Taking care of your product team's well-being – Lulu Cheng @ Pinterest

Product to Product

Welcome to the first episode of season two of Product to Product, a podcast for / by product people!

For our second season we’ve decided to shake things up. This season, each episode will focus on a specific theme: the human side of product.

We’ll be having candid convos with product people who will be sharing real-world, practical stories of navigating the human-related aspects of the product space. That means we’ll discuss topics like handling tricky relationships with non-technical team members, how to effectively think like a product manger, and how to disrupt human behaviour with human-centered AI design (just to name a few topics!).

For our first episode of the season we’re joined by Lulu Cheng, product manager on the Discovery team at Pinterest. When Lulu first joined Pinterest in 2015, her primary objective was to ship quickly and hit her KPIs. But as she got more comfortable in her role—and the product space—she realized she wasn’t really asking her team, “How are you doing?”

So she made it a personal priority to focus on her team’s “wellness.” Was her team motivated? How was team morale? How are they handling the stress that comes with the role? She realized healthy team members = better team performance = a better product.

So Lulu spoke to Roadmunk's Eleni Deacon about concrete and proactive steps she takes to put her team’s well-being front and centre. Plus: what does this focus on team wellness ultimately mean for her team’s overall performance and product strategy.

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