Becoming more strategic, navigating difficult colleagues, harnessing founder mode, and more | Anneka Gupta (Chief Product Officer at Rubrik)

25:45And that's the way I'll frame it up and again, ending it on a question so that you're not coming in and just being like, hey, this is what where we are at. But then inviting people to discuss and say, yes, or no, I agree with 90 % of that, but 10 % for 10 % off. And that helps move the conversation forward because sometimes you'll get stuck in these circular discussions that aren't moving forward and you need to figure out a way to move it forward. And then your experience as just doing that makes you look more strategic and gives people the impression you're thinking strategically. Yeah, also the other way you can do it is if you're in a room with someone and you have a whiteboard is actually summarize on the whiteboard while people are talking and then show your summarized framework or whatever on that.

26:31So that's kind of a good way to do it too if you're having a hard time interrupting the flow of discussion or you don't feel as comfortable thinking on your feet and interrupting and then framing your point of view. So you can do that in zoom. You can also use a chat. I've done that very effectively and said, I'm not going to interrupt the flow conversation. I'm just going to summarize in zoom chat. This is what I've heard. And this is what I think we're saying in this conversation. And then sometimes that'll get invited back into the broader conversation that's happening live on the zoom itself.

27:05That's a much lower stakes away doing it and I'm picturing all the PMs listening to this. So we're going to start doing this and there's going to be all these summaries now in zoom chats and everything. Oh my god, why is everyone sharing so much? Then zoom AI will start just doing it all for you. It then will have to think again. And then PMs are over and they have replaced us all. Okay, so then just to close the loop on becoming more strategic, your advice is when someone's like, hey, you're not strategic enough. You need to be more strategic. Your insight is the two things to work on is one, be clear on the wise behind the ideas that you're working on and be very clear.

27:38Crystal clear, people may not be understanding why you're working on the things you want to work on the things you're pitching. And then two is actually be the person that makes these things happen. Not just put a doc out there. If you're not actually achieving them, people are going to think you're not strategic. Yep. Awesome. Okay. I want to talk about decision making. You have a really interesting perspective on how to become a better decision maker in relation to being kind of a historian, which I love this concept. Talk about that insight. Yeah. So I was at my previous company for 11 years.

28:10So I kind of ended up becoming the historian. And when I joined rubric about three years ago, I came into an organization that had a lot of history that I just didn't know about. So one of the things that I decided to do when I joined the company was to really understand what happened in the past. Like what were the products that we launched that weren't successful? Why weren't they successful? What was the perspective on the history of how we decided to develop the things that we've had? We did and why what was the perception of different people in the organization? And I tried to construct this past knowledge of what had happened and what were the decisions that were made and why were those decisions made?

28:55Whether they were good or bad, didn't matter. So that I could better understand how to make decisions going forward and to learn from the mistakes that I didn't personally live through. And I think that's the part that's really important about being a historian. You can always be a historian. It doesn't have to be just when you join a company. But even today, I'll hear about projects from many years ago that people will bring up and I'll be like, tell me about this project. Why, like what happened with it? How did we decide to do this and just really learn and be curious about it? Because that gives me more context into, well, what is it that we did poorly?

29:31And how can we do that better? And also, what is the baggage that people have around trying to do something similar again? Because people always come with their baggage of, oh, this hasn't worked before. So why is it going to work now? And as a product leader, you're obviously putting in place a lot of thoughts and ideas around this is what I want to go achieve. And these are the initiatives. And some people are going to come and say, well, we've tried that before, especially you've been an organization that's been around for a while. I've been that guy. We've done this so many times. Why are we?

29:59This didn't work. Why are we thinking about this again? So, okay, so the advice is here, if you're new to a company, especially go through a bunch of, just like study the past decisions that were made and share them out as a part of that. And then as a side effect, it'll help you make better decisions because you'll have this history about what the company has done. I love that. Along the same lines of decision making, I asked your former colleague Rachel Wollon, what to ask you. And she said that your parting advice when she left to join a different company was it's not about making the right decision.

30:33It's about making the decision. And that's like the things you're remembered about you most, that parting advice. Talk about why that is so important and your insight there. It's very easy to get into analysis paralysis before making a decision and say, well, if I just had this one more data point, if I just knew this, then I could make a decision. But the reality is, is that you are always operating off of imprecise information as a product leader. And what I've found is that once you commit to a decision, you actually learn more post committing to that decision about what's going to work and not going to work and you get out move out of the hypothetical.

31:09And as long as your decision is like 70 % right, you can iterate on that 20, 30 % in either direction. But if you don't commit, then you don't actually get any new information that is high fidelity and high quality. So I'm big believer in making decisions. I know you've had a few guests talk about speed is super important in organizations. Well, I think making decisions quickly and then being able to iterate on them is a form of that is just make a decision. Don't make it uninformed but have a strong hypothesis. And then just keep testing whether that hypothesis is accurate or not and you'll shift here and there.

31:46You might build something that you have to throw away 20 % of the work on, but that's okay. It's better than making no decision at all because you won't get any new information if you don't make any decision at all. As a PM that might be listening to this feeling like, okay, yeah, that sounds great. But then I make a bad decision and then my, and then on it, because it's going to be like, you messed up here. You got the wrong, you've shipped the wrong thing here. It didn't work. How do you, how do you create a culture where people don't feel that and aren't as afraid of making bad decisions and making decisions with 70 % of the information.

32:19I think part of it comes down to making sure there's a strong hypothesis that everyone understands when you're making the decision or it might not just be one hypothesis. It might be a series of high, series of hypotheses and assumptions that we're making that are informing the decision. So it might be a hypothesis that, you know, some, this segment of customers is going to be willing to pay for this product because it's solving an urgent and important enough need for them that they're going to go do it. And this is the evidence we have to find it, but this is also the stuff we don't know. And then along the way, we learn whether that hypothesis is true or not.

32:57And so at the end of the day, if something didn't work out, we can go back to the original hypothesis and say, well, this is what we learned in this process that we are, our hypothesis was actually not true. And we learned all of this after the fact. And I think the way to make a culture of risk taking and people willing to make these bets and go out on a limb is to reward the learning versus the outcome. And that's what I try to focus on is if we're constantly learning, it is okay if we make bad decisions, but we learn from them and we get better for next time. And even in making this bad decision, we learned something about our customers or our business that we otherwise wouldn't have learned that we can use in some, in another context.

33:39I love first of all, I love that this comes back to your strategic lesson of just if you have a strong why behind something that's incredibly powerful and people will be confident that you're thinking strategically. I was just at a talk with Zach, he was giving, he's being interviewed at the Chase Center, the choir podcast of this whole event and his main thing that he talked about that Facebook that he values most and the culture Facebook is learning faster than anyone else, shipping stuff that isn't perfect, but just so that you can get one more turn and learn something faster and so on. So that's super resonates that's Facebook's culture.

34:17Is there an example of something you worked on where you where that you where you did that where you kind of shipped something that you weren't fully confident in and you learned faster. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot because anytime you're shipping products, there's so many different things that could go right and wrong. There's a situation where we created a really amazing high value product and we decided not to monetize it and that we realized after the fact we should have monetized it. So we're trying to figure out how to package some new capabilities to monetize this thing that we know has a lot of value without taking away what we already given to existing customers.

34:57So that was something we learned along the way that we originally didn't think we should monetize this, but then we realized that there's actually not been you to do that after the fact. There's been other things where we've developed a set of capabilities thinking that it will solve for this new personas problems, but then we misunderstood how easy it was going to be to go sell to that new persona within our own organization. I've made that mistake many times actually. And so now I think bad now what I've taken for that is really know how you're going to sell something and who's going to do the selling before you actually go build out the product because if you don't have that right focus, you may build out the best product and yet it's going to get zero adoption because no one in your organization is ready to sell it.

35:45So there's tons of stuff like that where it's like been okay, yeah, we can we've learned something from this and it's not all throw away. It just means that we've got to do something differently for this product and we need to do something differently for our organization going forward. This episode is brought to you by Epo. Epo is a next generation AB testing and feature management platform built by alums of air being being snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp and DraftKings rely on Epo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features.

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37:00Epo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization and email marketing. Check out Epo at getepo .com slash Lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. Let's get eppo .com slash Lenny. I want to come back to something Rachel also shared with me when asked her what questions to ask you. And by the way, first of all, she's been like a lot of time raving about how amazing you are first. That was the first instead of conversations and then she came up with a bunch of questions to ask you. And so her other question was about how good you are navigating very difficult personalities.

37:40She showed this code that she constantly saw you interact with and bring together several leaders who had much higher egos and very disparate points of you who are not informed or thoughtful or as gracious as you were. And she'll say you're very low ego. And so she wanted me just ask you for what you've learned about how to navigate very difficult personalities and help people align when that is not neatly what they want to do. I try to embody the mindset of feeling like and believing that I can work with anyone. And I think what I do when I hit a difficult personality and difficult personalities come in all shapes and sizes and forms is I really try to understand what drives that person.

38:30What really what is it that they really care about? Hopefully it's they care about something deeply about the company and making the company successful. Sometimes it's so they care about their own personal career, how they're showing up, what people view of them. That's fine. I just need to understand what it is that they really care about. And then if I need something from them, what is it that I can do to motivate them to find what I would I need from them. And I'm important and trying to make that match of like they have this desire kind of like building a product they have this desire and how am I going to get them to care about the thing that I'm going to care that I want to care about.

39:08The other thing I do is like instead of feeling like anger or frustration with the person and instead trying to shift that to a mindset of feeling gratitude and a positive emotion about that is I look at them and I ask myself what can I learn. And maybe I don't want to adopt their personality or do operate the way that they are operating but everyone has something that they can teach you. Whether it's their communication style or the way they're able to marshal people together the way they come up with visionary ideas, whatever it may be, trying to study that person and be curious about them, learn from them and then they take them for that and feel the generosity genuinely.

39:53About what I got from the situation it's easier to do some time than others, but I think it comes back to that abundant mindset if you can approach it with an abundant mindset, then you can really consciously do this and when you actually learn something you will feel the gratitude when you recognize that you are able to get something from that. I love that this connects with your other original piece of advice of just turning something into this is going to be fun let's make this fun and in this case it's like make it great. What can I learn from this person even though they're really annoying me and it's frustrating and don't want anything done.

40:27And then your other point of understanding what they want and you kind of using that as a way to pull them in your direction. How do you figure out what they want? Do you have any tricks for just like here's how I learn what this person's motivations are and goals are. Talk to other people that have worked with them before and have done so successfully so that might be people that work for them because if you work for a person like that you have to figure out and and and or your successful only what successful working for that person you probably understand what makes them tick. So that's one or work what talk to people that are peers anything like that to try to understand and build this view of us person that helps me empathize with them and also helps me understand what I'm doing.

41:11Understand what they may be wanting to get out of a situation and why I love that. Yeah, they don't have to be involved in that. You just ask other people what is this person's motivations and then ideas connect with a want with the thing you're trying to achieve. Beautiful. I really love this idea of when you're frustrated by someone just like reframe me to like I'm grateful I'm going to learn something from this person in our interaction even though they're making life hard for me. I really love that. Another skill I hear you're really strong at and this comes from another one of your colleagues, hey, Ma, Mohan.

41:45Share that your world class it giving feedback giving hard feedback and receiving hard feedback. And so I want to just ask you what have you learned about how to do this it's very hard to give hard feedback. It's why it's called hard feedback. So either for me, the direction what do you learn about receiving hard feedback or giving hard feedback or someone actually hears you and doesn't get defensive. The answer is so much I've learned so much from it. So maybe I'll start with receiving feedback. So on the receiving feedback side, I think it's very natural to feel upset defensive. All the negative emotions when you first see a piece of negative feedback whether it's you're reading it in a employee survey or you're receiving it in a one on one from a direct report or from a manager from a peer.

42:34And I try to let myself just feel the things that I'm going to feel. And sometimes that's an emotional feeling sometimes that means I want to step out of the room or depends on who I'm talking to but let myself feel the things that I'm going to feel and then once that's passed, whether that's a few hours or a few days, don't react. Don't try to say, oh, I don't believe this. Listen and then ask myself like, okay, well, where is this feedback coming from? Like why? Why am I getting this feedback and is and try to be super happy? I'm just trying to be very curious about it and that might be going back to the person that gave me the feedback and asking and maybe asking someone that's a peer in somewhere in the organization that might have more context and flavor to what the feedback really is.

43:21Just trying to learn. And then I can decide, do I think this is valid or not? Is this something I should do something about or not? Actually, all feedback I think is valid. People's feelings are valid, but doesn't mean that you need to do something about all of those things. And so that has, going through that process and letting myself ride the emotional wave and not judging myself for that, but then not reacting and letting myself then figure out and come back curious. And I think when you come back curious, people then want to give you more feedback because they know that you're listening and that you're you're hearing what they say.

43:54So the devices feel it like don't block it off and be like, no, no, no, no, this isn't real. So fully let your body go through the roller coaster of feeling the negative feedback. Sometimes the feedback is just like, no, this isn't actually a thing. If any, just like, he or she, like, I should actually pay attention to this deeply or just like, let me wait for more data points. Yeah, I think in product, you receive feedback all the time for your organization or for yourself. And you can't make everyone happy. Like everyone wants a different thing from products. I think this comes up quite often where there's a lot of feedback for the organization or for you as a leader.

44:32And you have to decide what to focus on and what not to focus on. I always try to anchor on, well, what is best for the company and what does the company need for me and for my team at this point in time? And there's stuff that is a must have on that list and there's stuff that's nice to have. And sometimes, you know, there's just too many must have to go deal with the nice to have. And you have to just be like, well, you know, I know this is a problem where I know we could be do 10 % better in this, but it actually doesn't matter as much as fixing these things that are really, really important and are really what's going to help my organization deliver what it needs to for the company and for the business overall.

45:13In terms of receiving hard feedback, so you should one example or I should an example or someone said you weren't strategic enough. Is there another example of receiving hard feedback that you got? You're like, that sucks either earlier in your career or recently anything else come to mind. I mean, all the time. It's always hard stuff. Yeah. You know, it's like there will people will give feedback of, oh, I feel like we're not moving fast enough on our roadmap and priorities. You need to be doing more. Why aren't we moving fast? Never never heard that one before, right? Or disparaging the direction that we're taking a certain product because they don't agree with it because a competitor is doing something else, but we've decided for our reason to we're not going to go follow that path.

46:01Like there's always something that that people have negative feedback about and sometimes I'm like, okay, this is an I roll. I understand where they're coming from. I understand why they're giving me this feedback, but I also don't agree that we should change directions because of it. So I don't know, like some of the things cut deeper than others, but I think people are making like personal statements about my team or they're feeling like, hey, the product team isn't listening to feedback or the product team of the bad culture. Like on a cousin listening things like that cut deep and are a lot more they they I know like physically or physiologically they make me kind of seize up a little bit, but again, then I try to feel the thing and I feel and try to understand why are they saying that?

46:47Why do they really feel that and what does that mean behaviorally that I have to do differently or my team has to do differently or maybe just two people on my team need to do differently and someone is extrapolating this out to be a much bigger problem that actually is awesome. Okay, and then we were going to shift to what you've learned about giving hard feedback so that someone actually listens and just put up a shield and like, yeah, it's not real. So I think in giving feedback, you can never fully control how someone else is going to respond to that feedback. All you can control is what you do, your body language and what you say.

47:22And what I have found is that if I can convey and I will say this very directly to people, I care so much about you and I'm giving you the feedback because I want you to be successful when I want you to be able to reach the pinnacle of what I know you can accomplish and you do all of that setup and you don't just hope that they understand that you actually explicitly say that and you show that in your body language. Then it makes the other person much more receptive to hearing whatever you have to say. And then I think the other piece is that you should not, you've got to be direct. Like the worst feedback is the kind of passive aggressive feedback versus saying directly, this is what you're doing or this is how you're being perceived in the organization.

48:06And here are the three things that you can do to make it to change the way you're being perceived or to change change the outcomes of what you're driving or become more strategic or whatever it is that I'm trying to give feedback on. And I try, I do a lot of prep before I give someone a lot of feedback. I really think about like, how can I frame this in a way that's going to resonate with them that doesn't come across as attacking them, but helps them understand why what they're doing isn't working or is being prepared. And I think this is the kind of process that I've been perceived poorly and try to give them examples and even examples that I've personally had to go through myself of how I've approached those situation and let them ask questions and brainstorm with them be part of the solution versus saying, here's all the feedback.

48:53Now you go figure out what to do with it. It reminds me of radical candor basically make people feel like care deeply about them, but jump be very directed about what they can be doing better. Are there like phrases or ways you kind of set up the conversation you talk you mentioned a few of just like I want to help you become the best version of who you could be in your capable of. Is there any phrases you find helpful that you come back to often of just like a way to start the conversation. Yeah, I think what I started with is like I care a lot about you. You have a lot of potential. I can see you doing these kinds of things.

49:27I can see you getting to where you want to go in your career. Sometimes I even start the conversation by asking them, what do you want to do? Where do you want to get go in your career? And that will help me frame up which of these things are important because honestly, you know, if someone wants to be eventually like a CPO, the feedback I'm going to give to them is very different than if they're like, hey, you know, like I don't really want to manage people over. I just want to be the best I see I can ever be. I'm not going to give them the same feedback. And so having that conversation up front also allows them even before I jump into the feedback to give them their perspective of what they want.

50:00And then I can tailor the conversation more to what they're looking for. I think that has really helped as well. Make sure that I focus on the things are going to really matter. During the feedback conversations, I also try to frame things as this is how you're being perceived. Then you are doing X because I think even though it's hard to hear, oh, hey, this person doesn't perceive you in the way that you may think. Then we can talk about well, how do what are ways that we can change the perception. I also think it's important because sometimes people like, well, if you say, hey, like I don't think your X and then they're like, well, yes, I am.

50:37And if you say, hey, well, this is how other people perceive you, including me. But maybe this is not what you are intending and you actually say that you're giving them the benefit of the doubt of like actually what they want to what they're trying to show up is different than how people are perceiving them. And you can have a better conversation then around, well, what can you do to change that perception? You mentioned, I see product managers and this is a gets like way to Europe, you know, your big deal, fancy chief product officer person. A lot of people listening to this podcast or early career pms or trying to get into product.

51:14I want to ask a couple questions along these lines. One is about getting into products. So interestingly, you got into product the same way I got into product, which is you're used to be an engineer and then you moved into product within a company, which is one of them. Maybe one of the simplest ways to get into product potentially for people that are trying to break into product management. What advice you often give them of how they could go about doing it. I know there's never the silver bullet, but what's your advice? I definitely think doing it within the same company is a lot easier than trying to switch companies and switch jobs at the same time because when you're in within a company, you've already built credibility.

51:52Hopefully, and if you haven't, then go crush it at your jobs that you build the credibility. Then you can start to raise your hand interact with the product team, take on projects and do things that allow you to get some experience and build a relationship with a leader on the product team. Who then may be willing to take a chance on you to put you into a product role, even if you don't have the experience. And especially when you're within the same company, you bring other things to the table. Let's say you're working in customer support. Well, you have a huge amount of knowledge about what are the big problems that people are calling up the support team or opening tickets on the support team for.

52:29And that is valuable knowledge for being a product manager. If you're coming from the sales side, you're coming with a knowledge of how to sell the product, what really resonates, how do you do the objection handling. And that can be a valuable perspective. If you come from the engineering side, will you understand how the product is built and you understand that technical nuances of that. Well, that can also be a valuable way to enter into the product team. And that way, even though you don't have the direct product experience, you're still bringing something to the table where you are going to have to get trained on core product management.

53:01But you're not going to be have to be totally trained on the business or the technology. So is the advice basically get a job in any function line necessarily any function, but join a company, however you can essentially and then push to try to get into the product team. Yeah, I think join a product adjacent function, which honestly pretty much every function is product adjacent because what function does product not engage with. But as closely product adjacent as possible and then yeah, find your way way into the product word from there. Ideally, there's something within the company that's like some program.

53:37I imagine that does this sort of thing. Some companies have something structured, some are just kind of at hawk. Is there anything there you just like like should you talk about this in your interview just like, hey, I really love to become product manager someday. Do you have anything along those lines that would help me get into that or not or she do not know. Well, I think it depends. So for instance, when I joined live ramp, which was my previous company as a software engineer, I actually did say in the interview process, I want to become a product manager, I think. At that point, it was still early in my career.

54:06I didn't know for sure, but I said that now that was a 20 person startup. So it was worth saying it because they didn't really have a product team. And I wanted to put it out there that that was something I was interested in growing into. If you're joining a 5000 person company, your hiring manager is probably not going to receive it well. If you're like, hey, I'm interviewing for product marketing. But really what I want to do is go into product. So it just kind of depends on the company in the stage. You have to play that. We have to play that wisely. But I think once you're in a company, then finding a way to make a relationship with the product leader, or if you're in a startup that is really small, they don't have product management.

54:45Well, then you have the opportunity to take on projects for sure that our product management related because no one is doing that work. Really taking initiative to do that so that you can find an in road into product management. Kind of along these lines, you have a really unique perspective on new pms because you teach product management at Stanford. You've been doing that for a while. I just want to ask you work with a lot of people that are new to product thinking about getting to product and getting to product. What do you find are the things that new pms or people getting to product most misunderstand about the role of pm or most surprised by when they become product managers.

55:22When we interview students as we were designing the class about what they wanted to learn. What was most surprising to me was that students would say, well, can you teach me how to use Vigma? Can you teach me the tools that product managers are going to have to use? And what was surprising me about that was, I don't think it's the tools that you need to learn to be successful. I think what you need to learn to be successful is how to take very ambiguous situations and consistently drive more and more clarity over time. It was interesting to see this mismatch between what people said they wanted to learn and what I felt they actually needed to learn.

56:03Now, having taught this class for a few years now, I think talking to students who have then left and become product managers, they've seen a lot of this in practice now. And I think they understand that. But there is this mismatch of people who haven't been in product management saying they want to go and thinking that they need to learn some like tools or process versus the mindset and the skills required to clarify ambiguity. Along those lines, I actually say somewhere in a talk or maybe something you wrote, talk about how creating this class, creating the curriculum, helped you crystallize your own thinking on product and helped you crystallize the mental models of becoming a product manager.

56:43Is there anything that you recall from that time of like, here's something that's really helped me understand about this function and the skill as you're putting together the class? Yeah, I know anytime you're teaching something, you have to figure out a way to synthesize it for another audience. And so many of us have learned product management just figuring it out on the job. I don't know if there was like a particular framework that I would say came out of that. But what I found very interesting was seeing the questions that people asked in the class and then feeling like, oh, I understand how to answer this question.

57:16I can provide an example for it. And that was super interesting to me because I didn't expect that coming out of the conversation. Yes, like there's frameworks we developed to talk about ideation and product discovery and all of that. But I think those are fairly flexible frameworks. What was most enlightening was being able to crystallize the answers to some of these questions, whether it was about like, how do you interact as a PM effectively with engineering? Or how do you, how do you, like what happened if the data shows you that, you know, it doesn't matter which direction you put pick. Like there's merits to both ways.

57:54How do you actually go about making those decisions? It was very interesting being able to then have those conversations with students and bring in the real life examples. And I found it's on situations that actually go back to my own team and share the same answer that I came up with in class. I was like, oh, this is actually valuable thing to share share with my team back at my company. Reminds me of the recent chat I had with the Alex Kamorowski, where he talked about how oftentimes talking with people helps them uncover new insights that he had in his head. And then he writes them down as soon as he says something that's really clever in the way he's like, okay, I'm going to remember that now.

58:31Coming back to how to become a PM. So you see all these people getting and taking this class want to become product managers. I know they're like Stanford students and you know, they have people will more likely higher Stanford people. But I guess in terms of how they end up becoming PMs, what's if you were to like look at the pie chart of the people that end up getting a PM job. What's like the biggest chunk is it they join it's a mother function and then move into product that they just join as a junior PM. So we're like how are people actually getting into the PM role in that. Yeah, I think very few are directly going to an established company and becoming a PM directly.

59:08So I would say a big chunk of them some of them are but a many of those then had PM experience to begin with or had engineering experience and then went to a technical company into a PM role. The vast majority of them are joining product adjacent roles or they're going to small startups where they might be doing product management might be the first product manager they might be doing product management plus plus cheap of staff something like that where they get to put their hands on product management. But it's a super small company. So I think those have been the two most successful pads to get into product.

59:39Awesome. That's a really interesting lens into how people actually get into this role. Potentially final question, but we'll see where goes. I have this recurring segment on spot gas called AI corner where I try to get a sense of just how people are finding AI tools useful in their work in their life. So let me just ask you is there anything you've found useful in some AI tool in how you work like something you found that helps you work more productively more efficiently either you are people on your team. One way that we're using AI today is summarizing our user research calls. So that has been really valuable because we're doing all these calls all the time we're getting a ton of rich insights.

1:00:20Some of those rich insights are related to the specific project that we were doing this call for and some of them aren't. And now we have that summarize and tag in a way where we can look up you can look up any sort of thing that you want around the calls that we've done and it'll find you the call it'll find you the context. So find you the transcript and summarize exactly what we've learned from that call. So we're starting to use that more and more. It's very powerful capability. I definitely think that that kind of summarization of information for PMs is a big unlock for for organizations.

1:00:54And I think we're still in the very, very early days of AI making a meaningful difference to the way that PMs do their work. Is there a specific tool that you love to help you with that that you may want to give a shout out to or something you guys built? Yeah, we use dovetail and it's been fantastic. Connects into all of the Zoom calls and everything does a great job with summarization with search everything. Awesome. I love it when someone recommends a very awesome sponsor of the podcast of tale is an ongoing and excellent sponsor. So I'm really happy to hear that. Amazing. Onika, is there anything else that you thought you wanted to share or that you want to leave listeners with that you think might be helpful before we get to a very exciting light in your.

1:01:37The mindset that you bring to your work is actually the most important thing over anything else that you can do. And if you are approaching every situation as much as possible with the positive mindset, you can do more than you could ever possibly hope to achieve. I'm going to pull on this thread because this is such a powerful point and I think it's easy to just hear that it's hard to learn to do it. Do you have any advice and just like how to build that mindset like a you know connect so many of the things you said, how can this be fun, how can I be grateful to this person that's annoying me and the things that they might teach me.

1:02:15Is there just anything you've done that has helped you build this mindset? Journaling is very powerful. So actually growing up I journaled every single day of my life from when I was 13 to when I was 23. And while I cringe to go back to read any of those, I think what it helped me do and build a practice around that I still do today is when I have a lot of thoughts going through my head, especially negative thoughts, just putting them all down on a piece of paper, writing them on my phone and trying to explore why. Why am I feeling this way? What is why am I getting triggered? What is it about the situation that's making me feel so strongly.

1:02:56And when I put it down on paper, then it takes a thing that's abstract and things that I'm ruminating on and actually makes it possible for me to break it down and understand, well, okay, this is something I may feel. But the why behind it is a little irrational. So let me let this go. I realize that this is an irrational way to think about this. Whereas other things I start to uncover, well, what is it about the situation? And what is it that I need to do differently? What's it in my control? And what is it? Maybe that need to go talk to someone about and say, hey, I need you to do this differently to be able to make the make make myself feel better and make the situation better.

1:03:33It's interesting. This is another thread that's been coming up a bunch on the podcast recently that when something is bothering you or something is hard, the more you actually listen to that part of yourself and like dive into and explore it and give it a space to share and talk. The less power it gets and the more space is created for the stuff you actually want to take space. It's like it's kind of it's not what you would expect because usually it's like, no, shut up. Everything's fine. But the more you actually hear that out, the easier things get. So I love that you share that. It's like doing cognitive behavioral therapy on yourself.

1:04:12That's how I think of it. I've never actually done cognitive behavioral therapy, but I've read a lot about it. And sometimes when I go through this, I'm like asking myself the same questions that I think are asked in those settings. Well, that. All right. Monica, is there anything else that you wanted to share or leave listeners with? I think that's all I could think of. Well, with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? I'm ready. All right. First question. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? The hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz.

1:04:45Such a great book. Great again about mindset of how to approach hard things. Second is I'm a huge fantasy sci -fi fan. So I love Brandon Sanderson's books. I highly recommend those to people as well. I only know about him as I saw videos of him after COVID where he just said I wrote like five new books during COVID as like what is going on? He is someone that is at the top of his craft and I admire people so much that are like truly the elite in what they do. And he is truly the elite in what he does. And he writes a lot about writing. He podcasts a lot about writing. It's pretty impressive. And he writes fantasy books.

1:05:18That's right. He writes fantasy. Yep. Okay. Cool. She has like a lot of books to read down just like, oh my god. So, looks. Okay. Great. Next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed? Again, on the fantasy sci -fi track, I really like Fallout, which is a dystopian show based on post -apocalyptic post -nuclear war world. Very entertaining. Yeah. It's just like very quirky and fun. Yes. And I'm unexpected. Awesome. Do you have a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you really love? My eight -foot iPhone charger. So I have a cord that's very long that allows me to move around the house and do stuff while my phone is charging because my phone is always running out of batteries.

1:06:05So highly recommend getting a super long charging cord. I've got one of those and I know exactly what you mean. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful and worker in life? I think it comes back to dealing with lots of different types of people. I really try to remind myself that everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn. And I think that helps not only like think about how you interact with other people, but also combat and post -resistant because you have something to bring to the table and teach as well as anyone else. No matter what your age is, no matter what your background and meaning into that and realizing that people can learn from you and you can learn from others in every single situation.

1:06:50Final question. I heard that you're a big fan of Isaac Asimov. Do you have a favorite Asimov book when they think if someone were to explore his canon they might want to start with? I really like the foundation series. So starting with that is really good. It's a very different style of writings. You kind of have to stick with it, but it's good. I promise. And I will build on that and say don't watch the show because the show is so different from the book series. I don't know if you've seen it. Yes, I have. And it's good. Okay. It's just like what is going on? This is not a story. What are they doing?

1:07:22Amazing. Onika, this has been amazing. We covered so much ground. I feel like this is going to help a lot of people. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to follow up on things, maybe ask you questions or just check out the stuff you're up to. And how can listeners be useful to you? So you can find me on LinkedIn. Follow me. DM me. I would love to connect. And the way you can help me is we're actually redesigning our Stanford class right now for PMs. And I would love to hear from you. If you haven't done any, you don't have any PM experience, what is it that you wish it class could teach you?

1:07:55And that would be super helpful for me as we're redesigning this class. Thanks. Amazing. And the way they could share that is DM you on LinkedIn or Twitter. Yes. Easy. Amazing. Onika, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely my pleasure. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast dot com.

1:08:32See you in the next episode.