Driving alignment within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller

... and many of the companies that I've either worked with, or advised, or coached over the past few years, it was all about outcomes. Like everyone was outcomes, outcomes, outcomes. Which is right. You wanna make sure you're doing the right thing with the right goal and that's fine. And some folks, you know, myself included, at certain points, like swung way too far on the outcomes train and forgot that, uh, output is an indicator of that. 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 documentation and setting up the right product briefs and design briefs and experiment briefs. All the things that we know go into successful product development. That's great, but if you're also not shipping a lot of things to market quickly enough, then it just doesn't matter that much.

(intro music plays) Welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Nikita Miller. A huge thank you to Camille Ricketts for recommending Nikita and for connecting us. Nikita is senior vice president and head of product at The Knot Worldwide. Before that she was VP of product at Duulip and before that she was head of growth and retention at Trello for over five years. In our conversation we dig into how product managers and people getting married are similar, a bunch of advice on getting into product management, a really cool framework for how to align roles and responsibilities within your cross functional teams, a bunch of advice for working effectively as a remote and distributed team, and the one question that Nikita asks constantly to get the most out of her teams. Nikita is amazing and I am excited for you to learn from her. With that, I bring you Nikita Miller after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. Anyone paying attention to the stock market over the past few years knows it's been a wild ride. Many people who made risky stock bets during the bull market are now facing big losses and wondering how to make better informed investments going forward. That's why I'm excited to tell you about Wealthfront's new stock investing product which is specifically designed to help you make better stock investments. It has all the features you'd expect including fractional shares, zero commissions, and a one dollar minimum. But what sets it apart is a unique feature called stock collections. These are groups of stocks created by Wealthfront's investment team that are designed around unique investment opportunities. You can think of Wealthfront stock collections like Spotify discovery playlists, but instead of helping you find new songs, they help you discover new companies and themes to invest in. For example, some popular collections right now are dividend to blue chip stocks, semiconductor leaders, and rising interest rates. And each collection includes a summary of the opportunity and trade-offs to help you make more intelligent investing decisions. To start investing with just one dollar, visit wealthfront.com/lenny. And note, I am a Wealthfront client and they arrange for me to share this product with you. Important disclosures and details can be found in the show notes. Are you hiring? Or, on the flip side, are you looking for a new opportunity? Well, either way, check out lennysjobs.com/talent. If you're a hiring manager, you can sign up and get access to hundreds of hand-curated people who are open to new opportunities. Thousands of people apply to join this collective and I personally review and accept just about 10% of them. You won't find a better place to hire product managers and growth leaders. Join almost a hundred other companies who are actively hiring through this collective. And if you're looking around for a new opportunity, actively or passively, join the collective. It's free, you can be anonymous, and you can even hide yourself from specific companies. You can also leave any time, and you'll only hear from companies that you want to hear from. Check out lennysjobs.com/talent. Nikita, welcome to the podcast.