Christian Idiodi
Christian Idiodi is a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group. After a long product career and founding multiple companies, Christian now spends his time working closely with product leaders at companies big and small to implement and improve their discipline of product management.
Career Skills
Promotions should be a recognition of work already being performed at the next level, rather than a chance to start learning that level's skills.
"I am promoting you to do the job, not to learn the job. You're going to work with me over the next couple of months to do those things because I am promoting you to do the job, not to learn the job."
Proactively seek mentorship from the most competent people in the company to gain both their knowledge and their social capital.
"You're going to find the loudest, most influential person in your organization, the person that everybody knows, knows everything, is in every meeting and stuff, and you're going to ask them to teach..."
Growth Skills
Product-market fit is validated when a specific threshold of customers is willing to put their reputation on the line as a reference for your product.
"The holy grail of product walk is really a reference customer. This is somebody that has used your solution or your product, loves it enough to tell people about it... I want six to eight references,..."
PMF is the result of iterating discovery until target customers are willing to provide public testimonials.
"Product market fit is when you iterate it in this discovery, you've discovered and delivered something so meaningful that these customers that are your target customers, are willing to put their reput..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Assess product candidates by giving them a live, unconventional problem to solve to observe their thinking process, empathy, and collaborative instincts.
"I always give them a problem to solve. That is probably my favorite question... 'Hey Lenny, I have a friend. He's been legally deaf or hearing impaired his whole life, and he just got a new job that r..."
Leadership Skills
Build trust with powerful stakeholders by asking them to teach you, which makes them psychologically invested in your success and competence.
"The most powerful way I have found to get trust with many people is to have them accountable for an outcome of mine, which is to know. So if I wanted to accelerate trust with Lenny, I will ask Lenny t..."
Product Management Skills
The most effective way to define and understand a problem is to attempt to solve it manually and observe the results in the real world.
"I said, there's nothing better in learning how to solve a problem than trying to solve the problem. You will get all the answers, the research, the failure, the mistakes, all the evidence. You know th..."