Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
The essence of product management | Christian Idiodi (SVPG)
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I try to explain to people that the real essence of this job is that you wake up on behalf of someone else to solve a problem for them. And you have to do it well enough that they give you something back in return. That's kind of the real essence of it. And that's the, I always call it like a certificate of appreciation, you know, and it can be in the form of revenue, engagement, loyalty, you know, reference, all of those things. And that's the real essence of this job. If it's not fun, you're probably not doing it right, if it's not hard, you're probably also not doing it right. Today my guest is Christian Ediodi. Christian is a partner at Silicon Valley product group alongside Marty Kagan who, when he introduced us, called Christian the most interesting man in the world. After meeting him, I tend to agree. After a long career in product, Christian now spends his time working closely with companies big and small, implementing and improving their discipline of product management. In our conversation, we discuss why the product management field is so often disliked and what you can do to avoid becoming a product manager people don't want on their team. We spend a lot of time on coaching, how to get better at coaching your reports, how to get better coaching from your manager, and some really clever tactics for building trust with leaders within your company. Also Christian Chairs is one favorite go to method, out of all of the discovery methods out there, for figuring out what to build. Also, we spend some time on the great work that he's doing in Africa to help product builders and founders build great companies. That and so much more, Christian is awesome. With that I bring you Christian Ediodi after a short word from our sponsors. You fell in love with building products for a reason, but sometimes the day to day reality is a little different than you imagined. Instead of dreaming up big ideas, talking to customers and crafting a strategy, you're drowning in spreadsheets and roadmap updates and you're spending your days basically putting out fires. A better way is possible. Introducing JIRA Product Discovery, the new prioritization and road mapping tool built for product teams by Atlassian. With JIRA Product Discovery you can gather all your product ideas and insights in one place and prioritize confidently, finally replacing those endless spreadsheets. Create and share custom product roadmaps with any stakeholder in seconds and it's all built on JIRA where your engineering team is already working so true collaboration is finally possible. Great products are built by great teams, not just engineers, sales, support, leadership, even Greg from Finance. Anyone that you want can contribute ideas, feedback and insights in JIRA Product Discovery for free, no catch, and it's only $10 a month for you. Say goodbye to your spreadsheets and the never ending alignment efforts. The old way of doing product management is over. Rediscover what's possible with JIRA Product Discovery. Try for free at Atlassian.com/Lenny, that's Atlassian.com/Lenny. This episode is brought to you by Vanta helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth. Thousands of fast growing companies like Gusto, Com, Quora and Modern Treasury trust Vanta to help build, scale, manage and demonstrate their security compliance programs and get
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