Combine conviction with humility and collaboration (Roblox CPO)
Manuel Bronstein, Chief Product Officer at Roblox, shares his journey & lessons learned from over 20 years as a product leader at major tech and gaming companies like Xbox, Zynga, YouTube, and Google.
Solve real user problems, not just sell products. "I actually realized very quickly that I was more excited to think about how do you build a product that matters? How do you like people? How do you actually do something that solves a real problem?"
Balance data with leaps of faith. "I think that what would have been a good balance to that was understanding when those things were just going to lead you to local maximas and incremental innovation. When do you need to have more leaps of faith and intuition?"
Learn to scale through others. "You start learning that when you start trusting and letting people do those things, they start to surprise you in a positive way. They start doing things in different ways or in better ways than you would have ever done it."
Cultivate the power of long-term conviction and storytelling. "The power of telling a story, the power of narrative, and painting a vision and a picture of the future, the ability to rally the troops and energize people based on a vision of a future you want to build, I think were some of the things that the Xbox team did phenomenally well."
Know when to build on strengths vs shore up weaknesses. "I have been a fan of leaning in on my strength and both whether it's my the traits and the skills that I bring to the table, but also the industry or the subject matter expertise that I bring to the table and use that as a catalyzer to learn and become very useful in the other areas."
Insatiable curiosity is a must for PMs. "An insane amount of curiosity is super important, and it manifests in multiple ways. And hopefully, when people are working in areas that they are passionate about, that curiosity is going to propel it on, right?"
Take a proactive, not reactive, approach to your PM career. "You should be deciding where do you want to go? What are the things that you want to do? And then start from there and then you'll find your way in. So that was super powerful."
Define and align around a powerful North Star Metric. "The other one I will say, it was more of something that I learned at YouTube was, how powerful having a long-term North Star metric could be or a North Star goal in the way it rallies the organization and it makes it self-fulfilling."
Combine conviction with humility and collaboration. "You need to be a good team player. You need to be able to work with others, evangelize ideas, listen, and be able to you know, build cloud and get people to rally behind your projects and your ideas."
Persevere in pitching bold ideas. "I had a big idea that I wanted to pursue and I wrote memos, documents or whatever. And it was probably in a drawer somewhere for like a year. A year later, new leadership came into the organization. They were looking for a big bang in terms of relaunching a bunch of things...It ended up being the project that I ended up shipping and loved."
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