What it takes to become a top 1% PM | Ian McAllister (Uber, Amazon, Airbnb)

**Ian McAllister** (0:00)
If you forget about everything else, forget about politics, forget about promotion or having more bigger org or whatever, if you simply wake up every day trying to have the biggest impact you can, or if you're a leader trying to use your team to have the biggest impact you can in the company, how you do every part of your day, that's a really good guiding light.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:22)
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. Today, my guest is Ian McAllister. Ian is the author of one of the most classic posts on product management, what separates a top 1% PM from a top 10% PM. Amongst many other pieces of writing that he shared online, Ian has managed over 100 product managers in his career. He spent 12 years at Amazon, where he built Amazon Smile and led the team responsible for growing Alexa internationally. He also worked at Airbnb with me. And now he's at Uber, leading global product for the vehicles platform, which includes making Uber's fleet increasingly electric and autonomous. In our conversation, we focus primarily on two topics. What separates a top 1% PM from everyone else, specifically for new PMs and also for senior PMs. And we also dig deep into the working backwards process. We get into how you can implement the process on your team and how you might be doing it wrong. There's also a bunch of links to templates and guides in the show notes. So if you want to follow along, definitely check those out.
With that, I bring you Ian McAllister.
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Ian, welcome to the podcast.

**Ian McAllister** (3:57)
Thanks for having me, Lenny. I've been looking forward to this.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:59)
Me too. I'm sure you hear this a lot, but when I was a new product manager, very new PM, the post that you wrote on what makes a top 1% product manager was really influential and really helped me figure out what to focus on and what skills are really important.
And I find that it continues to levon as this very legendary post for product managers who are trying to figure out what to do. And I just reread it in prep for this post, and I was just like, wow, this is, like now that I'm on the other side, I'm like, this is so right. And so I'm really excited to dig into a lot of these things in person, sort of virtually in person. And yeah, with you. So thank you again for doing this.