Building Products That Matter
at Massive Scale

Tamar Yehoshua

President of Product & Technology, Glean (formerly CPO at Slack)

FEATURED

Foundation

Two Habits That Drive Career Success

Do a great job at whatever job you have right now, don't look ahead
Master the core skills: be technical, know your metrics, understand your product deeply
Understand people's motivations, both for products and teams
Read the room: observe how people react, what their faces reveal

The psychiatrist effectTamar's father would analyze people at events and quiz her on "Why do you think they did that?" It taught her to see the whole room and read subtle signals.

Insight

You Don't Need Perfect Operations to Win

Company execution doesn't correlate with success, seen high-growth companies that are chaotic internally
High turnover, reorgs, broken processes don't stop strong product-market fit companies
What actually matters: product people want, distribution, sales team, runway
Most features companies fight over don't matter, the few that do are everything

The PMF truth

"Product market fit solves a lot of problems. No product-market fit is a death sentence."

The chaos window

Once you reach 5,000–10,000 people, you need real operations. Before that, some chaos is the cost of hypergrowth.

Tactics

Build Alignment Through Structure

Weekly OKR reviews together: Product and engineering review all team OKRs in one marathon session, sitting together
Async video updates: Teams post Slack docs + time-limited videos instead of meetings; you watch together later
Red/yellow/green tracker: Monday all-hands focuses only on red items; green items don't need discussion
Aligned leadership: Chiefs of staff for both product and engineering; they worked closely together

"You don't want people asking Mom and Dad and getting different opinions. We'd always say: 'Did you talk to them?' and never go around them. If it was unclear, we'd talk and decide: 'Who owns this?'"

Why this worksBy reviewing OKRs together and asking questions together, product and engineering stayed aligned and the team couldn't play parent against parent.

Leadership

The Engineering Partner

Evaluate your engineering leader before you commit, this is foundational
Respect and trust: they follow through on what they say they will
Clear ownership: you both know who drives what; no ambiguity
When they say "I'm on it," you know it's done or they'll flag the blocker

Fuzzy's takeFormer colleague (now CTO at Notion): "She's amazing at building strong cross-functional relationships, especially with engineers."

Contrarian

Career Truths Everyone Gets Wrong

✗You need a five-year planINSTEAD →✓ Never had one. Follow what pulls you. "I still have no idea what I want to do in five years."

✗Build what users ask forINSTEAD →✓ Don't be reliant on metrics alone. Use intuition. Ask questions. Understand what they're really trying to achieve.

✗Feature prominence = adoptionINSTEAD →✓ "You have to earn that right." Not everything you build deserves to be front-and-center in the UI.

✗Hitting your goals = doing greatINSTEAD →✓ Did you build something people use? Did you move the business forward? Impact is what matters, not checkboxes.

Based on Tamar Yehoshua's episode on Lenny's Podcast. All ideas on this page are from the episode.Watch on YouTube Follow @TYehoshua on X

GO DEEPER IN THE EPISODE

02:09 Key advice for career success 06:54 Understanding people and motivations 09:33 The importance of impact 11:20 Navigating company chaos 18:40 Career planning: a different perspective 26:22 Lessons from industry leaders 37:59 Building stronger cross-functional relationships 42:00 Streamlining OKR reviews with async methods 45:26 Why you shouldn’t worry so much about making users unhappy 47:50 The power of listening in leadership 52:34 How to leverage AI so you don’t fall behind 01:06:39 Closing thoughts and lightning round

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