collaboration: Allow teams to craft their process and evolve it over time. My favorite team performance ceremony is the retrospective, where the team can gather in a safe place and collectively define how they will improve. 🔄 Cross-Functional Alignment: Create alignment between product, engineering, sales, marketing, and leadership. This involves regular cross-functional meetings, transparent communication of goals and progress, and a unified vision that ties the efforts of all departments together. Ensuring that all teams are moving in the same direction is crucial for driving consistent and sustainable growth. Overall, there are many important items across both themes that define effective product leadership. By listening for a product leader who employs these structured methods, companies can make a better hire to turn insights into actionable strategies, ensuring that the user experience is not left to chance but meticulously crafted and continuously improved, while building and managing high-performing teams that drive success.

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Startup People Leadership comms 101 (survey fatigue edition) We were chatting about survey fatigue in the Open Org Community Slack last week, and it struck me that a lot of people leaders who were encountering survey fatigue look for resolutions here first: - Tweaking cadence - Tweaking number of questions - Tweaking type of questions It's rarely about this. If people aren't responding, it's usually because they: 🤷‍♀️ don't know what the point of it is “wtf is this for?” 🤦‍♂️ no longer trust that anything will be actioned after “here we go again…” So it’s not really about tweaking your questions and cadence It's about closing the loop: 📢 Transparent comms ⚡ Actioning your follow up. Closing the loop = trust and Trust => Engagement A simple blueprint to do it better: //up front comms - We're doing this {survey/pulse} - Here's why and what you can expect to happen next {run survey/pulse} //post-survey comms - Here's the result - Here's all the things we could do - Here's the things we are doing and these are things we’re not doing and why we made that prioritisation. {action things you said you’d do} //impact comms - Here’s what we did - Did that improve things? - Ok next up… This way of doing things builds trust because you are: 👉 Being transparent about the results 👉 Being transparent about the decision-making/prioritisation process 👉 Being accountable and showing integrity by saying what you'll do and then doing what you'll say. Close the loop FTW. If you're a people person tearing your hair out about this now... drop me DM and let's ☕ or... if you want to try a different approach to surveys entirely (another lever), Check out our playbook on Survey Fatigue alts: https://lnkd.in/eujKTBpv

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Why'd I make the jump to fractional from full-time? Here's a bit about how I thought about this jump myself: 👍 1 - Saying “yes” to product: After a career building products at Airbnb and early-stage cos, I still fundamentally loved the craft of product management. So continuing to build products and teams in some capacity was a no-brainer. 📕 2 - Learning from new products, industries & teams: I'm a curious guy. I wanted to work in a capacity that enabled me to work on, and ultimately learn from, a diversity of teams, products, and industries. And after having spent 5+ years at Airbnb, I was also eager to get back into early-stage product and company building (which is ultimately what attracted me to a career in tech and what led me to work on the founding team of my first startup during college). 📈 3 - More impact: My career has spanned building products and teams across growth and early-stage cos and in product & non-product roles. Given this, I felt uniquely positioned to drive product and business impact for cos at the earliest stages. And doing this in a fractional capacity, where I would be able to work simultaneously across multiple products and cross-pollinate the learnings from one company to the next, would enable me to deliver even more impact than I otherwise could have. 💪 4 - Increased autonomy, control: I also wanted to experience a relationship with product mgmt that afforded more autonomy. I wanted more control over what I worked on and how I spent my time. Through this, I wanted to develop even more control over my career and my trajectory. 👨‍💼 5 - Scratching that entrepreneurial itch: After having worked in growth-stage tech for more years than I (tbh originally) anticipated, it was time to re-tend to the entrepreneurial bug (that's always lurking). I wanted to get back to being an owner and building something from the ground up.

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One of the fun parts of starting a new job is getting to ask “Why” a thousand times a day.* Why is this our strategy? Why is this our target customer? Why choose this problem? Why do we believe this market is big enough? Why do we believe our solution is differentiated? Lean Startup Canvas is a handy tool to remind ourselves of the kinds of questions to ask. If there are questions about revenue model, market size, or similar “what needs to be true for this to be big enough, and how confident are we that those assumptions can become true one day”, I like to model out all of those assumptions, and then see which we need to de-risk.* If there are questions about what customer we want to target, what Jobs To Be Done we want them to hire us for, what would make us a differentiated solution, I like to turn to generative research. This starts with recruiting 6-10 people who 1) have no prior relationship with me or anyone at the company, 2) are likely to represent the kind of customer we would focus on. Then, we should interview them with open ended questions that stay within the context of our focus area. And don’t sleep on the power of ethnographic research, diary studies, card sorting exercises, etc. Let them take us to where they want to go, what’s on their mind, what feelings do they have. What we’re hunting for are flare ups of emotion that can reveal a worthy pain point. These are subtle — an edge to their voice that lasts half a sentence, a big sigh or rolling of the eyes, a shaking of the head. We’re fully present during these interviews, because these moments are easy to miss. When we see those moments, we pounce. “Can you say more about that?” “How does that make you feel?” “How do you deal with that today?” These are the nuggets of gold that can lead us to a problem worthy of Product Market Fit, if we can validate that the problem is 1) wide spread enough, 2) solvable in a differentiated way, and 3) can be monetized sufficiently. What we absolutely must not do is pretend we’re doing generative research but actually we’re user testing solutions we already have in mind. Evaluative user testing is a great and under-utilized tool, but it’s not the same thing. If we go looking for proof that we are right, we’re pretty likely to find it because human brains are great at confirmation bias. Don’t: “What if I presented you with this solution, that could do x, y, z. Would you use it?” Do: “You mentioned [problem hypothesis]. Tell me about the last time [problem hypothesis] happened. What was it like? What did you do? How did it make you feel?” We’ll get to the solution design soon enough, but until we have confidence and clarity about what problem we want to solve, any solutions we do build are hard to evaluate.* —————— *If you’re interested in reading the footnotes as well as my work-in-progress thoughts (today: “good and cheap” > “great and expensive”), sign up for my free newsletter: https://lnkd.in/g44P3_rB

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Sharing real stories from the trenches of product management. First topic - balancing big visions 🌟 with building MVPs that actually solve problems 💡 Would love to hear your thoughts! 👇 https://lnkd.in/einzrwbZ #ProductManagement #MVP #Startups

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I'm constantly asked for great resources for PMs. Here are a few of my tried-and-true favorites that I always return to. 🎧 Lenny's Newsletter & Podcast: This is one of the best podcasts/newsletters you can subscribe to. Lenny Rachitsky has high-caliber guests talking about relevant topics. Whenever I am stuck or need product guidance, I turn to Lenny's podcast for inspiration. https://lnkd.in/gzmy8AMq 🎤 INDUSTRY conference: One of my favorite Product-specific conferences to attend. Mike Belsito and team put on an incredible 2-day conference. Last year, they had premium speakers such as April Dunford, Marty Cagan, and more. It is always great to get out from behind the desk, connect with other Product people, and learn more about what's happening in the tech industry. This year, it is Sept 23-25 in Cleveland, OH. Product Collective also has a fantastic podcast and resource library. https://lnkd.in/gSu_UtR5 📖 Crafted's own Medium Library. We're releasing weekly content focused on continuous #collaboration, #leanproductmanagement, and #softwaredevelopment best practices. We showcase relevant topics and problems that we're experiencing and how we're tackling them. One of my favorites is Zero to ML Hero: Incremental Approaches to Machine Learning Check out the library here: https://lnkd.in/g6HpEZaH What are some of your favorite resources?

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Delivery-focused. Execution-oriented. Not Strategic. Or (my new favorite internet slur) ZIRPM. In a startup context, getting stuff off the production line IS strategic (despite what the haters say). Here are a few reasons why: Read this post and more on my Typeshare Social Blog: https://lnkd.in/dPDuKYQb

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Let me tell you about the one time I paired a design team with their product folks to work with a group of customers who had recently lost a loved one. It was an incredible project that led to a huge simplification of old, well-intentioned processes to help people. Together, we radically improved the experience by reducing the time it takes to report the Loss of a Loved One from 30 minutes down to 45 seconds. The outcomes were beyond expectations. By creating a process that spoke directly to the awful pain and needs of survivors, customer retention shot straight up and their assets remained under management in the amount of hundreds of millions of dollars. That type of “innovation” is easy to come by when you genuinely exercise empathy, listen, and co-create a way to pair their needs with those of the business. If you invest in providing time and empathy to earn trust and loyalty, the money and assets will follow. Designers can help make this happen. We can’t and shouldn’t own the work (that’s your role President Business), but dammit, we can put one hell of a huge dent in the problems and challenges people have daily. My name is Greg Storey and I love working with your designers who do not have a dedicated design leader or a design ops role. We can do good things together to improve your team’s skills, processes, maturity, and cross-functional relationships. I have done this work many times at all sizes and scales, from small teams of ten to global enterprise programs of thousands. I'm looking to work with a team or two fractionally on a quarterly basis. Act now, right now! Supplies are limited. If that's not you, then take two seconds and share this story with your network! Tell your Uber driver about it. Use this tale to break the ice whit the poor person who has to sit in the middle seat on the flight home. Jump in front of a live news broadcast and say my name. Whatever it takes to help me find teams that need the kind of vision, guidance, and growth I provide in spades. #design #fractionalleadership #designervsgoliath

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