Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG)

23:33Any objections? Let me know. Any new context? Let me know. That really forces you to deeply understand and take an opinion on the material. Final question, who do you like to invite to these product reviews? Any of thoughts, rules, policy? You know, I mean, I do think that usually fewer people is better. It leads to a sense of being informal and that is really useful because it lowers the bar on how coaxly or strong these conversations are and I'd rather have like a less formal conversation faster than a formal conversation in lose three weeks in the process when we could have been building. I think it needs to be cross -functional.

24:15I think like one of the things you want is cross -functional accountability. Do you want it cross -functional at the leadership level and cross -functional at the team presenting level? And I think those are normally the groups. I think the thing that gets hard is you often cut out like the middle where like if it's a working team presenting to like the senior leaders on something important, it's really hard because like it means people's managers are not in the room and can't help the conversation or other things. And so in order to do that, you have to really have a bunch of implicit trust inside the team that everyone will get the context later, that everyone's gonna be kind to everyone else and you don't need like a ton of air cover and the managers trust their team to like present in the best possible way.

25:01That is always a stressful place for a manager to be or like their success is kind of writing in that meeting and they're not there and they kind of... It's so stressful. It's so stressful. I think anything you need to make it less stressful is useful. And there are also in times of my career where I would keep the room itself small that because we were all trying to calibrate on specific principles, I would like record or broadcast the meeting to anyone who wanted to see it. Just so they could all like see the principles by which we were decision making and get calibrated on that. So through your career, you've kind of transitioned from being the person pitching products and being reviewed to the person reviewing and being on the other side.

25:41Is there anything being on this side of it that you think is helpful for people earlier in their career to know about that experience of, you know, from your angle now? I mean, I think for what is worth, I think I still do a fair amount of product pitching in the past few years. There's always someone else to convince. That's true. Especially if you want to do something dramatically different. Really, I think the biggest service for people who are starting out a little earlier is that point around like bringing the recommendation, like really having the opinion and standing behind it with conviction and doing what they need to do to build that conviction for themselves.

26:22Awesome. You've done this a number of times already in this conversation. And so I want to spend a little time here, which is using metaphors and imagery to make your point and get people to understand what you're trying to say. So you have this code of putting on the code of the job and this dinosaur brain. And so someone told me that this is just a skill you have where you use metaphor and imagery to rally a team, get your point across, get people to understand what you're trying to say. There's also this metaphor. Someone told me and you'd ask you about the hill climb metaphor. Does that ring a bell?

26:52Yeah. Okay. What is that all about? For me, the hill climb is all about like the difference from the local optimum and a global optimum. And so that sounds very abstract. But I think like a lot of the time when we're doing our job, when we're doing life stuff, whatever you're doing, like you try to just get better and better and you like optimize your current system and then you feel really good about it. And that is great. You're standing on top of the hill, you're looking down and you can see, you know, the, I don't know, rolling hills, the sheep, the grass, whatever. But then way off in the distance, you can see like a mountain, you know, one that's even higher than you can't even see the top of it, right?

27:32And you have to decide like, are you gonna take the risk of climbing down your hill, crossing like an unknown chasm and then climbing back up just to get to the same level you started at with more climbing to do to get to that summit. And that is really hard. I'm thinking of things like, you know, maybe the first time I saw this was like, a lot of companies were really good at desktop and you could see the mobile mountain like way out over there. But to get there, you had to really make a lot of trade -offs in your core desktop business that you were not totally sure we're gonna like pay off when you made it to the mobile mountain and you had to do a ton of work.

28:14You had to fundamentally rewire a lot of what you're doing without a guarantee that you're gonna get there. I mean, you can see it in life when you think about new jobs or new moves or new relationships like kind of anything that you think about, like you kind of are giving up something that is working pretty well without knowing whether you're gonna make it to the top of that next mountain. And that's been really helpful to me just to kind of place where I am on different things where you know, you can like, you get the inkling that there is a much better way to do this. There really is. Is it gonna be worth going down into the valley, climbing up, keeping climbing, is that gonna be worth it?

28:55Most of the time the answer is yes, but it's helpful for me to know, boy, this feels like a slog, it is supposed to because I'm still in the valley. And the thing that gets me through the valley is remembering what the summit feels like. When you're on top of it and you're like, this is great, it was absolutely worth it. My life is better in these ways, we're able to solve these problems in these ways. It was worth it. I love that. It feels like a big value of this metaphor, which I love is that to set expectations is gonna be really hard for a little bit or we will slow down what we're trying to do now.

29:30But the idea is there's a bigger hill, and a bigger hill, and it's worth it. On this kind of broader idea of metaphors and imagery, is there something there that you've learned of just like this works really well? I'm gonna invest in becoming better at this. Or is this something that's come natural to you? Anything you can share about that skill and approach? I think this one came from, I worked for a manager of St. Miseric Ante now, and he was just a master of the metaphor analogies. And so whenever I bring him something, he would be like, how is this product going to make you feel? And when is the last time that you felt this way?

30:05And you can say, oh, you know, I felt this way when I was hanging with my friends in Delores Park. And we were like, cool, tell me what it feels like, why that's the analogy, what ramifications come out of that? And one thing I like to do is try to build an emulator for different people in my head, because I've just had the good fortune of working with an amazing number of very different leaders. And so he's one of the people I tried to build an emulator for, where I'd be like, okay, I see this thing, I don't know how to solve this problem. What would, how would Eric describe this? I've tried to build one from Baws, which is all about like principle of decision making and principle of trade -offs.

30:44Like there's a few other people, or I'm like, I don't know how to solve this problem. Can I load this other person into my head and how would they approach it? And that gives me like a fresh lens on it. And I really like metaphors and analogies because like I think especially as you scale a team, narrative becomes increasingly important. Like narrative can carry so much weight and water, where otherwise it's kind of similar to like the product review point where either you can tell everybody exactly what to do at every point, or you can create a story that we all agree on. And when we all agree on that story, people just know better what to do.

31:23Like if we all agree that the feeling of something should be, I'm sitting in Delores Park with my friends on a sunny Saturday, you know what the iconography, like the designers know what iconography should look like. You know what the, like the communication and join pattern should look like. You're not going to build something cold and corporate. You're not going to build something strobe lighter. You're not going to build something flashy, but you don't have to go and make all those individual decisions. You can kind of buy into the same story. And then people will just naturally build something that feels more consistent.

31:55This is such a powerful and important skill. Is there an example that comes to mind where you did this really well, say it in WhatsApp or Facebook of kind of the story that carried a lot of water for you and the team? Yeah, I mean, I think the prime metaphor we kind of arrived at for WhatsApp was face -to -face communication, you know. Our goal there was to make it so that every person in the world could feel connected to the people they cared most about, even when they were separate, even they're distant geographically for whatever reason, you know, we are always going to be apart from the people you cared about.

32:34And we really had to build something that would work for literally everyone in the world, like people who are carrying these high -end devices in Western markets who are very tech -comfortable and savvy. And people in the low -end markets who were carrying these low -end devices, they weren't that familiar with technology, it was maybe their first time online. We had to build them that worked for everyone. And the most universal form of communication is face -to -face. Like when you talk someone face -to -face, you're not thinking like, how do I present, like what tool do I have to learn? You just kind of open your mouth and words come out.

33:08And that's the feeling that we wanted to create. And that involved a lot of like the app stepping back from communication creating spaces that felt really intimate. So people wouldn't have to think to themselves of what kind of space am I in. They could immediately map where they were in the app to the kind of the, okay, I'm sitting around on my kitchen table and people are joining and leaving calls. Just like they're walking in and out of my living room. But it is a family space and the family is there. Or in like, you know, one -on -one disappearing message, you're like, cool, this is my close friend.

33:41We don't need to keep track of everything that we're saying. We're here for a little bit of banter, a little bit of relationship, a little bit of like quick what's your Wi -Fi password and stuff. And whatever is really important, that's what we'll hold on to. And the rest is just like day to day normal intensity. That is super interesting. Like what's up, the whole, one of the main differentiators and benefits is super fast. And I see completely how it connects this idea of yours. Like the idea is we want you to feel like you're talking to someone. And it's all really small thing. It's like a typing indicator is like, someone's about to take a breath, give them a talk, you know, like the two check marks lighting up or like someone's face lighting up when they hear you, you know, it's just a recognition of being heard.

34:22These are all super small things, but I think they add up to a feeling of being there. That is super interesting. So I love this very tactical piece of advice you just shared of just when you're trying to come up with a metaphor or analogy, think about what you want your users to feel when you're using the product and when else have they felt that same feeling. So interesting. And then this other point you made of making this emulator of person in your head. I mean, it sounds a little loud. Now they think it's more symbolic. It's total sense. It's another way. I get very bored a lot. It's another way to make sure meetings are really interesting where like, okay, let me see what that person is going to say next.

35:02Like let me put myself in their shoes. Let me think about what they're reacting to and why they're going to think that and how they're going to see the world. And again, it just gives me more toolkits because it means when I'm stumped on something, I'm going to be like, what would Rob Goldman say? It's like look at the dashboard. Have I looked at the dashboard? No, okay, let me go look at the dashboard. You know, like you can kind of load up these different skill sets that people, have been so generous with sharing with me. Well, it would be the Ami emulator. What would people think when they loaded Ches and me?

35:33I think rather than number one, no joke. Is there an emulator you most often come back to that you find most useful in just like in their day to day who's like the person that, like, oh yeah. I think those are the three. I think it is like, Antony knows like story, story a metaphor analogy creation. I think if it's like bosses, if we played this out, what principles are we using? And if we kept on using those principles, what would happen? And it is Rob Goldman, who's an amazing kind of metrics growth product leader, being like, look at the dashboard. I mean, look at the dashboard, which is like a great like central rooting, rooting part of my life.

36:16This was so fascinating. Fascinating. Rebs up. I love this topic of just metaphors and stories and visions and things like that. It's something that a lot of people want to get better at. Is there another example per chance that you could share of maybe using a metaphor to rally team, get things done? I mean, I think taking like a sub part of WhatsApp, when we talk about like video calling, I really want the metaphors was like sitting around in your family room when you think about how to make calls where when you're sitting in a family, you're not scheduling it, you're not like, I don't know, having this like cold, corporate feeling, the way you do with like a conference call where there's like kind of heavyweight interactions.

36:58And instead, there's just, you can join and leave, you know, like it feels lightweight. It feels like the space exists even when you're not there. And so just creating things like joinable calls, like that feeling of people kind of popping in and just paying attention to whoever's there and letting them leave at the call can flow on without a super heavyweight action that everyone needs to take. I think that was another one where we were just able to kind of agree on the feeling and then you kind of know what to build. I was just using WhatsApp to do a video called my mom, they were traveling Tiddle.

37:30And so that's exactly it. It's fair instead. It felt great. Let me go in a slightly different direction. One of my favorite posts of yours is called execution beats strategy every time. And I think another way to phrase it is execution eats strategy for breakfast. I think you put that somewhere. I'd love to hear about this because I completely agree. I think a lot of people obsess with strategy and vision and gotta get this right. And forget that most of the work is execution. So yeah, I'd love to hear just your take and insight here. Yeah, I don't know if I coined execution eats strategy for breakfast.

38:01I think a lot of things eat other things for breakfast, but I'm a believer. Like, I didn't think I was usually in strategy for breakfast. And that's something I used to say a lot at Meta. Like, that was just the most important part. And I was well trained in that. That was like one of the key lessons that I learned there. And it's because when you have, look, strategy is super fun. You get to like think about all this pie and the sky stuff. You get to think about if the world operated in rational patterns and you could predict the future, what is gonna be the second and third order effect. Like, you get to use your brain in a really fun philosophical way.

38:36But like, customers don't care. Like, customers don't care about your fancy strategies and like your five year plan. They care about the product that's in their hands. And so anything that distracts you from thinking about the product in your hands, I think poor maybe worse takes you away from solving customer's problems today, I think is a distraction. And I think one of the things that you learn is like, if you have great strategy, perfect strategy, but poor execution, you don't win because your strategy never makes it to the market. And what's even worse is that you have learned nothing. You don't know whether it was your strategy that was wrong or whether it was your execution that was wrong.

39:21All you know is you didn't win. Whereas when you have like a pretty good strategy, good enough strategy, you're in the right direction and you have perfect execution, you still don't win immediately. But you know your execution was great. So then you learn what do you need to do to improve your strategy, got the execution machine, you go back, you update your strategy, relaunch, and you keep on doing it until your strategy is perfect. And then you do it. And that's kind of the lesson I repeatedly learned. And is this advice kind of a reaction to what you said where people, PMs, let's say, are just like, I wanna work on strategy, we gotta spend all this time get the strategy nailed.

39:58And it's just like, okay, we also need to execute. And that's maybe even more important. Yeah, I do think it's like, it's very glamorous to work on strategy. It's so fun. Like, you want, it's so fun to have the word strategy in your tent. I don't know, we've built a mythology around strategy being the most important thing. An institution is not glamorous. It is not like white boarding by yourself, you know, and pointing to things and like coming out with the grand vision. It is like the nuts and bolts. And like, sometimes kind of boring, sometimes kind of like grind it out work of like, you gotta ring the donuts, you gotta look at the dashboards, you gotta rewrite the spec, you gotta just do a bunch of the grinding.

40:41But that is what leads to the customer's outcomes. You know, that is what the customer is eventually going to feel. They're never gonna see the whiteboard. They're gonna see that someone took the time to fix this bug. This episode is brought to you by User Testing. Transform, how you build products and experiences with User Testing. Get fast feedback throughout the development process so that you can build the right thing the first time. Make better decisions that lead to better business outcomes. Companies are being asked to do more with less. They need to move quickly to build experiences that meet changing customer expectations and do so faster than ever, all while minimizing risk and costly rework.

41:22With User Testing, you have a trusted partner in experience research. They empower user research, product and design teams to make higher confidence decisions with human insights. Learn more today at usertesting .com slash Lenny. Is this advice you give to your PMs on your teams? Like, is this a kind? I guess how do you think about this when they're trying to move up the ranks, become better, product managers? Is this just like a common thing that you often share like, yeah, strategy's gonna be amazing. Important, you gotta get good at it, but also make sure this is going great. Yeah, I do think about it a little bit in terms of proportion of time you should expect to spend.

42:02So, I mean, there's no way next to be on that strategy. You can't have a bad strategy. So you should spend some time. Maybe it's like 20 % of your time. But the bulk of your time should be like, confirming that strategy actually makes sense for the customer, is getting it out there, building the machine to constantly make it better. As opposed to like a perfect strategy, you go away, you build it for a year, you ship it, the market has changed. Customers have changed, their needs have changed, competitions like just the whole landscape has changed. And you probably could have solved those problems more easily had you headed in the right direction, but done it with more ongoing.

42:39In terms of this proportion, I imagine what you see as you get more senior, more you time to spend on strategy, less time on execution, right? I mean, 100 % know that that's true. I think again, like even at high levels, this maybe the strategic directions become more important to get like mostly right. But I think still most of your time is making sure they can make it to market. You know, like I think you should still be spending your time understanding what's going people down and unblocking it, understanding like how is the market changing, understanding what the broad customer feedback is, like just constantly improving the system that you are building.

43:19I think that's, I mean, how, how much time can you spend anything about this future as opposed to like actually trying to create it? That is a really interesting advice because I think most people imagine as you get more senior, I'm going to have more time think about vision and strategy and not have to be in the weeds building things. And I love this point you're making, even as a senior exec, you're still like, it's executing in a different way, but it's still like execution. You're focusing on the execution of the system a little bit more, but you know, you gotta stay connected I think to the customer and to what you're bringing to them.

43:54I love that. Obviously, strategies also very important. You have this great quote that I'm going to read here. For strategy to be useful, it actually has to change our behavior as a team to create better customer outcomes. Can you talk about that? Yeah, I mean, I think again, like some of the joy of strategy is like the philosophy and excitement of thinking about all the long -term stuff that will happen. But I try to like always come back to what's going to change for the customer. If we had all of these conversations and we come out with a shiny five -year plan, but then we change nothing about the products that we're building or how we are building, what was the point of that exercise?

44:34Like it made us feel good. And there's something to making us feel good. That is good. Like it's important for teens to feel good and connected and this is like a good exercise for that. But it's so much more powerful when it's an exercise that translates into us doing something differently. Whether that's prioritizing different products, whether that's changing our portfolio allocation, like moving people to the things we think are most important now versus things that are going to be less important right now. Like what's the change? Or like coming out with a strategy that'll align people because we have the story, we have the narrative, we have the sequence, what's going to change for our customers as a result of this strategy exercise?

45:11Many people want to get better at strategy. Often their performance feedback is become our strategic think better about strategy. What does help you become better? A better strategic thinker? Is it just doing it? Is it a person that influenced you? Have a lead? Is it a book? What does help you? And what do you often recommend to people to be a better at the skill? I think I got that same feedback quite a lot, actually. Of needing to get kind of think bigger and be more visionary, et cetera. And I still do, frankly. Actually, there's moments where every trench weighed too far into execution and worry a little less about long -term strategy.

45:47So it's definitely my bias still. The biggest thing that held me back from talking about strategy was I didn't feel confident that I knew enough to declare a strategy. It was actually almost like a self -confidence imposter syndrome thing. Were there people who could just say, I know how the world is going to develop? In the next five years, and let me tell you, here's where we're going to be. This is the dot on the map. And I was always like, how could you know anything could happen? Who would I be to say I know how the world's going to develop? And here's where we're heading. And so for me, a lot of it was actually learning the things that made me feel confident in my own opinion.

46:29And there's a bunch of things that do make me feel confident in my opinion. When I talk to specific customers, and I feel like I can build an emulator for them, like a customer on my shoulder, or I can say, oh, I talked to this person working in this job. Here's what they would say. If I showed them this product or this strategy, you know? So I think talking to customers is a big unlock for me, and like feeling like I have unique knowledge of the customer. I think working through different like product iterations of if we thought this was the right outcome, what would it really look like from a product perspective or a product portfolio in three to five years, and which of those like seems right or rational, or like it will go the way I think the world goes.

47:11I think asking for other opinions, like sometimes I run like surveys to the leadership team, where I'm just like, how do you say, you know, what percentage of our revenue is going to come from small businesses versus big businesses in three years? You know, and if we all agree on that topic, we just take it as the truth, and we should just fill it. If we disagree, then we should talk about it, and we should talk about the strategic ramifications if we chose one path or the other path. So for me, it was getting more comfortable having an opinion, honestly, about how the world was going to go, and also feeling comfortable that we would be able to change it when we learned that like maybe that wasn't exactly right, like we would have the machine, the F -stutial machine behind it to try it out, and then change and iterate and improve with customer feedback.

48:00And which point of your career was this kind of overcoming this fear and uncertainty? Was it some time with Facebook? It was sometime with Facebook. It was really when I was stepping into like the, the bigger ads jobs, like getting, getting to be a head of product for Facebook ads. I got feedback. I got a lot of feedback over the course of my career. And some of the stacking of feedback was basically like, you could be the smartest person in the room, but it doesn't matter if people don't like you. Which I don't, which is a very complicated feedback, and I don't, I wouldn't give that feedback to anyone else.

48:41But I took it very seriously. It was coming from so many different places. It was coming from people I'm really trusted. And so I kind of went out of my way to be more likable, which for me ended up being like, shrinking myself a little bit, and not being so aggressive, not being so opinionated, kind of being more unjectual. And the weird part is that it kind of worked for a long time. Like people were more likely to work with me. They were more likely to say nice things. I mean, I'd take this to extremes. I wore earth tones for like two years because that was just like, I got a fade back a little bit.

49:22And then you know, at some point, I actually had to do a leadership job. And my team was like, well, what do you think? Like what's your opinion? And I was like, you've been telling me not to have an opinion for so long. And so it took a little bit of work to get back to, oh yeah, like I can have, I have a lot of opinions. I have a lot of thoughts. It is okay for me to express it is needed. My team needs me to have these opinions and thoughts and be a leader who can like take ownership and be visible. Thanks for sharing that. Do you think that was the right approach? Going kind of indexing far to the other end and then kind of realizing that maybe that's too far or do you think you would have done things differently looking back?

50:05Yeah, it's kind of one of my Roman empires. Like I think about this every week so often, like way too much I think, especially because I talked to other senior women who received similar feedback and shows not to act on it or did act on it and like, you know, what happened to their paths were different. I think where I landed is like, I wouldn't give that feedback to someone else. And the way I do give that feedback actually, because I think there is a lot of really useful information in that the way I do give that feedback is you do need to be able to work with a broader range of people. And the way to do that is to expand your tool sets.

50:45Like you're not gonna make yourself smaller, you're not gonna be any less of who you are, but you are gonna build new tools so that you can, you know, new keys to unlock new different kinds of doors. And that is only gonna make you bigger and more powerful and more expansive. But the end outcome is the same is that you can work with more different styles of people, more different styles of problems. I love that framing. There's an episode that's gonna come out before this episode with this professor from Stanford, Jeffrey Feffer, who teaches a class called the Paths to Power, which is like how to become powerful in the world.

51:20And he actually has a big lesson that many people hate hearing, which is you don't actually, you don't need to be authentic in the workplace that which you're trying to achieve, you're trying to achieve stuff. And you can do what you need to use tools that you need to use to achieve the thing you want to achieve. So sometimes, you know, don't be exactly who you are and act in a slightly different way, which is basically what you're describing. More tools. But I think that like a theme that's coming up is just like I'm all about like more lenses, more keys, more tools in general, because why not?

51:50Like why not have access to more different styles of things? Something you're kind of like talking about subtly is that being a woman in tech and being a female leader, I imagine you've gone through some stuff that isn't what something men would have gone through. Is there anything there that you wanna share or anything you've learned about just being really successful as a woman in tech? I think you've talked through some of them. I think like one, you get a different style of feedback and a lot of the ways to interpret that feedback. I think through this day, I get feedback that is about walking a very narrow tightrope where not only do you have to change a bunch of things and do a bunch of things that are important, you have to make people feel a certain way about how you do them.

52:37And the ways that they want you to make you feel are like diametrically opposite. Some people are gonna be like, be more directive. So that way everyone knows your things. Some people are gonna say, be less directive. So people can come to their own conclusions. Some people are gonna say, like, move faster because there's always more you do. Some people are gonna say, move less fast because otherwise you're gonna end up seerling people. And a lot of it is kind of personal, like there's a bunch of research about how women get a lot more personal feedback but is less about the content of the role and more about their style.

53:06I think that is still true. And there's often a kernel of truth that it, you know, for me, this is forever work. Like I do have biases to hard execution and being directive and things like that. But I think learning how to interpret and respond to feedback has been a really important point for me and making my choices of just because I'm getting feedback doesn't mean I immediately need to respond to all of it. There's a step in between where I can choose is this feedback I want to take action on in this exact way? Am I going to, like, look for more themes, take action in a different way? Or I'm gonna say this is who I am and I understand the trade -offs.

53:50I'm gonna do a better job of giving people context on the decisions I'm making and why I'm choosing these trade -offs. But actually, this is like part of how I want to operate and I'm gonna keep on operating. And then I think we just like give women weird, like, here's a hot take. I think we tell women things like you need to find a mentor and you need to find a sponsor. And that's just another set of hoops that we have that we tell women to jump through that I don't think we tell other parts of population to jump. Like, I think we tell women to unlock your future success. You've got to find somebody who has made all the same life decisions you have and who you look up to and relate to but also had an hour every month to like be an oracle to tell you all the things you do in your life.

54:40And it feels like yet another burden where you're like, I don't know how to do that. Like, I had the extreme generosity of so many wonderful leaders who helped me on my way but I did feel like I had this mentor. And for a while, I was just like, oh man, if I only had a mentor, I would know how to do all this stuff and it felt like another weight that I needed to carry, which I didn't. I had everything I needed. People were so kind and generous but I didn't recognize it that way because we talk about it differently. Thank you for sharing a lead. I wasn't planning to go in this direction but this is such an important advice for say young women that are just getting started in the say product, is there any advice you want to share to help them get to be the next army?

55:23Oh, I mean, number one, no next army. They're gonna be their next themselves. Like, that is maybe the most important thing is like, everyone will only tell you their own story. Like, that's all, that's all anyone can do. But the thing that I tell people is like, don't dampen who you are in your strengths, just continue expanding. Whenever you run into a problem, just add more to the things that you can do, the tools that you have, the way you can express yourself, just keep on adding and growing and don't shrink yourself ever. I love that. I wanna move to a different topic. Like, there's a few things I definitely want to touch on while we had our time together.

56:03One is that I hear, now this is gonna be a total tangent but I think it's really important and I'm excited to talk about it. I hear you're really good at setting goals and aligning incentives really well for teams. One of your colleagues told me, you're best in class at building product orgs and figuring out how product orgs can best work with other teams. I'm curious if there's any tricks or lessons you can share here about what you've learned about how to do this well. Yeah, I mean, I think one thing is to try to decouple all the things we're trying to do. Sometimes when you give people direction, you're like, okay, everybody just go get revenue or everybody just go get GMV.

56:41And it seems obvious because that's the thing you have to do, right, as a company. But there's only a few places where you're guaranteed to get that and it's measurable and like you can do it. And that leads to like what I call toddler -shoulding or soccer, where everybody just runs to the same surface or the same customer set or the same exact product where you can do this and it's measurable. And you end up like everyone's tripping on each other, everyone's trying, like nobody really gets contact on the ball. There's no like coordination. I have three kids, I've watched a lot of toddlers play soccer.

57:16Very good. It's a very fresh, very fresh metaphor. And instead, one of the things I like to do is just detangle, okay, as a company, let's think about our customers. Let's think about like all the things they're gonna need in their journey. Let's think about like how we will know, how we will match our own metrics to customer success. Let's play the entire field. Like what would it look like if we could detangle it so that every team we had internally had a different goal that ladders into like a goal framework that's actually the thing that we need to do to solve the full customer impact. And then you don't have the same swiveling problem.

57:55You have like plenty of room for people to like make progress on their length, they all know how they fit into the bigger picture and it just opens up a lot more growth for every team and it made sure that we're solving like the customer problem and the end. Is there an example that you could share to make this even more concrete from say, WhatsApp or Facebook or Instagram or anything like that where you can share some of these goals that you've like, oh, this worked out really well. I know it's probably private information and partly. That it might be trickier. I mean, maybe going back to like the GMV example, like maybe instead of motivating everyone on GMV, you motivate them on GMV per surface and you divide up the surfaces or maybe you motivate them on like actually different goals that underlie like when you think about GMV, what are the all the various engagements, customer engagements that lead to GMV, can you goal on those input metrics?

58:50Can you goal on a number of people who visit, number of people who convert, number of people who reorder, number, you know, et cetera, rather than goalings strictly on the output? So the core advice here is each team should have different goals that are kind of part of this metrics tree that ladder up to revenue, GMV, some like that. Whatever, yeah, the best matches, kind of the overall customer outcome that mirrors the company outcome as well. Got it. And there's always this balance between it's like actually the best metric versus like it's something they can move and understand and it's easy to watch and it's movable and things like, right?

59:24Yeah, and you have to have faith that it is actually connected to that output metric. Like you don't want to create a metric that's disconnected just to make a team feel good. It really does need to solve the customer problem and that's reflected in company's performance. But you can usually break it down into smaller pieces and I think that breaking down into smaller pieces and assigning those out to teams, that's really helpful. Is there anything else along these lines of things you've learned about helping teams work together and not play toddler soccer beyond having different goals that kind of all that are up to the one that really matters?

59:58I think there's value in also acknowledging that teams are going to have different incentives. Even inside a team like cross functional teams on the same pod or whatever are going to have different incentives, they're going to come in with different information, they're going to have disagreements and certainly like different teams inside a company or different pillars inside a company, different products. They're all going to have different incentives. And I think sometimes that feels like something is going wrong when people disagree. But actually that's just a sign of like healthy tension and knowledge.

1:00:34I think the thing that makes tension healthy is like one when you can acknowledge it and say yeah, of course there's tension. You're varying different information than I'm varying when we should be disagreeing. Like that's not, no one's a bad person. No one is like coming in with poor intent. Like everyone's doing the thing they are supposed to do and that is like a useful thing to do. And then you have to agree on an outcome that you're aiming for. Like if you disagree on like what the company outcome is or what the customer outcome is, then you've got some structural stuff you need to work out and normally you just have to escalate it.

1:01:05But if you agree on like we're all trying to move this metric by changing this customer experience, then all you're doing is like having a conversation about the best way to do that, using the different information that everyone is bringing. And I think that's super important to just have as a rational open explicit discussion as opposed to like trying to hide it or like pocket vetoing or something else because you assume that like when someone disagrees with you that I don't know, there's something emotional or wrong about it. But it's fascinating. Exactly. There's a piece of advice I once heard from the head of product that are being B1s where we're trying to find the reorg the business and try to figure out the best org and his advice and he something he realizes, like there's never the best org.

1:01:52There's just the best idea we have at the time with the, here's the things we know are not going to be optimal about it and let's build processes around that. I think that's my take on like leadership in general. Like especially as you get more senior, you can only make bad decisions. You know, like at some point, someone can bring you a problem, you can recognize a problem and you can like solve it. And there's like, so much happiness in solving that and like tying a bow around it. But as you get senior, the only problems you'll see are ones that are fundamentally unsolvable because otherwise someone would have solved it before they got to you, right?

1:02:27And so all you're doing is like choosing which branch of South optimal you're gonna put your name on and like describing like the principle that you're using and the context and the fact that you know it's South optimal but it's still the best thing. I think that's a really hard thing is just to recognize and acknowledge that like, increasing like people only see you do make South optimal decisions and then from a distance that are just like, why is that person only making bad decisions? And it's because those are your only options. All you can do is choose the least bad, the best possible for the time, for the problem that's consistent that makes sense with the framework and that's been like a tough thing to learn too.

1:03:10You said somewhere that as you get more senior, you get worse at everything because the problems get hurt. Yeah, it's a kind of dark view of leadership, you know, where you do, like yeah, you can't fully solve problems. You have to say know a lot. People are unhappy with you. I thought, you know, as you get more senior, everyone listens to you and they like you and you can just say a thing and then it happens and it's, that is not all accurate, you know, it really is most of the decisions you make are not gonna be perfect. And I think I'm all about just normalizing and acknowledging those hard truths because otherwise I feel like I'm failing.

1:03:50And if I just know that something is normal, that it's part of the job, then it's not me. It's just like, okay, this is a fact of the job that I have to get accustomed to if I want to have this kind of impact. And there's something about having the impact, like being able to serve the customer, being able to be part of this team, there's something about it that is so worthwhile that it's kind of worth being terrible at everything and being visibly terrible at everything because that is the best way that I have to like have that kind of impact. I think this is really important for early like ICPMs to hear because they see their CPO and founders making all these decisions and they're like, what the hell?

1:04:30That's terrible. Yeah, why are they doing this? And you know, what you're saying is just like, it's the best, there's options are limited. Yeah. And then nothing's gonna be optimal. Yeah, like no org is optimal. It's definitely what you can optimize for the people you have, you can optimize for the products you have, you can optimize for the customers you have, you can optimize for the technology you have. Those are like the options that you have, right? And in every one of those, you trade off everything else. And so you're just like, that you just have to know there's not gonna be a perfect for all of it works.

1:04:59And that's okay. Like that is part of the fun of it. That's part of getting to do this work is like continuing to improve. But it's hard. It's hard when people, it's hard. Especially when you want everyone to think you're so great at everything. This idea you mentioned as a senior person solving people's problems, feeling really good, reminds me, willing to this, there's this Harvard Business Review article from like the 70s or 80s or something about monkeys on your back. Have you read this or heard of this? Oh, yeah, yeah, I did. Where it's basically like as a manager, I was trying to get you off of your background with people's backs, right?

1:05:31Exactly. Like people come to you. I mean, here's my monkey please take it for me and feed it for me and take care of it. And your job is a leader is to keep the monkeys on people's backs and help them figure out how to feed this monkey themselves. So we're not. Very visceral. I want to talk about fair and your current role as a final section of our chat. First of all, what was it like starting something completely new after 15 years at Meta at the very various properties of Meta? Yeah, I mean, I was so lucky. I had such an amazing and amazing run at Meta. I got to work with amazing leaders, truly great products.

1:06:10And I came to fair for the same reason that I've been anywhere because I believe in the people and I believe in the mission. A lot of my family in India is in wholesale and local retail is so like, which is what fair does. And so it was also a very personal thing for me to do, I felt like I knew those customers, my huge fan of small businesses. I got to work with a bunch of them in previous jobs as well. I would say it like coming to fair, I mean, one of the things I always think about is that when you, especially as you are more senior, ramping on anywhere feels terrible because you expect to be as good at your new job as you were when you left your last job.

1:06:48But you forget that like at your last job, you were there for years. You had years to build up like the vocabulary and the cultural context and the network and the product knowledge. And then you're stepping in somewhere where you know none of that. But you have the same expectations of yourself of being able to like have an impact and improve things and help your team. And so I always just try to like remind myself it's gonna take time and what's most important is not for me to like try to come in and change everything immediately but to learn enough to be able to change things like 60 or 90 or 120 days in the future.

1:07:25And so that breathing helps a little bit. It was also really interesting because like fair wasn't entirely new to me. It was like a new business model. It was a whole new set of people. It was a whole new set of customer problems. And so like every interaction, I just like had to learn so much. I had to learn like who is this person? How do they see the world? What's the problem they're talking to me about? What's the customer impact? I think. So it was just like a dramatic like learning curve which I always really love. Maybe the last thing I'd say is like, again, I was super lucky at meta. I think I always had this maybe like deep seated insecurity that I maybe I was only good at meta.

1:08:06Like maybe there was something about that network of people and how great they were and how well I knew those products. And maybe I wouldn't be that successful somewhere without that scaffolding. And so leaving and being able to go somewhere else and like lead through change and a new place, a new customer set, a new business model. And that's also been really, really affirming for me, honestly. We have a lot of fans at Fair from the people I know there. And so, we're like things are going well, at least as far as I can tell. Something that I think is fair definitely has been a lot of companies have is a very product -minded visionary founder.

1:08:49And CPO's classically last like a year or two and then they're like, the sucks. The founder just tells me what to do. And I'm just the point of this role and so frustrating. I'm curious just what you've learned about, at least so far, about working with someone like that as a CPO and not just being this like middle person between what the founder wants to deal with the team is building. Yeah, I mean, this has been a sound so naive. But I literally didn't know how important it was for me to have such a great relationship with the CEO. Like, because I always had great relationships, you know, I was lucky I had great relationships with a lot of people at my previous jobs.

1:09:25I was like, oh, of course, like it's going to be fine. Everyone's going to let me do what I want, whatever. And I think I just got really lucky because Max is an amazing CEO who's also super growth mindset and super open to like talking over ideas even when they involve a lot of change. So like, you know, when I was onboarding, one of the things I always like to do is write like a list of observations. I go on and talk to people. I have one on one with like a lot of people and I write like, here's the themes that I'm hearing. Here's what's going well. Here's what's not going well. And that's like a way from you to both share what I'm seeing and like build some credibility and trust that way.

1:10:00But also people to give me feedback and be like, oh, you're wrong about this. Just so I can kind of correct my starting like people point of knowledge. And with Max, I also wrote like a parallel document of hot tapes. So like once a quarter or so for the first year, I write a document that was just like, hey, for sake of provocation, if we wanted to fundamentally change a few things, here's ideas on what we could fundamentally change. And Max, you know, very, very well could have just been like, hey, like, can you please just run product? Like, that's kind of you. Can you please do that? And instead he and the entire rest of the executive team were like, yeah, like let's step through these.

1:10:45Let's talk about which of these we should try. Let's talk about maybe context you don't have for why these don't make sense or why we don't do these. And that was such a gift, you know, because I was able to build like such a great relationship, like a trusting and complimentary relationship with Max and the rest of the executive team. And also they took seriously things that he really didn't have to that, you know, I have so much respect for that. And I think I got really lucky and just like finding a great CEO and executive. Is there anything you learn about this vetting process? Say you're a founder looking for a head product, a CPO, any advice for how they might vet this person to make sure they are a good fit in the last?

1:11:31What I would say to everyone else is like, make sure you just have a mind mel with a CEO. Before you decide to take the job, like spend a day together, like understand how they think and how they operate and whether you're going to work together in a way that feels a really high fidelity and like high trust and you're going to have room. I mean, I'm not a founder, like by any stretch. And so when founders asked me like, what should I look for in a head of product or CPO? I see something a little bit different, which is make sure that you really need the level of seniority that you are hiring. I think that a lot of founders say, I need a CPO, I need a VP product, I need someone who's really senior.

1:12:14When often like the founder has a bunch of the vision and knowledge and what they really need is somebody to build the products. They don't need somebody who's going to like scale the team or like build systems. Like they've got enough of that. And so that's a new part of building that complementary relationship where the founder and CEO know what they need. And on the CPO side, they know that they can mind meld enough with the CEO to actually have an impact. Last question. You started as an intern in the PR department, I think, at Metta. Oh, I started at 10. Actually, at 10. But okay. Amazing.

1:12:51And then you ended up leading Facebook ads and then WhatsApp and many other things. Can you show that story of just how you joined and how that happened? Well, I quit my last job. I knew that I knew that what I wanted to do was like be involved in all the wild stuff happening in Silicon Valley in the mid 2000s. So I quit my last job. I was trying to traveling around the world a little bit. I was living in New York. An extremely blissful lifestyle. I'm unemployed. I was doing whatever I wanted. It was some of the best time I've had in my life. And eventually I needed a job, you know, like you do.

1:13:31But it was 2007. And the only place I wanted to work was Facebook. Like, you could hear the way people talked about these products. You know, people would say, Facebook is more important than my car. It's like how I connect with the world. Right? Like, this is, it was such a magical product and you could hear that. And I knew some people at the company and that convinced one of them to introduce me to everyone of the offside. I made a trade. I said, I'll buy you a fancy coffee at Cooper Cafe in downtown Palo Alto. And in exchange, like just introduce me to everyone, everyone you know, taking around the office.

1:14:10And so everyone I met, I said, Hey, I'm on me. I really want to work here. I'll do whatever you need. And the only call I got back was from the head of PR, Brandy Barker, who said, look, we can't hire you. Like, we didn't interview you. We know I'm head cal. You're not really qualified. It was just like 10 reasons. I was like, okay, thank you for calling me. And she said, but we need a temp to review our press releases. So if you want to come and join a temp agency, we'll like tell them to send you here. And that's what I did. I moved out to California and I slept on people's couches and eventually they hired me full time.

1:14:47And I didn't let back. And now you're on Lenny's podcast. What are we on? It's interesting. This reminds me of another path to power rule from the Jeffrey Feffer podcast of networking is one of the best ways to acquire power in the world. It's interesting. The Mao that you just planted in my head anyway, just a plug for another episode also. Ami, is there anything else that you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round? Sometimes people ask me who are working in product. Like, what's the one thing they should do to be successful at product? And maybe the thing I would say is like, especially as an org scale, they're company scales, there's just a lot of distractions that get between you and the customer.

1:15:30And so the one thing that I would just advise everyone to do is just like, think about the customer. Like, talk to the customer, be an advocate for them. It's such a shortcut to everything else you need to do in order to be successful. But it's so easy for that to get like lost when you're thinking about, okay, how do I get alignment on my team? How do I figure out my roadmap? How do I like convince people to join the company? There's all these different things. But fundamentally, we're here to like create value for the customer. And the closer you can get to that, I always found myself the happiest because I'm building that feedback work with the customer, but also more successful.

1:16:08Well, let me actually follow up on this because this is really important and interesting. There's a PM part of my brain of like, okay, but we also got to move some metrics. And sometimes that metric isn't going to be moved by we need to do something specifically for the customer. But it's something that will help the business. Is there anything there of just that balance of like, we need to move this conversion metric versus like let's focus fully on what is the customer want and need? Any thoughts there? Yeah, I think often like, make things adversarial that are not actually adversarial. Like, it is very rare for customer value to be different than company value on a long enough time horizon.

1:16:47Like, there might be short term divergences, but really like to solve to create value for the customer, you got to be around as a business, you know, like otherwise you were creating zero value for the customer. And so I think really just starting with the like, what are the end goals and where where to stuff to verge in the very short term versus the medium term versus in the long term, it shouldn't. And really thinking about where you are in the journey and how to place that, that always helps me because our metrics should absolutely be about long term customer impact. It's very rare. If those aren't, and then you're still able to be successful.

1:17:25It was back to our chat about metrics and how to do those. Well, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Here we go. First question. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? The Year of Yes by Shonda Rhymes. I almost never read nonfiction. I love Shonda Rhymes made an exception for this one. It was very, it's about just saying yes to things and finding your voice when you do feel like you're sometimes the first or the only or the different. And what that feels like. And it was very life changing for me actually. That's an awesome pick. No one's recommended that when he had, reminds me of an episode of Matthew Dix who has a TED talk about saying yes to everything.

1:18:07He just says, Chris, say yes to everything and his life is incredibly interesting as a result. Next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed? I watched a lot of like witty workplace comedies from the mid -2000s. Like, so I watched a lot of like the office or 30 rock reruns. Things are just very comfortable that I already know everything. There's no surprises. I'm not great with new stuff right now. I hear they're bringing back the office. There's like a reboot happening. Oh really? Let's see. Let's see. Yeah, exactly. Is there a favorite product you've recently discovered that you love either digital, physical, anything?

1:18:47Maybe a physical product that I really like. I drink a lot of like coffee and tea through the day. And it's just like a, I don't know, like a calming ritual. And so I have like a fellow's electric kettle. That was my big work from home upgrade. So I have this, I have this life for kettle. I have like a pour over kit. I have these like lovely like colorful mugs that I like. Like that is actually just made my day to day. A lot better. It's just a little feeling of luxury. I love that. I think we have that same kettle. I also drink tea during every episode. Oh yeah. We know. So we're on the same page.

1:19:22Next question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often think about? Come back to share with friends or family and work or in life? It is definitely not in motto. I feel like I know people love motto and I'm so impressed. I'm like, you know, and you know what you are. You know what you need. I am not that person. But I have a piece of advice that someone gave me very early in my career. Actually, it was schmoth. He said, you can either have more energy or less ambition. And I was like, oh, that's a little harsh. But all start like really true. And I think about that. It's another of my Roman empires.

1:19:56I think about it all the time. Where I'm like, okay, if I want to have this kind of impact, I'm going to have to do the work. I'm going to have to try new things. I have to feel uncomfortable. And you know, sometimes I don't want to do those things. I don't want to do all that work. And then I can't be mad if I'm not having the impact. Like those two just have to go to get, I also have to get lucky in all these different ways. But like the two have to go together. And that's been just like a good governor a little bit of how I think about what I'm putting in. I love that quote. By the way, people don't know what you're talking about.

1:20:29When you talk about the Roman empires, there's a meme on TikTok where somebody said that every man thinks about the Roman Empire at least once a week. Right. And it's made me think about what are all the things I think about repeatedly without really having trigger or reason. And there's still a lot. I don't think about the Roman Empire though. That is not worth it. I also don't think about the Roman empires. Some things are wrong with me. Okay, final question. You can blame, you're calling bar for this question. He tells me that you are very good at jokes. You tell very good jokes. Do you have a joke that you want to share by the chance?

1:21:05I love jokes. There was a year at Facebook where I like, I kind of posted a joke of the leak to the company. And they're all terrible jokes. The company, yeah. Yeah, exactly. All right, here's my here's my favorite joke. Great. Why don't shark sea clowns? Why? Because it tastes funny. I'll tell you one more and you can choose which one. You can choose which one. All right. No, we're not cutting anything. What is zero same to the eight? What did the zero say to the eight? Something like us. Okay, now I don't know. Nice and belt. Nice what? Belt. Belt. Oh, I got it. What was your last thing to get?

1:21:52I get it. I get it. I'm going to tell you a joke. I just heard a stand up, stand up share. How do you turn an egg into a vegetable? I feel like if you put a letter on it, it'll turn into a vegetable name, but I can't think of the letter. I love that you're like really trying to analyze it. Yeah, yeah. Because I don't know if it's ever possible to actually get the answer. Okay, so how does a how do you turn an egg into a vegetable squash? That is definitely my level of joke. Definitely. It's, it's, they're like, this is for your kid. I'm going to do this joke. I mean, this was everything I hope it would be.

1:22:25I'm going to read again the goal you had for this podcast. I 100 % think we achieved it. To be as authentic as possible and show that people can be pretty messy and imperfect at times yet still be very successful. I think exactly this podcast and that are being thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Working folks finding a line if they want to reach out and learn more. And how can listeners be useful to you? Oh, thank you, Lenny. It's been such a pleasure. I, uh, I write, um, a blog on some stack at Amiborod .sumstack .com. It's called The Hard Parts and Grow. It's just about how even when you're working in great places with great people at great companies, sometimes things are hard and that's normal.

1:23:03And so you can find me there. I do the same. I cross -poster linked ends. I find me there. And how can people be helpful to me? I don't know. Just be by being great by being kind and nice and making the world slightly better. Yeah. I think that's what we can all do. I love that. And I will link to your sub -stack in the show notes so for people wanting to check it out. And I'll recommend it. I haven't done it yet, but I'm going to recommend it. For my sub -stack. Thank you, Lenny. So much. Such a fun conversation. I really enjoyed it. I loved it. I mean, thank you so much for being here. Bye, everyone.

1:23:33Bye. 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 leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lennyspotcast .com. See you in the next episode.