Ian McAllister
Ian McAllister is the Senior Director of Product for Vehicles at Uber. Before moving to Uber, Ian spent over a decade directing teams at Amazon, where he created and led Amazon Smile. He was also Director of Product Management at Airbnb, where I was lucky enough to have worked alongside him.
Career Skills
Focusing exclusively on business impact rather than the promotion process itself is often the most effective path to advancement.
"If you simply wake up every day trying to have the biggest impact you can... that's a really good guiding light. And I remember in my first 10 years at Amazon... I never talked to my manager about it..."
Communication Skills
Effective business writing is a direct reflection of clear thinking and serves as a tool to sharpen one's logic.
"I think business writing, I spent a lot of that time doing that at Amazon, is so valuable because you've got to be a clear thinker to be a clear communicator. And so there's two tests in writing well..."
High-stakes communication requires directness, the use of data, and a commitment to continuous self-improvement based on feedback.
"Avoid weasel words, answer first and then explain, own your problems... if you can get in the habit early of answering a when question with a date, knowing how to use numbers to answer questions and h..."
Trust is built through the consistent cycle of forecasting outcomes and delivering on those promises.
"Trust is the currency of a product leader... Trust is just built by repeatedly setting and meeting expectations. And I think that's a good mantra to think about as a FM. Am I meeting the expectations..."
Effective alignment requires understanding the specific goals of other leaders and intentionally building alliances rather than just pushing a strategy.
"I think it's trying to really understand, work backwards from that person and what are their goals and what are their organization's goals and honestly spend the time and the energy to try to get to a..."
Product Management Skills
Senior PMs should consistently challenge the scale of their ideas to ensure they are pursuing the maximum possible impact.
"At our scale we got to hunt for bigger elephants. And so I think at any scale as a PM, whatever your idea is or whatever your solution or the problem you're solving, take a minute at the beginning to..."
Thinking big involves looking beyond functional boundaries to address any barrier to the product's success.
"Most people operate within a box... take that really wide view of what product is across disciplines... take that really wide view of what success for your product is and not have the blinders on its..."
Prioritization is the highest-leverage skill for a PM, directly correlating to the total impact generated by the team.
"Given the same amount of skill intelligence and resources, a product manager with a great innate ability to prioritize is going to generate 5X the impact of someone without that skill."
Regular, rigorous metrics reviews build an organizational 'muscle' for understanding business drivers and taking corrective action.
"The WBR or Weekly Business Review... It would be a series of metrics for different parts of the business... The way he ran that meeting would lead all those leaders to build these muscles because you..."
The most common failure in working backwards is retrofitting a problem to a pre-existing solution rather than starting with the customer's pain.
"Working backwards is all about the problem and starting there and obsessing about the problem and being guided by it to then go into the solution. So when teams that do it wrong is they don't do that...."
The PR/FAQ mechanism is a tool to enforce the discipline of working backwards from the customer.
"The press release has a paragraph about the problem. That's what you write. And then you write the solution paragraph and then the customer quote. And then the fact which is is there a legitimate plan..."
A successful product proposal must pass three tests: scale of the idea, strategic fit, and a viable execution plan.
"One, is it a big idea? And then second, is it something we should be doing?... And the third test, is there a legitimate plan to succeed? And you got to have all three of those things. And I think the..."
The PM acts as the primary driver of momentum, ensuring the team stays on track and the product is delivered in a high-impact package.
"Product managers are the mode of power behind execution and impact. And if you stall out or you don't do your job, the project's probably going to stall out as well. And so you're the ones, especially..."