"my aha moment of the value of first principles thinking was when I was at Dropbox we would hire a ton of like really smart people that had never done sales and had them do sales there are a lot of dis..."

"after a short word from our sponsors today's episode is brought to you by assembly AI if you're looking to build AI powered features in your audio and video products then you need to know about assemb..."

"Melissa welcome to the podcast thanks Lenny it's great to be here I'm excited to have you on I hear there's a big development in your career that is gonna be out by the time this podcast comes out whe..."

"deeply I want to first talk about Dropbox so your Dropbox for four-ish year something like that doing a lot of their growth work and it was in the middle a lot of their growth spurts and things like t..."

"about go to market and growth so you said Dropbox essentially there was a late investment in sales and there's a sense maybe product like growth is going to take us really far and like I imagine like ..."

"know um yeah awesome okay so let me start the transition into talking about building awesome teams and high performing teams and something that I know about you that I've heard from other people is th..."

"caring deeply about someone and being that kind of leader people may be listening and are like oh yeah I care a lot about my my reports but like what are some examples of what that means to you that m..."

"be improved I know you're also a big fan of developing Talent internally versus hiring you know experts from the outside and it's always this like decision I think as a leader and as a company like ho..."

"personal career I had the biggest inflection point and the most progress I made as a product manager was one manager who just did exactly what you're describing where you invested really deeply in hel..."

"and then I I would also ask other people on the panel that are not going to be your manager but that work with this person especially if you happen to talk to people that they manage how is this perso..."

"it or if you are working with somebody you want to set up some type of monthly thing I think you can ask for that as well the only thing is I would just be respectful of the time so if you don't have ..."

"incredible roster so here's the question what are some of the most common ingredients you've seen across these teams which from an outsider's perspective seem quite High performing I think it first st..."

"about the team and Thinking Beyond yourself the third thing is really this ownership mentality something I directly saw at Dropbox is when we were a smaller company everyone just felt a lot more owner..."

"a million if we want to double the AR let's just double the team and so I actually push back significantly though I thought to myself if we double the team what is everyone on the team going to own an..."

"this connects to something else I wanted to pull the thread on which is the team first bucket I think about meta not to like throw them under the bus or anything but I feel like everyone I know meta t..."

"internal tools or trying to run your own experiments through a clunky marketing tool when I was at Airbnb one of the things that I loved most about working there was our experimentation platform where..."

"let's come back to the developing Talent bucket I would kind of went on a tangent but I want to come back to that so we talked about why you're excited by developing Talent the benefits you've experie..."

"their role it's a good Mutual fit I also tend to look for folks that have a growth mindset there are people that are wanting to learn they're looking for feedback they take feedback well and then afte..."

"finally I think it's that lifelong relationship actually so I'm still in touch with a lot of people that I've managed and I've helped them you know whether it's they're looking for their new job or th..."

"leader we're gonna link to that book if folks don't know about it I love it you talked about hiring PMs and how that is important in building High performing teams so let's spend a little time there m..."

"I want to spend a little time here so what is the actual sequence that you recommend or you use for interviewing there's a presentation there's a rep call what else is kind of involved in that usually..."

"before that we have that that preparation call with me where often candidates will have questions like oh I I need to know this data or I'm curious about X and so it's really just a call to help them ..."

"presentation and so if it's one week that's like long enough to create it but it's short enough that you don't spend tons of time the other thing is just making it clear like don't exceed more than x ..."

"sure we have time for the growth team stuff so let's transition to that and my first question here is you've worked with a lot of different teams a lot of different companies on helping them figure ou..."

"figuring out how you work with other teams I think the best or the ideal way to to work is to have growth Infuse in the company and so an example here is often the growth team is going to be potential..."

"so d stands for driver this is the person driving the project a is accountable this is the person that's ultimately accountable and is often the final decision maker if there's any open questions C is..."

"flying formation I love it that would make a great blog post by the way if you're looking for some to write an example of your actual client information webflow I think people would love that yeah one..."

"a lot of things you're talking about are kind of based on how growth starts at a company I imagine one of the most common questions you get is how do I start to invest in growth how do I hire my first..."

"volume isn't probably going to be strong enough I think even just finding like five individuals that are part of your target audience just doing user testing set up a zoom watch them on board onto the..."

"are you looking for an actual leader that's going to scale with the company or you know are you not ready quite yet for that what about in terms of their skill set I imagine if you're kind of feeling ..."

"the road just a couple more questions one is you mentioned that it sometimes makes sense to bring on an advisor I know sometimes companies have a bad time with advisors that just don't provide much va..."

"advisor wants to make sure they're adding value so I definitely think it's like you know to summarize being really explicit on what advice you're looking for and making sure you're on the same page of..."

"awesome story is there anything else you wanted to share or touch on before we get to or very exciting lightning round I I think that's it I I wanted to make sure I know I talked a lot about you know ..."

"round I've got six questions for you are you ready yes what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people the first one is Leaders Eat Last I really like that leadership book um ..."