The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
You've worked at so many great companies at YouTube. When you joined, my understanding is YouTube was losing a lot of money.

**Noam Lovinsky** (0:05)
There were many times where Google leadership reconsidered the acquisition, and should we like sell YouTube, if you can believe it or not.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:11)
At Thumbtack, it looks like you went from one to negative one, and then back to one.

**Noam Lovinsky** (0:15)
I remember in a board meeting, the new model really started to show legs, and one of the board members, Bryan Schreier at Sequoia, said it was the prettiest smile graph that he had ever seen.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:23)
When you were at Facebook, you built what is called the New Product Experimentation Team, trying to create a startup within a startup.

**Noam Lovinsky** (0:29)
You're thinking on a different time horizon. If you're a large organization and you do some performance management process twice a year in your zero to one incubator, you've already killed it. It's the wrong incentive.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:39)
As the Chief Product Officer at Grammarly, I'm curious what word you most often misspell.

**Noam Lovinsky** (0:44)
Ha ha ha ha. The.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:47)
T-E-H.

**Noam Lovinsky** (0:48)
T-E-H, yeah, exactly.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:52)
Today my guest is Noam Lovinsky. Noam is currently Chief Product Officer at Grammarly. Previously, he was an early PM at YouTube, where he spent five years leading the creator product experience and then the broader YouTube consumer product experience. He then went on to take on the Chief Product Officer role at Thumbtack, which involved helping the company reignite growth after a downturn caused by some changes Google made in SEO. He then went on to Facebook, where he created the New Product Experimentation team, whose charter was to incubate big new ideas protected from the larger Facebook org.
Noam has such a unique set of experiences, taking products from to 1, from negative 1 to 1, from 1 to 100, and even starting his own companies. He's never really been on a podcast before and he rarely ever tweets or posts anything online, which we actually talk about. In our conversation, we walk through the lessons that he's learned through his amazing career at YouTube, Facebook, Thumbtack and at Grammarly. We talk about when it makes sense to kill your project at a company, when it makes sense to ask to be layered at a company, why you should be keeping a nose out for which products matter most at a business and to find those products, why you need to diversify your growth channels at your business, why you should be finding work that is gonna most stretch you to help you advance in your career, a bunch of advice for creating space for innovation within a large company and so much more. Noam is such a gem and I'm really excited to share his wisdom with you. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow this podcast in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Noam Lovinsky after a short word from our sponsors.
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Noam, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Noam Lovinsky** (4:25)
Thanks for having me Lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:27)