Seek To Not Be Needed, But Be Valuable
Build a self-reliant team that's resilient to chaos by systematically removing yourself as a dependency.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
The way one IC PM owns huge scope (even multiple teams) is by deliberately engineering himself out of being a bottleneck. The mindset shift is 'product isn't a role, it's a team' — everyone owns the product. The PM then hunts for every place they're a single point of failure and dissolves it through small, repeated micro-interactions until the team figures things out without them.
Origin
Tal Raviv's operating philosophy; he cites a quote he attributes to Aviv (Netflix/Uber PM) that 'we're all product,' and a mentor's phrase 'culture over process.'
Core principles
- 01Product is a team, not a role — resist the hub-and-spoke model where the PM is the center passing everything through.
- 02Seek to be valuable, not needed: being needed means you're the bottleneck.
- 03The real product a PM builds is the team that builds the product and is resilient to shortcuts (like a salesperson DMing an engineer directly).
- 04Culture is an asset you invest in; process only scaffolds until the culture holds.
- 05Micro-interactions, not coaching sessions, are how the culture gets built — gradually, over quarters.
How to run it
- 1
Audit where you're the bottleneck
Look for games of telephone routing through you, people waiting on your attention, decisions happening in DMs with you, and working meetings that are just you plus one person.
- 2
Force conversations out of DMs into channels
When someone DMs you a question, reply: 'great question, can you put it in this channel with the team? I'll answer there.' Give a reason — transparency, findability, others can chime in.
Pro tip Naming the reason (e.g. 'so CS teammates can search and find this later') makes people comply willingly and triggers a snowball as others copy the behavior.
- 3
Reward anyone who takes PM work off your plate
When an engineer/designer/CSM leans in — brings an idea, writes a spec, does the 'PM thinking' — shower them with visible positivity so they feel bold enough to do it again.
Pro tip Correct the language too: reframe 'product didn't think of this' to 'I found a way to improve the product' — everyone owns it.
- 4
Do the next step live, together
Instead of 'I'll get back to you,' open Mixpanel / write the Jira ticket on the call with them right then. Don't say 'you should do this' — just show how easy it was so they start doing it themselves.
Pro tip Imply 'this is Fisher-Price-simple, you could totally do this' by demonstrating, not instructing.
Watch out This is slow — it happens gradually over many quarters, not in the first quarter a team forms.
In the wild
At a company with a huge customer-success org that constantly DMed PMs questions, Raviv responded each time with 'great question, put it in this big channel so other CS folks can search and find the answer later.' Enough repetitions created a snowball where people posted publicly by default.
→ Questions became self-serve and transparent; the PM stopped being a routing bottleneck.
Common mistakes
Being the hub to control the narrative
PMs default to centralizing because controlling what people see feels safer, but it makes you the bottleneck and creates a fragile team. Confidence and comfort with chaos are required to let go.
Is it for you?
Best for
An experienced IC PM who wants to scale their leverage across large scope or multiple teams without adding management.
Not ideal for
A brand-new team, an immature org, or a low-trust environment where process scaffolding is still needed before culture can carry the load.
From the transcript
“the second thing is personally to seek to not be needed but be valuable”
“anytime somebody sends me a direct message I say this is a great question can you please put it in this Channel with the team…”
“if you do this enough it becomes a Snowball Effect because other people on the team will see that other people are posting in public…”
“product isn't a role it's a team”
From the episode
Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor
Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside)