Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside)

**Tal Raviv** (0:00)
I've had thousands of people tag my CEO on Twitter, calling on him to fire me. I was actually on vacation, and I got bored, and I was like, I haven't logged in to Twitter, I haven't posted anything in Twitter for a while. What's going on on Twitter? And I see that the notifications number is maxed out. It's like 999 plus or whatever. And I was like, wait, what? And I clicked the notifications tab, and I see the first tweet is, has at CEO handle fired at Tal Raviv. And I saw that that has a ton of retweets.
And I just keep scrolling down, and I start to piece together the story.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:35)
Today, my guest is Tal Raviv. This is a very special episode for me, because Tal was one of the first and most active community members when I was just starting my newsletter Slack Community. And as a PM I've admired from afar for a very long time, he's got some really unique and insightful takes on how to be a great product leader. And interestingly, he's decided to stay an IC product manager throughout his entire career up to this point, which is over 12 years as an IC PM. I've never met anyone that's stayed in IC for this long. He's been a PM at Patreon, at Wix, at AppsFlyer, and most recently joined Riverside as their first ever product manager. Riverside, by the way, is the platform that I used to record my podcast. So this was kind of a meta experience for both of us. He's also former founder and outside of tech, he volunteers as a surf instructor for people with disabilities. In our conversation, we talk in depth about the IC career path, a bunch of tactical advice on how to be more productive as a PM, including a killer example of how he uses ChatGPT to scale himself. Tal also explains why every tech company has just two departments that matter, the difference between book smart decisions and street smart decisions. We also spend the most time I've ever spent in Failure Corner, where Tal shares all of the times that he's failed in his career and how those experiences made him stronger. And it was really important for him to share these things because he wants people to understand that successful people fail a lot. And those failures make you better. If you want to learn more from Tal, he's actually about to launch a course on Maven. That's called Build Your PM Productivity System, which based on the conversation that we had, I am confident is going to be awesome. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to follow it and subscribe in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Tal Raviv.
Tal, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Tal Raviv** (2:31)
Thank you. It's great to be here. This is a long time in the making.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:35)
It has been a long time in the making. You're interesting in so many ways. We're going to talk about a lot of different things. One of the things that makes you most unique and interesting as a PM is that you've stayed an IC product manager for your entire career for 12 years. I don't think I've ever met a PM that's been an IC for 12 years. I imagine you've had many opportunities to be promoted. I imagine this has been very intentional. I also know a lot of people actually think about this a lot. Should I move into management? Can I stay an IC and be successful? I want to spend some time here to start. My first question is why? Why have you decided to stay an IC? Why have you not moved into management?

**Tal Raviv** (3:11)
I don't really have a strategy for my career. My strategy is not to have a strategy. For the longest time, I've gone by, am I excited to wake up in the morning, and what's going to make me excited to wake up in the morning? Not every single day, not all the time, but for most of my days that I work, what's going to make me hop out of bed and just follow that?
Over time, as I got to have different managers and different product leaders that I worked with, I've never looked at their schedule or their days or how they spend the highest high percentage of their time and said, wow, that's what I want to be doing. If I compare their days with mine and the stuff they're busy with and focused on. At the same time over the years, I've also noticed that the colleagues that I identify with the most, like the ones where I just mostly relate to them, many of them have that same pattern where they've gone to team lead or director and so on, and their next role, they request to be an IC, like they insist on being an IC. And yeah, so that's from the tech world, that's what informs that and the values I had growing up, just watching my dad, he's a researcher, he's a professor, and he just has a blast every day. Like he refuses to retire, he's just so enthusiastic about what he does, and he's never like aspired to be like a chairman, provost, like that. Like he just loves what he does and he stayed there, and I just see the joy, like the fun.