Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more

Your PM, you've almost surely read and been influenced by Jackie Bavaro. And if you haven't, you're in for a treat. Jackie is behind two of the most important books in the PM canon. Cracking the PM Interview, and Cracking the PM career.

And she's also one of the smartest people I know on the essential skill of product strategy. In our chat, we go deep into all of the ways that you can become better at developing your own product strategy, including what is strategy. what makes a good and bad strategy, and how to very tactically put together a strategy. We also chat about what she's learned going from the first PM at Asuna to head of product at Asana, plus a ton of tactical advice on getting to senior PM. And then to manage your PMs. Big thank you to Jackie for sharing her wisdom with us.

This episode is brought to you by Flatfile. Think of the last time they imported a spreadsheet. Did it work the first time? Chances are it did not. You probably got some weird error, had to try a bunch of things like removing the blank title rows above your column headers, or Googling how to save with UTF 8 encoding. What even is UTF? Who cares? You're just trying to get your file where it needs to go so you can do your actual job. Your customers run into the same issues when it matters most.

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