Building your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace)

**Ravi Mehta** (0:00)
A framework I like to use with product leaders that I'm coaching is to think about a matrix. 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 effective way of leading, which is selective micromanagement, which if you don't feel confident in the direction that your team is moving, the right answer is not to be hands-off and to let them go in that wrong direction. The right answer is to micromanage, but do it in a very tactical and a very temporary way, so that you can help them understand what is the right direction moving forward so that you can then pull back.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:45)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Ravi Mehta. Ravi was Chief Product Officer at Tinder, Product Director at Facebook, VP of Product at Tripadvisor, and now he's co-founder and CEO of a company called Outpace that he shares a bit about. Ravi is one of my favorite writers and sharers of product wisdom, and he also helped create and teach us the Reforge programs on product leadership and product strategy, which is where we spend most of our time. We talk about how to get better at crafting product strategy, how to develop your skills as a product leader, and a bit about the differences between being a PM at a large company versus building your own company. Like I say in the intro, I feel like more people need to know about Ravi, and I'm excited to help do that. With that, I bring you Ravi Mehta, after a short word from our wonderful sponsors.
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Ravi, welcome to the podcast.

**Ravi Mehta** (4:00)
Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:02)
So I've been a huge fan of your writing for a long time and this may sound a little weird, but I just feel like not enough people know about you and I'm just excited to learn from you and also just to share your wisdom with more people.

**Ravi Mehta** (4:14)
Oh, thank you. That means a lot. I've been a fan of all of your work as well. I've been following the podcast. It's been great to see how it's evolved over the years.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:20)
Awesome, man. I really appreciate that. It continues evolving.