Welcome to The Lens - Edition 3, a newsletter on Product Management and related topics.
Product Management Leadership
Decision-making in product management draws from multiple signals and perspectives. That diversity enriches decisions — but quality depends on the inputs and context available to the person making the call.
Deb Liu from Facebook frames it clearly: "Product managers are there to make sure great decisions are made. You don't have to know everything, but you do have to lead teams to good outcomes."
This is an important distinction. A PM's job isn't to be the smartest person in the room — it's to create the conditions for good decisions to emerge from the room.
Personal Vision
During an MBA program, a values exercise centered on helping people achieve happiness. That personal vision, clarified early, has served as an anchor in difficult moments ever since.
Jeff Weiner defined his personal vision at age 15. He describes how that early clarity guided subsequent career decisions — not rigidly, but as a filter for what mattered.
His LinkedIn Learning leadership course offers practical frameworks for developing personal vision and applying it to management decisions. Recommended for managers and aspiring leaders.
Stories
Twitter launched Fleets (now deprecated), following the "stories" format that Snapchat pioneered and WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn all adopted. Twitter described it as "a lower pressure way for people to talk about what's happening."
This reflects a real shift in how the internet works: from static, permanent content toward time-sensitive, ephemeral publishing. The benefits are real — creators feel less pressure, and consumers get more immediate, context-fresh content.
The interesting question is what happens to thoughtful, longer-form contributions in that environment. Ephemeral formats reward recency and emotional immediacy. That's useful — and worth thinking about as a product consideration.