Listening to Kevin Yien on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast.

Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny)

Learn from Kevin Yien’s journey in product management, featuring insights on AI, writing, user research, and effective hiring techniques.

Lenny's NewsletterLenny Rachitsky

Some key takeaways:

• Kevin talks about scheduling meetings to have focussed time with people to review documents such as PRDs. Rather than waiting for async feedback, he asks people to join a meeting where they silently read and give feedback on the document while all in the same space. This gives faster feedback loops and ensures people actually get space to review give input.
• Maintaining decision logs. Capturing decisions you make, and the context for why you made that decision. Periodically review to see if the decision worked out. If not, why not? Opportunity for learning and self reflection.
• They also talked about “getting the reps in” in relation to making decisions. PMs need to make lots of decisions. Making a decision with the data you have, even if insufficient, is better than stalling while waiting for the ideal data. Make the decision, log it (see above), move on and revisit later to see how you need to adapt.

Kevin also talks about writing, and how to improve your writing

Write daily or weekly to refine your style and voice. Consider starting a blog, journaling, or drafting product-related content to enhance your writing capabilities.

And so, here we are - with the first entry of the “daily log”. Let’s see how it goes 😊