Lenny's Podcast

Tamar Yehoshua: Why chaotic companies can still win big

Tamar Yehoshua chased great people over plans at Google and Amazon; her time at Slack and Glean shows chaos and hypergrowth can still win on distribution.

Tamar YehoshuaguestLenny Rachitskyhost

Sep 25, 20241h 17mWatch on YouTube ↗

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Tamar Yehoshua on product leadership, chaos, careers, and AI’s future

Tamar Yehoshua, president of product and technology at Glean and former CPO of Slack, shares hard-won lessons from leadership roles at Google, Amazon, Slack, and beyond.
She argues that outsized impact comes from excelling at your current job, deeply understanding people, following great leaders rather than strict career plans, and building strong cross‑functional partnerships—especially with engineering.
Tamar challenges assumptions that companies must be perfectly run to win, stressing that product‑market fit, distribution, and sales execution matter far more than organizational neatness in high‑growth phases.
She also dives into how AI is already reshaping product work, why PMs who ignore these tools risk falling behind, and what it takes to build robust products on top of non‑deterministic LLMs.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Excel at the job you have before chasing the next one.

Promotions and new opportunities come from visibly moving the business forward—shipping things people actually use, improving organizational productivity, and optimizing for impact, not just checking boxes or launching features.

Deeply understand people’s motivations—customers’ and colleagues’.

Great product and great leadership both hinge on reading people: why users click a button, why teammates want to work hard, what they’re trying to achieve, and how they react in the room—skills Tamar credits partly to her psychiatrist father’s constant “why did they do that?” debriefs.

Follow great people, not rigid career plans or brand names.

Tamar never had a five‑year plan; instead, she chose roles where she could learn from the very best practitioners and where joining would be career‑making for the people she hired, emphasizing skills and networks over predicting financial outcomes.

Strong PM–engineering partnerships are non‑negotiable for product leaders.

You must choose environments with a trustworthy, capable engineering partner, align on clear areas of ownership, present a united front to the org (no “ask mom, ask dad”), and invest significant shared time in planning, OKRs, and execution reviews.

Hypergrowth success doesn’t require a perfectly run company.

Tamar has seen chaotic, poorly run companies grow explosively and impeccably run companies stall; in early and hypergrowth phases, product‑market fit, distribution, sales, and enough capital matter more than neat org charts—though chaos isn’t an excuse for neglecting people or basic functioning.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

There are no right decisions. You make a decision right.

— Tamar Yehoshua (quoting her father)

You’re not gonna get the next job unless you do really well at the job that you’re in.

— Tamar Yehoshua

You don’t need to be a well-run business to win.

— Tamar Yehoshua

Follow people who are the best at what they do… skills can’t be taken away.

— Tamar Yehoshua

If you have great ideas of what to build but you can’t get them built, then you’ll go nowhere.

— Tamar Yehoshua

Career development without rigid long-term planningDoing an exceptional job in your current role and driving impactUnderstanding people and motivation in product and organizational leadershipBuilding strong cross-functional partnerships, especially PM–engineeringThe myth that companies must be well-run to succeedHow AI is changing product management, engineering, and knowledge workDesigning and shipping AI-based, non-deterministic enterprise products

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