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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/27867494402dc35d

Boz, the CTO of Meta, said something about you. Working with me, she could have the most profound disagreement in the world, and she would respond, Fascinating. You have to tell me more why you think that. I really enjoy being right. And then it turns out in the working world.
That did not serve me so great. I think the hard part is sublimating your ego a little bit and saying it's more important to get to the outcome than to be right. I love this very tactical piece of advice. When you're trying to come up with a metaphor or analogy, think about what you want your users to feel when you're using the product. If we all agree that the feeling of something should be when sitting in Dolores Park with my friends on a sunny Saturday.
Then people will just naturally build something that feels more consistent. There's also this metaphor about the hill climb. For me, the hill climb is all about the difference between a local optimum and a global optimum. You're standing on top of the hill, you're looking down, you can see rolling hills, the sheep, the grass, whatever. But then way off in the distance, you can see like a mountain. And the thing that gets me through the
valley is remembering what the summit feels like.

Today my guest is Ummy Vora. Ummy is Chief Product Officer at Fair.
Which connects independent retailers and brands around the world, and I believe is the most successful and biggest B2B marketplace startup out there.
Prior to fair, Ami was employee one hundred fifty at Facebook.
Where she launched the first Facebook developer platform and was later head of product for the$55 billion global Facebook ads business. She also oversaw the introduction of ads on the Instagram platform, and most recently she led product and design for the largest messaging app in the world, WhatsApp.
In our conversation, we cover a lot of ground, including building your strategy skills, how to disagree with people skillfully, being a successful woman in tech, using metaphors and imagery to rally your team and get your point across, setting up effective goals, plus a bunch of jokes in the lightning round that you don't want to miss.
This was a really special and authentic conversation that I'm very excited to bring to you. With that, I bring you Ami Vora.

Ami, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.
Oh thank you, I was so happy to be here.
So when I asked you about your goal for our conversation today, you said the most amazing thing, which I love.
You said that y your goal is to be as authentic as possible and to show that people can be pretty messy and imperfect at times.
Yet still be very successful.
I love that so much. Let's definitely try to do this.
Is there anything else you want to add on that? Uh
I mean maybe maybe I'll just say like a couple of more words on that, actually.
I feel like when I was kinda coming up, like
When I looked at people who are successful, they seem to have everything figured out.
Especially the women.
They were all like super women, were they like
Respond to every email in ten seconds. It didn't seem to sleep. They like always wore high heels. They were just like perfect.
And I I was just like
Oh, I guess I'm never gonna be successful. Like that is that is not me. I I love to sleep. I like
Waste time doing absurd things all the time. And like I'll I'll tell you how glamorous my lifestyle is. I'm I'm currently working out in my bathroom, like I'm talking to you.
From my bathroom, which is where I work from.
Because
I love my house, it's a great house.
Wasn't meant for
Work from home, three kids, two parents, remote work.
Um and was just the place with the most closing doors between me and my children when the pandemic started.
And so it it just like took me a while to realize that
Actually it's all fine.
Like
No one's got it fully figured out. You never know how someone else is living, like
Most of us are winging it and learning.
as we're going and like learning through trial and error and like
That's it's all it's all normal. It's all fine and
I can do it and you can do it, and every.
I so love hearing this. This is something people often want to hear more of on this podcast'cause there's all these stories of here's all these successes, here's all these
Things they did and everything, it just always seems to work out.
And we try to ha we have this failure corner on the podcast where people share story failure.
So I love just setting that frame for this conversation of just
Super being real and
being clear that not that there's a lot of
Uh things that go wrong behind the scenes that people often don't hear about.
I for a long time felt like I was held back because I like don't have a plan.
But uh
I realize that probably the most important thing is to just like acknowledge that that is true for me.
that I'm not gonna be a person with a plan. And actually the thing that has consistently served me is to like
Do the thing that feels right. Go to the place that feels like home, work with the people who feel like my friends, like
Just work where
When I put on
The code of the job, I feel like oh, this is a place where I can I could really be lucky. I can be creative. I'm in the right spot.
As opposed to like
You know, feeling like oh there's an end state that I know of.
And I'm just gonna have to
Work my way to that end state.
Whenever I get in that zone of like there's only one outcome and I just have to get there, I like
I'm not I'm not my best not my best.
You know?
I'm not I'm not bringing the creativity and the luck and the excitement in the same way.
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Let's actually spend some more time here. I wasn't planning to go here yet, but this is really
Great and important advice.
I've just basically you're saying that a lot of your success has come from
Following people that are awesome.
Can you just talk more about that, just like what it is you
Followed in
seen that has helped you land in places that have
worked out so well'cause clearly you've done incredibly well.
I mean, I think a lot of us are just like
You have a spreadsheet in your head.
On the axes.
And certainly when you're choosing between jobs, it feels uh for me it feels like
Oh man, the rest of my career.
hangs in the balance of like making the exact right decision and getting the exact right job.
And you work through all of this like
spread sheet mass of like if I took this job, here's what it would do for me, here's like where I'd be in five years, et cetera.
And you know, I have that engine in my head also.
But what I try to do is like
You know, we're through the spreadsheets and then
Tear it up.
Because none of that stuff like
is actually gonna determine how good I am at the job. The thing that'll determine that ha the
In my track record, the thing that has determined it
Is like when I walk through the doors.
Do I feel like I'm lucky to be there?
So for me it's like
It's actually a lot more emotional. Like I try to just
Put on the coat of the job?
Like when I wake up in the morning, I'm like, what would it be like if I were doing this job? What would I think about on my commute? Who would I have lunch with? Do I like them? Like what problems am I gonna solve today?
And that gives me like an emotional
Response.
Which is just much more telling.
Then like
the spreadsheet of here's here's where I'm gonna be in five years.
And for me the thing that that has led me to like the places where I do my best work is a feeling of being at home.
Which is all about trust and trust with the people around me. Like can I walk through and feel like
These people are gonna have my back, they're gonna let me take risks.
I'm gonna enjoy spending time with them.
And that's where
I feel like I've always just been able to try more things and do better because that's a big um trust is a big unlaw.
I love this metaphor of putting on the coat of the job.
Of just kinda feeling out what it would be to work there. I imagine that was something that you did for before you joined Fair, which I want to talk about.
But let me transition a bit to talking about meta and specifically
Bars, the city of Meta.
Was on this podcast a few months ago.
And he said something about you.
Uh that I'm gonna read up.
Okay, so you've heard what he said about you. Okay, cool. So let me read this and then I wanna I wanna learn from you how to do that.
So here's what he said. Working with
Um e it was like watching an alien because she could have the most profound
disagreement in the world with somebody.
And they would say something that she thought was not just wrong but crazy wrong and she would respond
Fascinating.
You have to tell me more why you think that.
And she meant it from the core of her being. She saw the schism and rather than reacting as if it was a threat
She reacted.
With the most genuine and profound curiosity.
I just watched it.
Absolutely tear down walls between points of view.
Embracing curiosity in those moments of challenge has completely changed my life.
And I owe that to Amivor.
Uh
Man, I love Boss. What a great guy. And so kind of him to say that.
I mean I I will I will say that this did not come naturally to me.
Like
I
Uh
You know, I really enjoy being right.
I love V right. I think most of us love V right, and at least like in my childhood, part of my identity was built on like
Being the person who was right and being the person who knew everything.
And then it turns out that like in the working world
That did not serve me so great. Like it it wasn't great to walk into things and be like
All y'all are wrong.
I am the only answer.
Uh everyone please listen to me and like stop talking.
And w what really happened was that someone pointed out to me
But not only one of my old managers pointing out to me that not only was I spending a lot of energy
Trying to think through every possible thing by myself so I can be totally right.
I was often not really coming to the right answer.
Like
Other people have a bunch of information that I do not have.
And so
I'm just ignoring that.
Like I was letting my ego
overtake my desire to get to the best outcome.
Which is just like a that's a that's a silly trade off, right? Um and an unnecessary one.
The thing that the thing that changed there
Isn't me just saying
It's more important for us to get to the outcome.
And
I very selfishly just like to learn more things.
And so by like deciding that I already knew everything, I was cutting myself off from like learning the things that other people were really good at.
And it's so easy to just open the door instead.
And say like, Hey, you seem to know something that I don't know yet, like
Why not tell me about it? I'm gonna get better. We'll probably come to the right outcome. Maybe you'll have a better time, like
Why not?
Um and so it was a little bit little bit just accidental evolution.
In that direction. But it's made
Like
work in life so much more interesting.
to just be like, Hey, what did this person know that I don't know yet? Like it means that every meeting you walk into
you're probably not gonna get bored.
You know, and I hit bored a lot, but like if you assume that every person there knows something that you don't know.
Then it's
It's not like just wait.
to get to the right answer, it's like discover the thing that they know that you don't know and it becomes like
Just a little bit of of uncovering.
For people that want to
learn to be good at this the way you are.
A couple of things uh take away from this from the history and the way you're talking about this is
One is there's like an enthusiasm of like, I disagree with you, but I want you to know I
Care I really care about what you think.
So there's like an energy of like, please tell me what I'm missing.
There's also this assumption that
Like a lot of disagreement is rooted in we just have different information. So tell me what I'm missing. Can you talk a bit about just like how to what you've learned about how actually do this well?
Yeah, I mean
I think the hard part is just like sublimating your ego a little bit.
And saying it's more important to get to the outcome than to be right.
And I think like, you know, all of
Growth is a battle with yourself, but this is one of the hardest ones because we all want to be right. We all want to protect ourselves, and it served us.
Many of us for so long.
To be right.
I just try to think about the feedback loop of
I I kinda think like all of life is feedback loops. So I just start to think about the feedback loop I'm creating of like
I was curious about something.
I learned something new, we got to a better outcome. Probably the other person felt better as well as I felt better. Like it's all positive feedback.
And you do that a couple of times and the positive feedback
Far outways.
The desire to be right.
'Cause now we're like, we're more right. We're more right together.
And so just building that as a practice of just w noticing
How much better things can get.
When
You can be open to them.
Has been really fun.
Uh what do you think of this phrase that he uh used that he remembers? Is that like a phrase that you find useful of just like
Fascinating. You have to tell me more while you think that.
I do think that is a word that I say a lot.
I do say that a lot.
Because it is it's true. It's just like
It's fascinating sound look at the same
movie that I was looking at and come away with a totally different understanding of the plot.
You know, like
I could sit in a s in the same meeting as other people
And they would leave with just a different
retelling of what happened.
And that to me is fascinating.
You know, like
Isn't that surprising that we can all see the same what we think are the same facts and walk away with a totally different narrative?
And when you really like go deep into that, you just understand how people see the world.
And that is helpful.
I just I just
I'm like curious about things. I like to know more things.
And so that just helps me know more things.
I feel like the hardest part of this for people is like you hear someone say something.
Like say, okay, so we're our mutual friend Dan Hachenmeyer, he's in a meeting and he just says something
that you were just like no'cause you know he's got influence. He's a big deal. I fair
Most people have this like get this whole reaction of like, Oh no, I I really don't think that's a good idea.
H is there something you've learned about a controlling that bodily reaction of like oh
And then just being positive about it.
Yeah, I do think it is just that feedback loop. Like it's not like I don't have the visceral reaction. It's just that instead of interpreting it as
This is a visceral reaction, I gotta like
shut something down. It's like
This is a visceral reaction.
And it's a chance to learn more.
Like just reinterpreting some of the feelings in ways that are like more about opening than about closing stuff down.
Got it. So it's kind of like a thinking you do of like, Okay, here let me frame this and think about this in the podcast. For me the most important thing is just taking a pause.
I think we can just take a pause.
Your body calms down.
Your mind gets a chance to like breathe a little bit and then your your response is gonna be better.
But like you gotta take the pots'cause the immediate visceral
Reaction.
You know, it's not always it's gonna be primal. It's gonna be like protective.
It's just when you take a pause, you're like
This is all fine. Like let's just learn.
Yeah.
I feel like uh
More people are gonna start using this phrase fascinating when they when they hear something that's kind of my tagline. There were a few years where we're like I had to be careful about not saying it because whenever I said it, people would be like She disagrees.
So I'm about to I'm about to use the source and kind of expand my
No, such a good word.
Maybe we'll make that the title of this episode.
What a great title that would be.
So we're we've been talking a bit about like the bodily reaction to stuff and the or lizard brain almost reactioning to things.
Reminds me of this metaphor that you called uh the dinosaur brain.
And how applies to product reviews?
Talk about
What that is.
Okay, so a lot of people on my team, you know, they're they're coming in to do product reviews and they're worried about it. They're life stressed out, they don't exactly know what to show.
And the the normal temptation
is just to show as much information as possible because that way like you come in and you think hey like
The people in this room are super smart.
I'll show them the information, they will come to the right conclusions. They'll probably make a better decision than I'm gonna make. So like my job is to like
Catalogue the information and present it.
And one of the first things I talk to people about is like
Okay, for for the purposes of this
conversation I'm gonna put myself in like the capitally executive bucket.
Because that makes what I'm about to say less offensive.
Like, assume that like executives
Have like a
A little tiny dinosaur brain.
Like we all have like a little Brontosaurus brain.
And we can really only hold like
Three facts.
At the same time.
We will never be able to go deep.
In the way
That you are able to do on everything.
That crosses our desk.
And so the best service you can do
Is to actually do the work of making a recommendation.
That's the way we're gonna be complimentary.
You know, like
No.
the breadth that I normally have to look across, like, means that I'm gonna be better at things like pattern matching or giving you more context or telling you stuff that's happening in the company or the industry.
What I'm not gonna be better at.
is like looking at all the information that you looked at.
And coming up with a meaningful outcome, like
That's what you're gonna do.
And my little dinosaur brain is gonna be like, okay, that sounds like a very reasonable pattern. I've seen other patterns that look like this. Okay, that sounds like an outcome. However it conflicts with this outcome over here, I can like tell you about that.
Does that make sense? Yeah.
And I love that you put yourself in that bucket. Like you have the dinosaur brain also to that. It's it's pretty bad bad look. But it's really true, you know, like as you get more breath.
You were less and less able to go deep on everything that deserves going deep.
And you just end up doing a different service than the people on your teams and recognizing that as complimentary has been really helpful.
You have this phrase, my manager owns context, I own the recommendation, kind of along the same lines. Exactly. Very similar. And I think like the thing that was helpful for me there is that really unlocked what I was looking for from my managers.
Because otherwise I wanted them
To be exactly like me.
You know, if I assume that I need to bring them information and then they would come to the same conclusion that I would come to
That's very narrow, you know, like they have to be able to look at the exact same information and process it in the same way and come out with the same
Idea.
Whereas if what they're doing is like complimentary to me
Then I can learn from everyone.
You know, like they're gonna just have a different view. They're gonna have new information that I don't have.
And it gives me a lot more space to take account.
Is there any other advice you could share along these lines of just like product reviews, so
Kind of the big takeaway here is just
Keep it simple.
And
Have a recommendation.
Do people have a recommendation? I also think that like
I think we misuse product reviews sometimes as ways to get decisions.
And actually they should be ways to calibrate on principles.
So like what you don't want is to come to a product review for like every single decision that you want to make.
Instead, what you want is to come to a product review with one decision.
But the goal of that decision is to walk out with principles about how to make these decisions in the future.
So you don't have to come to product review, but you still have this like consistent and coherent product that you're building.
And so I think when you flip the frame of reviews
to being
less about okay, I'm gonna bring this information to an exec my manager, whoever, and they're gonna decide every piece.
Like you're not actually building that much more capacity in the system. You're like getting fast decision making, but you're not
You're not changing who can make really good decisions.
And like
I think you always want to change the org to like constantly make better decisions. And a way to do that is when you bring
These sorts of questions.
What you talk about is like why did you make this decision?
Like what are the trade offs you have in mind? Who are you optimizing for? What timeline are you thinking about?
What's the risk level we're willing to tolerate?
And then you don't have to come back.
Like you just you have enough information that you can take those principles and run.
Is there kind of a framework or a process you
Use for product reviews that might be helpful for people to hear just like a
uh agenda or a way of thinking about just how to set up a product review for success.'Cause a lot of people are
Trying to set these up at their companies and they're like, I don't know if we're doing this optimally. Yeah. I think everyone's got I think there's so many like different takes on frameworks.
I don't have like a single system. I mean, I th actually I think Boz has written about a bunch of this and I I probably most agree with him.
Where there's different kinds of product reviews, it's like what are you trying to solve?
What's the timeline on which you're
You're thinking about for these.
Is it like a philosophy? Is it a strategic shift? Is it like a day to day product decision?
Um
And then keeping it extremely short and pointed.
And then making sure you walk away with principles, not answers.
I think there's like a lot of nuance and important
there of what you just said, which is start with the problem you're solving. Like what are we trying to do here?
And the timeline, I think that's also really useful and important for people to hear.
I think the temptation is always to air toward like
Writing more?
And what I always really recommend people do is like write whatever you need to write and then cut out almost all of it.
What you really want to bring to any forum, whether it's like a product review or a written in form or anything else, is like
The minimal amount of information that you need.
To make a clean recommendation.
Because then you are forced to be opinionated.
Like otherwise the opinion can get lost in all of this information. You can hide
behind well all these analyses seem to suggest
And instead
You should probably just say
Looked at all the data.
There's three pieces there's three analyses that suggest this, there's one that suggests that. We think that one is inaccurate or worth taking the risk on.
Let's go.
Any objections, let me know.
Any new context, let me know. Like
That really forces you to like deeply understand and take an opinion on the material.
Final question.
Who do you like to invite to these
Product reviews.
And your thoughts, rules.
Policy.
Yeah, I mean I do think that usually
Fewer people is better.
It leads to a sense of being informal.
And that is really useful'cause it lowers the bar on how
complete or strong as conversations are, and I'd rather have like a less formal conversation faster than a formal conversation.
And lose three weeks.
in the process when we could have been building.
I think it needs to be cross functional. I think like one of the things you want is cross functional accountability.
Do we want it cross functional at the leadership level and cross functional at the team presenting level?
And I I th I think those are normally the groups. I think the thing that gets hard is you often cut out like the middle
Uh huh.
Where like if it's a working team presenting to like the senior leaders on something important.
It's really hard to like
It means people's managers are not in the room and can't help the conversation or other things.
And so in order to do that, you have to really have a bunch of implicit trust.
Inside the team.
That
Everyone will get the context later that uh
Everyone's gonna be kind.
To everyone else and you don't need like a ton of air cover. And the managers trust their team to like
Present in the best possible way.
That is always a stressful place for a manager to be where like their success is kinda writing in that meeting and they're not there and they kinda It's so stressful. Yeah, so stressful. I think anything you can make it less stressful is useful.
Yeah. But then there have also been times in my career where I would keep them the room itself small, but because we were all trying to calibrate on specific principles.
I would like record or broadcast.
the reading to anyone who wanted.
To to see it.
Just so we they could all like see the principles by which we were decision making and get calibrated on that.
So through your career you've kind of transitioned from being the person pitching
Products and re being reviewed.
to the person reviewing.
And being on the other side.
Is there anything being on this side of it that you think is helpful for people?
earlier in their career to know
About that experience.
Mm.
No.
From your angle now.
I mean I think for what it's worth, I think I still do a fair amount of product pitching in the past few years'cause there's always someone else to convince. True.
Um, especially if you want to do something dramatically different.
Really, I think the biggest the biggest service for people who are starting out a little earlier is that point around like
Bringing the recommendation.
Like really having the opinion.
And standing behind it with conviction and doing what they need to do to build that conviction for themselves.
Awesome.
You've done this a number of times already in this conversation, and so I want to spend a little time here, which is using metaphors and imagery.
to make your point and get people

What you're trying to say.
Yeah, this code of
Putting on the coat of the job and this dinosaur brain.
And so someone told me that this is just a skill you have where you use metaphor and imagery to rally a team.
Get your point across, get people to understand what you're trying to say.
There's also this
metaphor, uh someone told me I need to ask you about the hill climb.
Metaphor.
Does that ring a bell?
Yeah. Okay. What what is what is that all about?
For me the hill climb is all about like the difference between a local optimum and a global optimum.
And so I that sounds very abstract. But I think like a lot of the time when we're
Doing our job, when we're doing life stuff, whatever you're doing, like you try to just get better and better and you like optimize your current system.
And then you feel really good about it.
And that is great. You're standing on top of the hill, you're looking down, you can see, you know
The I don't know.
Rolling Hills, the sheep, the grass, whatever.
But then way off in the distance
You can see like a mountain.
You know one that's
Even higher.
then you can't even see the top of it, right?
And you have to decide.
Like, are you gonna take the risk?
Uh
Climbing down your hill.
Crossing like an unknown chasm.
And then climbing back up.
Just to get to the same level you started at.
with more climbing to do to get to that summit.
And that is really hard. I'm thinking of things like, you know, maybe the first time I saw this was like
A lot of companies were really good at desktop.
And you could see the mobile mountain like way out over there.
But to get there
You had to really
Uh make a lot of trade offs in your core desktop business that you were not totally sure were gonna
Like pay off.
when you made it to the Mobile Mountain and you had to do a ton of work. You had to fundamentally rewire
a lot of what you're doing without a guarantee that you're gonna get there.
I mean you can see it in life when you think about new jobs or new moves or
New relationships, like kind of anything that you think about, like you kinda are giving up something that is working pretty well.
without knowing whether you're gonna make it to the top of that next mountain.
And that's been really helpful to me just to kind of place
Where I am.
On different things.
where you know, you you can like you get the inkling that there is a much better way to do this.
There really is. Is it gonna be worse?
Going down into the valley, climbing up, keeping climbing. Is that gonna be worth it?
Most of the time the answer's yes, but it's helpful for me to know, boy, this feels like a slog.
It is supposed to,'cause I'm still in the valley.
And the thing that gets me through the valley is remembering what the summit feels like.
When you're on top of it and you're like
This is great.
It was absolutely worth it.
My life is better in these ways. We're able to solve these problems in these ways.
It was worth it.
I love that. It feels like a big uh value of this a the metaphor
Which I love is that
To set expectations is gonna be really hard for a little bit, or we
will slow down what we're trying to do now. But but the idea is there's a bigger hill.
And a bird.
On this kind of broader idea of metaphors and imagery, is there something there that you've learned of just like this works really well, I'm gonna invest in becoming better at this, or is this something that's come natural to you? Anything you can share about that skill and
Approach.
I think this one came from I I worked for for a manager, his name was Eric Antonow.
Um, and he was just a master of
The metaphor and analogies.
And so whenever I would bring him something, he would be like
How is this product?
Going to make you feel.
And when is the last time that you felt this way?
And you can say, Oh, you know, I felt this way when I was hanging with my friends in Dolores Park and be like, Cool, tell me
what it feels like, why that's the analogy, like what ramifications come out of that.
And one thing I like to do is try to build like
An emulator for different people.
In my head.
Because I've just had the good fortune of working with like
An amazing number of very different leaders.
And so he's one of the people I tried to build an emulator for where I'd be like, Okay, I see this thing, I don't know how to solve this problem
What would you say?
How would Eric describe this? You know, like I've I've tried to build one for Boz, which is all about like principle of decision making and principle of trade-offs. Like there's a few other people where I'm like,
I d don't know how to solve this problem. Can I load this other person?
into my head and how would they approach it, and that gives me like a fresh lens on it.
And I really like metaphors and analogies because like I think especially as you scale a team
Narrative becomes increasingly important. Like narrative can carry
So much weight.
And water
Where otherwise it's g it's kind of similar to like the product review point where
Either you can tell everybody exactly what to do at every point.
Or you can create a story that we all agree on.
And when we all agree on that story, people just know better what to do. Like if we all agree that the feeling of something should be
I'm sitting in Dalores Park with my friends.
On a sunny Saturday.
You you know what the iconography like
The design the the designers know what iconography should look like.
You know what the like the communication and join pattern should look like.
You're not gonna build something cold and corporate. You're not gonna build something strobe lighted, you're not gonna build something flashy.
But you don't have to go and make all those individual decisions.
You can kind of buy into the same story.
And then people will just naturally build something that feels more consistent.
This is such a powerful and important
uh skill
Is there an example that comes to mind where you did this really well? Say it in WhatsApp or
Facebook.
Kinda the story that carry a lot of water for you and you and the team.
Yeah, I mean I think the prime metaphor we kind of arrived at for WhatsApp was face to face communication.
You know?
Our goal there was
To make it so that every person in the world
Could feel
connected to the people they cared most about.
Even when they were
Separate, even they're distant geographically.
For
Whatever reason.
You know, we're always gonna be apart from the people you care about.
And we really had to build something that would work for
Literally everyone in the world, like people who are carrying these high end devices.
In Western markets who are very
Tech, comfortable and savvy.
And people in the low end markets who
were carrying these low end devices, they weren't that familiar with technology. It was maybe their first time online.
And we had to build something that worked for everyone.
And the most universal form of communication is face to face. Like when you talk to someone face to face, you're not thinking like
How do I present? Like what tool do I have to learn? You just kinda open your mouth and words come out.
And that's the feeling that we wanted to create.
And that involved a lot of like the ac
Stepping back.
From communication creating spaces that felt really intimate.
So people wouldn't have to think to themselves, what kind of space am I in? They could immediately map.
where they were in the app to the kind of the okay, I'm sitting around on my kitchen table.
And people are joining and leaving calls.
You know, just like they're walking in and out of my living room.
But
It is a family space in the family.
Is there.
Or in like, you know, one on one disappearing message. You're like, Cool, this is my close friend. We don't need to keep track of everything that we're saying.
We're here.
For a little bit of banter, a little bit of relationship, a little bit of like quick what's your wifi password stuff.
And whatever's really
important. That's what we'll hold on to. And the rest is just like day to day
Normal entrance.
That is super interesting. Like WhatsApp, the whole the whole
One of the main differentiators and benefits is super fast.
And I see completely how it connects this idea of your just like ideas we want you to feel like you're talking to someone.
And it's all a really small thing. It's like a typing indicator is like
Someone who's about to take a breath, give'em space to talk, you know, like the two
check marks lighting up or like someone's face lighting up when they hear you, you know, just a a recognition of being hurt. These are all super small things.
But I think they add up to a feeling.
Uh
Oh.
Of being there.
That is super interesting. So I love this very tactical piece of advice you just shared of just
When you're trying to come up with a metaphor or analogy, think about what you want your users to feel when you're using the product.
And when else have they felt that same feeling?
So interesting.
And then this other point you made of making this emulator of person in your head. I mean it sounds a little loud now that I think I'm robotic. It's another way
Yeah.
I I get very bored a lot. It's another way to make sure meetings are really interesting. Where like
Okay, let me see what that person is gonna say next. Like let me put myself in their shoes. Let me think about what they're reacting to.
And why they're gonna think that and how they're gonna see the world.
And again, it just gives me more toolkits.
Because it means when I'm stumped on something, I can be like
What would Rob Goldman say? He'd say, Look at the dashboard. Have I looked at the dashboard? No. Okay, let me go look at the dashboard. You know, like you can kinda load up these different
Skill sets that people
You know.
Have been so generous with sharing with me.
What would be the Amy uh emulator? What would be what are people thinking when they when they load it?
Fascinate.
Probably the number one, no joke.
Is there a an emulator you most often come back to that you find most useful in just like in your day to day, who's like the person that
Oh yeah. I think those are the three. I think it is like
And she was like
Story
Story metaphor analogy creation. I think it
It's like bosses.
If we played this out, what principles are we using and
If we kept on using those principles, what would happen?
And it is
Rob Goldman, uh
Who's an amazing kind of
Metrics.
Growth product leader.
uh being like look at the dashboard. I mean look at the dashboard, uh which is like a great like central rooting rooting part of my life.
This is so fascinating. Fascinating.

It wraps up.
I love this topic of just metaphors and stories and visions and things like that. It's something a lot of people want to get better at. Is there another example, perchance?
That you could share of the
Maybe using a metaphor to
Rally team, get things done.
I mean I think taking like a sub part of
WhatsApp or when we talk about like video calling. And I feel like one of the metaphors was like sitting around in your family room when you think about
How to make calls work.
Where when you're sitting in a family room, you're not scheduling it.
You're not like
I don't know, having this like cold corporate
feeling the way you do with like a conference call where there's like kind of heavyweight interactions.
And instead there's just
You can join and leave.
You know, like it feels
lightweight, it feels like the space exists even when you're not there.
And so just creating things like joinable calls, like that feeling of people kind of popping in and and just paying attention to whoever's there and letting them leave that the call can flow on without a super heavyweight action that everyone needs to take.
I think that was another one where we
We're just able to
To kind of agree on the feeling.
And then you kinda know what to build.
I was just using WhatsApp to do a video call with my mom. They were travelling to Italy.
And so that's exactly it felt great.

Let me go in a slightly different direction.
One of my favorite posts of yours.
It's called execution beats strategy every time.
And I think another way you phrase it is except you should eat strategy for breakfast.
I think you put that somewhere.
I'd love to hear about this,'cause I completely agree. I think a lot of people obsess with strategy and vision and gotta get this right and
Forget that most of the work is
Execution. So yeah, I'd love to hear just your take.
And inside here.
Yeah. I don't know if I coined execution heat strategy for breakfast.
I think a lot of things eat other things for breakfast, but I'm a believer. Like I do think I've usually start eat for breakfast.
And that's something we used to say a lot at Meta. Like that was it was just the most important
part and I was well trained in that. That was like one of the the key lessons that I learned there.
It's because when you have
Look, strategy's super fun.
You get to like think about all this pie in the sky stuff. You get to think about if the world operated in rational patterns and you could predict the future.
what is gonna be the second and third order effect like
You get to use your brain in a really fun
Philosophical way.
But like customers don't care.
Like customers don't care about your fancy strategies and like your five year plan. They care about
The product that's in their hands.
And so anything that
Uh
distracts you from thinking about the product in your hands, I think
Yeah.
maybe worse takes you away.
uh from solving customers' problems.
Today.
I think
is a distraction.
And I think one of the things that you learn is like
If you have great straty perfect strategy.
But
Poor execution.
You don't win.
Because your strategy never makes it to the market.
And what's even worse is that you have learned nothing.
You don't know whether it was your strategy that was wrong or whether it was your execution that was wrong. All you know is you didn't win.
Whereas when you have like
A pretty good strategy, good enough strategy, you're in the right direction.
And you have perfect execution.
You still don't win immediately.
But you know your execution was great.
You ni so the then you learn
What do you need to do to improve your strategy? You've got the execution machine. You go back, you update your strategy, you relaunch.
And you keep on doing it.
Until your strategy is perfect.
And then you do it.
And that's kind of the lesson I repeatedly learned.
And is this advice kind of a reaction to what you said where people PMs let's say
Or just like I wanna work on strategy. We gotta spend all this time get the strategy nailed.
And it's just like, Okay, we also need to execute and that's maybe even more important.
Yeah, I do think it's like it's very glamorous to work on strategy. It's so fun like
You want it's so fun to have the word strategy in your tetan it's I don't know, we've like built a mythology.
around strategy being the most important thing.
An execution is not glamorous. It is not like
whiteboarding by yourself.
You know, and pointing to things and like coming out with the grand vision.
It is like the nuts and bowls and like
Sometimes kinda boring, sometimes kinda like grinded out work of like
You gotta bring the donuts, you gotta look at the dashboards, you gotta rewrite the spec, you gotta just do a bunch of the grinding.
But that is what leads to the customers' outcomes. You know, that is what the customer is and eventually going to feel. They're never going to see the whiteboard.
They're gonna see that someone took the time to fix this buck.
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Is this advice you give to your PMs on your teams like is this a kind I guess, how do you think about this when
They're trying to
you know, move up the ranks, become better product managers. This is just like a common thing that you often share, like, Yeah, strategy's gonna be amazing important, you gotta get good at it, but
Also make sure this is going great.
Yeah, I do think I think about it a little bit in terms of like proportion of time you should expect to spend.
So I I mean
There's no point expanding that strategy. You can't have a bad strategy.
So you should spend some time, maybe it's like twenty percent of your time.
But the bulk of your time should be like
Confirming that strategy actually makes sense for the customers, getting it out there, building the machine to constantly make it better.
As opposed to like a perfect strategy.
You go away, you build it for a year.
You ship it.
The market has changed.
You know?
Customers have changed, their needs have changed, competition like just the whole landscape has changed.
And you probably could have solved those problems.
More easily had you headed in the right direction, but done it with more ongoing.
In terms of this proportion, I imagine
What you see is as you get more senior, more your time spent on strategy, less time on execution, right?
I don't a hundred percent know that that's true.
I think again, like even at high levels, aga this maybe the
the strategic directions become more important to get like mostly right.
But I think still most of your time is making sure they can make it to market.
You know, like
I think
You should still be spending your time understanding what's slowing people down and unblocking it, understanding like how is the market changing, understanding what the broad customer feedback is. Like
Just constantly improving.
The system
that you were building. I think that's
I mean how how
How much time can you spend
Thinking about the future?
As opposed to like actually trying to create it.
That is really interesting advice'cause I think most people imagine as you get
More senior.
I'm gonna have more time to think about vision and strategy and
Not have to be in the weeds building things. And I love this point you're making.
Even as
A senior exec. You're still like
It's executing in a different way, but it's still executing. Yeah. You're focusing on the execution of the system a little bit more.
But
You know.
You gotta stay connected, I think, to the customer and to what you're bringing to them.
I love that.
Obviously strategy is also very important.
You have this great quote that I'm gonna read here. Uh for strategy to be useful, it actually has to change our behavior as a team to create better customer outcomes.
Can you talk about that?
Yeah, I mean I think again, like some of the joy of strategy is like the
philosophy and excitement of
thinking about all the long term stuff that will happen.
But
I try to like always come back to
What's gonna change for the customer?
If we have all of these conversations and we come out with a shiny five year plan.
But then we change nothing.
about the products that we're building or how we are building.
What was the point of that exercise? Like it made us feel good. With and there's something to making us feel good. That is good. Like it's it's
Important.
For teams to to feel good and connected and this is like a good exercise for that.
But it's so much more powerful.
When it's an exercise that translates into us doing something differently.
Whether that's prioritizing different products, whether that's changing our portfolio allocation, like moving people to the things we think are most important now versus things that are that are gonna be less important right now, like
Моц.
Or like coming out with a strategy that'll align people because we have the story, we have the narrative, we have the sequence.
What's gonna change for our customers as a result of this strategy exercise?
Many people want to get better at strategy. Often their performance feedback is become more strategic, think better about strategy.
What has helped you
become better.
A better strategic thinker. Is it just doing it? Is it a person that influenced you heavily? Is it a book?
What has helped you and what do you often recommend to people to get better at the skill?
I think I got that same feedback.
Quite a lot, actually.
Of needing to kinda think bigger.
And be more visionary.
Etc. And I still do, frankly, actually. There's moments where I retrenched way too far into like execution and like
worry a little less about long term strategy.
So it's definitely like my bias.
Still.
The biggest thing that held me back from talking about strategy was
I didn't feel confident.
That I knew enough.
To like
declare a strategy. It was actually like almost like a self confidence.
Imposter syndrome thing.
Were there are people who could just say I know how the world is gonna develop
In the next five years, and let me tell you, here's where we're gonna be, like this is the dot on the map.
And I was always like
could you know? Like anything could happen. Like who would I be?
to say I know how the world's gonna develop and here's here's where we're heading.
And so for me a lot of it was actually
Learning the things that made me feel confident in my own opinion.
And there's like a bunch of things that do make me feel confident, in my opinion. When I talk to specific customers and I feel like I can build
An emulator for them, like a customer on my shoulder where I can say
Oh, I talked to this person?
working in this job, here's what they would say if I showed them this product or this strategy, you know?
So I think talking to customers is a big unlock for me and like feeling like I have unique knowledge of the customer.
I think working through
Different like
Product iterations.
Of if we thought this was the right outcome, what would it really look like?
From a product perspective or a product portfolio.
In three to five years and which of those like scenes
Right.
Or rational or like it will
Will go the way, I think.
The world goes.
I think asking for other opinions, like sometimes I run like surveys to the leadership team where I'm just like
How do you think you know?
What percentage of our revenue is gonna come from small businesses versus big businesses in three years? You know, and if we all agree on that topic.
We just take it as the truth.
Then we should just fill it. If we disagree.
Then we should talk about it. We should talk about the strategic ramifications of if we chose one path or the other path.
So for me it was
Getting more comfortable having an opinion.
Honestly, about how the world was going to go. And
also feeling comfortable that we we would be able to change it.
When we learned
that like maybe that wasn't exactly right. Like we would have the machine the execution machine behind it.
To try it out and then
change and iterate and improve with customer feedback.
At which point in your career was this kind of uh
Overcoming this fear and
And uncertainty, was it some sometime within Facebook?
It was sometime with Facebook. It was really when I was stepping into like
the ad the bigger ads jobs, like getting getting to be ahead of product for for Facebook ads.
Uh I got feedback I got a lot of feedback over the course of my career.
And some of the
The stacking of feedback was basically like
You could be the smartest person in the room, but it doesn't matter if people don't like you.
Uh, which I don't which is very complicated feedback and I don't
Uh
I I wouldn't give that feedback to anyone else.
Um, but I took it very seriously. It was coming from so many different places, it was coming from people I really trusted.
And so I I kinda went out of my way.
To be more likable.
Which for me ended up being like
Uh
Shrinking myself a little bit.
And not being so aggressive, not being so opinionated.
Kinda being more unobjectionable.
And the the weird part is that it kind of worked.
For a long time. Like people were more likely to work with me. They were more likely to say nice things. I mean, I take this to extremes. I wore earth tones for like two years,'cause that is just like
I gotta fade back a little bit.
And then you know, at some point.
I actually had to do
A leadership job.
And my team was like, Well what do you think? Like you get what's your opinion? And I was like
You've been telling me not to have an opinion for so long. And so it took it took a little bit of work to get back to
Oh yeah, like I can have I have a lot of opinions. I have a lot of thoughts. It is okay for me to express it is needed.
My team needs me to have these opinions and thoughts and be a leader.
Who can like take ownership and be visible.
Yeah.
Thanks, that.
Do you think that was the right approach?
Uh going kind of indexing far to the other end and then kind of realizing that maybe that's too far, or do you think
You would have done things differently looking back.
Yeah, this it's kinda one of my Roman Empires. Like I think about this every week.
So often, like way too much, I think.
Um, especially'cause I talked to other senior women who received
Similar feedback and chose not to act on it or
Did act on it and like you know it happened to
Uh their paths were different.
I think where I landed is like
I wouldn't give that feedback to someone else.
And the way I do give that feedback, actually, because I think there is a lot of really useful
Information.
In that
The way I do give that feedback is you do need to be able to work with a broader range of people.
And the way to do that is to expand your tool sets.
Like, you're not gonna make yourself smaller, you're not gonna be any less of who you are.
But you are gonna build new tools.
So that you can you know new keys to unlock new different kinds of doors.
And that is only gonna make you bigger and more powerful and more expansive.
But the end outcome is the same is that you can work with more different styles of people, more different styles of problems.
I love that framing.
There's an episode that's gonna come out before this episode with this professor from Stanford, Jeffrey Pfeffer.
Who teaches a class called The Path to Power.
Uh, which is like how to become powerful in the world.
And

Lesson that many people hate hearing, which is
Uh you don't actually
You don't need to be authentic.
In the workplace.
That
But you're trying to achieve. You're trying to achieve stuff and you can
Do what you need to use tools that you need to use to achieve the thing you want to achieve. So sometimes
You know, don't be exactly who you are and act in a slightly different way, which is basically what you're describing.
More tools.
I think that's like a theme that's coming up. It's just like I'm all about like
More lenses, more keys, more tools in general.
Because why not? Like why not have access to more different styles of things?
Something you're kind of like uh talking about uh
Subtly is the being a a woman in tech and being a w a female leader.
I imagine you've gone through some stuff that isn't uh what something men would have gone through.
Is there anything there that you want to share or anything you've learned about just
being really successful as a woman in tech.
I think we've talked through some of them. I think like
One you get a different style of feedback.
And a lot of the ways to interpret that feedback, I think to this day.
I get feedback that is about walking a very narrow tight rope.
Where not only do you have to
change a bunch of things and do a bunch of things that are important, you have to make people feel a certain way about how you do that.
And the ways that they want you to make you feel are like diametrically opposite. Some people are gonna be like, be more directive.
So that way everyone knows your thing. Some people are gonna say be less directive. So
People can come to their own conclusions, you know?
Some people are gonna say like move faster because there's always more you can do. Some people are gonna say move less fast because otherwise you're gonna end up skewering people.
And a lot of it is kind of personal like there's much research about how women get a lot more personal feedback, but it's less about
the content of the role and more about their style.
I think that is still true.
And there's often a kernel of truth in it. You know, for me this is forever work. Like I do
Ham bias.
Toward execution and being directive and things like that.
But I think
Learning how to interpret and respond to feedback
has been a really important point for me, and making my choices of
Just because I'm getting feedback doesn't mean I immediately need to resul like respond to all of it.
There is a there's a step in between.
Where I can choose
Is this feedback I want to
Take action on
In this exact way, am I going to like look for more themes, take action in a different way, or am I gonna say this is who I am?
And I understand the trade offs. I'm gonna do a better job of giving people context.
on the decisions I'm making and why I'm choosing these trade offs.
But actually this is like part of how I want to operate and I'm gonna keep operating.
And then I think we just like give
Women weird about
Here's a hot take.
I think we tell women
Things like you need to find a mentor and you need to find a sponsor.
And that's just another set of hoops.
The we
We have that we tell women to jump through that I don't think we tell other parts of the population to jump.
Like
I think we tell women
You know, to unlock your future success, you've gotta find somebody.
who has made all the same life decisions you have and who you look up to and relate to, but who also had an hour every month to like
be an oracle.
To tell you all the things you do in your life?
And
I it feels like yet another burden.
Where you're like, I don't know how to do that.
Like
I had
the extreme generosity of so many wonderful leaders who helped me on my way, but I didn't feel like I had this mentor, and for a while it was just like
Oh man, if I only had a mentor, I would know how to do all this stuff.
And it felt like another weight that I needed to carry. Which I didn't. I had everything I needed. People were so kind and generous. But I didn't
recognize it that way because we
Talk about it different.
Thank you for sharing all that. I wasn't planning on going in this direction, but uh this is such important advice.
For say young women that are just getting started in the say product.
Is there any advice you'd want to share?
Tell them.
Get to to be the the next army.
Oh, I mean uh number one, no next army. They're gonna be there next themselves. You know, like that is maybe the most important thing is like
N everyone will only tell you their own story. Like that's all that's all anyone can do.
But the thing that I tell people is like
Don't
Dampen.
Who you are in your strengths, just continue expanding.
Whenever you run into a problem, just add more.
to the things that you can do, the tools that you have, the way you can express yourself.
Just keep on adding.
And growing.
And don't like shrink yourself ever.
I love that.
I wanna move to a different topic. There's a few things I definitely wanted to touch on while we had our time together.
What is that? I hear now this is gonna be a total tangent, but I think it's really important and I'm excited to talk about it.
Um, I hear you're really good at setting goals.
and aligning incentives really well for teams. One of your colleagues told me
You're best in class at building product orgs and figuring out how product orgs can best work with other teams.
I'm curious if there's any tricks or lessons you can share here about what you've learned about how to do this well.
Yeah, I mean I think one thing is
To try to decouple all the things we're trying to do.
Sometimes
uh when you give people direction, you're like, Okay, everybody just go get revenue.
Or you know, everybody should go get GMV.
And it seems obvious'cause that's the thing you have to do, right, as a company.
But
Uh
There's only a few places where you're guaranteed to get that and it's measurable and like you can do it.
And that leads to like what I call
Toddler soccer.
You know, where everybody just runs to the same surface or the same customer set or the same
uh like exact product.
where you can do this and it's measurable, and you end up like everyone's tripping on each other, everyone's trying like nobody really gets contact on the ball. There's no like coordination, you know?
I have three kids. I've watched a lot of toddlers play soccer.
Very good.
It's a very fresh very fresh metaphor.
And uh and instead like
one of the things I like to do is just detangle, okay, as a company
Let's think about our customers. Let's think about like all the things they're gonna need in their journey. Let's think about like
How we will know how we will match our own metrics to customer success. Let's play the entire feel.
Like what would it look like?
If we could detangle it so that every
Team we had internally, it had a different goal.
that latters into like a goal framework.
That's actually the thing that we need to do to solve the full
Customer in that.
And then you don't have the same swim lanes problem. You d you have like plenty of room for people to like
make progress on their lanes, they all know how they fit into the bigger picture.
And it just opens up a lot more growth.
For every team
And it makes sure that we're solving like the customer problem and to end.
Is there an example that you could share to make this even more concrete from, say, WhatsApp or Facebook or
Instagram or anything like that, where you can share some of these goals that you've like Oh, this worked out really well. I know it's probably
private information.


It might be trickier. I mean maybe going back to like the GMV.
Um example
Like maybe instead of motivating everyone on GMV
You motivate them on GMV per surface and you divide up the surfaces. Or maybe you motivate them on
Uh
Like actually different goals that underlie like when you think about GMV, what are the all the various engagements, customer engagements that lead to GMV?
Can you goal on those input metrics? Can you goal on
Number of people who visit, number of people who convert, number of people who reorder, number you know, et cetera.
Rather than going strictly on the output.
So the core advice here is
Each team should have different goals that are kind of part of this metrics tree, the latter up to revenue, GM V, something like that.
Whatever thing that best matches kind of the overall customer outcome.
That mirrors the company outcome as well.
Got it. And there's always this balance between it's like actually the best metric
versus like it's something they can move and understand and it's easy.
uh watch and it's movable and things like
Right. Yeah. And you have to have faith that it is
actually connect into that output metric.
Like you don't want to create a metric that's disconnected just to make a team feel good.
It really does need to solve the customer problem and that's reflected in companies performance.
But
You can usually break it down into smaller pieces. And I think that breaking down into smaller pieces and assigning those out to teams.
That's really helpful.
Is there anything else along these lines of things you've learned about helping teams work together and
Not
Play toddler soccer.
Beyond uh
Having different goals that kind of all ladder up too.
To the one that really matters.
I think there's value.
In also acknowledging that
Teams are gonna have different incentives.
Even inside a team like cross functional teams.
On the same pot or whatever.
are gonna have different incentives, they're gonna come in with different information, they're gonna have disagreements.
And certainly like
different teams inside a company or different like pillars inside a company, different products and they're all gonna have different incentives.
And I think sometimes that feels like
Something is going wrong.
When people disagree.
But actually that's just a sign of like
healthy tension and knowledge. I think the thing that makes tension healthy
Is like
One when you can acknowledge it.
And say, Yeah, of course there's tension. You're bringing different information than I'm bringing when we should be disagreeing. Like that's not
No one's a bad person. No one is like
Coming in with poor intent, like
Everyone's doing the thing they are supposed to do and that is like a useful thing to do.
And then you have to agree on the outcome that you're aiming for. Like
If you disagree on like what the company outcome is or what the customer outcome is.
Then you've got some structural stuff you need to work out and normally you just have to escalate it.
But if you agree on like
We're all trying to move this metric by changing this customer experience.
Then all you're doing is like having a conversation about the best way to do that.
Using the different information that everyone is bringing.
And I think that's super important to just have as a rational, open, explicit discussion.
As opposed to like trying to hide it.
Or like
Pocket vetoing or something else.
Because you assume that like when someone disagrees with you that
I don't know, there's something emotional or wrong about it.
But it's fascinating.
Ha ha ha.
Exactly.
There's a piece of advice I once heard from the head of product at Airbnb once where we're trying to find the
And reorg the business and try to figure out the best org.
And his advice and he something he realizes like there's never the best org, there's just
The best idea we have at the time with the here's the things we know are not going to be optimal about it and let's build processes around that.
I think that's my take on like leadership in general.
Like
Especially as you get more senior
You can only make bad decisions.
You know, like
At some point y someone can bring you a problem, you can recognize a problem, and you can like solve it.
And there's like oh so much happiness in solving that and like tying a bow around it.
But as you get senior, the only problems you'll see are ones that are fundamentally unsolvable.

They got to you, right?
And so all you're doing is like
choosing which branch of suboptimal you're gonna put your name on.
And like describing like the principles you're using and the context and the fact that you know it's suboptimal.
But it's still the best thing.
I think that's a really hard thing is just to
recognize and acknowledge that like
Increasingly people only see you do s very make suboptimal decisions. And then from a distance they're just like, Why is that person only making bad decisions?
It's because those are your only options. All you can do is choose
The least bad, the best possible for the time, for the problem.
That's consistent, that makes sense with the framework.
And that's been like a tough thing to learn too.
Mm. You said somewhere that
As you get more senior, you get worse at everything because the problems get harder.
Ah!
I mean it's a kinda dark view of leadership, you know, where
You do like yeah, you can't fully solve problems. You have to say no a lot. People are unhappy with you. I thought
You know, as you get more senior
Everyone listens to you and they like you and you just say a thing and then it happens and it's
Uh that is not at all accurate, you know? It really is
Most of the decisions you make are
Are not
Uh are not gonna be perfect.
And I think
I'm all about just normalizing and acknowledging.
Those hard truths?
Because otherwise I feel like I'm failing.
And if I just know that something's normal that it's part of the job
Then it's not me. It's just like okay, this is a fact of the job that I have to get accustomed to if I want to have this kind of impact.
And there's something about
Having the impact like
being able to serve the customer, being able to be part of this team, there's something about it that is so worthwhile.
But it's kinda worth
Being terrible at everything and being visibly terrible at everything because that
Is the best way that I have.
to like have that kind of impact.
I think this is really important for
early like I CPMs to hear because they see their CPO and
Founders.
Making all these decisions and they're like, What the hell?
That's terrible. Yeah. Why are they doing this? And you know, w what you're saying is just like it's the best there's options are limited.
Yeah.
And then nothing's gonna be optimal.
Yeah, like no org is optimal. It's definitely you can optimize for the people you have, and you can optimize for the products you have, you can optimize for the customers you have, and you can optimize for the technology you have.
Those are like the options that you have.
Right. And in every one of those you trade off everything else.
And so you're just like
That you just have to know there's not gonna be a perfect where all of it works.
And that's okay. Like that is part of the fun of it. That's part of getting do this work is like continuing to improve.
But it's hard. It's hard when people
It's hard. Especially when you want everyone to think you're so great at everything.
This idea you mentioned of as a senior person solving people's problems feeling really good.
Reminds me, we'll link to this there's this Harvard Business Review.
Article from like the seventies or eighties or something about monkeys on your back. Have you read this or heard of this? Oh yeah, yeah. I did.
Where it's basically like as a manager, uh people get off of your back. Like people come to you.
Hummy, here's a my monkey. Please take it for me and feed it for me and take care of it.
And your job as a leader is to keep the monkeys on people's backs and help them figure out how to feed this monkey themselves.

Yeah.
Very visceral.
I wanna talk about fair and your current role.
As a final section of our chat.
First of all, what was it like?
starting something completely new after fifteen years at uh meta. At the very various properties of meta.
Yeah, I mean I was so lucky. I had such an amazing
An amazing broad meta. I got to work with amazing leaders.
Truly great products.
Um and I came to fair
For the same reason that I've been anywhere because I believe in the people and I believe in the mission.
A lot of my family in India is in wholesale and local retail and so like
Which is what fair does. And so it was also a very personal thing for me, too. I felt like I knew those customers. I'm a huge fan of small businesses. I got to work with a bunch of them.
In previous jobs as well.
I would say it like
Coming to fair, I mean, one of the things I always think about is that when you especially as you are more senior, ramping on anywhere feels terrible.
Because you expect to be
As good at your new job.
As you were when you left your last job.
But you forget that like at your last job you were there for years. You had years to build up like the vocabulary and the cultural context and the network and the product knowledge.
And then you're stepping in somewhere
Well you know none of that.
But you have the same expectations of yourself of being able to like
have an impact and improve things and help your team.
And so I always just try to like
Uh remind myself
It's gonna take time.
And what's most important is not for me to like
Try to come in and change everything immediately, but to learn enough.
To be able to change things like sixty or ninety
Or a hundred and twenty days in the future.
Um and so that
Breathing helps a little bit.
It was also really interesting because like
Fair was entirely new to me. It was like a new business model. It was a whole new set of people.
There's a whole new set of customer problems.
And so like
Every interaction, I just like had to learn so much. I had to learn like who is this person? How do they see the world?
what's the problem they're talking to me about? What's the customer impact, I think.
So it's just like a dramatic like learning curve, which I always really love.
Um maybe the last thing I'd say is like
Again, I was super lucky at Meta.
I think I always had this maybe like deep seated insecurity.
That I maybe I was only good at meta.
Like maybe there was something about that network of people and how great they were and
How well I knew those product.
And maybe I wouldn't be that successful somewhere without that scaffolding.
And so leaving and being able to go somewhere else and like
lead through change and
A new a new place, a new customer set, a new business model.
Um
That's also been really
Really affirming for me, honestly.
Well we have a lot of fans at Fair from the people I know there and so
Clearly things are going well, at least as far as I can tell.
Um, something that I think is uh fair definitely has in a lot of
companies have is a very product minded visionary
Founder.
And
Uh CPOs classically last like a year or two and then they're like uh this sucks. The C founder just tells me what to do and I'm what's the point of this role? And it's so frustrating.
I'm curious just what you've learned about
At least so far.
Uh about working with someone like that as a CPO.
And not just being this like middle person between what the founder wants to deal, what the team is building.
Yeah, I mean this is gonna sound so naive.
But I literally didn't know how important it was.
For me to have such a great relationship with the CEO.
Like
'Cause I I always had great relations you know, I I was lucky I had great relationships with a lot of people at my previous jobs. I was like, Oh, of course, like it's gonna be fine, everyone's gonna let me do what I want, whatever.
And
I think I just got really lucky'cause Max is an amazing
CEO
Who's also super growth mindset and super open.
to like talking over ideas, even when they involve a lot of change.
So like you know, when I was onboarding one of the things I always like to do is write like
uh like a list of observations. I go out and talk to people I have one on ones with like a lot of people and I write like here's the themes that I'm hearing, here's what's going well, here's what's not going well.
Um and that's like a way for me to both
share what I'm seeing and like build some credibility and trust that way.
But also people to give me feedback and be like, Oh, you're wrong about this just so I can kinda
correct my
Um starting
Like pe point of knowledge.
And with Max, I also wrote like a parallel document of hot takes.
So like once a quarter or so for the first year, I would write a document that was just like
Hey, for sake of provocation
If we wanted to fundamentally change a few things here's ideas on what we could fundamentally change.
And Max, you know
Very, very well. Could have just been like
Hey, like can you please just run product? Like that's kinda you don't know. Can you please do that?
And instead he and the
Entire rest of the executive team.
We're like
Yeah, like let's step through these. Let's talk about
Which of these we should try. Let's talk about maybe context you don't have for why these don't make sense or why we don't do these.
Um
And that was such a gift.
You know, because
I was able to build
Like such a great relationship a tr like a trusting and complimentary.
relationship with Max and the rest of the exact team and also that he took seriously
Because if he really didn't have to.
That
You know.
I I have so much respect for that.
And I think I got really lucky in just like finding a great CEO on exact team.
Is there anything you learn about this vetting process? Say you're
A founder looking for a head of product, a CPO.
Any advice for
How they might vet.
this person to make sure they are a good fit and will last.
What I what I'd say to everyone else is like make sure you just have a mind mill with the CEO before you decide to take the job.
Like spend a day together, like understand how they think and how they operate and whether you're gonna work together.
In a way that feels a really high fidelity.
And like high trust and you're gonna have room.
I mean I'm I'm not a founder, like by any stretch. And so when founders ask me like what should I look for in a head of product or CPO.
I see something a little bit different, which is
Make sure that
You really need the level of seniority that you are hiring.
I think that a lot of founders say
I nід a CPO, I ні a VP product, а ні сама хузри снір.
When often like the founder has a bunch of the vision and knowledge.
And what they really need is somebody to build the product. They don't need somebody who's gonna like scale the team or like build systems.
Like
They've got enough of that.
And so that to me is part of building that complimentary relationship where the
The founder and CEO know what they need.
And on the CPO side, they know that they can mind meld enough with the CEO to actually have an impact.
Last question.
You started as a
Intr as an intern uh in the PR department, I think, at Meta?
Oh I started the tank.
A temp okay.
Amazing. And then you ended up uh leading Facebook ads and then WhatsApp and many other things.
Can you share that story of just how you joined and how that happened?
Well, I had quit my last job. I knew that
I I
Uh I knew that what I wanted to do was like be involved in all the wild stuff happening in Silicon Valley.
And
The mid two thousands, um
So I'd quit my last job. I was kinda traveling around the world a little bit. I was living uh in New York.
A an extremely blissful lifestyle. Um, I was unemployed, I was doing whatever I wanted. Some of the best time I've had in my life.
And eventually I needed a job, you know, like you do.
But it was two thousand seven.
And the only place I wanted to work was Facebook.
Like
You could hear the way people talked about.
These products. You know, people would say
Facebook is more important to me than my car.
It's like how I connect with the world.
Right. Like
This is it was such a magical product and you could hear that.
And
I knew some people at the company.
And I convinced
one of them to introduce me to everyone at the office. I I made a trade. I said I'll buy you
Fancy coffee at Cooper Cafe in downtown Palo Alto.
And in exchange, like just introduce me to everyone. Everyone you know, take me around the office.
And so everyone I met, I said, Hey, Mommy, I really want to work here. I'll do whatever you need.
And the only call I got back was from the head of PR, Brandy Barker.
Who said, Look, we can't hire you. Like
We didn't interview you. We don't have head cow.
you're not really qualified. It was just like ten reasons.
It's like
Oh okay, thank you for calling me. And she said, but
Um we need a temp to review our press releases.
Uh, so if you wanna come join a temp agency, we'll like
Telling to send you here.
And um
And that's what I did. I moved out to California and I
Slept on people's couches and um
Eventually they hired me full time.
And I didn't let that.
And now you're on Lenny's podcast. What are we on?
It's interesting. This reminds me of another uh path to power rule from the Jeffrey Pfeffer podcast of networking is one of the best ways to
acquire power in the world. So it's interesting that now that seed is planted in my head anyway, just to plug for that other episode also.
Ami, is there anything else that you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?
Sometimes people ask me who are working in product like what's the one thing they should do?
Um to like be successful at product.
And maybe the thing I would say is like
Especially as a an org scales or a company scales.
There's just a lot of distractions that get between you and the customer.
And so the one thing that I would just advise everyone to do
It's just like
Think about the customer.
Like talk to the customer, be an advocate for them.
It's such a shortcut.
To everything else you need to do in order to be successful.
But it's so easy for that to get like
lost when you're thinking about
Okay, how do I get alignment on my team? How do I figure out my roadmap? How do I like
convince people to join the company. There's all these different things.
But fundamentally we're here to like
create value for the customer. And the closer you can get to that.
I always found myself the happiest.
Because I'm building that feedback group with the customer, but also more successful.
Let me actually follow up on this'cause this is really important and interesting.
There's a PM part in my brain of like, okay, but we also gotta move some metrics and sometimes that
uh metric isn't gonna be moved by we need to do something specifically for the customer, but it's something that will help the business.
Is there anything there of just that balance of like we need to move over this this uh
Conversion metric.
Uh versus like let's focus
Fully on what does the custom want and need?
Any thoughts there? Yeah, I think often like
make things adversarial that are not actually adversarial.
Like it is very rare.
for customer value to be different than company value.
On a long enough time horizon.
Like there might be short term divergences, but really like to solve
To create value for the the customer.
You gotta be around as a business.
You know, like otherwise you are creating zero value for the customer.
And so I think really just starting with the like
What are the end goals?
And where
Where does stuff diverge in the very short term versus the medium term versus in the long term? It shouldn't.
And really thinking about where you are in the journey and how to place that.
That always helps me.
Because our metrics should absolutely be about long term customer impact. It's very rare.
If those aren't, and then you're still able to be successful.
Comes back to our chat about metrics and how to do those well.
With that we've reached our very exciting lightning round.
Here we go.
First question. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?
The year of yes.
By Shonda Rhymes.
I almost never read nonfiction.
I love Shonda Rhymes made an exception for this one. It was very it was
It's it's about just saying yes to things and finding your voice when
You do feel like you're sometimes the first or the only or the different.
And what that feels like. And it was it was very life changing for me actually.
That's an awesome pick. No one's recommended that one yet. Uh reminds me of uh an episode of Matthew Dix.
He has a TED talk about saying yes to everything. He just says he tries to say yes to everything and his life is
uh incredibly interesting as a result.
Next question, do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed?
I watch a lot of like
witty workplace comedies from the mid-2000s. Like so I watch a lot of like The Office or Thirty Rock reruns. Things are just very comfortable that I
I already know everything, there's no surprises.
I I'm not I'm not great with new stuff right now.
I heard they're bringing back the office. There's like a reboot happening.
Oh really? Let's
Fancy.
Yeah, exactly.
Is there a favorite product you've recently discovered that you love?
Either digital, physical, anything.
Maybe a a physical product that I really like. I like
I drink a lot of like coffee and tea.
through the day and it's just like a I don't know, like a calming ritual.
And so I have like
A fellows electric kettle. That was my big work from home upgrade.
Um
I so I have this I have this life for kettle. I have like a pour over kit. I have these like lovely, like colorful mugs that I like. Like that has actually just made my day to day.
A lot better is just a little feeling of luxury.
I love that. I think we have that same kettle. I also drink tea during every episode. I have to do later. Yeah.
So we're on the same page.
Next question. Do you have a favorite life motto?
That you often
Think about come back to share with friends or family and work or in life.
It is definitely not a motto. I feel like I know people have motto's and I'm so impressed. I'm like, you know.
Uh, you know what you are, you know what you need. I am not that person.
But I have
A piece of advice that someone gave me
Very early in my career.
Actually it was Shamath. He said
You can either have
More energy or less ambition.
And I was like whew, that's a little harsh.
But also like really true.
And I think about that. It's another of my Roman Empires. I think about it all the time.
Where I'm like, okay, if I want to have this kind of impact.
I'm gonna have to do the work, I'm gonna have to try new things, I'm gonna have to feel uncomfortable.
And you know, sometimes
I don't want to do those things.
I don't want to do all that work.
And then I can't be mad if I'm not having
The impact. Like those two just have to go together. I also have to get lucky.
In all these different ways, but like
The two have to go together.
And that's been just like a good governor a little bit of how I how I think about what I'm putting in.
I love that quote, by the way. If people don't know what you're talking about when you talk about the Roman Empires, there's a
meme on TikTok where
Uh somebody said that uh
Every man thinks about the Roman Empire at least once a week.
Ha ha ha.
Right.
And it's made me think about what are all the things I think about repeatedly.
without really having trigger or reason and there's still a lot.
I I don't think about the Roman Empire though. That is not working. I also don't think about the Roman Empire. Some things are wrong with me.
Okay, final question.
Uh you can blame uh your colleague Bar for this question.
He tells me that you are very good at jokes.
But you tell very good jokes.
Uh do you have a joke that you
Wanna share by any chance.
I love jokes. Um there was a a year at Facebook where I like I kinda posted a joke of the week.
Yeah.
And they're all terrible.
Yeah, exactly. Um
Uh
Alright, here here's my
Here's my favorite joke.
Great.
Uh
Why don't sharks eat clowns?
Why?
'Cause they taste funny.
I'll tell you one more, and you can choose which one. You can choose which one. All right. No, we're not cutting anything.
Wouldn't zero save the eight.
What did the zero say to the eight? Something like us. Okay, no, I don't
Nice belt.
Nice what?
Belt.
Belt.
Oh I get it.
More than your last thing again.
I get it. I get it. I'm gonna tell you a joke. I just heard a stand up stand up stand up chair.
Uh how do you turn a
An egg into a vegetable.
I feel like if you put a letter on it, it'll turn into a vegetable name, but I can't think of the letter. I love that you're like really trying to analyze it right there,'cause I don't know if it's ever possible to like actually get the answer.
Okay. So how does a
How do you turn an egg into a vegetable? Squash!
Ha ha ha
That is definitely my level of joke. Definitely.
They're like this is for your kid.
Go home and do this joke.
Ami, this was everything I hoped it would be. I'm gonna read again the goal you had for this podcast. I a hundred percent think we achieved it.
To be as authentic as possible and show
That people can be pretty messy and imperfect at times, yet still be very successful.
I think exactly what this podcast ended up being. Thank you.
So much for being here.
Two final questions, where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and learn more? And how can listeners be useful to you?
Oh thank you, Lenny. It's been such a pleasure. I uh I write um a blog on SubSucket.
I mean more. Substack dot com. It's called the hard parts of growth. It's just about
How even when you're working in great places with great people at great companies, sometimes things are hard and that's normal.
And so you can find me there. I do the same I cross post to LinkedIn so you can find me there.
And how can people be helpful to me? I don't know, just be by being great.
By being kind and nice and
Making the world slightly better.
Yeah, I think that's all we can all do.
I love that.
And I will link to your sub stack in the show notes if people want to check it out and I'll recommend it. I I haven't done it yet, but I'm gonna recommend it for my sub stack.
Thank you, Lenny, so much. This is such a fun conversation. I really enjoyed it. I loved it.
Ami thank you so much for being here.
Bye, everyone.
Bye.
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