Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside)
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I've had thousands of people tag my CEO on Twitter calling on him to fire me. I was actually on vacation and I got bored and I was like, "I haven't logged into Twitter. I haven't posted anything Twitter for a while. What's going on in Twitter?" And I see that the notifications number is maxed out. It's like 9.99 plus or whatever. And I was like, "Wait, what?" And I clicked the notifications tab and I see the first tweet is, "Has @CEOhandle fired @TalaRviv." And I saw that that has a ton of retweets. And I keep showing down and I start to piece together the story. Today, my guest is TalaRviv. This is a very special episode for me, because Tala was one of the first and most active community members when I was just starting my newsletter Slack community. And as a PM I've admired from afar for a very long time, he's got some really unique and insightful takes on how to be a great product leader. And interestingly, he's decided to stay an IC product manager throughout his entire career up to this point, which is over 12 years as an ICPM. I've never met anyone that's stayed an IC for this long. He's been a PM at Patreon, at Wix, at Apps Flyer, and most recently joined Riverside as their first ever product manager. Riverside, by the way, is the platform that I used to record my podcast. So this was kind of a meta experience for both of us. He's also a former founder and outside of tech, he volunteers as a surf instructor for people with disabilities. In our conversation, we talk in depth about the IC career path, a bunch of tactical advice on how to be more productive as a PM, including a killer example of how he uses chat TPT to scale himself. Tala also explains why every tech company has just two departments that matter. The difference between book smart decisions and street smart decisions, we also spend the most time I've ever spent in failure corner, where Tala shares all of the times that he's failed in his career and how those experiences made up stronger. And it was really important for him to share these things, because he wants people to understand that successful people fail a lot, and those failures make you better. If you want to learn more from Tala, he's actually about to launch a course on Maven, that's called Build Your PM Productivity System, which, based on the conversation that we had, I am confident is going to be awesome. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to follow it and subscribe in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Tala review. Tala, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you. It's great to be here.
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