Maria Angelidou
speaker
134 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Maria Angelidou’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You only promote people to the next level when they actually consistently already demonstrated that they can operate successfully at that level for a long period of time. And if they haven't done that, don't promote them because actually promoting them when it's premature, it's worse for them.
Because at that next level, they will be calibrated compared to the group of people, the whole cohort of people who are already operating really well on the next level. And if you promote them prematurely, it's actually going to be really bad.
Thank you for having me, Harry. I'm really excited to be here.
Yes, it was indeed a sliding doors type of moment. I'm going to take you to 2013. I was invited to one of those alumni events. This is the Boston Consulting Group. I worked at the firm for many, many years ago. I typically don't go to these, but that time was different because one of my friends made partner and it was a big deal to her.
And so I wanted to go and congratulate her and give her a hug. And so I said, I'm going to go. And, you know, I remember that day, I almost didn't go. You know, I had a lot of work that day. And my husband literally, I remember, was pushing me out of the door because I already committed. And he said, you should go. Okay, I went.
So I come to this event and I join one of the groups who are standing and chatting and I meet this impressive woman. She was a director of product management and she speaks of her job at Facebook so passionately.
that I was listening to her and then I thought, you know, it's either a bunch of BS or there's something that I really don't understand about this company, you know, from everything, just from outside in, everything I know about it, right? So she invites me on site and it ends up being a loop of interviews. And I go. And then on my way back, you know, my house is in Menlo Park, California.
And so it's 15 minutes away from the headquarters. And so it took me 15 minutes to get home. And I'm not even at my house yet. And I am pulling into my driveway and my phone rings and it's Facebook offering me a job. And so I was so impressed. It took them literally less than 15 minutes from the time I left to discuss, debrief, do whatever they needed to do to offer me a job, right?
Incredibly impressive.
Maybe 3,000 people. Yeah, something like that. And the product team was very, very small, maybe less than 100.
Product manager.
So my perspective is that a manager is responsible first and foremost for the outcomes of their team. That means that you as a manager need to do whatever you can, everything that you have in your control to de-risk and make sure that your team delivers on what they sign up for. When you transition from IC to a manager, there are two things that will change for you.
Number one is you're no longer responsible for just the product that you're working on directly. You're responsible for all the products that your team is working on, right? Like every one of them. That's one. And two, you're responsible for the people on your team. So, you know, you need to understand their weaknesses and their development areas and their strengths.
You need to manage, you know, deal with underperformance. You need to get them to the next level. The sooner you change your mindset about those two things as you transition, the better it is.
You know, this actually topic is near and dear to my heart. So when I was at Meta, in addition to my core responsibilities, I was also a functional leader for product management. And one of the things that I did at Meta is I introduced PM archetypes. exactly for that problem because you're going to have people who are brilliant ICs.
If there's no clear career progression for them, they feel pressure to transition into management. Oftentimes, that's not the right decision for them and for the company because it's much harder to find very senior ICs who have superpowers on different topics than to find managers. So So I introduced this archetypes. There were certain characteristics that they were spiking on.
For that exact reason is that you could go all the way up to VP on this IC truck.
So the ones that I work with the team to introduce were, in addition kind of to generalist track, you had captain. So captain is someone who excels in managing insanely complex projects. You need to have a central strategy, but then to bring them to life, you have to manage 10, 20 teams who are executing on this central strategy.
The second one is entrepreneur. So this is, especially in big companies, you really need to protect that talent. And these are the people who are incredible for zero to one. bringing ideas to life and then getting them to product market fit. And so they are just excellent, just getting the team together, getting them inspired, motivated, and iterating on an idea to get it to work.
So that's the second archetype. And then the next one, the third one, and the last one was specialist. So these are the people who have just some very, very deep expertise in a specific domain, like integrity, growth, ML, things like that.
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