Avinoam Zelenko (Sr. PM, Linkedin) : Interview

Insights on PM from 14 yrs of exp from Atlassian, Linkedin and others

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Hi 👋 Deekshit and Andy here, and recently we interviewed Avinoam Zelenko who has been a product manager for 14 years and has worked across various B2B companies, Atlassian and currently at Linkedin. We spoke about

• His product experiences

• The essentials for good experimentation

• Advice for early career PMs

We distilled our 1hr conversation into this newsletter so that it’s easy for you to consume all the valuable insights. Check it out.

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When did you have the most fun as a product manager? 

The most fun project I worked on was when I was in a state of flow. It was a combination of several factors, including the challenging nature of the project, the presence of amazing people, a supportive company culture, autonomy, exposure to leadership, and a sense of impact. This project was when I worked on Confluence Cloud in Atlassian, specifically the new editor for Confluence Cloud.

Atlassian had a problem with fragmentation where each product had its own text editor. This made it challenging for users to learn and master the text editor since they had to start from scratch when they switched to another product. Atlassian realized the importance of having a platform, so they decided to build a new editor that would be used across all their products. This was the context in which I worked on the new editor for Confluence Cloud.

Our team faced a unique challenge because Confluence was the most complex customer of the new platform editor. Confluence was a full-page web-based editor with 10 to 15 years of tens of thousands of customers and millions of users. It was a monumental task to build such a monster from scratch with only a small portion of the features.

Over the course of two years, our team had to deal with pivots, change management, and other challenges that came our way. We had to think about how to take something that already existed and make it better, not just build it back for the sake of parity. We needed to find ways to ensure that users would adopt and enjoy the new editor more than the old one.

What were the complex elements of this project?

As a product team, our success depends heavily on the platform team or the heart of our product, which drives the rest of the ecosystem. For example, creating a page on our platform is just 1% of the work, but it has a huge impact on how users interact, comment, view, and consume the rest of the pages. This is a unique and interesting dynamic that we need to constantly keep in mind.

We've had teams that worked for 10 years to get everything right and make sure everything just works. But when we open a can of worms and make a change, we have to figure out how to scale, how to edit collaboratively on a document, and make it reliable. It's not easy to achieve that with existing customers who have already paid for our product. They expect a seamless experience, and we can't afford to mess it up.

One of the biggest challenges in a B2B environment is decision-making. We have to bring along many people from different teams and functions to make decisions that are not always easy to say no to. We have to consider risks, roadblocks, and mitigations in advance. We do a lot of thinking through pre-mortems, post-mortems, and try to get everything right the first time. However, it's not easy to get everyone moving along at the same time.

To help with decision-making, I came across a useful framework called the magic formula, which I learned from someone during an interview at Facebook. 

Magic = Focus + Momentum

Focus is the why, and without it, we don't know why we are working on anything. We need a sense of mission and purpose to build unity and a culture within our team. 

Once we have focus, we can achieve momentum, which is progress, and it feels good. We need both focus and momentum to unlock the rest of our team's potential. With a strong sense of identity and purpose, we can overcome roadblocks and achieve our goals.

Talk to us about your favourite memory in your career

I was born and raised in Israel, but my parents are American, so I always had citizenship. While I was building my career, my wife and I moved to New York for a while, but eventually, we moved back to Israel. However, I always wondered what my life would have been like if I grew up in the US. I had traveled to the Bay Area quite a bit, and my older brother lived there, so I liked the vibe and wanted to work at one of the bigger companies.

However, being in Israel made it challenging to make that happen. I had two little kids, and we didn't want to just move without a plan. At one point, I had an offer to work on Jira in Sydney for Atlassian, but it didn't feel right for me. Then, I had interviews with Facebook and Google, but I didn't get in. I started feeling like I would be stuck in the Israeli startup nation, and that's when I stumbled upon a TED Talk by one of the co-founders of Atlassian. His talk on imposter syndrome was so relatable, and I knew I had to work for the company. 

Luckily, I found out that the Confluence team was moving from Sydney to Mountain View, so I got in touch, and after two months, I got an offer to work for Atlassian. It felt like a dream come true.

Any advice for people trying to get into big companies?

I used to think that my multicultural background, lack of engineering background and not attending a well-known university were liabilities in the tech industry. I felt inadequate and apologized for not being technical enough in interviews. I put people on a pedestal and gave them too much credit.

However, during the interview process, I realized that my diverse background and scrappiness from working in product management in Israel were huge advantages. Being resourceful and comfortable with doing whatever needs to be done helped me stand out. I leaned into my soft-spoken nature and used my instincts instead of trying to sound a certain way or say the right thing.

Ultimately, I didn't have a specific playbook or strategy. I simply applied and tried to be myself, which led to amazing things happening. Once I was accepted, I began using all of the things that seemed unimportant before and realized they were actually quite useful.

What should a PM look into before setting up an experiment?

In my experience working at LinkedIn and other big companies, one of the most amazing things is the robust infrastructure for experimentation. This means that randomization and direct measurement are key, and you can always count on things working properly. 

However, it's important to call out this aspect of the environment depending on your level within the company.

At a hypothesis-driven environment, you can't simply test an idea for the sake of testing it; it must have merit and be rooted in data or research. There is a high bar for experiments, whether you're running a control versus one treatment or control versus several treatments. 

Every experiment you run has implications beyond just your metrics. When you get test results, you're looking at your North Star metrics and the general company's North Star metrics, and you can see what's happening across many other teams. This creates a conversation between you and other teams, which is an essential piece of working in a large company. 

Being a systems or ecosystem thinker means understanding that any change you make could have positive or negative effects on other teams. It's crucial to be proactive and ready to have that conversation, considering the customer or user's journey and whether you're making trade-offs between metrics. You may be making more money in one area, but it could have downstream implications for getting people to eventually do something else. 

The more processes you have around experimentation, the better, as you can compare different experiments and understand what works best. In contrast, at other companies, crafting experiments can be difficult because teams don't have a single way of doing it, and it's hard to compare results.

Here’s an example

We had a hypothesis that people are afraid of creating things in internet-based products, including Confluence. It's because creating something means not knowing where it will go or what it will look like, which creates anxiety. We came up with an idea to introduce a contextual creation button within the page tree to help users understand where their creation would go. It's a small change in the UI, but it ended up leading to insane adoption.

This experience taught me that sometimes small things can create a step change, and we don't always have to do something grand or huge.

B2B vs B2C products, what mindset shift did you have to make to make the switch? 

Before Atlassian, all of my roles were in B2B, but Atlassian was the first hybrid that created an opening into pure B2C, which is quite unique. Atlassian was one of the original product-led growth products, and it's an amazing story what those two co-founders did with a credit card and $10,000 all the way from Sydney.

What was really interesting about Atlassian was that there were no account managers or salespeople for me to work with, unlike my previous roles where I had to manage tension between the product and sales/account management. It was a fully self-served model where nobody was going to make the product look good. 

You work in a B2B environment with a consumer mindset, and I think it's a really unique place to be in. However, transitioning to B2C at LinkedIn was a different story. There's no specific list of things customers want, and crafting your vision and thinking about your hypothesis is a different mode. The attention to metrics and experimentation is a lot deeper and wider on the B2C side.

What skills would you look for in a Junior PM?

As someone who has worked in product management for a while, I believe that the most important qualities in a PM are not necessarily related to the technical aspects of the role. Instead, I prioritise what I call a good human base.

Curiosity

Curiosity is important because a PM needs to be someone who is always looking for ways to improve and innovate. They should be willing to ask questions and challenge assumptions. 

Humility

Humility is also crucial because it allows a PM to recognize their limitations and acknowledge that there is always more to learn.

Coach-ability

Coachability is perhaps the most important quality of all, in my opinion. If a PM is coachable, they can learn the skills they need to succeed in the role.

What would you look for in a good mentee?

In my opinion, when seeking out a mentor, it's important to be specific about what you hope to gain from the relationship. Simply asking someone to be your mentor without a clear direction can lack specificity and become a low signal-to-noise ratio. When someone is specific about what they hope to learn, it shows that they have put thought into the relationship and have a clear goal in mind.

Additionally, it's important to have a two-way street of learning and growth in the mentor-mentee relationship. As a mentor, I have found that I learn a lot from my mentees and their perspectives. Overall, a clear and specific mentorship relationship can be valuable for both parties involved.

That’s it for this post! Hope you liked it. If you did please do subscribe as we send out one article a week where we share tips on how to succeed as an early career product manager. 

You can also follow Avinoam on Linkedin!

And, follow us on Twitter as well- Andy Bharadwaj and Deekshit BN