Brittany Cheng

Product @Seesaw, @Yelp | Alumni @YCoreNetwork | @UCBerkeley @Cal_Engineer | SF Bay Area local | Likes steep things 🍵🧗‍♀️

[Kevin Yien @kevinyien]

"Poor communication" often refers to a fumbled presentation or incoherent doc. Those are valid! But the hidden part that rarely comes up is how you spread an idea. How good are you at saying the same thing x times in y ways to z people, individually? That's the real grunt work.

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

The ability to create clarity when there’s no shortage of chaos, opinions, and competing priorities is a rare skill.

In any reasonably competent company, this skill alone will help take you quite far, fairly quickly.

Concretely, this means creating clarity on the main problems, clarity on the right solutions, and clarity on the action plan & priorities.

Very few people can do this well even though most people possess the intelligence necessary to do it.

This is because most people in the workplace have been conditioned to add more information, sound more clever, satisfy more stakeholders, and feign more precision & certainty than is possible.

Few understand that clarity in a chaotic situation can only emerge from subtraction, never from addition.

Clarity comes from communicating what stands out as most important, why it is most important, how it will be achieved, and last but not the least, giving people a way of thinking about why it is okay, even great, that we aren’t doing All The Other Things.

[Brittany Cheng @bcheng42]

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[jenny wen @jenny_wen]

My fave moment about launching is when you start to get all the feedback, good *and* bad. It's incredibly clarifying.

All the theoretical things you worried about become real or not real. You know exactly how to make it better.

I'm so excited for this moment next week.

[Brittany Cheng @bcheng42]

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[claire vo 🖤 @clairevo]

Was asked recently how I help orgs prioritize—not the frameworks or systems, but how I get buy in from collaborators.

My answer?
I do sooo much “pre socialization”

Basically much of my time spent on incepting everyone around me on themes and levels of investment. “Do you agree on this direction?” And then check, check, and triple check.

The biggest mistake I see is the big reveal. Suss out debates early, then have them openly. Invite inspection when change is easier.

When “planning” comes all my peers, the team, and my boss should be thinking: oh yeah, I’ve heard this already and agree.

I regularly use this basic formula:

📖 Story: did you hear this about that customer?
💡 Theme: this is why I think we need to double down on [this theme]
📄 Plan: so over [time period] I’m gonna ask the team to really sprint on [these projects]
📈 Outcome: I think we’ll be able to [do measurable thing]
❔ Ask: do you agree? <— don’t forget this

This is not just an exercise in managing up. These convos should happen at all hands. They should happen in team meetings. They should happen in little hallway convos and slacks.

Put the effort up front, have debates early, and create a team that can move fast against shared priorities.

And then remember: people change their minds or forget. So do it again 😎

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Love love love @vikramadhiman's 3-part advice for being a successful PM:

1. Raise difficult issues without being difficult to work with
2. Bring up important topics without drawing importance to yourself
3. You are in charge of getting the decisions made and not making all of the decisions

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