Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:04)
If you're a PM, you've almost surely read and been influenced by Jackie Bavaro. And if you haven't, you're in for a treat. Jackie is behind two of the most important books in the PM canon, Cracking the PM Interview and Cracking the PM Career. And she's also one of the smartest people I know on the essential skill of product strategy. In our chat, we go deep into all of the ways that you can become better at developing your own product strategy, including what is strategy, what makes a good and bad strategy, and how to very tactically put together a strategy. We also chat about what she's learned going from the first PM at Asana to head of product at Asana, plus a ton of tactical advice on getting to senior PM and then to manager PMs.
A big thank you to Jackie for sharing her wisdom with us.
This episode is brought to you by Flatfile. Think the last time you imported a spreadsheet. Did it work the first time?
Chances are it did not. You probably got some weird error and had to try a bunch of things like removing the blank title rows above your column headers or googling how to save with UTF-8 encoding. What even is UTF? Who cares? You're just trying to get your file where it needs to go so you can do your actual job. Your customers run into the same issues when it matters most, right after signing up for your product. Enter Flatfile. Flatfile is the data onboarding platform built to take the acute pain out of importing customer data into your product so they can see the magic that you promised them. Flatfile is SOC Type 1 and 2 certified, GDPR compliant, and even HIPAA compliant. Ensuring your customers, no matter where in the world they're located, are sharing their data securely and in compliance every step of the way. No more emailing files back and forth. No more help articles that just don't land. Just clean data on day one when it matters most.
Get started importing millions of rows of customer data in minutes at flatfile.com/lenny.
This episode is brought to you by Amplitude, the number one product analytics solution. Amplitude helps product teams, growth teams, marketing and data teams build winning products faster and turn products into revenue. Amplitude has everything you need including an integrated CDP, self-service analytics, and even an experimentation platform to help you better understand your users, drive conversions and increase engagement, growth and revenue. Amplitude is built for teams that want to learn as fast as they ship and ship as fast as they learn. Ditch your vanity metrics, trust your data, work smarter and grow your business. With over 1,700 customers like Atlassian, Instacart and HBO, Amplitude is helping companies build better products. Try Amplitude for free. Visit amplitude.com to get started.
Jackie, I am so excited that we're chatting again. We've done a bunch of Fireset chats over the years in various events, and you've always been really generous with your time. And so I just want to say thank you for joining me, and I'm really excited to chat again.

**Jackie Bavaro** (3:01)
Yeah, I'm so excited to chat with you. I'm so excited that you're doing a podcast, and I'm glad I get to be one of the early people on it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:07)
Absolutely, it's my honor. Okay, so you're kind of a famous PM in the world of product management. You wrote Cracking the PM Interview, Cracking the PM Career, both of which I own and love. And fun fact, my sister was just interviewing as a PM, and she used your book and found it really helpful. So thank you for that.
Yeah, and then also you've written a bunch of classic PM posts on Medium that I reference often and share with people. And also you were the first PM at Asana, ended up being the head of product management at Asana. And that's actually where I'd love to start. Could you just kind of share how you got into product very early on, and then how you worked your way up to the head of product management at Asana?

**Jackie Bavaro** (3:47)
Yeah. So I was just really lucky in finding product management. Is I went to Cornell, studied computer science and economics, and I'd never heard of the job.
And one of my friends who had been a PM intern the summer before, I was like, Jackie, you have to apply for this internship. And I said, I'm like a sophomore, I can't be a manager. And they're like, no, you manage the product, not the people and like, just go apply. So I applied having no idea at all what the job was. And through the interviews, I tried to figure it out. And I loved the interview questions. I thought they were a lot of fun and got the job, became an intern on Microsoft SharePoint services and stayed with the team, loved that team, went there full time. When I moved to New York, I started to think about changing companies. So Microsoft didn't have any product management in New York. So I applied to Google and I was like, yes, I'm a good product manager. I'm sure I'll get this job. And I got rejected. And I was like, I was shocked. I really had thought that I would pass the interview. So a year later, I applied again. And that's when I got into the Google APM program. And of course, at the time, I thought this was like one of the biggest mistakes in my whole career.