Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside)

I've had thousands of people Tag my CEO on Twitter calling on him to fire me. I was actually on vacation and I got bored and I was like, I haven't logged into Twitter, I haven't posted anything to Twitter for a while. What's like what's going on on Twitter? And I see that the uh notifications number. It's like maxed out. It's like nine nine nine plus or whatever. And I was like, Wait, what? And I clicked the notifications tab and I see the first tweet is has at CEO Handle fired at Tallervive and I saw that that has like a ton of retweets and I just keep scrolling down and I start to piece together the story.

Today my guest is Tall Raviv. This is a very special episode for me because Tall was one of the first and most active community members when I was just starting my newsletter Slack community, and as a PM I've admired from afar for a very long time, he's got some really unique and insightful takes on how to be a great product leader. And interestingly, he's decided to stay an IC product manager throughout his entire career up to this point, which is over 12 years as an IC PM. I've never met anyone that stayed in IC for this long. He's been a PM at Patreon, at Wix. at Apps Flyer, and most recently joined Riverside as their first ever product manager. Riverside by the way is the platform that I use to record my podcast, so this was kind of a meta experience for both of us. He's also former founder, and outside of tech, he volunteers as a surf instructor for people with disabilities. In our conversation, we talk in depth about the IC career path.

A bunch of tactical advice on how to be more productive as a PM, including a killer example of how he uses ChatGPT to scale himself. Tal also explains why every tech company has just two departments that matter. The difference between book smart decisions and street smart decisions is We also spend the most time I've ever spent in Failure Corner, where Tal shares all of the times that he's failed in his career and how those experiences made him stronger, and it was really important for him to share these things because he wants people to understand that successful people fail a lot, and those failures make you better. If you want to learn more from Tall, he's actually about to launch a course on Maven, that's called Build Your PM Productivity System.

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