Driving alignment and urgency within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller (The Knot, Trello)

**Nikita Miller** (0:00)
And many of the companies that I've either worked with or advised, coached over the past few years, it was all about outcomes. Like everyone was outcomes, outcomes, outcomes, which is right. You wanna make sure you're doing the right thing with the right goal, and that's fine.
And some folks, myself included, at certain points swung way too far on the outcomes train and forgot that output is an indicator of that. So if you have a team that's doing all of the ideation and figuring out how to make decisions quickly and getting the right documentation and setting up the right product briefs and design briefs and experiment briefs, all the things that we know go into successful product development, that's great. But if you're also not shipping a lot of things to market quickly enough, then it just doesn't matter that much.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:52)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Nikita Miller. A huge thank you to Camille Ricketts for recommending Nikita and for connecting us. Nikita is Senior Vice President and Head of Product at The Knot Worldwide. Before that, she was VP of Product at Dooley. And before that, she was Head of Growth and Retention at Trello for over five years. In our conversation, we dig into how product managers and people getting married are similar. A bunch of advice on getting into product management. A really cool framework for how to align roles and responsibilities within your cross-functional teams. A bunch of advice for working effectively as a remote and distributed team. And the one question that Nikita asks constantly to get the most out of her teams. Nikita is amazing and I am excited for you to learn from her. With that, I bring you Nikita Miller after a short word from our sponsors.
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Nikita, welcome to the podcast.

**Nikita Miller** (3:59)
Yeah, Lenny, thank you. I'm excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:01)
I'm excited to have you. So I don't know if you know this, but I'm actually having a kid in a couple months, and I've been doing a lot of reading, as you do when you're gonna be a parent. And I was reading a lot of stuff on The Bump, which turns out I realized was something that it was in your umbrella of products. And then-

**Nikita Miller** (4:15)
A part of the Knot Worldwide, yeah.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:16)
Yeah, and then I realized you all have that for pregnancy. You have a site to help you with proposals. You have a site for obviously wedding planning and vendors and just party planning in general. And so is the general strategy to be there for every adulting milestone in life, is that the plan?