Ravi Mehta

AI's current primary value is as an 'amplifier' that provides a high-quality starting point for human experts to refine.

"I think one of the most interesting things about it is not AI as a replacement for people, but AI as a way to amplify people and make them more effective. And I think we'll see a lot of that in terms..."

The primary advantage of a startup over a large company is low latency (decision speed) rather than total work volume (velocity).

"The advantage a smaller company has really is in latency. You can have an idea one day, you can test it the next day, and as a result you can have this really short cycle time between an assumption or..."

Big company networks and startup networks are distinct; transitioning requires intentionally building a new network of builders, freelancers, and early-stage investors.

"I think it's important to plug into an early stage network as soon as possible... the people sort of really build their lifestyles and their careers around a particular stage. And there are some peopl..."

Effective leadership requires a 'dynamic range' between granting full autonomy and stepping in with selective micromanagement when a team loses direction.

"Your ideal goal is to lead in a scalable way, which means you feel really confident about the direction of your team and your team has the autonomy to move in that direction. There's another really ef..."

Proactively giving your manager 'permission' to be blunt reduces their social friction in providing high-volume feedback.

"I think oftentimes people refrain from giving feedback when they feel like that feedback is going to be intrusive. So just inviting your manager to say, 'Look, I'm really looking to level up. Please g..."

The ability to deviate from a manager's preferred direction depends on the 'currency' of their confidence in your judgment.

"As someone who's working with a manager, there's kind of two things that you're constantly solving for. One is the degree to which you're aligned with your manager, and the second is the degree to whi..."

Early-stage startups must rely on 'informed conviction' rather than statistical significance due to low user volume.

"At a startup, you can't do that. You just don't have those users to test with. And I think a lot of startups make the mistake of trying to use an experimental approach too early... I've had to shift m..."

A complete product strategy requires a logical stack connecting high-level mission to daily goals through company strategy, product strategy, and roadmaps.

"The product strategy stack is a system that helps people understand what framework they're using in order to make decisions and what's going to drive value for the business. The top of the stack is th..."

Visualizing the end state through wireframes is essential for ensuring stakeholders have a shared understanding of the product strategy.

"One of the things that we said with stake that we put in the ground was the strategy doc wouldn't be complete without wireframes... the reason is that oftentimes when you talk about strategy in words..."

Goals should be the final step of the strategy process, serving as a measurement of progress toward a destination rather than the destination itself.

"I think about all of the pieces of the strategy stack as being really clear about what is the end destination that you're solving for, and then you should work on goals to the extent that they help yo..."

Goal setting should be calibrated against the team's 'frontier of understanding'—moving from understanding risk to execution risk to strategic risk.

"I refer to that as the frontier of understanding. There's a point at which what the team knows and what the team doesn't know... if you don't understand how to move a particular metric, then the right..."

PMs should be self-sufficient in creating conceptual wireframes to communicate ideas without depending entirely on designers.

"I would suggest learn how to sketch, learn Balsamiq. Having that ability to think at a conceptual level about how UI and UX works is I think a critical part of being a product manager. And if it's a s..."

Quantitative data identifies 'what' is happening, but user interviews are required to understand the 'why' behind extreme user behavior.

"We identified something quantitatively that was really interesting... Our assumptions about why that use case was that use case were wrong. And when we ended up talking to users, we had some really su..."