Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart)

0:00 You were early growth PM at Facebook, you were head of growth at Instagram, you're a VP of product at Instacart, you're now director of product management at YouTube, and I've heard that you've had a lot of impact on a lot of different cultures. I found this framework travels with me. It's got like these five components to it vision, skill, incentives. Resources, action plan, and you need all of those to have change. And then within those buckets, you've got to figure out what are the right levers that you need to pull, what are the things that are missing. You're really big on something you call understand work. What I call the anti-partern of what we want to do. Someone says, Hey, you know what? This would be great to build. And you go pull data to go justify why that would be great. Call that identify justify execute. First, you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on. So understand identifying You wrote this legendary blog post called How to Choose Where to Work and What to Work On. There's impact that you're really trying to draw. And the impact is only achievable by looking at set of variables related to the environment, set of variables related to your skills.

1:02 Today's guest is Bengali Kaba. Bengali was an early growth PM at Facebook where he was responsible for how people make friends on Facebook. He was head of growth at Instagram, where he helped scale the platform to over one billion users. He was also VP of product at Instacart. He's also worked with tons of amazing startups as a growth advisor, including Twitter. He's now director of product management at YouTube, where from what I hear he's already made a huge dent. This conversation went long because there was so much gold to be extracted from Bing Gali's head, and I could not stop myself from learning everything I could in our time together.

1:35 This episode is for anyone looking to level up their product and growth chops, or also just do better in your career. We dig into his framework for how to choose where to work and what to work on. The importance of spending time On something he called understand work. His adjacent user theory and how it can help you drive growth.

1:53 A bunch of advice for coaching, product managers, and managers of managers. Tons of lessons and stories from his time at Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. And so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that I bring you Bengali Kaaba.

2:15 Bangali, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. So many previous guests have recommended that I get you on this podcast, which I already knew.

2:29 Funny story, when I first launched this podcast Uh I asked you to be on it, you're like, sure. And I included you on my launch poster of all the guests that were gonna be on the podcast. And then you decided to take on uh very uh hard work. And jobs that kept you from having time. And so I'm really excited that we're finally doing this.

2:47 I'm glad we're finally making a reality. Sorry about that, Lenny. No sweat. You actually mentioned to me that uh somebody came up to you In Zurich and I was like, I'm excited for you on Lenny's podcast. Yeah, it was crazy. I was like, you know, visiting a team that I managed there. About to get back on the plane to go back to SFO. And just standing there, you know, doing some work, minding my business, and I get on a plane, I'm talking to a colleague, and someone comes up to me, I don't think I've never seen them before, and said,

3:12 Hey, sorry to interrupt you. I am so excited for your podcast with Lenny. Why I I can't wait for it. And then just walks away. And I was like, What is going on right now? Lenny is a big deal. I don't even know how this person knows me.

3:25 It's like and that's how I knew Lenny that I had to be scared with you because I was like People are coming up to me and telling me that they're excited. I was like, there is a lot of anticipation. And Lenny like the power of your reach now is like legit. That is hilarious. That's like a a new strategy for me to get people on the podcast just say they're gonna be on the podcast and then the pressure will start. Oh yeah. I mean totally.

3:46 Okay, so there's two broad topics that I wanna spend our time on today. I wanna talk about career advice and growth advice and they're both essentially growth oriented ones. Career growth. When is product growth? How does that sound? Sounds perfect.

3:58 This episode is brought to you by Wizard. Empowering product leaders to ideate and iterate faster than ever before with the power of AI. As a product manager, I often spend hours taking screenshots and then annotating them with feedback for my team. With Wizard, I can simply upload my screenshot, and Wizard's AI will turn them into a ful UI design that I can then take, make tweaks to, and then share with my teams in minutes. And when I want to get really creative and explore totally new ways to improve our product experience. I can use Wizard's AI to generate new design concepts from simple text prompts and turn them into interactive prototypes effortlessly.

4:37 There's a reason that over 2.6 million people have trusted Wizard to accelerate every phase of their product life cycle and speed up time to market. Developers can even export UI components to React and CSS to speed up their development. Wizard's Drag and Drop Editor is super easy to use, and you can collaborate in real time with your entire team, even your CEO and customer service teams can contribute. Unlock all of Wizard's game changing AI powered features and more with 25% off Wizard's Pro Annual Plan. Visit UIZ A R D dot IO slash Lenny and use code Lenny to check out today.

5:14 That's U I Z A R D. Dot Io slash Lady This episode is brought to you by Mercury. Mercury knows your financial operations are complex. It doesn't have to be this way.

5:27 I've been a super happy customer of Mercury for over a year now, and it's honestly hard to imagine a better online banking experience can exist. Most founders and finance teams have to couple together a patchwork of tools to reconcile transactions from different sources, work extra hard just to get a holistic view of cash flow and how it maps to company priorities, and struggle to get answers from platforms that all speak different languages. Mercury knows that there's an art to simplifying this complex patchwork. With new bill pay and accounting capabilities, you can pay bills faster, stay in control of companies spend. And speed up reconciliation.

6:04 The end result is the precision, control, and focus that startups need to transform how they operate. Apply in minutes at Mercury.com and join over 200,000 ambitious startups like mine that trust Mercury to get them to perform at their best. Mercury The Art of Simplified Finances. Mercury is a financial technology company not a bank, banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and involved Bank and Trust members FDIC. So let's maybe start with the career.

6:33 You wrote this legendary blog post called How to Choose Where to Work and What to Work On. that a few people have mentioned to me was really impactful in their career. And just to remind people of your career path, which still here in the intro, but just to give people a reason to listen to your advice on career. You were ear early growth PM at Facebook, you were head of growth at Instagram, you're a VP of product at Instacart. You worked with a ton of amazing startups as an advisor, including Twitter.

6:59 You're now director of product management at YouTube. This is a career that many people would dream of having. So let's just spend a little time on this topic of How to choose where to work and what to work on. And I know you kind of have this framework in this post, so maybe that's a good way to start of just kind of how you broadly think about. Where to work and what to work on.

7:17 Um yeah, that blog post that you're referring to actually came out of A personal struggle that I had. Um when I was at Facebook and trying to decide What my next move should be. Um I felt like I was kinda stuck. Felt like I was working harder but not getting

7:32 seeing incremental kind of benefit to the work that I was doing. And I knew that I needed a change, but emotionally I understood that. But I couldn't really have an objective way of thinking about it.

7:45 And so I really pushed myself to figure out like what is actually going on with my situation. How do I create a a way that I can rely on objectively to understand what's actually going on. And so I looked at that situation and I wrote that post and it's You know, the framework is really that there's impact that you're really trying to drive.

8:04 And that is the thing that is the most important. And the impact is only achievable by looking at two sets of kind of variables, a set of variables related to the environment. You set up variables related to your skills. And really breaking down each in understanding what's happening in the environment bit by bit and what's happening

8:23 With your skills. And Where are you hindered? structurally within the environment. Where are your skills kind of lacking and what do you have control over?

8:34 And using that whole kind of uh Hope that framework to the side. What makes the most sense. Why is impact the key output of this equation. I think for a lot of people that isn't necessarily

8:45 The intuitive Variable. that they think is important to focus on. Why is that so important in your experience? Yeah, I mean Yeah, it's it's

8:53 I didn't really know how to think about what the right thing to optimize for was initially. I realize that it's not compensation. Compensation is a reflection of the input. The impact that you have. Um and so

9:08 And You're leveling Like how love senior you are, how much scope you has. Uh is a derivative of how much impact you're driving.

9:16 The more impact you're driving at your company. More people feel like you can operate independently, you can drive real results, the more the scope they'll give you. So really impact became the thing to optimize for. It is the import and compensation becomes an output.

9:31 I think this is a really important point that is easy to miss and this is what I always tell people when they're looking for ways to get promoted and do well in companies just find ways to have more impact. Can you maybe give make it a even more concrete, like what does impact mean to you when you talk about impact? Yeah. I mean so impact can be a lot of things, but I think

9:50 For a product manager, for example, it's really One helping to get drive extreme clarity about where there is where the problems with the product, where there's opportunities. And what is the right focus and prioritization?

10:03 Right. Like that is actually a form of impact. Just creating the clarity that people need to understand. And believe in the investment. The reason why I name this and it feels a little counterintuitive is that The s more smear you get.

10:16 Тому There are questions of are we even investing in the right place? Like is this area, is this team, is this org? the right investment, right? And so being able to even create the clarity There is opportunity. It is the right thing to do. It is strategically and structurally important.

10:32 is a form of impact. And then actually delivering on that impact, showing that you can make progress Quickly. that you can deliver fast lane winds as Casey Winners would say, or medium and slow lane winds. And then actually showing that you can do this again and again.

10:47 Is how you actually validate the impact that you can see what where the opportunity is and what's going on. Awesome. Okay, so this equation is impact equals environment times skills. Can you talk a bit about how to Work on these two elements.

11:00 So the environment was the one to me that I think is most people overlook and I overlooked when I was first thinking about this. environment in this case, I think I kind of discreetly named a few things. One is your manager. Then there's the resources. So you know what kind of Team do you have?

11:19 Is your team staffed appropriately? Do you have the right Yeah. P L or whatever budget to get the things done that you need. Then there's a scope like what is in your remit versus not in your remit.

11:30 'Cause you know, if you don't have enough scope then you can't actually focus on the things that are most important. The tim itself. Yeah, just skills of all the skills of the team. Your compensation in some ways is part of the environment because if you're not compensated failure, you don't believe you are, then it's hard to feel like The work that you're doing is meaningful.

11:46 And then there is the last part is the company culture. So to what extent Is the culture a place where you feel supported, included, you feel like you can do your best work? And so you're really looking at each one of these variables, and I look at this every year. And I say

12:02 How is my manager doing with how do I think about my manager? How do I think about the resources I have to scope? the team, the conversation, the c company culture. And to what extent and I score her. Right. I score them as Yeah.

12:14 A one means it's kind of neutral. A two means that like I'm greatly, greatly benefiting from this situation. And like something even closer to zero is Oh much. I'm not in a good place. So you I start in the score.

12:27 Mm. quarter point increments point two five point five point seven five one Up to two. Every year and I really ask myself, you know, what is the state of each one of these and to what extent do I believe that they can and will change? Wow, I love this. Uh okay, so

12:43 This there's this formula impact equals environment times skills within environment. There's these five variables and they add up to ten if they each give you two points. That's so cool. Okay, so the five just to be clear. Uh your manager, the resources you have His team teams number three. Uh uh.

12:59 compensation and then the culture of the team. And then your scope. And then scope. Okay, got it. Oh, there's six. Okay, got it. So it's up to twelve. And then okay, so the idea here is You score each of these of how you're feeling.

13:14 how in the environment is contributing to the impact that you're delivering. And if one of these is not A great score, that's an opportunity to improve your impact. Which will improve improve your career. That's right. And it you have to really be honest, I think part of what

13:29 makes this framework so powerful for me at least is that It helps you to be honest around one of the things that are limiting your ability to have impact and for your skills to really land. And to what extent Do you believe that you can help to change or try to influence the change in the environment?

13:49 And because you know, no one wants to be in a place where there's a bad culture and the culture's a bad fit for you. But if you're not really thinking about it objectively and naming that. Or maybe it's the culture of the team that is not the right place for you. So it really forces you to evaluate what's going on around you that's limiting your impact. Is there an example from your career you could share or

14:08 One of these was not. where it needed to be in either help change it or Realize you had to get out of there. When I was actually at Facebook, I was running um the team that does all the people recommendations. And

14:21 It was a great team actually had a massive, massive Team I had thirty engineers I was working with. Fifteen. machine learning engineers and fifteen front end back end engineers. And so

14:33 Great team, incredible team, lot of resources. Ton of scope. In some ways it was too much scope. And to me that was problematic because I really needed to build out I felt like multiple teams to support

14:48 the work that we were doing or to break it up because it was I mean the pace, the velocity you can imagine at Facebook was incredible. I felt like between all of the work that we needed to do, the amount of engineering capacity that we had. And the amount that was on the table, I felt like I wasn't resourced.

15:06 In a way where I felt like I could actually deliver on all of the things that were necessary without burning myself out. And I felt like I was burning myself out and I couldn't really see the forest from the trees because I was just There's so much to do. And so that was a situation that I didn't really understand how

15:24 to navigate at that point in my career. And there were like two or three manager changes concurrently. Right. And so I didn't have a manager to lean on that I felt like I had a relationship with. So help me to navigate that space. Yeah.

15:36 scope was actually too much for what needed to be done and so I needed to find a better kind of fit for me. There's nothing wrong with the team. It was like a great learning environment, but it's like the confluence of scope. And manager.

15:49 And all happening at once just wasn't a good fit for me. A lot of people are in these situations where they Go they'd say they'd go through the score. They identify I have way too little scope, way too much scope, kinda like you described. And there's always this question of can I actually make a change or is this just not

16:05 Am I not in a position, especially I see product managers? There's just always a lot of like I can't actually change anything. What do you often tell people around this that just feel like there's nothing I can do here and my manager sucks. What am I gonna do? Well, I do think one of the things that I recognize is your manager, not all of these variables is creative. And

16:24 Manager is the most important variable in the environment. Because a great manager who is empathetic who is aware of what's going on, who It's a great communicator.

16:36 has the ability to move the chess pieces around and to like fix some of these for you either immediately or in time. Right. There's no one other than your manager who can really help to increase your scope. Or to help make sure that the team has the right pieces in place, or you know, dial in some of the issues that you might see in culture.

16:56 And so that's why people say, You know, they don't leave a job, they leave a manager. because the manager is the one that has a lot of the power to m fix a lot of these variables. And so really the question becomes like to what extent have you been able to clearly articulate what of the you know, and dispassionately articulate what are the challenges that you're having. you're seeing across some of these variables with your manager.

17:17 Help them too. tie it back to how it's impacting your work. Hence like See if they can help you to create a plan to like Or alleviate some of these things.

17:27 That's super interesting. Then your experience of the manager is kinda the core of a lot of these variables. Is there anything else? You recommend to people if their managers is not someone they like is it just like try to find a new manager. Or potentially leave. You're never gonna always like your manager, really. That's not the the goal isn't to like your manager. Ideally you

17:44 Respect them and they respect you. You feel like there's things that you can learn from them. Finding a new manager's always an option, but I guess sometimes the real question is Actually spending time trying to understand what is your manager optimizing. A lot of times I think there is Big disconnect between an I see

18:02 Focusing on their discrete area and try to Optimized for a local maxima. versus understanding okay my my manager's thinking about these things and this is how I fit in. And understanding maybe they have a gap to understanding why your area is important.

18:17 Or Maybe there's stuff that's on your manager's plate that is actually adjacent to your remit that if you understood they were optimizing for. you can take that on and you would find more synergies with what they're trying to do. I love that advice. Let's talk about the other side of this equation. We've talked about environment. Let's talk about skills.

18:33 What do you advise there for folks that want to improve their skills? The skills part is really, really big and it's something that requires like I think consistent you know, evolution of your own abilities and so yeah, I broke it out in that blog post or kind of communication Your ability to influence your leadership.

18:52 Strategic thinking and then execution, right? Like actually getting things done. The communication o of these again, not all of these are created equal. I think communication is the one that Tends to be the most impactful. Uh and you see this in a lot of ways, right? You see this for people who are poor executors, but incredible communicators.

19:10 They seem to continue to rise and rise because, like, you know, they can tell a great story, but when you look under the covers, there's nothing there, there's no substance there, right? So communication for better or for worse. is the mo one of the most important things. But building out your skills I think is really just kind of a It's an interesting time to be in product and to be in tech right now because you have so many more ways to build up your skills than what previously existed. Um so many incredible blog posts, right? Like your

19:37 podcasts and blogs, so many incredible people who come on here. who tell you things like, you know, how to go to market, how to think about B2B SaaS and metrics. So like you know re like listening to you, listen reading Ben Thompson, understanding his mental models. You know, if you go to look at Elena Verner or whomever, right? Like this

19:54 So many thought leaders who are out there. So Okay. Being a voracious reader. is really, really critical because it helps to build your toolkit, right? And you need arrows in your quiver. to really understand how to think about the right framework and the right men's model at the right time.

20:09 Um one thing I also tell people is people think about mentorship as like I have a mentor. Many is Lenny is my mentor, or John is my mentor. I tell them it's actually better to have a stable arm source. You wanna have three or four. And ideally what you do is you meet with each one of them once a month.

20:27 On a different Friday of the month. Right. And so you might have three or four people on every Friday you're meeting with someone different. The reason why this is so important is because if you many are mentored to me, You're busy one Friday and we only meet once a month. Now I don't have anyone to talk to for two months.

20:41 And you're going through a lot of things and you're not really able to bounce ideas or get build skills or learn how to influence others. But if you have three or four mentors If you know, y you have someone different to talk to every week and if one or two of them cancel, you still have two people to talk to them. Right, and you still can continue to grow and to to build.

21:00 You're thinking. So That's something I always recommend. And then the last thing I actually talk about is When it comes to execution, I think people Don't especially product managers don't do enough of watching and learning from others. Does an art and a science department management?

21:17 And in a lot of ways I come from a background of education and in a lot of ways In product management. very similar, like you wanna watch how other people Hone the craft, how they deliver, how they lead teams. And kind of steal things from them, like figure out, Whoa wow.

21:32 And he did this really, really well when he was at Airbnb and it was really incredible. I'm gonna take that. I'm gonna take how he runs that team or how he landed that framework. Or how he communicated this message. and note it and use it in my own toolkit later on. And so if you're really a student of product, you can't just be a student of theory, you've got to be a student of practice too.

21:51 meaning you're going and you're looking, you're like, Hey, I'd love to sit in your team meetings, can I come watch? Right, or your PM meetings or your leadership meetings. And you really like doing that for the sake of learning is really, really incredible. And that's some of the ways I talk about building skills. Is there an example of that ladder? Lesson that you

22:07 Learn from someone that comes to mind. Of s watching someone and like, Oh, I'm gonna use I'm gonna do that. Earlier in my career when I first got to Instagram um I wasn't the first PM insta growth beyond, but I was one of the first And um a guy who was there before me his name was George Lee, he actually stood up the growth team and

22:28 end up leaving six months right after I joined. But like I watched George was like a really good Listen up. Yeah, just the really incredible ability to be in a room. And hear what was going on to recast it back and make sure everyone

22:42 Felt good about where we were and what was being said and the path forward. And really crystallizing There are the action items and up and also like how people felt about what the next steps were. And walking out of that meeting it felt like he always had

22:59 Buy-in and clarity? It was like helpful to build trust. You can see him almost like winning trust. in every like in every moment of that meeting And that was something that I like really kind of admired and learned and

23:13 Kind of sort to emulate. Uh later on in my career. That's an awesome example. It comes back to the skill of communication that you talked about, just the power of becoming really good at that. And this is such a simple skill you just described is just recapping. Here's what we talked about. Here's what we're gonna do. Here's the decisions we made. There's action items. It's like not actually difficult. It's just Yeah, but like was what was magical about the way he did it was like he would name people and their contributions and show how

23:37 All of this came together into What is the path forward, you know? That's amazing. It's the communication, but it's also the other side. It's the other coin, the side of communication, which is listening to figure out how you communicate back to others. So good. Following up on something else you talked about, which is mentors, any time someone talks about finding mentors, everyone's always, How do I find a mentor?

23:57 Well, how do you what advice do you share with folks of like how to find a mentor to help you? Say once a week. Or once a month. where I see people find the most success is they Ask they tell people what they're

24:09 working on or what challenges they had. And they say you know someone who I might be able to learn from who has done this or has good thinking about this recently. Right? So instead of just going and someone saying, Hey, can you be a mentor? So coming to me and say, Hey Bengali. I'm actually trying to figure out how do I change the way this team operates because we need to go from this model to that model.

24:30 But here are some of the challenges. So do you know someone who's actually really good at changing the way teams work. we're really good at communicating a new vision. I I can talk to

24:40 And so that I think is really important because What you do is you're creating a seed. And the seed is You know, there's like a triad and you have the person who's looking for the mentor, you have the recommendor.

24:53 The recommender and then you have the the Central mentor. And the recommended is basically saying here, there's common purpose between the two of you. And I can see it and I think this is important. So I want you all to come together. Right, and that triading in that moment.

25:07 creates a higher affinity, highly likelihood that the person who needs the help and the person who you're connecting them with or going to see mutual benefit from one. Right. And I think um I I find that like just doing that and seeing that and being really Focus on what the opportunity or the challenge is. tends to lead to better connections as opposed to just reaching out and saying, Hey, I like your style, will you be a better time?

25:30 So essentially share with folks you trust. Here's what I'm working on. See if they recommend someone. that could help you with that specific skill versus assuming that there's this person that can help you with the skill. That's right. I love it.

25:42 Going back to your advice on career Something that You wrote about in your post plus folks have told me you're really big on is this something you call understand work? Does that ring a bell?

25:53 Yes. Okay. Talk about that and why that's important. I certainly cannot take credit for understand work. This is a part of a like an old Facebook framework. Understand, identify, execute what I probably will say is I I I guess I've been

26:07 The shepherd for Understand Work and other companies. Like I've taken it from My time at Facebook and really institute are it regularly at Instagram, then at Instacart and When I worked helped with Twitter now at YouTube. Um, the way I like to talk about it with my teams is

26:21 that you know, first I tell a story actually. And the story is is You know. Um we've all had a moment where we have worked on something with the team. Super excited. Finally launches and we go out to dinner and we celebrate. And you know, we're celebrating everyone's juiced.

26:36 Um, you know, it's a great night. You go back to the office the next day. And you look at the metrics and the metrics of flat. And everyone's a little bummed, like why did this Why are the metrics flat? What happened we work so? And ultimately when you unpack it, you realize that you built something that you thought was gonna be a good

26:54 Idea. But you really didn't understand a lot of key components of what people really needed, what pain points really existed. Or what were the alternatives and what the real value of those alternatives were in the market. or exactly how like the product needed to work, what the flywheel or what the experience needed to be.

27:13 And so that is what I call the anti pattern of what we want to do, and I call that identify, justify, execute. Right. Well, you identify something. Someone says, Hey, you know what? This would be a great debt and you identify that. And then you go pull data to go justify why that would be great to build. And then you sink an ungodly amount of time working on it.

27:33 In order to make it work, but it ultimately doesn't succeed. And that is the anti pattern to what is kind of like the Facebook kind of way of thinking, which is understand, identify, execute. Right? So first you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on. So when we talk about understand work. There's a few ways to think about it. One is

27:52 It is an in intentional affordance. In your execution. to do the work that helps you to de risk a project and to learn what's going on. When I say an intentional affordance meaning You put it down, like Lenny is gonna work on this thing.

28:08 Right, Lenny as a product manager is gonna write a strategy. Janice as a designer is gonna design a prototype. Like whatever the thing is, and you put it down as actual and item. As opposed to assuming it's gonna happen in the background. We don't make an affordance for understand work, then the work doesn't get done. And everyone's just sprinting on execution.

28:27 And so it's a plan. Uh intentional time. to the team's bandwidth. To figure out. What is it that we need to do to understand what's happening? And so

28:36 You know, for example with At Instagram we get a lot of understand work of What makes for a good connection? Like how do we wanna think about that? How do we wanna make sure that we're actually growing a craft A social graph that makes sense. And so

28:49 I might work with data science to do understand work. to like pull a funnel and look at the different types Of connections. For different types of users. And make it make sense, right?

29:00 And engineering might do understand work to instrument logging. So make sure that we have the data that we need. In order to tell the story. And so you're doing this understand work. So basically better understanding gaps and knowledge.

29:14 What's also really interesting is that understand work helps you to clarify what is a root cause. Like or what is a job to be done, or like And what is the right use case? And because The team adopts this mentality.

29:29 It becomes this forcing function for execution. So when someone says, You know what we should build, we should build this. You have a team that's enabled and empower to say That's a good idea, but we don't actually understand These three things.

29:44 before we start working on that. So maybe we should do understand work. So make sure that that is actually the right idea. Right. And so what you end up getting by embracing this concept is two things. You get Parallel paths of work.

29:58 So every sprint, let's say you do a three week sprint or a three month roadmap. You're executing on the things that you have a lot of conviction around. And you're also doing understand work in parallel. And so at the end of the sprint. You have learnings from what you executed.

30:13 Wow, that test or that launch worked really well. We should double down. Oh wow, that Tesco launch didn't work. Here's how we should pair it. And you have insights from the understand work. And you use both of those.

30:25 To plan the next sprint or roadmap. Right. And so because you have a Hello Pass. You end up getting this velocity multiplier over time.

30:35 Right. So The next sprint and the third sprint and the fourth sprint, every subsequent sprint. You de-rist new ideas. You've gotten more clarity, and so you do more execution, you do better execution. And you move faster and

30:48 The things you ship you have a higher win rate on the things you ship. Right, and s you know, you're shi' shipping when I remember When I left Instagram this was many years ago, but we had like had fifteen teams and We might have been running twelve to twenty experiments a quarter a team.

31:04 And I would say probably sixty to seventy percent of them were like Positive. And shippable. Which is incredible. I mean you think about multiple magnitude of that. Um, and it was because we were so effective at de risking and understanding what was going on.

31:17 This is really interesting. I imagine many people listening are like we we put time into understanding. We run experiments. We write strategy docs. We do the research. What is it that you think people are Where do you think they're missing? Is it that you dedicate people's

31:32 Like actual time, like you're just doing understand work instead of building a new thing. For this next sprint, you're just gonna be Telling us. what the problem here or opportunity is. Like how do you actually operationalize this versus just what people probably already do, which is Use the research, data dives.

31:47 What I found is a couple of things. One is When your team does not fully understand a problem space. The balance of work. Tends to be higher like I think when I started at YouTube we were doing sixty percent execution, forty percent understand work.

32:06 Right. And over time as we understand more and more The mix. Shifts. Now my teams are probably doing eighty percent execution, twenty to Or eighty eighty five percent, twenty to fifteen percent understanding. And so it's not just about writing a strategy, it's about saying

32:22 Okay, if we have these themes of stuff that we want to work on. What do we know with confidence because the data tell us? And what do we need to understand because we don't have the data, we don't have the research, we don't have the insights. And really being honest with yourselves around Like what are the things that are

32:41 Low to medium effort. But hi. likelihood of being impactful because you have the data. What are the things that you or interested in perhaps too many, but bec because you're missing something, you're missing

32:53 research or feedback from users or data or some insights or strategy You should actually say, I'm going to go do this before I do something else. Right. Um You know, an example of this is one of my teams Um, does ships paid virtual goods in the live experience on YouTube.

33:11 And That's a really, really important and hard problem series. And when I joined, we didn't really fully understand the whole live ecosystem, like how we lived in that live ecosystem. How our products work. where the biggest opportunity was. So

33:25 the first most important piece of understanding work was instead of shipping Iterations to the current product. We needed to actually get the funnel. What was happening. Right.

33:34 What's happening with How many people are watching live every day? How many people are clicking through? How many people are seeing our experience? How many people actually buying it? We didn't really fully have the experience mapped out. And To understand where were the gaps.

33:49 Where are the problem places in? Like where should we be focusing? And so no, we had to do that. And that was understand work from multiple people, for multiple teams. We had to do On the engineering side, we need a data science as analysis. Need the PM to go and dog food the experiment to figure out what was broken. Like all of that was intentional and affordance on our roadmaps.

34:07 What's interesting about this is that this is very counterintuitive to how people would probably approach Hey, we need to ex speed up execution. We need to speed up growth. We need to ship more More execute, go faster, do more. And what you're saying is you find

34:21 The Impact. Comes from Actually slow down how much we're doing and spend more time understanding two

34:29 Execute more intelligently. Sorry, slow down and speed up. Fascinating. Because it's interesting, uh I have a bunch of questions that emerged out of folks that you've worked with, and many of them Around how you turn a culture around.

34:42 Speed things up. And drive growth and really Meaningful way. And it sounds like this is one of your

34:48 uh key strategies is get people to spend more time understanding before Diving into a bunch of stuff. It does sound counterintuitive, but if you actually think about it What is a better outcome? Is a better outcome to

34:59 Just ship more faster. Now But most of the things are unimpactful. Right? Or was it? A better outcome to ship.

35:08 Fewer things. But really work on making sure that you're shipping them in the best way. and de risking a lot of other things so that A year later, your win rate's higher and your velocity's higher. Yeah, I think counterintuitive is the wrong word. It's m I think it like makes sense. I think it's just no one does this.

35:24 Usually everyone's like move faster. We need more ship more experiments. Well, I mean, this is the this is the irony of growth is people think growth is over overnight success. And it's not, right? It is A lot of short wins. In short term.

35:39 execution for a longer term gain and really understanding got a lot of short terms chores towards the longer term outcomes. So that people can take away this Lesson. Can you help people understand just when you say understand work? Like what does that look like generally? Is it

35:57 Just uh dedicated time to dive into data and answer a bunch of questions you've Santum is it Uh running experiments still test hypotheses. Like what does that usually look like when you're here, let's do forty percent understand work. The understand work sometimes comes from me, but most often comes from the teams themselves.

36:16 And under every function can do and should be doing understand work at some point. Right. And so It really depends on what the function is. So for An engineer. It could be looking at the code and saying, Okay, we want to

36:30 improve this, I need to Do you understand what to understand? Do we need to refactor this code and how scalable is it? And what do we need to do to make sure that we can execute fast and make sure that we're not gonna have a lot of starting stops. That could be understandable. It could be actually instrumenting the data. and making sure that we actually have full visibility into what's going on.

36:50 Data science, like we work a lot with data science doing activation metrics and like understand proxy metrics, right? Like That's understandable, but it'cause it helps us to figure out what we need to build and and where to focus. Um, you know, for product management. Sometimes understand work is Figuring out the partnership strategy.

37:10 ahead of like actually launching the product because you need to go figure out how the pieces are gonna come together. And so it really just depends on what The function is but When I say it should be coming from the bottoms up, what I mean is I encourage the team when we

37:25 Plan a sprint or plan a roadmap. To ask. or question to like identify the key themes that they need to work on. And when they ask a question on a key theme, also asked What else do we need to understand to make this happen?

37:38 And to in that planning session to make sure that you're including cross functional partners. So it's not just product. Not just product design and Data science and injury. You also include go to market. You also include marketing. Because if you're not

37:52 inclusive then you don't really understand what the issues are. My PM brain is uh afraid of uh creating too much understand work. And nothing getting done. How do you find that balance of we're just sitting we're gonna be understanding

38:05 For hours and days and weeks and months and Not shipping much. How do you how do you design it? I told I tell them you have to ship. I mean you always have to ship, right? Like it's It's I sometimes I give them Sometimes it's helpful, especially early on, because it is a it takes a while for people to get their head around why this is so critical.

38:24 I say, you know. We should choose sometimes I'll give them guidance. We should choose three to four understand projects that are gonna really help us. This this roadmap. and figure out what they are.

38:37 Right. So Choose your top three or four and then let's talk about it and I'll give them guidance. Or I'll say you know figure out Um There should always be some execution. So initially

38:50 You know, you're looking for low effort, high impact things to execute against. Right. So Build a portfolio of work to do every sprint or every roadmap. Some of which should be low effort, high impact, some of which should be medium effort, high impact. And sometimes understand work actually looks like doing a cheap test.

39:07 doing a task that's gonna help us to learn as fast as possible. That we think is like a good enough experience. that can inform us, right? And so identifying ways to do that. And so it's really about just managing expectations and helping people to be clear that Um the goal is to ship product, but you wanna ship the things that you have more confidence and understanding.

39:28 Rush it up. So I think a big takeaway here is if you want to Have more impact. Move faster. try to spend a little more time understanding

39:37 the problems you're going after in the opportunity space. But like I'll give you an a a very tactical example is when I joined Instagram in January twenty Sixteen Believe it or not.

39:48 the onboarding the like the sign up flow at Instagram had literally no logging to it. It had logging of how many people started and how many people ended. And I joined in January and was like we had to write a roadmap. And so The roadmap looked like this.

40:03 Okay, we know this amount at the top of the funnel and this amount at the bottom of the funnel, and there is eight steps in the funnel. And we don't know what is going on. Right. So the first bit of understand work was We needed to do Um like the instrumentation.

40:16 of like that funnel as fast as possible. to get the data to figure out where the drops were happening and what to fix. But W because we knew of what was happening at the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel.

40:28 We can go and play around with the experience. And see what was broken. So we ran a bunch of tests of stuff that was obviously broken to see What went What would improve? Right?

40:38 Um and so it was like a mix. And so what we did we Set up time where we did The beginning of like First couple of weeks. Add logging.

40:45 Ship it to code. reevaluate in the middle of the corner, look at the full funnel, and then add more things that we can do later on. Once we got that. But like in order to get that done, that involved understand work with growth marketing to figure out what were the schema for the instrumentation. Right, the engineering to actually do that locking, right? Data science to like pull together phones and dashboards. All of that had to come together all at one point at one time.

41:07 I really like just this concept of calling it understand work. I think that alone is a powerful tool is we're gonna spend more time on understand work. Because people it feels like it gives meaning to stuff that otherwise people would brush aside. Right. Where it's just like, No, no, we let's just ship stuff. Let's just try stuff. Let's just Test the step. We'll see what happens. That's right.

41:26 Is there anything else you have seen and often do To help. A team you join. Move faster and grow Bigger.

41:35 Uh And I've heard that you've had a lot of impact on a lot of different cultures. So I'm curious if there's anything else that is really effective. I found myself in a a bunch of interesting situations where I had to come in and help improve cultures or change cultures around teams. I found this framework, I don't even actually remember where I got it from, but it like it travels from computer to computer with me.

41:55 It's in it. And it's uh you know called managing complex change. I actually think I got it from my business school or something. And it's really interesting. It's got like these five components to it. Um you know this vision. Skills

42:08 In San Terror. resources Action plan. You need all of those. So have change.

42:15 Right. Like you need Team needs that vision, they need to have the skills. They need hair. The right incentives. Sometimes some teams are incentivized to do some things versus others.

42:24 You have the right resources in the right places, and you need to have a clear action plan. And what I love about this framework is is if you can visualize it and maybe you can share it with your um Yeah, we'll put it up on the screen on YouTube so folks can see what you're talking about. It basically what it does is it shows where if you're missing any one component, you get different outcomes, right? So if you're missing the vision component

42:46 You end up in a state of confusion. Or if you're missing the incentives you end up in a state of resistance because people aren't understandably do right. Or if you're missing an action plan, you end up in a state of False start. So I use this and I think about this a lot actually because

43:03 I You know, when you come in as a leader, as a someone who supposed to influence change, you have to really observe what's happening. And figure out w what are the challenges, what like anecdotally and what are you observing. And then I figure out like where I can plug in. And what

43:19 I can do to make the teams better. And what I tend to find is You know, moving from the right side to the left side of this, like action plans are easier to institute. Right. So Yeah. If I see a team that's like Struggling to execute.

43:31 I wonder do they have the right type of PRD framework? Are they communicating well? Do they have the right type of team meeting structures? Those are like kind of lower hanging fruits. Цела харчу візин and skills. It will come in time.

43:43 But what I also have done over the course of my career is I've Built just like um This duck. of that comes with me of like

43:52 Different like how to different skills then. Like what are different skills, what are different frameworks, how do we think about it? To help up level teams fast. Because I find that sometimes you walk in and not everyone is grounded in the same mental models or concepts. Um yeah, one example of this um I talk about a lot is

44:10 Yeah, Instagram and Instagram have just this fantastic culture of thinking about how do we ship high high quality product Right, and what does product craft mean? And so that is something that you know, I came, I came to YouTube and my teams particularly, they didn't have a mental model for product. So I found myself talking into an echo chamber in some way. So I had to build

44:31 Back. That like showed, okay, here's how I think about Crycraft. Here's a framework for it. Here's how I think about like all of these different things. And so now we have a shared language.

44:41 Shared communication. for and and a and a repository of skills that we're gonna build. So I'm looking at this image that uh we'll have up. So in this case

44:51 Their skills weren't necessarily there. Which in this framework leads to anxiety. And so what I'm hearing is essentially you come into a team You're like, what am I feeling? Is it confusion? Frustration.

45:01 the wrong thing and that kinda tells you which of these buckets to spend time on. That's right. And then within those buckets you've gotta figure out what are the right levers that you need to pull, what are the things that are missing? How do you really focus and like where do you kind of like spend your time?

45:16 So interesting. I love that you uh this image is just like this very grainy. So screenshot from some old McKinsey deck or something. I love it. So you have this thing, you have this deck. You just come in with all these tools in your tool belt. Is there anything else in that

45:32 list of things that you bring with you to help change culture and How teams. Um I think you know one thing I think about a bunch is I come from my background's a little bit different, um than a traditional tech executive. Uh there was actually three phases to my career. I was in education for six years.

45:51 Hart in University D C Um, and then was a dean of a boarding school in Switzerland, which is like a little bit of a plot twist. Yeah, I went to business school and I worked on Wall Street for a bit and then I left my job on Wall Street. quit and started a startup. Startup was a glorious failure, as many startups are.

46:06 But you know, it was like a very non traditional path towards tech. And you know, I think a lot of my time in these other industries actually shapes the way I think about Products. Product management. And actually changing teams and like

46:19 building scenes. And what I mean by that is like, you know, um You know. I think there's a lot of similarities between education and product management.

46:29 Believe it or not. You know, when I Where is Interviewing for my first set of jobs in tech. Recruiters would say to me

46:36 How does your background relate? Like I don't really see it. And I would tell them, you know, when I was in education I would walk into a classroom of twenty four seven year olds. And those kids owe me nothing. And I needed the only way I could be successful or impactful is I needed to be able to

46:55 Be a strong communicator. I needed to be able to have a clear vision of what was going on. I needed to be able to influence them. in a believable way, such that they would Get on board with what needed to be done for two hundred and seventy days of the year.

47:08 It's like You know, when you walk into a room as a product manager, peo engineers, designers Researchers go to market. Nobody owes you anything. And the only thing that you're gonna do in order to be successful is you need to be a strong communicator. have a clear vision of what's going on, and you need to be able to influence them.

47:23 To give the things together what what matters, right? Very similar skill set, just different domain experts. And so because of that, right, like I've really adopted a mindset of like how do I coach my teams? How do I Enable them because it's really about the sum of the parts.

47:39 versus me being a top down leader saying you have to do this and you have to do that. So I think a lot about that. In both approach. And um, you know. And the processes that we create.

47:51 And you know to give you a couple classic uh examples of this. Um, there's two things I want to call out. One is You know, there's actually this education Uh framework. It's called Bloom's Taconomy. It's I think it's changed over time, but

48:05 When I learned it It's basically a pyramid. The pyramid was Bloom tech signally describes what's their different levels or order of critical thinking you need in order to be

48:16 A master of something. And at the bottom of the parrot was was knowledge and then it's comprehension. And then application analysis. Synthesis in evaluation. Right. And so

48:27 Going up the pyramid means it's higher order thinking. And I think about that a lot and trying to understand where where are my teams struggling? Do they have the core knowledge that they need? Do they understand it, but they can't apply it? Are they applying it? Were they not able to?

48:41 Yeah. To analyze it across different business segments. Right, and you can use this framework. Not only with the I C PMs and the teams themselves, but also for your managers, like What what is breaking down?

48:53 And then using that and attaching that to like the skills that we want to build to figure out how do you fill in those gaps. Right. And it really is a grounding for me, a a grounding mental model. for how do you build teams that are actually effective, how do you meet people where they are. as opposed to just saying, Hey, we need to figure this out. I I find that too often in tech and also in product.

49:13 People ask. you know, to figure things out, but not giving the support to get there. And there's no way to really like um to really uh connect the dots for them. Amazing. I am pulling up the bloom blooms taxonomy.

49:24 So essentially If you see a PM Struggling. What you try to do is figure out which of these things do they not have. How are you not supporting them? How can you support them better? So it could be they don't have the skills, they don't have the understanding.

49:37 What are some of the other things that often you find that maybe hinder a product manager's success? A lot of times it's they might have the understanding, but they haven't had a chance to apply it to a variety of different scenarios or haven't seen it applied to multiple scenarios. And so oftentimes you might understand a concept like machine learning.

49:55 But you haven't actually. Worked on it. in multiple against multiple scenarios. So you maybe have one way of doing it that doesn't make sense. And you need to like have two or three. You don't even know that two or three ways of doing it. Like that is

50:09 like often a common failure point, right? Or It's maybe you know how to apply it, but you can't synthesize why this thing that you're doing actually matters for the business context, right? Like oftentimes that becomes like a challenge with managers. Like they know what to do, but they don't understand how to tie it back to the business context.

50:27 An overall strategy needs. And so where to prioritize. Right and so What what I find is that like You know, when you're trying to manage managers, you're really trying to live the top of the pyramid.

50:38 You are responsible manager is responsible for basically owning that pyramid. for all of the areas that they operate, but they need to be able to live at the top of the pyramid. Across all they need to be able to synthesize and evaluate what's happening. For each product team that they own. In order to kind of make the bigger picture connections.

50:56 By the way, I love your metaphor of product managers or like this group of seven year olds where you have to Learn. Uh Influence communicate. It's great. Yeah. I mean it is they're not like a group of seven year olds, but I think it's actually it's Yeah, the same skills. The same skills, uh same skills. I mean

51:12 I I think it's true. Like I found it actually significantly harder for me to get twenty-four-seven year olds to believe in what I was doing than to walk into a room with Kevin Sistram and my creeder. And explain to them what's the strategy for growing the next hundred million users on on Instagram. Like these are very logical adults. who, you know, can reason with you and like you got a classroom of kids. It's not quite the same, so

51:33 Um, you know, those skills are really critical. I love that. I definitely want to ask about your Instagram days. Is there anything else in this bucket of wisdom of Uh you kind of talked about Things you've learned about how to manage product managers.

51:46 And managers and managers. Is there anything else there that might be helpful to folks that you've learned? One thing They also think about a lot. Yeah, I don't know if this is just A me thing, but like I think about

51:56 PM as a Team sport. Right. It's leading product teams is really about being a coach and helping other people to like kind of see what their role is on the team and to maximize them.

52:10 People talk a lot about product as a you know, you're the CEO and I don't actually fully believe that analogy. You know. If you think about it as a team sport. There's a few things that kind of shake out. One is not everyone's gonna be a star player.

52:24 But not everyone needs to be a LeBron James or Cobby Bryant, right? You need You need role players, you need really strong role players, you need people who feel valued in their role. You need to understand.

52:35 how to groom those role players and how to make sure that they Have the right seat at the table on the right. And so I think it's Yes, you're the conductor of the orchestra, but you're really more than that. You're really like kind of the coach of the team. Another thing I think about a lot

52:48 Is not have a good friend who's a a college basketball coach, and he taught me about kind of this idea of your coaching tree. I mean, this is a really important concept, especially in college basketball. It's like You as a head coach

53:04 You take a lot of pride in who were your assistants. Who's your first assistant, the second assistant, the third assistant. And where do they go on to be head coaches? And what legacy do they have because you were able to install a bit in them. Right. And so The coaching tree of a Mike Sheshewski, the coaching tree of a John Calpari

53:21 These like the steam coaches not because of what not only because of what they've done, but because of The tree that they've built. Right. I like to think about this as well,'cause I think it's really important for product leaders. Think about what is there like leadership tree?

53:33 Like who have you Help to build up and help to grow. Mm Help to get to their next law. Right.

53:42 So I think about this a lot. You know, I have people who I've worked with who are running growth as straight or the CPO at Chi for Now running stories on Instagram that were all my team in the earlier days. And And

53:54 you know, their success is my success. I'm proud for them, right? I'm happy for them. I think it kind of like reinforces this mentality, it's your responsibility to coach people up to greatness. So what I'm hearing is you've uh put a lot of value In your team on them coaching.

54:09 Folks. Whether they're managers or even I Cs. is helping them understand that it's important to Coach folks on their team. And

54:18 uh help them develop. That it's part of your job, essentially. That's part of your job. I mean, you're trying to build a repository of skills and a p repository of like knowledge and of seeing velocity and the only way you can do that is everyone is like So rising tide has to lift all boats. Amazing. And interestingly, that probably teaches you how to do your job better because you're in teaching you actually learn.

54:38 Things a lot better. That's right. And it forces you to like figure out how can you get things off of your plate. So that you can go work on bigger things. Yeah. And how good does it feel when folks that you used to manage and go on to do? Bigger and better things. It's great.

54:52 I wanna talk a little bit about growth uh within YouTube. I heard that You you haven't been there for that long. And apparently you've already Two extra, three extra more. S some something important within YouTube. I don't know exactly the details. And people are very impressed with the impact you've already had. And apparently a lot of the success there and other places is how you think about growth.

55:13 Through flywheels. You always look for the flywheel that helps. drive growth. Can you just talk about either at YouTube? Ideally you two, whatever you can share,'cause that's pretty impressive, especially for a company that scale that you're making so much impact. Or other places just how you think about

55:27 White wheels and growth. Um well very generous of you, I wouldn't say. Look, we've done some really Good work. Some good work so far on YouTube. And it's been you know a journey. I think

55:38 I I do I do think a lot about fly rills. I think it's actually A lot of growth is really understanding Yeah.

55:48 What is the value profit all of the different Points of the experience. Especially if you have a multi sided marketplace, right? Like a multi side marketplace For YouTube is like, you know, the creator. what the creator is trying to achieve both from a

56:01 engagement perspective, but also for me from monetization perspective. And then for the viewer or the purchaser, like you know, where They had like what are they trying to do? And where are they missing the opportunity? I can't really go into specifics a bunch with you two, but I what I'm saying is this is that like

56:18 You know, one thing that I always do when I come in is I Trying to push my teams to really dog food products. In their Adjacent user state, if you will. Right. Um

56:30 Often A product that you and I use that we've been using for years. Isn't actually the product That we're building

56:40 for for other people. Like a power user. Who's using a product? has so m there's so much history and so much informed knowledge on how that product And

56:50 for that product to actually create a great experience for you. That if you were to go and create a new Gmail account and look at YouTube today. I guarantee you it's a completely different and significantly worse experience. Right. And

57:04 There's a lot of Obvious opportunities missed, especially with what is the flywheel on why things are working or not working. If you don't actually go and use things in a new state. Right. And an example of this when I talk about YouTube is A lot of the YouTube graph

57:19 For searching stuff is based on what have you watched in the past. So if you go on searching, search history. It's going to be about like well, what have you watched in the past, or what have you searched for? And what can we show you that's gonna be what we can better predict, but if you don't have a lot of socialist three. then they're not gonna do as good of a job.

57:37 So that's not exact a direct translation for what we were doing, but For me, I work on freedom monetization and there are Really important flying wheels are we're on like. What does it take for a creator to make content that can help them to monetize.

57:50 How do we get that content to people and where and to what extent are we getting that content to people? How do we make sure that people feel good about what they're receiving, the people who are paying? Right. All of those firewalls have to work and So part of what I've been able to do is really think about like how do we connect the dots in a story

58:07 That the teams can uniquely understand. Can help them to lean in even more. and have clarity and purpose of work. Right. Sometimes what's super important about the flight was actually is enabling for your teams. To know what to work on, what not to work on.

58:22 Right. And then it also helps us to understand What do we know and what do we not know about creators and viewers and monetization operations? So that we can do the understand work. to improve the velocity and to prove the impact. And that's really where we've been focused. And so we did I did a lot of this in YouTube, but you know, also did this in Instacart.

58:40 really thinking about when I joined Instacart. One of the questions I had was like How are people in their daily lives, how's their daily life actually reflecting? in the purchase experience. Are we making it easy for them'cause No, when you buy groceries, you're not going to grocer going grocery shopping because you want beautiful ingredients in the fridge.

58:59 You're on grocery shopping because you're actually having meals together. Right so. Are we actually reflecting the real job to be done? Which is I wanna buy tacos.

59:08 I wanna make taco Tuesday. Really like, can we make it easier for people to find ingredients in tacos? Right, as opposed to having them sort for tortillas and tomatoes and avocado. Right? So it's really thinking about what is the job and then what is the flywheel to make that happen.

59:22 And how we make this come to life. There's so many things that I wanna follow up on here. First of all, I realized that all of the things you worked on I'm a daily active user of or weekly active user. Twitter. YouTube, Instagram

59:36 Instacart about a weekly active user. I think there might be Yeah. Wow, nice job. Got me got me in the flywheels of all your flywheels. Not intentional, but I'm glad my my effort's gonna improve it always just a little bit. Nice work. Ideally.

59:49 Okay, so So a couple of takeaways here. One is you think about The value prop at every interaction. of both sides if it's a multi side marketplace. Or if it's just just like why would I be doing this? So it's like why would I send an invite?

1:00:03 To my friend, why would I share this photo? Why would I Open up Instacart. And then you think about the jobs to be done during the day of s of a potential user and how can we flow into that versus like N not connect to their actual

1:00:16 Day to day experience. And is the product actually working? Like as I'm doing this, I'm looking saying like is the product actually set up? to deliver these things. Like do we do we actually see it work or not? I think there's a lot of assumptions that the product works. But a lot of times teams will surprisingly build

1:00:31 The pieces of a flow? But not actually build the experience, the output. Like they don't design it in a way where you're getting the real output. It's such a Easy to miss point you're making here, which is

1:00:42 you just think about hey, I may I have Taco Tuesday. I'm actually as a product manager on Instagram, I'm gonna open up the app. And use it in this use case and see how it goes. That's right. And most people don't do that, is what you realize. Another example of this, right? Like in this was years ago, but in It's gonna make it really hard to reorder stuff.

1:01:01 Super hard in New York. And It's it was shocking to me. Because When I thought about it, when I go to the grocery store, ninety percent of the time I'm getting the same stuff.

1:01:11 Right? It's like You know, maybe not any trip, but over the course of a month or two You've got a list of things that are part of your stable and then occasionally, you know, like Holiday time I want some peppermint bark. chocolate or something, you know? Like it's not.

1:01:25 Like it's like there's like random snacks you're gonna throw in, but like there's And so when we looked at the data, it turns out Like after five Times when you go to Instacart, ninety percent of your order's the same. Right? But like when you wanted to reorder, at least back then

1:01:40 You couldn't go and reorder. Easily you had to dig and find it's like seven or s eight clicks. And when you did reorder, you had to reorder the whole thing. You couldn't take pieces, you couldn't take I want to take the milk and the blueberries. Right? And so You know, you think about growth, right? You think about what does it mean to grow an Instacart? What does it mean to like actually drive better retention.

1:02:00 Well it's actually really important to give make it p easy for people to make the next order. Right. And so like like the product wasn't really built for that, though people had the best intentions in mind. The adjacent order. Exactly. Uh I imagine that was maybe one of the biggest growth wins in his Instagart history is just the reorder the same thing,'cause I do that all the time. Yeah, you wouldn't be surprised.

1:02:22 This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top notch security practices Things get complicated. Fast. Now you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC 2. ISO twenty seven thousand and one

1:02:40 HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Banta. Vanta's market leading trust management platform. Helps you continuously monitor compliance. Alongside reporting and tracking risk. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get$1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com slash Lenny.

1:03:10 That's V A N T A dot com slash Lenny. You mentioned this concept of the adjacent user. kind of adjacently, but I think it's worth spending a little more time here. It's like this term you popularized and you explained it somewhat, but it maybe explain a little bit more because I think it's really powerful for people in how you think about growth. It was yeah, this was something that came out of actually my time at Instagram.

1:03:32 Um it was a kind of a framework that we came up with. Because Instagram really was at that time, we grew so fast. Yeah. the people who were using Instagram in February were completely different than people who were using it The following October

1:03:48 Next January. I mean, I think when I joined we were at like four hundred and forty five million monthly actives. January twenty sixteen, at the end of that year, we're at six hundred thirty six million. Like forty seven percent that yeah. And so you know, when we talk to users

1:04:03 First half of twenty six stin. You know, when we talk to women in the US in their thirties, they're like, Why would I have an Instagram? I have a Facebook account. Literally people said that, right? It was that long ago Right. And then like a year later, it's like of course I use Instagram. Like Instagram is is my everything. And it the world changed so fast. And so when you're in a hyper growth product

1:04:23 It's really, really important to understand who your users are today. And the persona of the user what motivates them. why they're using it, but then also So understand who is the next user. Who Is the user who

1:04:37 could be using this product, but for some reason it doesn't work. Right. And Understanding who that adjacent user is and when you're actually starting to see that adjacent user adopt the product. And one of the ways you start to see though, Jason, is

1:04:51 Usually starting to adopt the product, especially With the data as you start seeing cohort. Cohort curves decline. Right, you start seeing the people who sign up.

1:05:00 Today. three or six months from now, they're signing up and they're doing worse job. Nothing's changing the product. But just the understanding of how the product should work. Is different.

1:05:12 they might be less tech savvy, right, on the scale of like an earlier doctor. versus like late majority, they might be closer to the late majority. And so we saw this at Instagram, right? Like we would always be working on our registration flow. And at one point we were converting at some insanely high percent. And then three months later, it would go down by fifteen percent.

1:05:31 Right, not f because anything was broken, but just because We've broken into new markets. You're bringing on people in India or you're bringing on people in the Philippines. I don't understand how it works, the phone they use, et cetera, are all different. So really the core of the adjacent user was One is like

1:05:46 You know, you have to understand who's using your product today and why. And when you're growing at some really strong pace, thirty, forty, fifty percent or more per year. You've gotta be on top of

1:05:59 Who is your next who you believe the next user is and why? And then you also have to be the adjacent you have to use the product lifecom and see how it's working. What's broken with it? Right. And so and an Instacart, the adjacent user The original user might have been like

1:06:14 uh, you know, an office admin who is gonna buy this thing every week because of during happy hours and team staff, but then The next adjacent user might have been the mom of three or four Or the dad of three or four who's home with the kids. And they are

1:06:30 You know, they need to depend on Instacart. Birthdays, you know, like Later on it might be there a single person in New York who like does this out of convenience, right? But like what they're optimizing for how they use the protocol changes.

1:06:42 And the functionality and the abilities are. Fundamentally different. So you have to be them, you have to watch how they use the product, you have to talk to them. And you have to visit them and l literally see what they're doing in real time. In order to make sure that you're enabling the right job.

1:06:57 I love just this idea the visualization of the adjacent user. Basically your growth is gonna come from not existing users. It's the users right outside that circle of Where users are today and you need to think about what do they need. That existing users maybe don't need. You said that this is most powerful for hyper growth companies. Is this something you think people like all companies should be thinking about, or is it a lot less? Important if you're not a hyper growth.

1:07:20 Business. So it's a great question. I think it's Essential mandatory for hypergrowth. I think it's very helpful. If you Have a product

1:07:29 or company that is not growing what it what you want it to be. Um and so you're focused on Capturing more share wallet. Instead of expanding your audience.

1:07:40 Right? And so Sometimes you can imagine like a cosmetics company, for example, right? That's like digitally enabled. You can imagine that like they've hit a ceiling in terms of like the growth of their users. And they're really just Trying to get people to buy more product.

1:07:55 But maybe They're missing like the people who want to use their product are missing. something from your current product, right? Maybe you're missing different skin tone shades, right? Or maybe you're missing certain types of tools. So really talking to who is just outside of your current user base, who's coming to your product.

1:08:12 looking around and not buying and understanding what are their needs and figuring out How do you enable for them? How do you build the right experience for them? In order to become adopters of your problem. So what I'm hearing is spend some understand work to figure out who your potential users are. Yeah.

1:08:27 As them. And see what is missing. Uh I imagine user research goes into this. You're not like actually gonna understand necessarily all the things they need. So it's probably fine folks in that cohort and See how they use the product.

1:08:40 Awesome. The question I had on my mind as you're talking, you've come into so many companies And Help them with growth. Where do you find most of the

1:08:49 Opportunities often lie. Is it like onboarding? Activation. Is there is there a trend like that? You've like here's probably there's gonna be opportunity here, or is it super mixed back? usually it's somewhere in the Onboarding

1:09:04 So like habit building experience. Right, right. What does it take for someone to actually Understand the value. That first moment, that first aha moment.

1:09:14 In the product. And a lot of teams it's shocking how many teams don't really understand what that moment is for them. And then also how do you get them to build habit around the product? Oftentimes a lot of people quit growth. to top a funnel, and that is also critical.

1:09:31 I think Having the right top of foam motion. is really critical in building on that. So I think there's One quarter of it's like once you have the right type of phone motion to get people to come in. How do you help them make sure that they're finding value and they're building habit and they're routine?

1:09:49 Because that's the thing that helps you to compound over time. Like if you're Bringing in a lot of people, but they're not staying around. Then you just have a leaky bucket and like it doesn't matter how big a top form is. So making sure that that first month and two month, three month experience is great.

1:10:03 And then the other part is really figuring out how do you build compounding growth loops. Where it's not just one way of acquiring people, but you're building two and three and four ways that layer that layer on to each other that help you to really supercharge your your engine of like aquarium.

1:10:21 Say Instagram If you kinda look at where Instagram is and what Hard sang Aaron Groom. There's a lot that goes into it, but who Actually unpack the top of front of what worked at Instagram.

1:10:35 There's certainly a component of it. which was our core component, which was invitations. Really? people inviting you and making sure that those invitations work and they work well. And that people's um the friends are coming on and get notified.

1:10:48 But you know, another part that goes unspoken still critical to this day was like the celebrity partnerships. was critical, right? Because basically, you know, they had this wonderful Partnerships team.

1:11:01 that basically took Instagram and taught celebrities how to use it. how to make it work for them, how to tell their own story and be their own brand. And that was a critical growth funnel because With uh You had the ability for them to

1:11:16 create these celebrities and celebrity creators. She Set the norm for how the platform gets used. But they also were getting picked up by the news and the media. Right for

1:11:28 Yeah. All the stuff that's happening in the celebrity world. Which then added on to this other growth level which had which was SEO. Right. And so every time a

1:11:37 News article. came out they would link to the creators. Like or the celebrities. Instagram account. Or that particular post.

1:11:45 Right. And so you have this whole SEO engine that worked, and the SEO engine was because You have Both web, which we launched at Instagram. Which created the canonical kind of like SEO tables. And then you had

1:11:58 the you know all these inbound links from these celebrity sites and Um in news media. But but then what you also had is you had embeds. for Instagram and all of these different sites, right? Like a news article, whatever. But posts, you know, Lenny's podcast, Instagram account.

1:12:13 Those embeds help with SEO Gs. So you have not just the invites, but now you have the celebrities, now you have V you know the SEO component. And then we would do a bunch of paid media on top of that.

1:12:24 I'm using a lot of those signals. And so we would have and then we have our own content. Um and so you have all of these different kind of growth engines. Compounding each other. So every time the invitations got better, every time got more celebrities lived out, every time the SEO gets better.

1:12:38 It's like magnifying the top funnel. And at the bottom of the funnel, like or in the mid funnel, we're making sure that people are retaining and getting value and staying around over the long term. That is so interesting. I had no idea this was such a core part of the early growth strategy. Everyone's always talking about morality and Word of mouth, all these things, and you're saying partnerships.

1:12:56 was a key part of the early growth strategy. So funny because it's never something people talk about in growth is partnerships. So he's like, Oh, there's a couple of companies that really had success from partnerships and Yeah. How early was this a big part of the strategy, like how early in the

1:13:11 It's true. I mean the partnerships team was there before I joined. It was a very savvy and astute thing that Kevin and Mikey set up. Um really kinda. Like made Like the partnership team drove a lot of the word of mouth around Instagram. But it was the partnership's work in combination with the product work that actually helped to

1:13:31 allow a lot of that to land, right? Like it was You know. Our ability to think outside the box and understand that we needed to have a web presence. Because it was critical for international growth. And it also helped with SEO.

1:13:42 Right, and so No the idea of launching web really drove it actually increased Instagram's growth by ten percent the minute we launched it. And it was something that, you know, George Wang, who was there before me had the invent had the idea around.

1:13:55 It wasn't really something that Kevin and Mikey believed in initially. But we had to prove to them. that it was really impactful and once it launched. Then they understood why it was impactful and all of that. Effect of it.

1:14:07 Web was really critical for like driving so much SEO. Which helped support a lot of the celebrity work and the partnerships work. Because now every time Creator or celebrity.

1:14:18 Um Did something on Instagram. you know, every news media or article picked it up and it like just helped to drive searches in Google searches. Which helps it make Instagram part of like the cultural side, guys. This is so f interesting because everyone imagines Instagram Vality word of mouth.

1:14:33 Like SEO and partnerships was sounds like a core part of Instagram's early growth, which I don't think anyone ever talks about. Wow. I mean it was part of Facebook's growth too, right? But I can think a little bit differently, it's not as much partnerships but when you Google someone now. You go over someone's name, oftentimes like Instagram is like one of the first five things that comes up for the average person. Yeah. Right.

1:14:52 Instagram, Twitter. Do you ever see the video of Alex Zhu talking about TikTok's growth strategy of this whole he had this metaphor. Where and he was trying to grow off of Instagram. So his metaphor was Instagram is like you're uh in Europe. And you're killing it. If you're in Europe and you're king

1:15:10 You don't ever want to go to America. There's no reason for you to give it up. And America is is TikTok in this case. He's like, How do we convince people to come to America and try moving everything there? He's like, We need to go after the people that are not doing well in Europe. Who want to be the king.

1:15:24 And we're gonna help you become that king in America. Or in the president. So he used the used adjacent user theory. That's right. You did. Yes, yes.

1:15:35 Drink drink up your your uh your uh shake. Yeah. Yeah, so I think and I think the reason that strategy worked differently is there was already a place. So They couldn't execute what you did because there's already

1:15:47 Celebrity's already there. And it's not like come here, there's no point. Yeah, I already have a heat following. So And you make your own celebrities. Make your own celebrities. Exactly. And they went after like the Belis Celis people. Right. So it's interesting that people look at Instagram like, cool, we're gonna do partnerships, SEO. But I think it's important to realise things change when the market is a different dynamic.

1:16:06 You can't just do the same thing, it won't work as well. Uh, is there anything else from the Instagram early days that maybe people wouldn't know or would be interesting to share because you were there quite early and now it's maybe the most thriving social network in the world. One thing that's actually I think interesting There's an interesting story that doesn't get talked about a lot is Um, I think the early Instagram was built.

1:16:27 Where it was built in a way Where? Every follow was created equal. And what I mean by that is Um, you know, if I followed you, Lenny, or if I followed Kim Kardashian, or if I followed

1:16:41 Sina Gomez, all followers were treated like Yeah. They were. Equally important. And this is actually a really important factor. It was a really important factor.

1:16:52 For a couple of reasons. One Early celebrities who adopted Instagram. Obviously benefited from that. Because You know, a celebrity's gonna get a follow before an average person does it.

1:17:03 It doesn't mean that like, you know. their follows weren't meaningful. It was just that like You know, when you have a machine learning that's just Optimized for. a a click through a follow, then like

1:17:13 You know. That matters, but what ended up happening Um is We ended up looking at the data. And yeah, I can't take credit for this. My um colleague at the time, Rob Andrews, had identified this. He was the head of growth marketing.

1:17:27 Pure mine. Yeah. You know, basically This is twenty sixteen ish days. The average person would come on Instagram and retain, but then

1:17:38 Leave after seven, eight, nine months. We saw like we s we'd see it flattening in the retention curve, then w we would see it like dip again, which was very I'm like, why is this happening? And it turned out that

1:17:50 What was happening anecdotally is that people were Rapid on Instagram. Following a bunch of people. Falling a lot of celebrities, actually. because the slide was being shown. And then when they actually went to make their first post

1:18:03 None of their friends were following them. And so there was like posting into an echo chamber. And anecdotally people would stop using the product'cause they they felt that. We we hypothesise.

1:18:15 Like no one was Liking or following Like or commenting on the post. And so we had to do this thing we called it the connections pivot. Right.

1:18:24 twenty sixteen, twenty twenty seventeen. Where we Had to convince Kevin and Mikey that it was actually not the right thing to do to prioritize celebrities to everybody. Because we're basically biting on c was it bite your nose, just bite your face, whatever that is.

1:18:40 Like you know, because The regular person wasn't having a great experience. Right. So it doesn't mean that we shouldn't recommend celebrities, but you have to recommend celebrities So people who are already on there, they already have the graph. And the most important thing to do was actually get regular human to human connections.

1:18:56 In the first Yeah, whatever when people first sign up. So that when you Lenny actually go write your first Make your first post. Wait.

1:19:03 your friends would see it and you would be validated and you would feel like okay, this is a pleasure for me. Right, like I I have a community. Um and so that connection pivot was critical. It changed literally Angle change the retention on this. And so if you like Google Instagram growth, there was like a tech crunch article about

1:19:21 Instagram's growth at you know, I think twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, where we're going forty, fifty percent year over year. And a lot and you know, obviously there was a lot that went into that skyrocket. People think that stories was the sole reason why we grew and stories brought us a lot of people. But I mean We literally are attention double.

1:19:38 Over the course of like a year. I mean if you could imagine, imagine if like, you know, your your Your bank account like the interest rate doubles like every month. You know what I mean? Like It was incredible. This just this shift in making sure that people got connected with their friends early on.

1:19:53 Change the way that like people perceive the value. And so a lot of the top of funnel work that we did, a lot of the activation work that we did. Really like. Paid off in speeds. Uh

1:20:04 Wow. I'm curious, what's the most impactful thing you've Shipped. Slash let two. In terms of impact and experiment launch. Uh at Instagram

1:20:15 Um You know, we saw this big problem where people were logging out. And not being able to get back into the game. It's crazy. Like hundreds of thousands of people a day could not get back into the account. And it was because and and and like when I say could not get back into account, I mean

1:20:32 They literally Um What Try And twenty eight days later we would never see them again.

1:20:40 And we thought it was a problem because they didn't remember Where the email was, which email they signed up. Wait. their hand what their actual handle was or what their password was. And so this was you know, we were losing like ten, twelve million people a year.

1:20:55 From what we called account chart. Account access charm. So we worked on this problem. And we had spent a lot of time in South Asia and South East Asia trying to understand how to grow the product. And from that time we realized that

1:21:11 It's important actually for people to be able to launch up. We don't want to restrict people's ability to lock out because There are many people in the world who Don't want to

1:21:22 use background data because they own prepaid phone plans. Or they don't have a lot of money and they want to share. Their phone with a sibling. And so They log out, and so it's really important.

1:21:34 So we don't wanna take away that behavior, but we did have to do a better job of helping them get back in. So we did two things. One was like There used to be a time and you can probably find it on Google if you do like an archive search with it. If you wanted Log into your

1:21:48 Instagram account, there would be a tab for your email and then there would be a tab for like your handle. Right. And like And we didn't really make it easy for you to log in with your phone number either. You had to get to the right tab and the right place to get the right thing. So we get this omnibox experience. We were just like

1:22:04 Email, phone, handle, put it all in one place. Right. And we made it super simple for you, and the second time if you tried it twice. And It didn't work.

1:22:14 If we knew that we were you were on a trusted device. We would just send you a text message and say, Hey, are you trying to log in? Right. That solved like half the problem. And then the other half, what we did, and this still exists today when it's on Instagram, when you log out, we say, Hey Lenny, it looks like you're gonna log out.

1:22:30 Do you want us to save your credentials on your device? So you don't have to worry about the Right. And then we later added an ability to have a passcode. And that's all basically. Right. And so just like

1:22:41 Being really thoughtful around like what is actually the core job that people are trying to do. Cause a bad experience would have been like, Hey, let's make it really hard for people to walk out. Right. And then how we m like one or two experiments really Oh. People to get back into

1:22:56 Experience. And so What was interesting was that like we were able to solve this and it's actually helped drive probably like fifteen, twenty million Extra monthly acquisers a year. What was also super interesting was that It helped us to realize that

1:23:11 Getting people back into their account more Drove more account. product like content creation on Instagram. In ways that we didn't expect. And so because we were getting people back into the count.

1:23:25 People getting into their second account. getting into a third account. And they were going into their finster account. And Mm. creating content more.

1:23:33 And so that actually led to the creation of a multiple accounts team. Which is what has made it easy for you to navigate between accounts on Instagram today. Right. And so that was understandable, actually. coming to life, right? Like it was Hey, we're gonna do the understand work to figure out how to solve it.

1:23:48 Account ch account access issues. And we're gonna we're gonna f solve it. And and solving it when we looked at the data, we're like, Hey Why is all this account? Like, why is all this content creation happening? That was not what we were expecting. And where is it happening?

1:24:02 And it was happening from second and third accounts. And so that made us realize that oh people were not only getting marked out of the first accounts, but they were actually creating a lot of them in the second and third accounts. How can we make it easy for them to get and navigate between their first account, but it's like your account and a business account, or your account and a fence account, or like a bakery account. You know what I mean? And so that created a multiple accounts team which I ended up owning and that ended up even becoming like a bigger F

1:24:26 That's like an example of like understand work to solve a real problem, real solving solving massive solution. Massive impact. Creating new Like data that you didn't expect.

1:24:37 They drive you understand work. Which creates a whole new team to like allow you to kind of move around your Instagram account more seamlessly. And you can see this now like when you go to post, you can decide okay, I'm gonna post as Lenny, I'm gonna post as Or when I wanna write a story, you know you can change anywhere.

1:24:51 That was all an effort that came originally came out of this realization. I love how many of these Huge impact stories are just like such straight simp straightforward simple Things like Just let people log in more easily.

1:25:03 Help'em log out more effectively. Uh Fine show them their friends versus celebrities. Like so many of these stories are often just like really simple ideas that lead to such profound change. The log out example is interesting. At Airbnb we found the logout was actually causing a lot of

1:25:19 Turn also and the but they went the Initially they went with a simple solution of Just extend the session. log out length instead of like a week, make it two weeks or three weeks or four weeks. Mm-hmm. You pointed out with Instagram people actually wanted to log out. So they were like, Let's leave that alone and start with making it easier to log back in.

1:25:35 Sorry. Amazing, man. You're so full of amazing stories. I'm curious with Facebook, maybe just as I wrap up here. Is there anything there? 'Cause you were an early PM, a growth PM at Facebook. You worked a lot on friends and helping people discover their friends. Is there anything in there that would be

1:25:50 Interesting to share. In my time, so I joined Instagram or Facebook in twenty fourteen and I was uh the peop uh responsible for people recommendations globally. And at the time Facebook was at scale and big and dominated North America. And so really the focus area at the time was South Asia and South East Asia. And uh yeah, we did And we notice a lot of really interesting things, especially in India.

1:26:14 Facebook seemed to be broken from a people graph perspective, right? Like We just didn't there was the data was telling us like people Didn't have as many friends in common. Right, like in the US it might have been just making up a number like

1:26:26 On average we saw twenty two friends in common when you make a friendship connection. But in India was like seven. Right. And then there was a lot of Friending and messaging or friending and unfriending. We're like, What's going on here? So we had some hypotheses from the data, we ran a bunch of tests.

1:26:41 Nothing seemed to work. And like be a breakthrough. So You know, actually at that time I had to propose and they you know they agree to do this. Like we needed you understand her. So we were literally on the ground in India every three months.

1:26:54 Took a team of engineers with me. Like I'm talking like we're in Del people's homes and you know Mumbai. And we went to go kind of investigate what was going on, like watch people, make friends. Watch them like use people you may know and really understand what was happening and see what was going on.

1:27:12 Because we felt like there was context that we were missing. There's a lot of things that we learned. It was mind blowing. Well one of the most interesting things, Lindy, was that We Watch people try to make friends.

1:27:24 And we said, Hey wait, like That's their profile page. Why don't you Looking at it. And they would say Well

1:27:32 That doesn't have any relevant information for me. So I need to go look in the pictures. Like, well, why doesn't the profile page have relevant information for you? Like that's Where the Information supposed to be.

1:27:43 And they're like, listen. This guy's named Ahmed Kumar. I have ten friends named my come on. Right. Like, what is this page gonna tell me?

1:27:51 Also, and it would scroll down. They'd be like All of these fields are not relevant to me, right? And so you look at it, Facebook at the time was very Western centric. Publish the list. It is it was like name.

1:28:03 like school you went to Like job title. Right, like affiliations, that kind of stuff. That's all Western paradigm and like So at least people are like my friends sell jeans at a market. Like none of this is relevant. Like we didn't you don't like you don't even know the name of the school sometimes, right? It might be a number or something.

1:28:19 And so all of the descriptors that we take for granted We're not relevant. And the names were very common. This was really illuminating. So what they would do is go look at pictures and say, Is this my friend's car? Or is this my friend's like can I see my friend's animal and what's Um, and it was interesting because, you know, the understandable at least the more realization. So when we went back to Miller Burke.

1:28:38 With the data. Turned out we said Okay, let's look at the David in a different way. What are the most common names on Facebook? And we looked at the top ten common names are Indian names.

1:28:49 And like the most common name was Amit Kumar. There's like two hundred fifty thousand people a month. Who used a Mikklam? Like who were like real people. So imagine you're in Bangalore and you're trying to find your buddy

1:29:01 Name of Micromaro is probably five thousand. That we could possibly recommend. Right. So like super interesting was like the cultural context was so different. So we have to get creative creative ways to figure out how to solve it. The power of understand work shines again.

1:29:15 We have a recurring segment on this podcast called Fail Corner, where I ask guests to share a time they failed in their career. And what they learned from that experience because a lot of people look at your career and your story and just like, holy shit. What a journey. I will never be able to achieve this. Is there a time when things didn't go

1:29:33 Well And Something that you took away from that experience. probably for me, I think my time at Instacart was probably not my best time. Um I think

1:29:43 I Went to Instacart with a vision. What I thought the product Cord B? Or should be.

1:29:52 And It was, I think, a big story that I deeply believed. But I was not, I think, aware or in tune with what the DNA of the company was at the time. Which was it was like uh Company that was really great at operations.

1:30:09 And Because that was the core of what they did and they're really building out a lot of their product. Experience. And A lot of what

1:30:19 Like the new function. And so I think What they needed at the time was a much more tactical In the weeds. Kind of like

1:30:29 Get your hands dirty, do do do. Because they hadn't really seen that before. And what I wanted to deliver in that experience was Your kind of like building the right systems, the right people, the right processes, so that we can like figure out how to institutionalize the work.

1:30:46 And then for me that was like probably my biggest oversight is that like I think I I think they needed more tactical and I was like kind of more

1:30:55 I don't say in the clouds, but more think about like where do we want to go with the experience that we need to build. versus like let me get deep in like the the funnel data. Right felt like it like became loggerheads where Like I didn't feel like I was like probably either delivering what they wanted or s being supporting the way that I wanted.

1:31:13 Is the lesson there to uh Spend more time on understand work before you take a job to make sure you're aligned with what they're looking for. That is actually a blessing. Um, and I think it's part of that is It's doing that. One of my takeaways is do that not only with the people there, but with the people who've left it to the people who've left the company.

1:31:32 will give you a perspective that is raw and different and much more Um I think aligned with What you want to hear? And it may or may not be the same, but I think that people And it's in this isn't specific to instantly. Whenever you talk to people who are at the company, they're always

1:31:46 Trying to tell you Passing. Version of the company. The people who left will tell you what the worst version their or their version And it's on you to like triangulate that information, but you need both sides.

1:31:57 Love that lesson. Bengali, is there anything else that you want to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round? Oh no, I think we've got a lot. We have. With that we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got six questions for you. Are you ready? I am ready to go. First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? few I've recommended most of them over my shoulder actually, like Range by David Epstein.

1:32:24 think of really critical PM work really think being able to be a master of a lot of different things or be somewhat deep in a lot of different things. Deep work. Um county port. kind of clearing space to be focused and do the things, thinking about the most important work in a deep and like undisturbed way. And then Start at the end by Matt Waller, who's a kind of behavioral scientist buddy of mine.

1:32:44 really thoughtful book helps you kind of really think about what you're building, but in a way that's like more holistic. Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates when you're interviewing them? Got a relatively new one that I love. Um It is so this works

1:32:59 Exceptionally well, I believe, for more senior hires, whether they're like group product managers, directors Or even like kind of See your ICs. I go through when I think about

1:33:11 One of the Four usually five skills. That are really critical. for someone to have in the shop. And I think about them myself.

1:33:20 And I think about the archetypes of like who are like what like what is the ratio on one of these? But then I ask them, I say Hey, take out a piece of paper or take out your laptop. I'm gonna give you five skills. And I want you to stack ranking for me.

1:33:34 One to five. Right. So one being among the strongest at And five being the one you're relatively weak. So like it's way better than saying give me your strengths and weaknesses. It also forces them to contextualize it.

1:33:47 Against the skill that you're looking for. But it also helps you have a meaningful conversation. Around how they think about themselves and their self awareness. And to what extent they're ranking these skills based on the context they're in?

1:34:00 Right. Versus their own ability. Sometimes you rank something after because like Something you're just weak at'cause you haven't had to do because there's A strong function at that time. Right. And so when they staff rank it and people are like

1:34:12 Th I've asked this part four or five times on a recent roll that hire people. Mm. Oh, this is a really hard but really good question. And then you can like I usually will dig into like what if like number two Right, and what's number four, number five, and why?

1:34:26 Um, and it really helps me to one calibrate like am I looking for the right person? And two are their skills actually a match for what we need at this time. I love when I hear a question I've never heard before. That is genius. Next question, do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really like? I think one that I enjoying quite a lot. Actually it's really kind of

1:34:45 Um Really simple, but amazing is just Up call flighty. A little bit? F L I G H T Y. Um it is a traveler.

1:34:54 And it is it manages all of your your flight itineraries and your friends friends itineraries. But the reason why I love it is it goes two or three clicks deeper than the average travel app or like your You might not?

1:35:09 And it tells you when your inbound plane is running late. It helps you to understand like where the gates are my wife was just in Madrid last week. And she texted me saying, Hey, I'm at the airport, but no gate is announced. I looked at Flighty. I'm like your gate is E sixty seven. It's actually been assigned, but it hasn't been announced.

1:35:24 I mean this happens a lot, right? Like you'll be there and they'll tell you the gate until like an hour beforehand. So it gives you so much information right before it's actually publicly announced. Which is really helpful, especially if you really need to be somewhere because Oftentimes I know if my plane's gonna be late and if I need to rebook before anyone else does. Which helps you give you a better chance of getting somewhere or

1:35:44 Like I won't be able to get to a gate. I get to SFO and it might not be on the board at SFO. But I know exactly where getting this. So We agree that. Can't say enough about it. I'm downloading it right now. It's got a Bazillion reviews, five stars.

1:35:58 Uh thank you for the recommendation. Incredibly useful. I'm trying out a new question. You've joined a bunch of different companies. What's one thing that you've

1:36:06 done in the first ninety days at the job that has made a big impact. I go and I sit in team readings. And see how they operate. I just will listen. I

1:36:17 Talk to not only the PMs but the engine, uh content designer. everyone and I Try to get to know them by both name and story. Right. And what I mean by that's like Oftentimes people execs come in and they're like, What are we doing? What are we prioritizing? Why does it matter?

1:36:34 And they don't really take the time to actually learn Who the people are, what their story is. Like what they what they care about, right? What they're passionate about. Both professionally and personally.

1:36:45 And really try to understand. how the team is working from that person's perspective. And what I find is actually when I do that people are way more willing to hear When it when it's time for me to share. My thoughts.

1:37:00 The way more invested. Because I'm because they believe I'm invested in them. I love that. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you really like and find useful and often share with friends or

1:37:14 Family. And work or in life. I'm not big on models. There's one that I've actually been repeating. I don't remember where I got it from. Might've been like Adam Grant or someone on Instagram. But it was um

1:37:25 It's one, I said it to a uh a colleague of mine, he's like, Wow, that really hit differently. Oh. It it's that like I think it goes something like this, like you know. Um people and teams don't really reach But um they don't actually reach their goals.

1:37:39 They fall to the level of their systems. And that to me was really powerful because like I struggle a lot with like just being balanced in life, right? Like working out the way I want to and getting the right rest and making sure that I'm spending time in all the right places. And that's really like It's a goal of mine, but like the problem is that like I don't my system for that specifically.

1:38:00 I tend to like, you know. Not I d I don't I don't I'm not rigorous with it is more I need to be. But but on the other hand, at at work, I'm very various in the systems and processes. So really like that that saying to me really like kinda hits because it

1:38:14 is both applicable to your life and how you wanna live your life, but also How you wanna run your teams? Final question, you mentioned that you were a dean at a school. A boarding school. Is there something that you take away from that experience that's gonna sticks with you? I know you mentioned one thing about treat

1:38:30 PM's skills are similar to teacher skills. Is there anything else there? Actually so I was a dean of a boarding school in Switzerland which was like uh actually one most fun and interesting times of my life. Um it was American in Switzerland, just just outside of Lugano, Switzerland, in the Italian speaking section. And I'd say, you know.

1:38:49 What was I learned a lot about myself during the time. I learned a lot about just like relationships and people. I actually had a call with one of my old students this morning. She's like in her thirties now. This was like twenty years ago. So I still keep in touch with them.

1:39:03 Um, and I think that's, you know, the kind of the comment I made about knowing people by name and story matters a lot. Like, you know. It says a lot that twenty years later I'm still talking to some of these students, you know, who are like their own adults run their own businesses. But also You know, I think the human

1:39:18 Like human challenges and human connection, human problems very universal. Right, this was a really interesting place. We had kids. Coming from

1:39:27 variety of different walks of life, you know, some who lived in Azerbaijan or Kosovo. And felt like the family felt like No. they couldn't be safe there, so they wanted to send the kids somewhere else. So some Kids whose parents worked at the US Embassy.

1:39:41 And like just we're kind of there for a little bit of time. And what I found in the true is that like, you know, just spending time with people and understanding their own story and a family life. really led to a lot of kind of like shared interests and passions and

1:39:55 It helped really me to see that the world can be very Similar in so many ways and Yeah. It's very much reflected to me in my day to day life in tech. Because if you know in the Bay Area so many people who come from so many walks of life end up

1:40:09 in this journey, going these products and companies. And just help me to value so many different voices. Right, right. If you want to build world class product. If you want to build product that can scale around the world.

1:40:21 If you want to build product that's gonna be hyper growth, you have to be inclusive of so many voices. And so you have to build that skill to be able to acknowledge and learn from and to live intention by different forces. That is beautiful. I love that we're ending there. Magali, I feel like we've done a lot of understand work.

1:40:37 Uh, and I think we've helped a lot of people with a lot of things. We talked about so much. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to follow what you're up to? And how can listeners be useful to you? As much as I worked at social companies, I actually don't use my social products that much. Um on Instagram, like if you look at I am Bengali, I A M B A N G A L Y, Google that all of my like socials Handles all have the same.

1:41:01 Kind of like Link um including LinkedIn. So Um hit me up whenever. Um and then um What p can people do useful for me? Oh no, I mean I think

1:41:11 I don't have a like a short list, I would say. I love to hear people stories. I love to give advice. You know, obviously my time is a little bit limited occasionally, but I think if people can share with me things that they're learning or things that they see in the market. Or if they have questions, I always love to hear it. And so

1:41:30 I think for me like you know, just hearing other people's stories and learning what other people are doing is probably the most rewarding for me. Bengali, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. This is amazing. I really appreciate you, money. 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.

1:41:56 You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show. at Lenny's podcast dot com. See you in the next episode.

What you see above is a preview of the first minutes. One unlock costs 10 credits and covers this episode forever: full segment and word-level timestamps on this page, plus .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like.