Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello)

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Lenny Rachitsky

Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 6 April 2023

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Brought to you by Wealthfront—Make smarter stock investments | Lenny’s Job Board—Hire the best product people. Find the best product gigs | Ahrefs—Improve your website’s SEO for free

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Nikita Miller is a product leader, angel investor, and advisor. She has built and led product teams at companies ranging from early-stage startups to multinationals, and she is currently SVP of Product Management at The Knot Worldwide. Nikita is passionate about scaling product teams to support high-growth businesses and was a product leader at Trello and Atlassian for five years. In today’s podcast, we cover:

• Lessons from building and growing Trello

• Nikita’s roles and responsibilities framework

• How the PM landscape is changing

• Lessons about managing remote teams

• Tactics for driving urgency within teams

• Why working cross-culturally was such a formative experience

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Find the transcript and references at: ⁠https://www.lennyspodcast.com/driving-alignment-and-urgency-within-teams-work-life-balance-and-the-changing-pm-landscape-nikita-miller-the-knot-trello/#transcript

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Where to find Nikita Miller:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/nikitadyer

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikitadyer/

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Nikita’s background

(03:56) How Nikita helped Trello develop enterprise features

(09:41) Trello vs. Jira

(10:28) Similarities and differences between building for users at The Knot vs. Trello

(15:02) Pro tips for Trello users

(15:41) Nikita’s roles and responsibilities framework

(21:10) Why scrum masters are disappearing and what shifts are happening on teams

(21:56) Why every team should have a data scientist embedded in it

(23:27) The proper cadence for the rules and responsibilities framework, and problems around execution

(25:27) Outcomes and output

(28:34) The importance of urgency, and how to cultivate a sense of urgency

(29:52) How to determine if your team is moving quickly enough

(31:03) Prioritization between big bets and optimizations

(31:29) Questions Nikita asks to understand her team’s speed

(33:30) Changes in the field of product management

(36:42) Advice for people who want to get into product

(38:40) Why being a PM is hard, and thoughts on work-life balance

(43:03) How to manage remote teams and how to do successful, short, in-person meetups

(47:59) The importance of having overlapping work hours and onboarding in person

(49:09) The advantages of working in different cultures

(52:58) The question Nikita finds most useful

(55:07) Lightning round

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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

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Disclosure: I am a Wealthfront client and I have received non-cash compensation for the testimonial in this episode.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	and many of the companies that I've either worked with or advised, coached over the past few years,
0:06.0	it was all about outcomes, like everyone was outcomes, outcomes, outcomes, which is right.
0:11.4	You want to make sure you're doing the right thing with the right goal and that's fine.
0:16.2	And some folks, you know, myself included at certain points like swung way too far on the outcome strain and forgot that output is an indicator of that.
0:27.6	So if you have a team that's doing all of the ideation and figuring out, you know, how to make decisions quickly and getting the right
0:34.8	documentation and setting up the right product briefs and design briefs and
0:39.0	experiment briefs all the things that we know go into successful product development, that's great.
0:45.5	But if you're also not shipping a lot of things to market quickly enough, then it just doesn't
0:48.9	matter that much.
0:49.9	Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth
0:56.8	experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's
1:00.3	most successful products. Today my guest is Nikita Miller. A huge
1:04.7	thank you to Camille Ricketts for recommending Nikita and for connecting us.
1:08.3	Nikita is Senior Vice President and Head a product at the Not Worldwide.
1:13.0	Before that, she was VP a product at Dooley,
1:15.0	and before that she was head of growth and retention at Trello
1:18.0	for over five years.
1:20.0	In our conversation, we dig into how product managers and people getting married are similar.
1:26.2	A bunch of advice on getting into product management, a really cool framework for how to align
1:30.3	roles and responsibilities within your cross-functional teams, a bunch of advice for working
1:35.2	effectively as a remote and distributed team, and the one question that Nikita asks constantly
1:40.1	to get the most out of her teams. Nikita is amazing and I am excited for you to learn from her.
	...

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