How to Know You’re Ready for Product Leadership | Yue Zhao

Vit Lyoshin (00:00.706)
Welcome Yue. Thank you for your time today.

Yue Zhao (00:03.425)
Great to be here.

Vit Lyoshin (00:05.59)
Awesome. So you have a lot of experience being a product manager and a leader. and my first question is how does a product manager know when they are ready for the leadership role?

Yue Zhao (00:20.515)
Mm, it's a great question. I think of it in the reverse, which is how does someone else s look at you and see you as a product leader versus a product manager? So it matters because it matters a bit less whether you think you're ready. What matters is whether the people around you see your potential

want to put you in a place where you can grow from you know a product manager to a product leader. And one of the things that I ask people to notice is how often you're asked about things outside of your responsibility. So product managers generally have an area they're responsible for, a set of features, a scope, however you want to think about it. And you usually, you know, you get questions around that.

Vit Lyoshin (01:13.922)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (01:16.095)
Right from your team, from others around you. Great. That's you doing your job. One of the signals I look for is how often do people come to you with their problems and be like, Do you have any advice or ideas? Or they might just come to you to be like, Hey, I need help on this. Or what do you think of this? And that has n very little to do with your area of expertise or what your team is actually doing, but just you as a person and as a leader. And the more that happens, the more I say, look.

You're ready for a promotion because you're ready for that next level of scope and responsibility and people already come to you naturally for a broader set of things than what you currently own.

Vit Lyoshin (01:54.581)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a great signal actually. I didn't think about it that way. But yeah, just paying attention to what people ask you to do and and like relying on your expertise, that's great. Okay. and then also sometimes when people get promoted, they may not be a best leader. So why why do you think this happens? Why some of the product managers just can't become good leaders?

Yue Zhao (02:07.819)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (02:17.857)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (02:24.991)
Yeah. I think it comes down a bit to what is really important to do well between the product manager role and the product leader role. In the product manager role, it's much more execution focused. It's much more about getting things done. There's a lot more wiggle room and tolerance for perfectionist tendencies and the ability to make sure that, you know, you don't drop any of the balls. So the things that you're rewarded for are

making sure everything happens, you know, getting into everything else, doing everything yourself, figuring out yourself. And those exact tendencies are what makes people sometimes not great leaders. Because as a leader, your job becomes to enable other people to do their job well. Which actually means not doing their job, right? And not trying to get in and solve the problem and not trying to fix it yourself and

you know, coaching and setting up systems and, you know, putting together conversations, which doesn't always come naturally when the thing that you've been rewarded for, the thing that you've learned to do really well is well, how do I solve the problem myself? Why don't I like, you know, go and figure it out? And so the tendency often needs to shift to be much more on a scalable basis and much more people oriented. And it's not one that

Vit Lyoshin (03:39.436)
Right.

Yue Zhao (03:50.496)
everyone enjoys making or wants to make sometimes. And so, that's why I don't often think of it as necessarily like a linear, you know, higher is better. We all want to be, I guess story has it that we all want to be leaders, but some of us may actually be a lot happier doing more of the execution work than, you know, being the one to enable others just because of what you enjoy as a human being.

Vit Lyoshin (04:02.188)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (04:19.27)
It's actually pretty funny because I saw some people on LinkedIn writing about this that they now, especially with AI tools that enable them to do things faster, or maybe even independently without too much relying on their teams, many leaders becoming experimenting and going back to being individual contributors. That's really funny how it works backwards now. Yeah.

Yue Zhao (04:42.911)
Mm-hmm.

Yes. And it's because managing people was a requirement of scaling your ability to build prior to AI. You were just limited in terms of what you could build by yourself. and AI has grown that and scaled that such that you could build more things yourself without having to manage other people. And so if you didn't enjoy the people management piece of it and you really just want to build, then

Vit Lyoshin (04:55.543)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (05:01.473)
Uh-huh.

Yue Zhao (05:15.425)
you know, you get this tendency of okay, maybe I just wanna go back to building because now I have cooler Legos and I can just build better things faster with these new tools.

Vit Lyoshin (05:25.068)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, right. So now if a project manager is sitting there and they receive the signals but in they really want to try their leadership skills, I guess, or become a leader, what's some of the things they should be trying themselves? maybe skills, maybe some activities or anything that you would recommend.

Yue Zhao (05:48.054)
Yeah. So the first thing I might think about is broadening scope, which is whichever area you own right now, which area you're working with, what are the adjacent areas to the thing that you're working on? And what is your perspective or or opinion about how those areas should function? Now there's going to be people in those areas, hopefully, sometimes. and so then trick becomes how do you influence

Vit Lyoshin (06:07.895)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (06:16.651)
Outside of your core team. How do I influence a fellow PM? How do I influence a you know more senior technical leader? How do I influence, you know, my manager's peer? Those are the skills and those are the activities I would encourage them to think about is okay, you've got your core thing, it's going well. Let's say you're getting the things done, you're you're having the impact. Now think about your adjacent spaces and think about where you can influence.

And think about where you can start having a perspective and helping drive a little bit of what's happening in that area without again stepping on other people's toes. And that's a challenge that becomes a people question, right? Because they might be like, Why are you here? and how are you being helpful, X, Y, Z? and then I also think about that function only. I think now more than ever, you see different functions merging a bit, right? And so as a PM,

Vit Lyoshin (06:56.843)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yue Zhao (07:14.719)
You might do a little bit of engineering work, you might do a little bit of design work, data, whatever it is. So start thinking about adjacent to your current role, what are those other things to take on? Separate from that, but related, is then going upwards. So we talked about like broadening, but I also think about going upwards. So you probably have a good relationship with your manager. What about your skip level? What about your engineer's manager? Their skip level. Okay, so

you know, all those people, how can you go higher in terms of the people that you're influencing and talking to and have relationships with? And once you have that, you also want to go broad, right? At but at the higher level. And again, it looks easy as I'm going like this, but it's hard. The harder you go out, they're like, why would I talk to you when I'm over here and you're down here? Right? So making that connection, finding the path there, that's not a overnight sort of plan.

Vit Lyoshin (07:55.052)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (08:06.072)
Yeah.

Yue Zhao (08:11.841)
But it takes time and it's important. So I think about building your relationships and your awareness upwards and then out. so it's really two parallel tracks. They sometimes intersect and the type of conversation you have intersects. But this is where it requires you to up level to more strategic conversation. 'Cause if you just stay at the execution, like, I'm shipping this and building this, the people over here don't care. Like I I mean they might care a little bit, but most of the heart they don't care.

Vit Lyoshin (08:19.864)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (08:38.733)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (08:41.685)
Right? You have to up level the conversation enough such as it affects what they're working on. And they might be interested in, okay, like let me talk to Yue because she wants to talk about something that's g might affect what I'm doing in three months or six months. So it has a natural way of pulling your conversation higher in terms of the strategy or the level at which you're talking about problems.

Vit Lyoshin (08:42.446)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (09:08.556)
Yeah, so yeah, building relationships is definitely a skill. I can see that. And also going not like above your boss b basically, right? But like trying to help other people and other leaders and so they notice you and maybe start trusting and building relationship and things like that. Yeah, that's great. And then another thing is there are so many like certificates and educational programs and

Yue Zhao (09:26.515)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (09:36.234)
like courses at universities that prepare you to be a leader and things like that. what's your opinion on those? How helpful they are and does it even make sense? Because some of them are pretty expensive.

Yue Zhao (09:40.863)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (09:46.966)
Yeah. Yeah. It's a good question. So I think it depends on where you're coming from. And it depends on what you have access to in your day-to-day work. So I'll give you two examples. When I was working at Instagram at Meta, in the time that I was there, some of the best of the best worked there. I really didn't need to go to a program and get a certificate on PM because the people who are teaching were the people that I was working with, right?

And so I just needed to absorb from my environment what was happening. Now, not everybody has access to that, right? You know, right now I teach a Maven course on executive presence. If you were working with me, you probably learn some of that just naturally by being around, by being in meetings together. But, you know, I've c students who are from India, who are from Europe, who are from a small town in Italy, and they're like, Well, yeah, I don't have that around.

Vit Lyoshin (10:16.067)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (10:20.472)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (10:45.889)
And so for those people, I do think finding ways where you get access and exposure to you know a a different type of leadership, a new way of thinking about leadership is important. And so I think it really depends. And then one more layer on this, which is you mentioned the the cost and sort of the brand name. in certain instances, I think getting a brand name.

Vit Lyoshin (10:46.414)
Sure.

Yue Zhao (11:13.767)
on your LinkedIn on your work history matters. But more than that, the brand what the brand name buys you is again access to people. So you'll see that I think about a lot of this in terms of relationships, right? Does I don't know, you get in Wharton badge allow you to talk to other Wharton alumni and therefore that has more value. And to some extent that is true. And so I think this is where the brand

Vit Lyoshin (11:39.341)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (11:43.186)
may matter if you're trying to get into a group of people or a network or a place where there are more of these people. But if you're not, then don't spend the extra money. Like you know, it's not gonna buy you content that's much more magical than some other content you might be able to get for free on YouTube. And so, you know, I wouldn't sort of pay the price for that if you're not trying to get into that's why, you know, if you look at Lenny's, if you look at

Vit Lyoshin (11:56.022)
Right, yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (12:03.118)
Yeah.

Yue Zhao (12:11.713)
What Shreyas does, lot of it is actually on community. Because what they're doing is saying you're buying entry to this group of people and you get to talk to and be with and learn from this group of people. And that actually has much more value than, you know, whatever it is they're teaching, which has some value, but again, you know, it's not the same as that at that type of access.

Vit Lyoshin (12:15.469)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (12:19.949)
Right.

Vit Lyoshin (12:29.442)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (12:34.892)
Yeah, that makes sense because when I look, some of them so cost thousands of dollars. Maybe not everybody can get reimbursement from employer or have this money to spend. And like, yeah, I totally agree with that. That badge is cool, but you know, it's like buying a new car. It you you're happy about it for l for a couple of weeks and then that's it. It becomes like a normal thing for you. So access to people and networking and and relationships are much, much more valuable.

Yue Zhao (12:58.432)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (13:03.884)
Yeah, that's a great addition. Yeah. So let's say somebody's already like ready for promotion or opportunity exists and they've been asked to accept it or not. What sort of questions should the person ask before they jump into the leadership role?

Yue Zhao (13:07.669)
Mm.

Yue Zhao (13:25.111)
I think some of the most important questions are to yourself about what type of leader you want to be. And I think sometimes people are very eager to, you know, do the role, be in the role, do the next job. That's great. but I think the great leaders are the ones who like before they jump in, but also throughout the process, ask themselves like, what is the type of leader I want to become?

What's important to me and how do I want to show up? Because there is no right or wrong answer. There's many different leadership styles. There's and there's many situations where different leadership styles are effective, right? When you're in a emergency, like some kind of crisis, you typically want a more authoritarian dick like leadership style.

Vit Lyoshin (13:54.99)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (14:18.965)
You don't have time to be like, what does everybody think? You know, there's a fire, like we gotta get out. Somebody's gonna say, like, here's the exit, leave, right? and in other times you want to be more collaborative. So, you know, when you're at startup and you want to innovate and you wanna come up with new ideas, something that hasn't happened before, okay, you want to hear the voices, you want to debate, you want to hear all sides, great. And we're not in an emergency, right? And so I think it's important to think about like what type of leadership.

Vit Lyoshin (14:19.49)
Uh-huh.

Vit Lyoshin (14:26.446)
Yeah.

Yue Zhao (14:48.167)
is important to me and how do I surround myself with people such that I grow in that direction, such that I become the type of leader that I want to be. Because in the absence I mean we're so affected by our environment that in the absence of that, it's really difficult, right? can be done. I'm sure people have done it, but then it becomes okay, what communities do I want to get into? What type of people do I want to know? What kind of mentors do I want to get

Vit Lyoshin (15:00.002)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (15:18.319)
and the last thing I'll say is sort of around what they want what you need want to sort of think about is like not assuming you know how the job is to be done. there's a lot of people who say like, okay, I've been waiting, you know, five years for this job. I already know how to do this job. I'm just waiting to get the promotion so I can do it. I think it's always a perspective change when you get that promotion and then people start treating you also differently.

And even if you s feel like you know everything about the role before you go into it, everything just changed when you went into it. It's like what's that? It's Schrodinger's box, right? As soon as you like open the box, things have changed. It's very similar in this circumstance. You may know everything about it before in your current state with the current setup, but as soon as you step into this new role, stuff has changed. So sort of relearning and being open to relearning then how does the dynamics now work is important.

Vit Lyoshin (15:56.517)
Vit Lyoshin (15:59.938)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (16:15.348)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I I think that the yeah, it could be possible that it happens, but it also how do you the reason I'm asking this, how what questions you're asking is basically sometimes maybe the role is poorly defined, or maybe something is between the lines, people don't expect that leader is supposed to do something, but you haven't done it, and now you expected to do it, and some people may be saying, now that I have this role.

It kinda sucks because I don't wanna do this. I don't feel comfortable. I have to learn a lot of new things. A any like any like rocks or things, red flags to watch out for before you step into this role that that you can maybe name a couple.

Yue Zhao (16:45.735)
Mm.

Yue Zhao (16:58.815)
Yeah. So one thing to think about is whether there's been a lot of tr turnover in the role. So if the role that you're stepping into has had very short term managers, that's something to look at and say, like, why is it so difficult for someone to stay long term in this role? The other thing I think about that often comes up is has there been a strategy change right before?

Vit Lyoshin (17:07.467)
Mm.

Vit Lyoshin (17:17.837)
Uh-huh.

Yue Zhao (17:27.167)
Or preceding the role being open. So did the leadership change? Did the company change direction? Was there a big strategy shift? Because that will affect what the role is, right? At the end of the day. And it may be very different from what you thought you were going into. And I guess to cover the basis, like know something about the role, like before you go in, right? I'm sort of assuming that you know you have a sense of what that job entails.

And so it's helpful to talk to different people that work with that role today to just ask questions about like, okay, how do you work together? What do you expect from them? What does your day-to-day look like? Just cover your basis in terms of okay, what it what is this person really doing on a regular basis? and then maybe checking that with folks outside of the company, right? Someone with a similar title and a similar position, like what are you doing?

Vit Lyoshin (18:22.914)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (18:23.287)
I have an example. A client of mine was the head of tax for a company. And the CFO wanted her to also take on treasury. And she was like, I don't know what that means. Like, I don't know what's involved in taking on treasury, but I have some friends and colleagues who do both the tax and treasury role. So let me test them. Like, what do you do? What what are the downsides? What are the upsides? Do you like it? You know, like what are you learning? What are you not learning? You know, how are you what does it look like from this

perspective. So it can be helpful if you kinda know what role you're stepping into to triangulate with other places as well. What are the things that's important about this job?

Vit Lyoshin (18:53.697)
Uh-huh.

Vit Lyoshin (19:04.428)
Yeah. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Basically do what product manager is supposed to do, right? Do your discovery on this thing and figure it out. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Exactly, yes. are there any differences between product leader, product manager in startup versus bigger organization? And and if there are substantial differences, what those are.

Yue Zhao (19:11.708)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's a product. It's a product.

Yue Zhao (19:30.113)
Yeah. I think the scale and the amount of time you spend on people versus product building is different. So in a startup, the org is smaller, you have fewer people, you have fewer PMs, you have fewer engineers, more people know more things about what's happening. And it's relatively easy, let's say up to, you know, sixty, a hundred people to stay pretty informed about what's going on.

Vit Lyoshin (19:59.971)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (20:00.32)
Changes at a big company, right? At meta, there's no way I know what's happening across meta, just just no way, right? and so at a startup, you tend to have a bit more ownership and agency and ability to do things because you have more knowledge of if I do A, then B will happen. If I go path X, then here's how it will affect everybody basically at the company. When you're at Meta, you're like, if I do X.

I know how it affects like the 50 closest people around me, right? But I don't know, not necessarily how it will have ripple effects across the rest of the company. And so what happens is twofold. One, you spend a lot more time in meetings talking to the next set of 50 or 100 people about how it affects them because you want to make sure that it doesn't affect them in some negative way. That slows down.

Vit Lyoshin (20:39.212)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (20:54.795)
decision making that slows down, you know, getting something done because you gotta make sure it doesn't break something. the other thing that happens is I find that it's harder to be to have a ton of agency. You still need a lot of agency, but it's harder to sort of say, I want to do this big change, right? And then be able to sort of drive that change from end to end. There's just more people involved, there's more politics, there's more just time spent.

And then the last thing I'll say is because there's more people, there's more people changes. So if you're in a leadership manager role, you're spending a lot more time with people things. Recruiting, hiring, firing, performance reviews, org structures, culture, that tends to matter a lot more than at a startup. I don't think I ever wrote like a values doc for my team at a startup because I had three PM, so we all knew what our values were, right? Versus when I worked at Meta.

Vit Lyoshin (21:51.49)
Yeah.

Yue Zhao (21:53.496)
One of the first things I did was like, what are our values? Right? Like, how do we work together? You just don't really have these types of conversations when you're operating at a smaller scale. So different type again, different types of leaders will like different environments and prefer different environments because it's asking different things about.

Vit Lyoshin (22:11.82)
Yeah, I can imagine I was about to say it also depends on like personality or preferences, which environment you like better, like more bureaucracy or more more like day to day activities and actually getting things done faster, right? Because also in a startup everything moves fast and also it actually can go in the wrong direction and and you should be able to like stop or accelerate or pivot really quick. and I guess

Yue Zhao (22:19.861)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (22:26.945)
Right.

Yue Zhao (22:34.507)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (22:40.254)
leader has a little bit more I I don't want to say more accountability or or pressure, but it kinda does because you're responsible for those decisions and decisions have to be made faster. So yeah.

Yue Zhao (22:52.705)
Yeah, yeah. I agree. And I I think that there are parts of big companies that move very quickly as well. So part of what slows down smaller companies is they don't necessarily have like a ton of users, let's say, or you know, a ton of ability to experiment. Versus at a Instagram I was building for a billion people. So I could take a small sample of that and run an experiment and I would know within, you know, a couple of hours whether something worked or not.

Vit Lyoshin (23:08.206)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (23:22.049)
So in a way, big companies can move faster when they need to, and you have higher impact, right? If I'm a PM or product leader making a decision at a startup, maybe I have, I don't know, ten thousand users. You make a change in a decision on Instagram that's a billion users. I mean, it would take forever for one to translate to the other, right? And so I think maybe the sort of

Vit Lyoshin (23:22.306)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (23:48.82)
step change is smaller, but potentially over a much, much bigger audience. And so again, it's just a different type of work. but generally speaking, the accountability is also there, right? Like you have, you know, if you look at Facebook, Instagram, they have a lot of impact on many, many people's lives. Versus if I were at a I was working at Fuzzy in the pet health. Yeah, sure, the pets that came to us matter, the owners like it matter, but

Just so much smaller scale, right? Than working on Instagram.

Vit Lyoshin (24:21.838)
Sure, sure. do you have any advice or recommendation for new leaders that stepping into the role in like their first six months or so? Which mistakes to avoid, some dangerous stuff that they should not be even trying? maybe somebody just to caution people.

Yue Zhao (24:37.879)
Yue Zhao (24:41.845)
Yeah.

I would not underestimate the power of doing a roadshow to understand what's happening within the organization as a new leader. Especially in the more senior leadership roles, people value FaceTime or just being able to talk to you as a leader. So some of again the relationship building things tends to get set aside because you have problems to solve, you have decisions to make, the board wants something from you. It's very easy to just like

do the work. So I think one of the mistakes that leaders make is they believe that just because they have the title, that it comes with the power and the authority. Now it may be true, and in some companies I am sure that that is true. But more often than not, especially in the startup world, especially in tech, that's not true. You can get a new title and people are like, I don't care. I'm still not gonna listen to you. Right?

and so really understanding how much power comes with that official title versus not. and again, who like who is where in terms of the politics, how that's going to change. And for the things that you want to get done now in this new role, how do you even move that forward? All of that again requires often one on one conversations, time spent, getting to know people and where they stand.

in addition to understanding the data and the strategy, user research, whatever it is, so that you can put it all together and say, like, this is what I need to do and why. And here's how you would actually go get that done in a, you know, a team of people rather than something you can do by yourself.

Vit Lyoshin (26:30.092)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. That's that could be a challenge and in my just projecting this to myself and I think yeah that could be especially for people who are a little bit introverted, right? I don't know if there is such a thing as for product manager to be introverted or not, but some people are. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yue Zhao (26:44.811)
Mm.

Yue Zhao (26:51.509)
introvert. I think some of the best product leaders I've met are introverts.

Vit Lyoshin (26:57.1)
Really? Okay, interesting. so let's talk about decision making because I would like to kind of have a line between what the leader is responsible for, like in decision making versus the team. You mentioned a little bit they should be empowering their teams to do more and do less, but can we like specify maybe a couple of things in terms of who makes what decisions? Team versus leader?

Yue Zhao (27:26.261)
Yeah. I would say the leader makes the decisions the team cannot make. That's it. Everything else the team should make the decision. If the team can make the decision, they should make the decision. Now there's gonna be things that are across multiple teams that maybe the leader has to make because the teams disagree and the leader's the only one who can break the disagreement.

maybe there are things where it has again a large enough impact on other parts of the organization such that the team doesn't feel like they can be held accountable for it. Then the leader needs to be held accountable. and then I'm sure there's people decisions, right, around who's on what team and hiring, firing. That's up to the leader. But outside of that, the way that I see the best teams run is autonomously. Like you make the decisions. You are accountable for what happens.

And I will check in and I will support and I will help. But in always possible, I will try not to make the decision. And that sometimes can actually be challenging because the team wants you to make the decision sometimes. They're well, if Yue said so and she's like the VP of product, then like let's just go do that. Easy, done. Right? But as the VP of product, I don't want that. Because the team is closer to the work that's being done. They know more. I want to hear.

Vit Lyoshin (28:36.567)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (28:46.583)
Sort of the logic. I want to hear the reasons. I want to hear what they've thought about and what they've not thought about. And maybe I'll add a little bit, be like, have you thought about this? Have you considered that? But I don't want to make the decision. I want my product leader and engineering leader on that team to make the decision. And then they're accountable for it. and they can iterate faster if we are all aligned on the reasons, and if something goes wrong or unexpected, as it always does, they're much faster.

Vit Lyoshin (29:03.245)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (29:14.729)
without it then having to come back to me again to be like, Yue, what do you think we should do now? I don't want to be in that situation. Ideally.

Vit Lyoshin (29:22.24)
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that makes that's actually like coach, right? You asking questions, you navigate or help them navigate through the decision tree, I guess, but they have to make a call and and implement it. Yeah, that that's a good way to remember this. Yeah, great. And then w what if the some of the things that the team like disagrees with? They couldn't make the dis well, I guess it it still kind of matches what what you just said.

Yue Zhao (29:32.951)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (29:37.323)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (29:51.821)
Because if they can't make decision they will come to you and if you tell them something, if they disagree, then they really were able to make the decision themselves.

Yue Zhao (29:52.171)
Mm.

Yue Zhao (30:01.907)
Or they'll come back to me the next time they have a disagreement. Right. So my entire goal is to work myself out of a job in a way. I want to I mean I never quite get there because there's always more harder problems. but you want to keep trying to get your team and the people around you to essentially be able to resolve things among themselves because the more they can do that, the more time you have.

Vit Lyoshin (30:04.942)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (30:11.095)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (30:15.074)
Yeah.

Yue Zhao (30:29.953)
to do the what's going on on other teams, how are my VPs or board or whomever doing. for some of the executives, it's like go out into the industry and figure out what your, you know, competitors and other there's always more work to be done. I wouldn't worry about that. Right. But if you're stuck in the your team can't make a decision, so they always come to you or they always get into an argument and you have to break the fight, you're not gonna have time to do this out and like up and out.

Vit Lyoshin (30:35.575)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (30:44.193)
Right.

Yue Zhao (30:57.889)
type of work because you're gonna be with your team trying to make decisions, trying to, you know, get the next you know sh launch out.

Vit Lyoshin (31:07.362)
Yeah, that that makes sense. Yeah, that's good. And then another thing is are there any tips or advice how to break bad news to the teams? because maybe something changed, like with new technology, with strategy, whatever happens, leadership changed and teams been working so hard on something, but now we sh we should like abandon it. And in those situations are really, really hard how to you know communicate that. Do you have any tips for that?

Yue Zhao (31:17.632)
Mm.

Yue Zhao (31:39.48)
I think sharing the full context of why the decision is being made is important. And ideally, you're sharing it early enough that the team can reach the decision on their own. This is where the team is making the decisions. I've had teams come to me and say, I don't want to be working on this project anymore because here at XYZ Reasons, it's not the most valuable thing that the company should be working on.

Vit Lyoshin (31:55.234)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (32:09.122)
Yeah.

Yue Zhao (32:09.419)
I wanna work on this other thing instead, you know. or here's what we can do with our time instead. No one wants to work on something that doesn't add value. I mean, in general, right? Like, do you like I don't want to go to a job if I'm building something that I know is like not useful to anybody. Why would I wanna do that? Right? And so if the bad news is like, look, stuff changed.

Vit Lyoshin (32:28.684)
Right. Yeah.

Yue Zhao (32:34.943)
And now, like, you know, the thing you're working on is no longer the most important thing. We need you to go do something else. I think the important part is helping the team see why that is. Now, where this gets tricky is I think companies don't always make the best decision in terms of that trade-off. Right? So then the team might disagree. They're like the leader said, you know, we should work on X but not Y. But we think we should work on Y and not X.

And so we're not happy that we're getting deprioritized or defunded or whatever it is. I think in that scenario, if the leader is not the person making the decision, like that decision is like outside of their control, then it's important to sort of have that vulnerability and empathy with the team and say, like, look, this is where the decision came from. We all gotta like disagree and commit. Like I I can see your side, I can see your argument.

You might actually be right, but this is out of you know all of our controls, and here's how the decision got made. Maybe in six months, nine months, we can challenge that decision again. But for now, we gotta disagree and come in and sort of move together and you know work on this other thing instead. I think often that transparency and that ability to just let people know this is what's happening, gets underestimated. And instead

Vit Lyoshin (33:37.229)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (33:58.944)
you know, they make up something or they high some parts of the truth and that's is eventually what gets you in trouble.

Vit Lyoshin (34:02.988)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (34:06.754)
Yeah, yeah, I think transparency, empathy, like we're all in the same boat, it's affecting everybody. So yeah, those kind of conversations could be really helpful to kind of mitigate and help team you know be supportive. Yeah. Okay. I I wanna shift a little bit to AI and ask how that part of the world now is changing.

Yue Zhao (34:16.959)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Yue Zhao (34:28.875)
Mm.

Vit Lyoshin (34:33.316)
or merging into ours and that AI now help capable of doing or helping at least with like research and building prototypes and experiments and all of that stuff. what skills are changing in product management with product managers, with leaders that AI is capable of doing or helping with many of those things that are core to the job?

Yue Zhao (34:33.377)
So I

Yue Zhao (35:02.539)
Yeah. So decision making and how decisions are made, I think, have been changing with AI. Because you and I can get to know how something works or have context in an area much faster than before. So bef that's an example. Before if I wanted to understand a part of the code base, I had to go bother some engineer and be like, Hey, can you explain what's happening over here?

Now I go to Claude and I'm like, can you explain what's happening over here in the code base? Okay, can you give me some options of like if I wanted, you know, the it to do this, like how could it do that? It could explain it to me very quickly. if I wanted to understand some part of finance, I might have to go find my friend in finance and be like, Can you explain what this means? Right? Now I ask Claude. I'm like, What does this mean? They're like, okay. So you can go back and forth. So you can walk into decisions with a lot more context. That actually sometimes makes decisions

Vit Lyoshin (35:39.79)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (35:58.082)
Harder because all of us think we know something about something, right? And some of us may have AI that hallucinated or you know emphasize a different part. And so as a leader, the challenge actually becomes how do you get your team to agree on what to work on and why? Because it is actually much faster to build the thing. The question is what should you build and why?

Vit Lyoshin (36:08.608)
Right, yeah.

Yue Zhao (36:24.651)
Because as a customer, I still only have twenty four hours in a day. I like to sleep for eight of it. You know, I can only use one messaging tool. Like I still have limited capacity, right? So you can build a hundred apps, I'm still gonna use one. Right? And so I think that becomes the challenge for product leaders in this time is what do I spend time on and why?

Vit Lyoshin (36:24.725)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (36:36.941)
Yeah.

Yue Zhao (36:51.255)
And it's no longer a function of how quickly things can get built. It's much more what does a user actually need and why and what's the problem they're trying to solve and what's the best way to solve it. And much more time spent on that type of questioning. Which to me goes back to empathy and relationships, if there's a theme in this conversation, right? Understanding others and understanding their relationship with whatever it is they need to get done.

Vit Lyoshin (36:51.757)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (37:18.187)
And how decisions get made in an internal organization, that's what's gonna make the difference.

Vit Lyoshin (37:23.782)
Mm-hmm. So it all comes down to making better decisions or spending more time figuring out what to what decision to make, what needs to be built and why needs to be built and so forth, rather than generating ideas and options. Because yeah, those are cheap, those can be done in in dozens very quickly with AI, and most of them probably junk. So okay. Are there any other

Yue Zhao (37:34.155)
Mm.

Yue Zhao (37:40.907)
Right.

Yue Zhao (37:44.406)
Yeah.

Yue Zhao (37:48.662)
Right.

Vit Lyoshin (37:52.149)
leadership skills that people should be building now that like AI is taking over some parts of their jobs.

Yue Zhao (38:02.273)
I think one thing I would think about is how do you manage a combination of a team that has some AI workflows and agents and things that's doing work and then people? Like how does that interface how do you interface that? Do you allow each PM to interface with their own set of AI? Is there some shared AI? Like how does that work? And then the thing I would think about is how can you get

Vit Lyoshin (38:14.882)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (38:31.415)
context to each person and each agent as quickly as possible in your organization. Because that's what's that's gonna be what impacts the speed of decision making. So what I mean by that is let's say you're running an experiment, very simply. Let's say you're running an experiment, the experiment has a result, like win or lose. Let's say it won. How do you get the fat that fast to as many people and as many AI agents?

quickly as possible with all the context of that experiment and why it won. Because the next decision depends on that group of people knowing it. Right? And so right now I don't think this is a solved problem. Different companies are trying different things. The bottleneck is well still the PM's looking at it, being like, here's why it won, let me talk to my AI about why, let me come back, let's discuss, and then we talk about what to do next.

Vit Lyoshin (39:03.448)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (39:25.102)
Mm.

Yue Zhao (39:25.313)
So that's still the bottleneck is sort of the the the next decision making because the context sharing and the discussion still takes time.

Vit Lyoshin (39:34.381)
Yeah. And yeah, and I guess now with AI everybody become a little bit more silent and independent rather than we had more collaboration. I feel like it feels like we had more collaboration. Now engineer or product manager can go and deploy a couple of agents, tell them what to do, do all this stuff, and nobody else knows what's going on. I think that's that's like really a big problem. It's gonna become a big problem. Yeah.

Yue Zhao (39:41.291)
Mm, mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (39:59.99)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it makes collaboration even more important, right? Because you are now doing a bigger piece of the puzzle, right? I used to I use this analogy of building the pyramid. Okay. So like back in the day, each worker was responsible for moving a brick, right? So if you screwed up moving your brick, it was bad, but like, you know, the pyramid was still there. Now let's assume you're running a machine that can build the whole pyramid.

Vit Lyoshin (40:07.788)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (40:12.514)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (40:29.623)
Well, if you screw that up, the whole pyramid's gone. Right. And so, you know, it's it's even more important that you agree what pyramid you're building versus which brick you're moving, right? And so this is where that collaboration becomes even more challenging. Actually more time needs to be spent discussing. And I see a lot of product teams trying to shortcut that. To be like, let's just try a bunch of things. Like, no, you don't want to end up with a hundred pyramids. Like

Vit Lyoshin (40:32.566)
Right, yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (40:49.356)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (40:52.963)
Mm.

Yue Zhao (40:57.195)
I'd rather have the guy move the brick to the wrong place. Like you know, because I can move it back very easily. So versus I now have a hundred pyramids to deal with. I don't know what to do with them. So it's yeah, it's a bit of don't shortcut the front part of that product building process.

Vit Lyoshin (40:57.793)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (41:01.869)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (41:08.845)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (41:16.502)
Mm-hmm. Are there any specific AI skills leaders should be building themselves?

Yue Zhao (41:24.737)
Say more about that?

Vit Lyoshin (41:26.966)
For example, we have tools for like doing research, doing testing, doing some analysis and things like that. Those I consider myself being like hard skills because they require you to actual some technical technicalities and stuff like that. but maybe for leaders it's these days with AI, it's especially important how to which skills with AI to have. Like for example, for example.

Yue Zhao (41:39.667)
Mm.

Yue Zhao (41:44.693)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (41:56.803)
How to transition to this new reality with AI and how to be good with change management and things like that. or maybe how to evaluate the quality of the work that human produces versus AI produces, because yes, it produces a lot more and faster, but how good it is? Is it actually valuable or is it all waste of time? So those types of skills that maybe leaders should

Yue Zhao (42:11.575)
Mm.

Yue Zhao (42:22.423)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (42:25.526)
like look into and acquire and and I'm curious to see if you if you see any patterns in the industry or maybe you teach something yourself in this area.

Yue Zhao (42:31.66)
Yeah.

Yeah. So I would say on the technical side, quote unquote, understanding evals and building evals and how they get built becomes really important because again that decides which pyramid that you're building and why. it's basically, you know, the equivalent of understanding A B testing and experimentation. If you don't really understand it, then you don't really know how decisions get made. So I think in the AI world, if you don't understand evals, you don't really know how decisions get made.

Vit Lyoshin (42:50.2)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (43:02.891)
and that is really the control for all the input right from the things that get built. So I think that's on the technical side. I think on the change management people side, I think the important part is understanding what your if you think about the process, where do you actually need to speed things up within your product building process?

Because what I'm seeing a lot is sometimes people automating and accelerating steps that are again not the bottleneck in the organization. And so you can speed it up, but the overall throughput doesn't actually increase, right? Because you're speeding up something that was already not a bottleneck. You might save some money, you might be able but like that's it. You might have fewer people, but that's about it. You you're not actually accelerating your overall

Vit Lyoshin (43:45.985)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (43:49.998)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (44:00.632)
sort of product building process. And so this is where I think knowing what are the different AI tools, which part of the process is it actually helping with. And do I actually need that part to be sped up or not? Because again, speeding up each thing is not always necessary. This is why I like keep telling people you don't always have to do everything as quickly as possible. The question is to ask where is the bottleneck and how do you speed that up?

Vit Lyoshin (44:03.778)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (44:30.859)
with AI. because maybe research is not your bottleneck. Maybe data is not your bottleneck. Maybe your bottleneck is design. So you can do everything really fast, but then everything still gets stuck in design. You need to go speed up design. Right? Like, so thinking about and again the bottleneck will change as you fix the bottlenecks. And so it might at some point be research. So as a leader it's kind of knowing like

Vit Lyoshin (44:31.399)
huh.

Vit Lyoshin (44:45.016)
Right.

Yue Zhao (44:57.011)
What am I working on in the moment? And what is the AI tool or process that's actually gonna help me with that particular part?

Vit Lyoshin (45:04.322)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. So yeah, overall knowledge of the process and and change management implementation and things like that and f figuring out where teams stuck and and maybe deploy AI there to help them. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. And in general, do you see that AI is like really replacing product manager role? Because I know many people are scared, especially with like last few years.

Yue Zhao (45:16.905)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (45:33.562)
firing going on and layoffs. some people say it's because of the overhiring during the pandemic. Some people say no no no this is AI replacing people, engineers, product managers, project managers. Do you see the same or which of these do you actually see? And what's your opinion on this?

Yue Zhao (45:57.176)
So my subjective opinion is that there was a bit of overhiring in the pandemic, as in companies always tried to hire ahead of what they think they need. And then I think growth came from areas that wasn't where they expected, namely AI. Right? So they didn't do headcount planning very well, and so they hired a bit ahead of Target. So there's definitely that happening. So it's a little bit of it's that. It is also if you look at engineering.

you look at some of the data roles or research roles, we just need less of it. And so even if companies are not eliminating these roles, they're not actively hiring as quickly. Because you can do more, you can build more quickly, you can, you know, do the research more quickly. Now, where I don't necessarily see a lot of this playing out is again in some of the more senior roles. I think this has been talked about, where you still need that judgment of like, okay, what do I do with this research? Right? Or like.

Okay, you built me a business model. What do I do with it next? Right? Do we invest or do we not invest? Somebody still has to make that decision. I think those types of roles I actually see more of, like I see more demand for. So the market is shifting, but I would say it's generally shifting more senior in terms of the type of skill set, and a lot more sort of decision making and leadership, and a lot less like in my pyramid example, come in and move the bricks.

A lot more where do we put the bricks and how do we build it and where do we

Vit Lyoshin (47:30.292)
I see. Okay. Great. And I also wanted to ask you if you have s like a final advice, I guess, or not final, but like to wrap up the whole thing. what are some of the things somebody who wants to move into the leadership role or maybe a young leader, what some of the things they should be focusing for the next like six months, a year or so to become better at being a leader?

Yue Zhao (47:57.976)
Help others, support others. Go out and figure out how you can be helpful to important and influential people in your organization and learn from them and build your relationship with them. And then make it known what it is you want from your career. But the first, you know, one and then two. Make yourself useful, support them, be helpful to them, and then make it known to them.

Vit Lyoshin (48:20.942)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (48:25.835)
what it is that you're looking for in your career and why. And then do a good job at your job. Because those things are gonna add up such that they will see the opportunities that will help you grow as a leader.

Vit Lyoshin (48:40.33)
Okay, great. Well, thank you very much. And I also wanna ask if you can share some information how people can connect with you. like I know you're doing coaching and you have course and you have a book and and all of that great stuff. So how people can connect with you.

Yue Zhao (48:57.621)
Yeah, so I'm easy to find on LinkedIn. it's just dash UEZAL. I have a website which has access to the coaching and the book and everything. It's called the Uncommon Executive. The book has the same name. The newsletter has the same name. So if you just search the uncommon executive and my name, everything will come up.

Vit Lyoshin (49:20.746)
Okay, great. And lastly, I I think I I'm saying this for like fifth time now, but before you go, I actually ask my three typical innovation questions every guest at the end, and I'm curious to know your answers. so the first question is can you define innovation in a few words?

Yue Zhao (49:32.343)
Mm.

Yue Zhao (49:36.439)
Sure.

Yue Zhao (49:43.851)
Creating something that did not exist before.

Vit Lyoshin (49:48.406)
Okay, great. the second question is which one innovation in the history you think changed the world the most and why?

Yue Zhao (49:58.869)
Yue Zhao (50:03.509)
This is your stere for me it's always been a debate between gunpowder and paper. Depends on whether you believe war changes humanity more or education and storytelling and passing down cultures and customs. But one of those two.

Vit Lyoshin (50:19.776)
Hmm. Yeah, b b both are very you know changing. So okay. Yes, yes. and the last thing is last question is which technology or software or tool or anything that we use today we will be laughing at ten years from now.

Yue Zhao (50:25.919)
Mm. Very critical to humanity, yeah.

Yue Zhao (50:44.611)
I I encountered one today, which is I still go to print file and print to save something as a PDF.

Vit Lyoshin (50:55.566)
Mm-hmm.

Yue Zhao (50:56.927)
I can like there's no other way of creating a PDF from a document that I know of. I'm sure there is. so the fact that to create a PDF, to save as a PDF, I have to go to print as PDF.

Vit Lyoshin (51:15.114)
I see. Okay. Well I'll take it. It's you know, they could they could make it easier. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you very much, Yue, for your time. it's been a pleasure and a lot of interesting good information from you. I really appreciate your time. Yeah, absolutely. We'll stay in touch. Thanks. Bye. Bye.

Yue Zhao (51:31.841)
Thank you for having me. Yeah, thank you so much.

Yue Zhao (51:38.625)
Okay, take care. Bye.