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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So I think that you can get stuff done with either initiative or process. And both of those extremes are bad. If you have a company where it's all about initiative and there's no central process whatsoever, you're going to have a lot of chaos and you're going to have a lot of things that are conflicting efforts. That's also going to slow you down and it's going to be hard.
Also, if you have, on the other side, if it's all about process and you train your team to wait for process to do anything, you're going to feel like it's a bureaucratic government over time and nobody talented is going to want to work in an environment like that. Both extremes are bad. I think if you, like I told you, I think companies do better when there is
Yeah, just minimum process and the process and means to an end. And that end is, you know, it's either for to help people go faster or to help them ship better products. Any other process is waste of time. And you have to be really, really diligent not to let it become over-processing in your organization because it's actually going to, it could destroy your culture.
I set aside two to three hours a week for product reviews. We don't have to fill them up. The way that we decide what to review is both in pull and push ways. Pull is me and my report. In our staff meeting, we discuss typically what are the priorities, how they're going, and other things that we want to discuss because there's a lot of ambiguity, whatever. And so that's the pull way.
And then the push is when the teams themselves, they want to discuss a topic because they need help with making a decision, they need help on trade-offs that they're considering or strategic considers, whatever it is, right? So those are the two ways.
I ask my teams to stick to the minimum number of people that they need to have a good discussion. So basically, I ask only for people who need to directly contribute to the discussion to be in the review. And that's typically like up to 10 people. But what we do, because I think transparency is very, very important, right? We record every review.
And we have a Slack chat and we post about every review, the materials, the recording, the action items, the ETAs, like everything is documented. And then the team can pull whatever information they want.
We have kind of like four different types in my current organization.
So there could be a strategy review. So the strategy review is where we go deep on what is the problem that we're trying to solve? Why is it important? We talk about product opportunity, we talk about business case, whatever it is. but it's all about just like the what, if you will. The second one is roadmap review. This is like an execution plan for whatever problem you're trying to solve.
It talks about the sequencing, the milestones, the exact goals that the team is going to take. It's basically the plan to get there, so it's the how. We have a launch review. So a launch review is before the launch of any product, we look at all of the things that need to come together to have a successful launch.
And the same review, we look at experience and we pressure test it against the quality bar that we have. And then the last type is business review. So we look at the financial performance of the product and all of the business levers for that product to do well or not well, what we need to change, what we need to pay attention to. So those are the four types.
Now, you asked about when product reviews don't go well. And I think one of the reasons is when the team doesn't know what are the most important questions that we need to answer. And you can catch that in the pre-read. So we ask that the pre-read is sent at least 24 hours in advance.
Well, the pre-read goes over the problem that we're trying to solve and all the different components that you need to discuss as part of the review type.
It's a Google Doc that everyone is expected to read before the review and add any comments or thoughts in that document so that we can have a productive discussion.
No, I really try to not be a bad example. If the pre-read is sent 24 hours in advance, I will. If the pre-read is sent like, I don't know, one hour in advance, I'm not gonna be able to do that, right?
I think debate is incredibly important. And so one of the things, but I also don't know if talk is cheap. So I think those are two different concepts. One of the things that I really loved about the culture of Facebook when I was there can be captured by strong opinions loosely held.
One of the reasons why we were successful with the products is that we were really leaving that value, that culture. It really means two things. One is that you have to have a point of view. And to get to a point of view that you feel conviction about, you're going to have to go deep into whatever topic you're having this point of view about, right? You're going to have to do your homework.
You're going to have to spend enough time to develop expertise in that topic to have a strong point of view. And you have to share that point of view, and people will debate a lot. I was going to say the crap out of it, but that's how you get to a better outcome. And the second part of that, you should not be stuck with your strong point of view, right?
You should be open to new information as it comes in. And not just open to new information, you should go seek out new information because you know that it makes your decision better. And so that's what this culture about the importance of not being right, but it's the importance of making the right decisions. That's one thing. You talked about talk is cheap, and there I really agree with you.
I disagree with the philosophy that talk is cheap. Just because talk doesn't cost us any code doesn't mean that we need to do more of it. I think, like you said, talking costs us time, and that is the time that you can be spending progressing towards your North Star, and your teams could be executing during that time. Any product leaders who love philosophizing, for me, it's a big red flag.
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