Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/2e159dc55bde936c

You're a VP of product at Facebook, you're a director at eBay and PayPal. You're on the board of Intuit. You've been the CEO of Ancestry now for the past three and a half years. This is the career path that a lot of people dream of. You know, some of the best PMs I have ever worked with are terrible PMs for their careers. They just drift from job to job. Hey, should I take this role or this role? Like how do I think about this?
And if I said you had to write a spec for your beer, what does success look like? How were you to get there? The workplace is really favored.
People who can speak up. It looks like self-promotion. I wouldn't want to do that because of self-promotion. But instead, what if I called it educating about all the great work your team has been doing? Helping people see why your team should get more resources. You have to actually share what you do. Is there something that you believe that you think most other people don't believe? The most important career decision you make.
is who you marry. Is this person lifting you up or pushing you back? You will have a much more successful career if your home life is in balance. It's like a yin and a yang.
Today, my guest is Deb Lu. Deb was VP of product at Facebook, where she spent over eleven years.
And while there created and led Facebook Marketplace, which is now used by over one billion people monthly, she also led the development of Facebook's first mobile ad product for apps and its mobile ad network.
Also built the company's games business and payments platform including Facebook Pay
Prior to Facebook, she was director at both PayPal and eBay. She's on the board of Intuit.
And for the past three and a half years she's been the CEO of Ancestry.
I actually generally have a rule of no CEOs on this podcast, but to me Deb is a great exception because she is a product person at heart.
In our conversation, Deb shares a ton of tactical career advice, including why resilience is so key to career success.
How to PM your career like you PM your product, how to be successful in business as an introvert.
What she's learned about building multiple billion dollar zero to one businesses within a large company like Facebook, and so much more, Deb is so full of wisdom, and I'm really excited to share her insights with more people.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it on your favorite podcasting app or YouTube, it's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and helps the podcast tremendously.
With that, I bring you Deb Lou.

Deb, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
It's wonderful to be here, Lenny.
It's wonderful to have you here.
You have had such an incredible career.
Your VP
a product at Facebook, your director at eBay and PayPal.
You're on the board of Intuit. You've been the C of Ancestry now for the past three and a half years.
This is a career path that a lot of people dream of.
And honestly, just like one of those roles is a dream for a lot of people.
And so I wanted to start with just uh this question and I wanna see where the conversation takes us.
If you could give one specific piece of advice to someone that's looking to do well in their career or to do better in their career based on what has worked well for you.
What would that be?
Always be learning.
And I tell this to everybody. So I often tell people someone who's always learning is always going to exceed someone who's the expert today.
You're gonna find people, you know, the one thing about school is that we go to school and there's just such a thing as getting a hundred on the test.
A perfect school on the S A T, graduating with a four point oh. Well, there's nothing like that in careers.
Right. We think it's actually a nonlinear experience. And there's always someone better than you at speaking or presenting or strategy or execution. But if you're always learning, learning from the best, getting feedback.
You're always gonna get better every single day. And that's what I have always held, which is each job I took, I didn't necessarily qualify for it.
I wasn't necessarily the very best at it.
And so I became a student.
Of being better at that job.
And once I mastered that, I was a student for something else and something else and something else. And so I always balance learning and impact.
Which was you can have the most impact the job you know the best.
But then you stop learning.
And if you're worrying all the time, you're not necessarily having impact. So how do you keep going back and forth and back and forth so that you're not going straight up a ladder? You're actually laddering back and forth into different things where you're having an amazing time where you know everything.
And then you're
The newbie again.
And learning new things.
And you're incorporating what you used to know into what you're learning and the impact that you have today, and so on and so forth.
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You talked about like you got into a new job maybe you weren't ready for it and you like had to learn on a job.
So either maybe share a story of one of those experiences or just like how do you actually do this? So if someone's listening, they're like, What how do I learn? What am I learning?
Well start with my career in tech. So I had um I had worked in consulting before business school. I went to Stanford for business school, came out to California, didn't know that much about tech.
But I really loved using eBay, so I interned there my fresh my first year in um business school.
And then when it came to finding a job, I really wasn't sure what we wanted to do, but we wanted to move back to the the east coast.
And so it wasn't looking and
Can find a job.
Like it was really hard, it was challenged two.
And so I kind of ran into Tim Wensel and Catherine Wu. So they Catherine Wu is from Airbnb, as you might know her.
And uh Tim Winsl put together the PayPal Mafia. He was the recruiter for PayPal.
Went to this table and I said
absolutely love PayPal, use it all the time. I'm a
big seller on eBay. And he's like, Do you want a job? I'm like, No, I'm actually going back east.
I mean like just come in and talk to us.
And so I said, Okay, well what kind of jobs do you have? And he's like I have jobs and product.
And jobs in marketing. Now I take it in a marketing class, obviously, in business school.
And I said, I wonder what this other product job is. So I look over at Catherine and I've kind of seen her around Stanford before, so she she was a year ahead of me.
And I said, Well what do you do? She's a product. I'm like, That sounds good. I'll do that.
And that's actually how I fell into product management.
Well, I w actually and I'm embarrassed to say faith my way through those interviews.
Because during the interviews they're like, Well, what would you build? And since I was an avid user of both products, I
could really richly say, here's here's the product feed out feedback I have, here are the new products you should build, here's my feedback on things that we should be doing differently. And they said, Congratulations, and they gave me the job.
And embarrassingly, I went to the first day of work and I said to Amy Clement, who was the VP of product at the time, and I said
Okay, I literally have no idea what this product job is.
And she showed me the ropes, and she was so incredible. She actually showed me she said, You know, all those ideas you had.
All that energy you had around building this things.
We go do that. Let's go do it. And I said, Well, how do you do that?
And she said, Well you write down what you want to build and then you work with the engineers to do it.
And I just remember thinking
This is crazy. I have no idea what I'm doing.
And it was such an incredible adventure, though. Those first few years, I just learned so much about the craft of building how to really think through product use cases, how to think through what customers wanted. Not just the customer of one myself, but really what true customers and customer cohorts wanted.
And so it was really a time when I felt like I was really blossoming.
But I didn't come in with mastery.
I came with a curiosity, and I think that's what made me a great product manager, was that I didn't have a set way of doing things. There wasn't some playbook I was trying to play, there wasn't some framework.
But instead I was willing to learn.
So one takeaway might be from this uh the phrase fake it till you make it.
Uh
Any thoughts on just how to like I imagine many people right now are like oh I'm trying to get a job as a PM. How do I do this? That sounds great. I'm gonna
Pass this interview, figure out the job as a
After I joined.
Coming in with humbleness was really important. But during the interview process, actually, I didn't realize this, but they
Ask me questions as if I was a product manager, as if I knew what I was doing.
And I think when you have passion around a product or passion around a company or around a business model or around something.
It shows.
And so it's not necessarily faking the enthusiasm or faking the idea that you want to work there.
But you don't have to know how to write the spec or a PRD or briefings or anything like that. You don't know how to do have to know how to do customer research or do data analytics or read reports, but instead show your passion around the product itself, around the use case, around the customer.
Show who you are and why you care.
I think sometimes people just say, Well, I've won a product job.
But you know, you have to be able to fall in love with the problem.
You have to fall in love not with the product, but I said the problem.
Right, the use case. What problem are you trying to solve?
And if you can do that, you can be a great product manager even without a lot of experience.
That's an awesome piece of advice. So just like lean into the passion. One first of all part of it is you have to
be excited about the thing you're trying to work on or thinking about the company you're thinking about joining. Sounds like that's a prerequisite here.
Uh I had we have a podcast episode with uh early Levine who has a whole book called Fall in Love with the Problem, which is all about that same idea actually for startup founders. I'll have to read it. Yeah. He has a he always wears a shirt. Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.
Yes. Yes. That is absolutely the most important skill for a product leader.
Something else I've heard you talk about in terms of
Yeah.
Something that contributed to your success is
is uh being okay with failure and just bouncing back quickly.
Versus avoiding failure. Is that something that you come back to a lot?
Well here's what I notice about everybody and you know, I have coached a ton of people in my life. I have managed big teams and
You know, the people who are most successful are not the people who had no failures.
who's who would live charmed lives and head up into the right careers and got promoted every cycle.
The people who were most successful were the ones who actually through adversity
Learn to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones.
They were the ones who got hard feedback.
And then came back stronger because now they learn what to do differently.
They're the ones whose products failed, but they said, You know what? I'm gonna turn this failure into success.
I'm gonna take those lessons and make this company stronger.
The ones who, you know, when you live a charmed product life, you always work on everything that's easy. You don't actually, you know, trees are strong.
Because they bend in the wind.
Because they're tested, because it's cold, because it's windy, because there's
conditions and that's how a tree goes grows strong and s and you know
And tall over many generations. And I think sometimes we think, oh yeah, you know, I wish I lived a charm life. And that is not what we want.
You want to have enough adversity that you learn to overcome so that you can build stronger over time and build resilience in your career.
And I've seen that so much, which is the best product leaders I ever worked with are the ones that have the toughest stories.
that had the hardest feedback.
But also the ones who are able to bounce back quickly and make it happen.
We have a segment on this podcast called Failure Corner, where people share a failure they went through kind of along the same lines and something they learned from that experience.
Is there an example of that from your career where
A failure made you stronger.
Yeah, I remember um there was a job that I really wanted at Facebook, and I'd been there for a long time. I had been, you know, leading different teams. I was a VP of products and a GM.
Yeah, and there was a job, there was one job.
that I never got to do. So I got to do all the jobs I wanted.
And Mark gave it to someone else.
And I told him at the time when he gave it to the first person, who was amazing at it.
I said, you know
If this job were open, I'd like to be considered for it.
The job opened up later.
Give it to someone else.
And I said to Lark again, like I really wanted that job. And he said, Not only will I not give you that job
You know, I'll never you'll never have that job.
It is coming out.
And he didn't say it harshly, he didn't say it, but
He was giving me feedback about something which he did not see me in that role, in a role that I really wanted.
And I had to decide each time, like what do I do with this information?
Right. This is a j my dream job.
I actually
I decided I was gonna turn the job I had and the job I wanted.
And that's a choice, right? I could have said, You know what, I can't have that job, I could go do something something else.
But I didn't.
I took the job I had with the team I had and I
turned it into thing that was gonna be something we wanted.
And so I think sometimes
It's not you know, I think that that experience was a very humbling experience because
You know, to be told no and then to say that this will never happen.
was really hard, but at the same time
It was a reminder that you're not right for every job, even if you think you are.
And that you can't take the raw materials of what you have and turn it into what you want.
Are you able to share what those jobs were that you wanted to get that you never got?
I never actually shared it, uh publicly, but it's something which
You know, I had always had a role that where I I did new things for the company. And there was a role where it was running something which
You know, more of an existing business, but I had always been kind of the innovator, the new the new stuff person, right? I had taken over so many new things. And so, you know.
Maybe that wasn't the right thing at the right time for me.
But it was something that was really incredible and a turning point for me.
Uh, great segue to an area I wanted to spend some time on, which is
Building
Zero to one stuff within a larger company.
So
From what I can tell you built two
billion dollar businesses within a large company.
Facebook marketplace and then the ads platform.
Within Facebook.
And maybe more, I don't know.
Uh the payment stuff, the games. I don't know. Maybe there's billions of dollars there. I don't even know about
And this is very rare and very hard.
And it's something we talk about a little bit on this podcast, just the skill to build something new.
And I know with marketplace it was not something people believed in for a long time. It took a lot of work to convince people of
To actually give it a shot.
So
I guess the question here is just
What have you found are key tactics to
start something new and allow it to continue to exist and
get to a place where people start to believe it what what has worked for you.
So first I didn't build the ads platform. I actually built the first direct response ad product company ever had.
Um, but we'll talk about how that led to uh why direct response is a vast majority of the ads um revenue for the company. But one thing that it was really interesting is that I just
Yeah.
I really saw my opportunity in Facebook to be somebody that zigged when other people zagged. Like there were amazing people who did a lot of the really core products, right? Working on feed, photos, like videos and
I, you know, I came in actually on the payments team.
And we worked on payments and eventually build games, which was the first billion dollar business. It was very successful. Uh we worked with the likes of all the game companies that were on kind of the Canvas games platform.
And it was just an incredible opportunity to start from scratch and build something really cool. We built Facebook credits, which eventually um became kind of the face Facebook payment system.
And you know, then from there on I built the first direct response ads product and
Again, leveraging the skills that we had. We had a lot of relationships with game companies because of my time and payments. And so we just said, Hey, look, what ad product do you want?
And they said actually our biggest challenge, like your biggest challenge is a shift to mobile.
Build us a mobile acquisition engine. And we said.
That's doable.
And at the time the company was very brand oriented. Most of the ads on the actually almost all the ads on the platform were brand.
And we were not even on the ads team. So we actually worked on this team called the platform team.
And we said.
Okay, we'll build an ads product for the Facebook feed, the new mobile Facebook feed, and suddenly became a billion dollar business within about eighteen months.
Which was such an incredible journey.
Um we worked on the um advert the mobile advertising platform. So basically a mobile ads um network.
That was a a great experience. And so each time I worked on something, it was just
I
The thing that you have to remember is the failure rate for something like this is very high.
You know, you start something and the amount of iteration, people think, Oh, yeah, it's very easy. You start something and it's linear, because you have all the resources of this company behind you.
But actually
Everything in a company is like, let's do the most important thing. These are kind of seeds.
And we'll just let them and so if you do that, you have to know that
You don't get a lot of resources, you get a lot of attention, and I appreciated that because I think.
I work best when
People aren't there is not a lot of scrutiny.
I think sometimes large companies they say, Well, this innovation team and then they check in on them way too much. They're like
Week to week progress. Where are you going? What's your strategy? But so much as you know of of building something new is the iteration process. It's the failing a lot.
We actually tested fifty like five or six versions of the ads product before we got got it to take off. And it took months. And then we were on the verge of death multiple times. In fact, I actually went back to run the payments team while I was working on that product because the team we had gathered still want to continue working on it.
But I needed a second job.
back on the payments team because they ask me like this we don't think this thing is gonna work. You should go run your old team again. And I thought, well
I will do both.
And so I did both.
For a while until it really took off. And I think
Me the thing that I think a lot of large companies don't realize is that
You can love something to death.
Right. And say with every new product I'd rather kind of
Do it out of the limelight.
Do it with the minimal resources.
And have the freedom to fail.
Because success and failure really is, you know, the in startups failing failing fast is really important or succeeding fast, right? It's the long slog that makes it really hard. And in a company, you end up getting cut if you're the long slog product.
And so being able to just say, you know what, we're pruning this, we're doing the next thing, the next thing, and then having the time to iterate.
And grow is really critical.
So as a leader trying to do this and create space for this, is there something
You've learned about how to
Allow for
Don't over scrutinize us.
Don't look at us too carefully.
Uh, we don't want to be in the limelight. Don't put too many resources on this yet. Is it just like, hey Mark, here's what I think.
I imagine it's not as easy as that. There's like a lot of you know, uh influence and
That kind of work. Is there anything any tactics there you could share to create this sort of environment?
I think the most important part of the environment is really patience.
patients with and you know, again, this is a portfolio strategy. And I tell every PM who, you know, I used to do a new higher PM class.
And I said, look, a lot of you are going to go into the core product.
And your job is to grow X.
Like three to five percent every six months, right? Like
growing, you know, engagement or growing sessions or maybe growing video views or whatever your metric is, you're trying to grow something five percent and then you know, you you you exceed expectations.
And I said, and then a bunch of you are like, I wanna do something new.
I'm gonna build something from scratch.
And I said, by the way.
A very, very successful company for a new set of products.
has a fifty percent.
Hit me.
So f half of you were gonna come back in a year
And have a different job.
Because that did not work out.
Do you have the resilience?
To do that.
And I think somebody, you know, you enter a large company, you ease by the way, you can have an amazing career building core product. Like that is a
Incredible journey within'cause you learn so much about the mechanics of what that takes.
And yet at the same time, I found a lot of energy from doing something that someone hasn't done before.
And so I really enjoyed the
Hey, this thing could fail.
Let's pivot, let's try to figure out, let's prune this, let's try that. And you know, not everything I did there succeeded, but you know, a lot of the things that are lasting, the lasting products are ones that got really big. And so for me, it was a greater reward and it it made the journey so much more interesting.
But for others, I think, you know, work on the core product, learn the skills. It is absolutely respectable as well. But if you choose to be the person who works on innovation new products, expect in a year, you might literally have nothing to show for it, but the lessons that you learn.
And I think those lessons are really precious and we often underestimate that too.
Along those lines, do you think it's a good career move to
do a zero to one thing within a bigger company or is it
often a bad idea. Do you have any advice there for folks? It depends. It depends on your personality in the company.
So the one thing I realized about
about my role was that I did a lot of I I had like five different careers at the company over eleven years.
You know, and so most people don't realize that when you work on new things, you're constantly adding to your portfolio, subtracting from it, growing things, pruning them. And so you could just work on so many cool things.
Except you know, you're you're the
Everything ha has similar kind of it's like it rhymes, but it's not exactly the same.
Right. So you learn the lessons of how to get things done, how to get resource, how to get support when the product's not working, how to, you know, not get pruned in the next culling. And those are really, really important skills.
But
I think
For people who are just starting out a career, it is a very high risk thing to do.
So if you're very early in the career, I encourage people just learn the core skills first.
You can learn the core skills when there's a lot of stability. This product is growing.
You know, X percent, like five percent, and you're gonna grow at ten.
That's amazing. Like that is because you are there, you're gonna change the directory of the product. Or this thing is, you know, this thing has a hundred uh you know, a hundred thousand users, you're gonna get it to two hundred thousand. Like that those are the kinds of things that are, you know, going to be
successful for you and you can put on your resume.
But I think it reaches a point in your career where you have to decide when am I going to take the big swing?
Because the big swings are the things that you can
You know, you write your career stories about. They're not just I move this metric X.
But I changed the trajectory.
In this way.
And so the big swings though
Have a lot of failures along the way.
And so you have to understand you're you're making trade offs in that. And I encourage everybody to take some time, two, three years in their career, when they're ready for the big swing.
Where if it doesn't work, you know, if it works you
Run the team, you run this amazing product. But doesn't work
You can always go back.
And go back to the core products.
It's interesting how your strategy here is very similar to a product portfolio strategy where
As a team, you should have
A few big bets and then a lot of incremental stuff.
And it reminds me you wrote this awesome post call, You're in control of your career.
And uh
argument in your post is you should PM your career the way you PM your product.
So there's a lot of synergy here. So maybe just diving into this post and advice around this.
How how should someone be PMing their career the way they PM a product? That's your that's your take there. By the way, for your PM audience, I want to say this, which is
A lot of the greatest PMs are the worst PMs for their careers.
They love products. They love the craft. They love, you know, the customer research, the data, they have plans, they have timelines.
And then when it comes to career, they have none of those things.
They just drift from job to job. Hey, should I take this role or this role? Like, how do I think about this? And and I see that, but if I said you had to write a spec for your career.
What is what's in there?
Right? What are what are your milestones?
What are the skills, what are the features that you want to have of your career?
Yeah.
Well, how are you to get there?
What does success look like? You actually have metrics for your product, and yet you don't have metrics for your career.
And so often I often poach them. I coach a lot of people and when I coach them, I ask them, Well
Where do you want to see yourself in five years? Where do you want to go?
And half the people have no idea.
And I think that's really tragic because you know, when you PM your career, it's about intentionality.
But I'll tell you the story of my career and how I was the accidental PM and then eventually I told you how I accidentally fell into PM, but also fell into so many of the things that happened in my PM career. And if I had to go back, I would think much more deeply about what I want to accomplish. So I ended up at PayPal.
It's working for a guy named Dave Lee who reported to Amy Clement.
And then you know he left.
And so she offered me his role.
I can only manage people for like, I don't know, fifteen seconds.
I was two years out of business school.
And I was definitely not qualified to do his job. He was a director of product. I wasn't even a director.
And I was running the
The team for eBay. So basically the pay PayPalvert part
of eBay, which is basically half the company's revenues and and profits.
Totally unqualified.
I end up in this job.
And you know, I do a good job. I end up, you know, doing it for several years. I I build up the team and we have a great relationship with eBay.
You know, that our team was very close, and we were able to actually build something really lasting and that worked really well. And then
I had a baby.
And so this happens in a lot of women's careers. I was turning thirty, I had my son.
And
You know, I had to leave for s you know, six months, and so I handed my
My product to my successor, Mike Woop.
And he ended up taking over. And he did such a good job while I was gone. I didn't want to displace him when I got back.
And so I thought, Well, I'll go look for another role.
I couldn't really find a product role I liked, I mean,'cause there weren't that many product director roles. And so I ended up um in corporate strategy.
So I worked for the amazing Rajiv, who was CEO at the time, he's since passed.
And I wrote his speeches, worked on strategies, I worked on digital goods and um charity. And he ended building that into a vertical for the company. So charity, social commerce and and um
and digital goods. And I thought, Okay, this is an interesting job. So I create the job.
Have a couple of product managers.
Wasn't really sure where this was going. And then one day I was like, You know what?
I'm not
Feeling this. I have a child at home.
I just I had gotten to the
You know what Cheryl Sandberg calls that kind of like between kids situation where I was bored of my job.
So I go to
I go to the VPOs working
I was working one of the BPs I worked with and I resigned.
He said I'm leaving tech.
Just I'm gonna stay home and and maybe start something small.
And uh he convinced me to hold off and he said, I'll find you a job.
He calls me a week later and he said
Found you a job with Stephanie Telenius leading the buyer experience at eBay product.
And I said, Oh, that sounds interesting. So I said, Sure.
As you notice, I do not have a plan. I'm just drifting as
I'm so fortunate that I had amazing mentors who gave me opportunities to
But
You know, end up working for you know Greg Fance and Stephanie Telenius at eBay for two years. I led the buyer experience. We did some really good work there.
And then
You know, let on maternity leave again.
And I get a call from a friend, my old engineering manager from PayPal. Hey, I'm at Facebook, you want to come?
You can't come into product, you need a C S degree for that, but you know, we have a product marketing job open. I was like
So it's good.
Drop into Facebook.
And so again, no idea what I'm doing.
Back in product marketing.
So I spent a few years doing that, eventually was invited into product and
You know, so so on and so forth. And each job that came along was
Organic, but also kind of accidental.
And I see that happen in a lot of careers, which is my
My story when you look back.
Looks great, right? It looks like it all worked out.
But I've had almost zero intentionality in any of these.
And I think that had I had more agency and I thought about what I wanted, I could actually measure is this the thing that would get me further or not.
I ended up extremely lucky, but not everybody does.
And so I think having a plan allows you to compare every decision. It's not like when you grab you know, when you're offered a
An admission to college.
We're looking at three different offers, maybe, you know, with financial aid or not.
And you can make a decision. Oh, they're offering me this department, but I can't get into this department, you know.
And I'm gonna s this is how far it is from home.
But jobs and roles are nothing like that.
It's like someone calls you one day, hey.
I'm at Facebook. You wanna come? I'm like, I'm actually
you know, on maturity leave and he's like, Just come talk to me I'm like
Why not?
And you know, you end up dropping into different parts of your life. And I think
Sometimes but by saying here's where I want to go.
And here's how I want to get there.
You can have such a better career.
And so I do encourage everybody to do this and
To think about what does success look like in five years.
And how far am I from that and am I heading in the right direction?
What's interesting is I also had a similar path to you where it was I had zero plan or intention or goal.
And also just
Follow things and
Things worked out.
I wonder how often that happens, and I wonder if this idea of
having intention and plan and a roadmap.
Is something you do if things aren't working out.
'Cause maybe you think you maybe maybe there's some
Good to not overthinking it and just following pull. I don't know.
Well, I think the problem is this with you and me, Lenny.
Is it
Hindsight bias is a problem.
We made it because we weren't intentional in a lot of ways.
But for how many people is that true?
Right. For how many people who
Aren't you?
You don't have a plan and you get there.
I was telling people, you know, if you if you aren't sure what your destination is, that's definitely where you're gonna end up.
But if you actually aim in the right direction, you can shape your learnings, you can shape the roles you take, you can shape your, you know, your skills towards the place that you want to go.
When you when you talk about getting this offer from Facebook.
Usually those are like you have three days to decide.
Yes.
the thing you've done ahead of time of here's what I want would be most helpful.
And also also I think the thing about job opportunities in particular is they tend to come serially.
You know,
You present with these offers. It's like
One role is so different from another.
You know, and they often don't happen at the same time. They might say, Well, you have to decide in two weeks, and then you say, Well, I there's this other company I'm talking to, and they're you get a lot of pressure to say yes to this versus this.
And to really having
A a measuring stick.
Is this getting me closer or further away from where I go can allow you to actually take serial decision making.
to a place where you're measuring against a long term goal.
I did a meditation retreat once.
And when you're meditating, there's this uh kind of guidance of don't try too hard, don't
Don't like push yourself.
to go into a direction don't like oh this I'm not doing a good job. I need to get to this enlightened state.
And instead their advice is
Just like push your cart in a direction.
And think about that's the direction you want to head, but don't you don't need to have like grasp onto here's what I here's where I need to land, here's where I need to go.
And I wonder if just having a thought of
Here's where I want my career to go. I wanna be on boards in the future. I wanna start a company in the future. I wanna
Become a designer in the future.
Is like at least start there, maybe, just like a direction that you're heading.
Yeah, there's a there's a woman who I worked with in product and now she's a she's the founder, very successful founder, and she said to me, I want to join the board.
of this Fortune one hundred company.
She told me the company and I said, Okay.
That's a lot. So she said.
How can I get there?
And I say first it's probably gonna take you ten years,'cause look at who's on the board.
I happen to know a couple of people on the board and I said, Why don't I introduce you to one of them?
And they can tell you how to get there.
But the point is she knew where she wanted to go.
Mm.
And she said, I'm willing to take the first step today.
And I think first you've never been on a board.
You you were very successful, but y this is not you know, you have not
You know, you there's so many steps before you get there. It's like
Before you go to Harvard, you know, you have to graduate from you know elementary school to middle school. You have to take the SAT, you have to apply. So I said, let's start.
From the first step and let's break this problem down.
But I love that she knew where she wanted to go and she's like even if I don't make it there
I'll be happier having made this journey.
And I love that for her. And I think she's still early on her career, she has so much time ahead of her, but it's really incredible to see her kind of on this path.
And to know that that's her dream.
And that I can help her a little bit along the way.
And it also relates very much to your idea of thinking of your career like like a PM thinks about their product where
One of the tactics is to imagine the ideal scenario.
Network backwards.
From that versus like incrementally, what's the next thing, what's the next thing.
So in this case she was thinking, here's where I want to leave.
Head. Okay, what's the next thing to get to that direction?
I love that.
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Okay.
Going a slightly different direction. I I'd say the post that you've written that has most resonated with me.
Was about
Introverts?
And how hard it is to be successful as an introvert.
And that
Basically have to learn to be an i extrovert as an introvert because in business
Extroverts are
Uh.
Most valued.
Can you just talk about kind of your insight, what you've seen around this and
How
And your advice to introverts like me, huh?
about how to be successful in business, like what you need to change.
Well, first I love the book Quiet by Susan Kane. She talks about the power of introverts. Unfortunately, the world doesn't see the way the world
The way she does.
And I think that you know there is and I I wrote this post of the secret bias no one talks about, right? Which is the workplace.
is really favoring.
People who can speak up.
And I tell the story of somebody on my team who's just an amazing product manager.
And yet every time she came up for promotion or calibration, people were like, Oh, what does she do?
And it was because she was not good at broadcasting or explaining what she does.
And I would take her to executive meetings and she was really bad at answering questions or talking.
And so we would prep and prep and prep.
And
I just knew her skills. I could see her every day moving the product forward, but for some reason
People, you know, because your peers also have influence over, you know, people's ratings, their promotions. And I was constantly just trying to figure out how to get them to see her brilliance.
And I asked her once, I said, you know, like I notice that you never answer questions when we do these presentations. She's like, Yeah, because I'm a processor.
You know, by the time I processed.
I feel like, you know, the conversation has been done.
And so you know
I really feel like the world it's all built for somebody like her, who's a brilliant product leader.
But people couldn't see it.
And I realized that so much of what product and and just general leadership is is not just doing the work.
But actually it's like it's not just having the product, it's having great product marketing to go with it.
Call it that.
Okay. So I've been in product and I've been product marketing, right? You make a light bulb, but you're selling light.
And I I really think about how that she was like making amazing number of light bulbs. She was lighting up all the houses and but she was not.
Marketing the light.
And I think that was the the thing that was really missing. Is that fair?
Absolutely not.
There are a lot of people who are born introverted.
Is it fear that a product
Manager who isn't extro introverted.
But the next party is struggling with that.
No, but that's the world we live in.
And so, you know, it's one of those things where you get to choose what you do.
First I think for the individual is realizing that
You have your own
Best marketer.
You have to actually share what you do. You know, if a
If a great product is out in the world but no one's told about it.
Did it exist?
And so one of the things that's very important is really to get that product marketing.
Second part is we should change our workplaces so everyone can be successful. And I think that that's a really important skill as more.
introverts get into leadership, they need to actually change the world to make more space for people like them as well.
So one of the things that I found was, you know
In my leadership teams
Over the last several years we had this thing where we all vote.
But we vote offline.
In a document.
And we put a number in and then we put our comments in.
And that way everyone has an equal voice in this document. And then when we talk about it, usually, of course, the extroverts speak first, but
Yeah.
Everyone has a vote and we can actually see what people's point of view.
And I love that.
I love that when you know there's
Something we used to do at Facebook is we used to go around in a circle and everybody would give their opinion in a meeting.
And I do that still today. I ask every single person as a business leader at this company, would you do this?
And even when I I joke with our chief legal officer, Greg Greg, he I say, you know, you are a business leader and the lawyer. You can't just say, Well, legal advice is X. I'm like, Well, what would you do?
And so nobody can nobody can take a backseat to decision making. Everybody has a voice. So there's so many of these kind of
bias interrupters, things that we can do.
to actually make the world easier for those who weren't speaking up and taking eighty percent of the air in the room. And I do think that we have to craft a workplace where everyone can be their best.
In the post you also talk about like as much as we want to change the way people run
their companies and think
I love your advice of like you also still have to learn how to speak up.
And
act more extroverted even though it's not natural to you. Is that right?
I think we do a disservice when we say we're not good at speaking up because
It's a skill like any other.
And if I told you the difference between your product being successful and not being successful is you giving this presentation, they're gonna kill your product if you don't sell this to the executives. You would figure out a way to stand in front of those executives and defend the freaking heck out of your product.
But why aren't you doing that every day?
And I think sometimes we forget that
Not everything's as essential as they're gonna cut your product if you can't convince them to keep it.
But every day you're actually building credibility for your team, getting more resources, getting more people to talk about your product inside your company, getting more press for the
Product outside.
All of those things combine into momentum for your product. And don't you want the best thing for your product and your customers?
And so if you think about it that way, it's not, Well, I'm uncomfortable.
I hear this a lot where people say, Well, you know
You wouldn't understand I'm an introvert, and I'm like, So so was I.
And but instead I just said, Okay, this is a necessary skill.
And it's a learnable skill.
You don't have to be comfortable with it. You don't have to love it.
But you just have to do it.
What about from the another perspective of why people don't do this, which is it feels like self promotion and it feels like icky like I'm just sitting around promoting myself. I don't want to be doing that.
Anything there that helps people get over that piece.
Well, I just remember I was I was talking to this um ERG group and um
I I was asking about the there's an upcoming calibration and you know self reviews were due in a couple of days.
And I said, Well, what are you doing for yourself or for you? And somebody somebody raised their hand and said, Well, I'm really bad at self promotion. How what advice would you have for me?
And I said if you think yourself review
Is self promotion.
You've already you're you're not going to do a great job at it.
What if I called it
Educating
your manager about all the great work your team has been doing.
What if I called it, you know
Um
Helping people see why your team should get more resources.
suddenly you're you're cracking open you're changing you're changing the question, right? From oh I was self promoting.
Two
Actually I'm helping my team get more resources and support.
And suddenly she was like, Oh yeah, I never thought about it that way.
But I think often
If you frame it one way
It looks like self promotion. I wouldn't want to do that because of self promotion.
But at the same time, if it's education, what if I said, you know, I was talking to a PM who's really incredible. I've mentored him and sponsored him for a long time and I said, I don't understand why you don't have more of a voice. Like you've learned so much about
craft, you've done this at multiple companies. And he said he said exactly what you said, which is I'm not really self promoting.
And I said if you see it as self promoting, you will never do it.
And so let's talk about why you don't actually do this.
Mm-hmm.
And he said, I've seen a lot of people who are really great on LinkedIn write these articles, but they have nothing to back it up.
And I don't want to be like them.
And I said, Okay, well you read my blog, you know, you follow me on LinkedIn. Do you think I have nothing to back it up?
And he's like, No, of course not. And I said, Well then
Why do you put yourself in his category instead of mine?
And I think it was just a moment where we just came to an understanding where he in his mind was like, I don't want to be that person. It's an empty vessel that has like nothing, no substance behind it.
And I said, Do you think the things I write have no substance? And
But it was an interesting conversation because he had
take in this mantle that it'll self-promotion and that behind what if people think I have nothing behind it. I'm like, I know you have something behind this. I have been your manager. I have worked with you for many years. But you see how just reframing it has really changed his way of thinking about it.
So watching on him.
But actually he's so much to give, and I think he has learned so much about the craft.
And I wish that more product managers felt comfortable.
That they have something to give to the world.
I think what you're saying right now will resonate with a lot of people.
When I see
People posting it like I feel the still.
of just like I don't wanna be this guy that's just posting nonsense on LinkedIn just to get like
Even though it's kinda what I do now full time, hopefully it's not nonsense.
But it is all substance.
So Lenny, we know the substance behind it.
I think there's like uh posting at LinkedIn, posting on Twitter, it's just like
There's like an innate um just doing this'cause I want to get attention when
Often in the way I started this is just like I
Things I've learned that I think are useful. I'm just gonna put them out there.
Uh so just to double click a little bit,'cause I think this is a really powerful point.
What actually have you found helps people get over that? Is it like someone like you in his corner being like, you have really great stuff to share. You should actually do it. Don't be as worried as your.
As you think you might be. Is there anything else that works there?
Actually what worked for me was I was working with Boz, and I talk about our relationship in my book.
Um, but I you know
We we made a contract when I started reporting to him.
And Boz, for those of you don't know, is currently the CTO of Meta. At the time he was the head of ads and and then our team moved into his team. And so I was reorged into his his um organization.
And as I said, you know, um we did not have the best relationship before that.
And so we made a contract to work together. And I had written like here's how here's how I want you to take care of my team, here's how I want you to support our products. And I wrote them like this long.
My part of the commitment. And then he wrote back, Here's what I'm asking of you.
I want you to write and publish something every month.
And I was like what?

Like, why would you say that? And he said, You have so much to teach people. Just do it.
And I said, I don't really have that much to say and he's like
Just trust me on this.
You'll figure it out.
And so his advice was write what you repeat. If you say something more than once, just write it down.
And then just you know, then the next time someone asks you, you can just hand them.
And he has a great blog with you about it.
I just don't really think that is a weird thing for your new manager to say after you had a lot of conflict together before that.
But he took my contract, which was by the way, he's like, Oh, do you wanna like codify this in some way? I'm like, No, I just
So but every month from then on, I would literally just write something.
And it was my promise to him.
And I did it.
faithfully and I published it internally. So I didn't publish it externally for a long time. And then sometimes they would ask me if I want to publish it externally from the company. And I would say yes. And so I did it for years. I reported to him for years. And then you know we switched managers, he moved over to reality labs and then I
had a new manager and and I continued
And I've continued this.
You know
Then I started doing it publicly and then obviously I wrote a book and you know
Because of him and his encouragement, it got me to a totally different place. And part of it was just the commitment. I now had accountability because I knew he was watching. I'm not actually sure if he was actually watching every month, but I felt the accountability to do this.
And I've done it every single month since
So it's interesting that that's another example of your manager
Giving you the space slash forcing you.
to share publicly being a really good lever to get someone over this fear.
I think sometimes just doing it gets you over the hump. Yeah like, for example, my friend Ami Vorra, she writes an incredible blog. If you have not read her self's stock, you should.
But um she's an incredible writer. She'd write all these things internally and I said you should probably just externally. She has
Now she does that and it's really great. And I think
Part of it was just seeing her
Just put it out there because she is one of the wisest career coaches.
that I have in managers that I've ever worked with. And so like you have so much to say and to share. So to see it out there, I feel like for years we all got the benefit of it because we knew her. But
you know, the world was not getting the benefit. So in some ways just having accountability. So we created a little accountability group to like help each other write.
And it was just a reminder, hey, did you do it? You know? And so I think it's sometimes what's necessary to get over that hump is either having someone forcing you, like your manager who you made a commitment to, or just having a friend to say, Hey, by the way, where's this month's post?
Those things matter because now
You got under the hump of I have to do it.
And now it's just about how good you're gonna make it and how much time you're gonna put into it.
Awesome advice. And by the way, if folks don't know, we've had both Boz and Omi on the podcast in the past.
And uh And aren't they both amazing? Amazing. And I mean this episode is one of the most popular episodes. H more popular than Boz, CTO of Meta. What do you who would have thought?
Um
She has a lot of coaching wisdom.
I think that everyone should hear.
Yeah, she's amazing. She uh yeah, she has a great sub stack. We'll link to it again in the show notes. We'll link to your sub stack as well. Please do go sub stack.
I wanna move in a slightly different direction, talk about growth for a little bit. You have a really
nice perspective on how to think about growth.
I think a lot of people think of growth as like, here's a magic bullet, we're gonna do this thing, it's gonna go, Wow, we're gonna win.
And your approach is it's you talk about it's a game of inches. Growth is a game of inches. Can you talk about your perspective there?
Yeah, and you know, sometimes we think it's like
What is the huge step function?
But actually most companies are like
We we call points of growth, right? It's like if you can move things one percent.
A little bit faster every single week. Think about the amount of growth you get at the end.
And so it's not just, you know
Okay, what's gonna get you the three X?
You can get to three X one percent at a time.
Five percent of the time, single digit grade.
And
Sometimes it is the small things that matter the most.
And so when we think about product led growth, it's really about finding the the aha moments, the
Opportunities. And sometimes opportunities are things that seem really silly. I heard the story at Facebook that one of the big things was just adding the next to ads, they put the word create an ad.
You know, was like one of the biggest growth drivers.
And that was it. Just putting a link because people just didn't know how to get to the ads flow.
And you know, it was things like that where you can actually bend the curve of things, choices that you make. Same thing, you know, each of the growth teams I've ever worked on.
It's like really the small things adding up. It is a list we used to work on payments growth.
And we had a list of a hundred things we're working on.
Hypotheses.
And then we would pick.
And we would grow them by picking the first 10 and we would start working on them, the next 10, the next 10, and we would go through these sprint cycles. And the same thing when we were growing the ads product as well.
Marketplace
Each of them were just like what are the small things that add up to big things?
And I think sometimes we overthink it.
Instead, you probably have a hundred ideas.
And by the way, it is absolutely okay.
If like
eighty percent of them don't work.
I tell people like sometimes we we overthink as product managers, right? If we just had the perfect plan.
perfect battle plan. But instead, imagine you're a team and you can ship I don't know, like
Let's say
Four things.
But what if you're a team that can ship twenty things?
with the same with a twenty percent success.
You get just as much.
Output transcript:
And yet you now have
You know what doesn't work.
Also.
What if you can move it from twenty percent to thirty percent? Suddenly six things work, not just four things.
And so in the same amount of time you have all the lessons of what didn't work.
Plus you're getting fifty percent more outplay.
And so you're thinking about growth as this engine.
Of it's a learning machine.
Of what doesn't work, what you re iterate on, what you change.
And you're constantly getting better and better and better.
I think what you're saying will resonate with a lot of product people, where there's always this like
We're just doing a bunch of optimization, incremental work. So sucks. Boring. Why would we let's take some big bets.
And uh
In my experience, and sounds like in her experience, a lot of the wins action and Facebook is famous for this, just like
Const relentlessly looking for ways to
Grow, grow, grow like optimize, optimize, optimize, because that's
where a lot of growth comes from.
The same time.
Obviously need to take some big bets and take some swings and look for step function changes.
But I guess if for someone that's just like
I don't know, is there any advice on just creating that culture of like it's okay to optimize for a long time, there's a lot of opportunity.
Optimizing is there anything you've learned there, or is it just like bringing in a depth and like
So it has to be a top down.
I treat growth like a like
Let's say a product marketing team.
Right.
It is an augmentation for a product that works. So if you have a core product that works, you have a team that's working on so for us at Ancestry, it's like search and hints or the core, you know, what it what is the mechanics? You want people to add, you know.
People to their family tree, you want them to add stories. Okay, there's teams that make sure that the uptime is good, that the hints are working, the search delivers results. And you need those teams. You need those core teams kind of functioning.
But growth is an is is actually optimization on top.
It is making it so that you get to the search flow faster. The hints are surfacing.
better that people are accepting them, that if we put the button here versus here, that people are going to discover things faster.
And so it's really taking the core engine.
and actually wrapping it around the user interface, around the experience, around the flows, so that people can get to it faster, they can have more satisfaction, they can have more impact.
And that's what I see growth as. It's not the core product.
It is the cherry on top.
making that product more accessible and more usable and better every single day.
Yeah, kind of along these lines I think
It surprised people to learn there's like
At least a hundred people at R B and B just working on like pricing, optimizing pricing recommendations.
There's like endless opportunity to just make all these core
components of an experience better and better and better over time.
Okay, last thing I wanna talk about, and this is like completely unrelated to everything we've been talking about mostly.
Which is your thirty, sixty, ninety day plan.
So he wrote this post a while ago of just like here's
A great
thirty, sixty, ninety day plan when you join a company.
And I've heard that many people use this. It's really effective for helping someone onboard and be successful.
And I think it's mostly for execs, or is this for just anyone joining a company?
It's for anyone, right? Anyone I I created it actually when I joined Ancestry.
Because I hadn't started a real new job in eleven years.
And I thought
I'm gonna be a student of how to land well.
So I read a bunch of things, I read you know, it's like
Okay.
And I decided I was gonna adapt all of those things into a a summary and then I was gonna
try it real time in my vlog. So in my vlog, I write, here's what I'm gonna do.
And then I tell you what I did and how it worked. And some things that and then I actually do a look back as to all the mistakes I made.
And so I kinda did this live. It was not
Kind of it was not planned quite as as well as I would thought, but I put it together and I I wrote the thirty sixty ninety day plan.
And I have a template.
And it's really I always tell people like
It's focus on listening and learning first.
And then doing.
And so that's the crux of it, which is in those ninety days, it's like
You know, you gotta get used to the environment. You wanna have some impact at the start. You wanna have a couple quick wins, but you want to understand the lay of the land.
And you want to listen.
Because you're
You have something to contribute.
But if you don't understand the language, you don't understand the culture, you might actually make huge mistakes. And so for the first 30 days, I did a listening tour.
Listen to you know, I talked to over sixty people in thirty days.
And then I summarized.
You know, a state of the union. Here's what I'm hearing.
Here are the challenges people feel like we're facing. Here are, here's what people's wish lists are. And by the way, one person sent me a wish list of five things, and at that year, I think it's me.
Till year two to finish his five things. And then I sent him a note. I said, by the way, the first time we met, these five things you wanted to see.
We just finished the last one.
And he's like, I can't believe remembering but I took these sensit notes and I summarized it. And I think it's important because people want to hear that you
Hear them.
And you don't have to be
you know, a manager or CEO to do that. I think people on teams often
feel like there's no outlet for the things that they want to they wanna say.
And I encourage especially product leaders, especially if you're joining an existing team, to listen really behind what people are saying.
You know, and then offer to help them do one thing. So especially when you're meeting with a a new engineering team for the first time, actually ask them, like what is one thing I can do to help you this week?
I was saying one thing. So it's limited.
this week, so getting fifteen you head count, probably not gonna happen. And it's like how can I
Give back.
And suddenly you're building a reciprocal relationship. And so a lot of this thirty, sixty, ninety day plan is really to help you find your footing.
And then to start having impact immediately.
Say you join a company and you're like
I'm gonna do thirty days listening.
And then your boss is like, No, we need ship stuff. Get on it. Ship the stuff.
Is there any advice for
trying to push back on that create space for listening when there's like deadlines, things are on fire, you know like it's start
I encourage everybody to get on the same page on this thirty, sixty nine day plan with their manager. So actually don't just keep it to yourself, share it with as many people as you can.
So I think it's very important that everyone sees what you're trying to accomplish and what your output is gonna be.
'Cause if you don't know the output, are is success there.
The second part is
Yeah, with your manager say, Okay, I would like to carve twenty percent of my time listening.
And I'm happy to do this work eighty percent of the time.
Therefore, you know, every morning from nine to ten I wanna
you know, talk to somebody somebody in the organization.
Just make sure he's like, I will do a better job and have more impact if I have this time to make sure that.
you know, I'm not accidentally making, you know, mistake or I don't, you know, I didn't get a chance to I'm asking something of somebody, but I've never met them.
And so really
You know, carve out space because it's really important. Once you're in it
You tend people give you kind of the new person card.
For maybe a month or two.
And then suddenly it's all the problems are your problems.
But what if you don't know what the problems are?
And so I always say, you know, diagnose before you treat.
So make sure you understand so that you can help and deliver what your manager's actually expecting of you.
I'm looking at your template, so just uh
Uh share the bucket so
First thirty days learning focus, second
Thirty days is aligning.
On vision for the future.
And the last
thirty days of the ninety days is executing, setting up.
Ac like actually getting s starting to get stuff done.
Awesome.
Uh anything else along these lines of this?
The one thing about having a plan also is that you don't feel rushed
Two
Yeah.
Do something that you're not ready for.
Because I do think sometimes you feel like you need to have impact. And I always say I always tell people, like do something small.

Give back in some way to people see you making, you know.
But
When you actually reflect one of the biggest things I could do
was actually reflect back to the organization.
Here's what I heard from all of you.
I'm listening.
I hear this and here's what I want to do about it.
And then in aligning, it's like, do we agree this is a set of problems we want to tackle?
And then an execution is like
Do we agree that this is how we want it?
And I think that is such an important part of building a
Building into a team.
You know, when you enter an organization, you're also entering a team and you're part
You know, you're part of a dance that's going around.
What role do you play?
And people are dancing around you. And if you if you actually make a mistake, you could trip other people up as well. So really kind of finding your place in the dance.
Is really important.
And as a as a PM, the way I always think about it is people don't will us won't assume they should trust you.
Like you're just this person that's coming in to kinda tell'em what to do.
And so much of your
first month, two, three is building that trust with people so that they can actually
feel comfortable listening to your guidance and not just like oh my god, this person's getting my way.
And earning that trust, you know, sometimes people really you'd be really surprised. A lot of people feel like they're they're not heard.
And even just coming in and listening.
Is a trust building exercise.
Such a good point.
As we wrap up our conversation, just w couple more questions here. So first is I wanna take us to Contrarian corner.
Which is a segment on this podcast.
And my question is just is there something that you
believe that you think most other people don't believe something that you think is a contrarian perspective.
I don't know if this is a contrarian perspective, but I tell um I go to speak in a lot of um universities. I speak at Stanford and going to speak at Duke and
I always tell the people, especially young people, the most important career decision you make is who you marry.
And it's not something we think that much about, especially I started dating I met my husband I was eighteen, my first weekend in college. Started dating when I was nineteen. I we had no idea what our life was gonna be like.
And yet every single day, like this week we had our board meeting, I was in Utah the whole week, I come home.
And you know, he's taking care of everything.
Right?
And it's that you you will have a much more successful career.
If your home life is in balance. It's like a yin and a yang, right? If something is out of balance, it it engulfs the other side, both your job and your home life.
And especially, you know, we have three kids.
Really really balancing that is very hard over both of us having demanding careers.
And I think we just it's not something that's contrarian, but it's something which we don't think about at all when we make that decision. We think, is this person fun to deal with?
Is this person, you know, somebody we see ourselves as?
But my question is, what is the impact of this relationship on your career?
Is this person lifting you up or pushing you back?
Is this person someone who's gonna be your greatest cheerleader?
Or are they gonna be the greatest weight on?
On you.
And how do you think that that's gonna manifest itself twenty years?
Thirty years from now.
And I think it's just something I wish we thought about more, and I encourage especially young people to think about that.
Such a great point is
What I want now is uh
A guide for
Betting these things when you're dating.
Deb's Guide to Dating.
Oh, I need to write that. Although I've only really dated him the one person, so maybe I'm I'm like the worst person to talk to you. But it but it worked. So you're maybe the best person.
And now you look back and here's the questions I asked that work.
Um, that's so funny.
Okay, so before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you think might be helpful to share? Something you might want to leave listeners with, any other nuggets of wisdom or advice?
Well, there's one quote which I share, which um I thought about when you were speaking earlier, which is about um, you know, people who are resilient, which is life. This is a quote from Chuck Swindahl, he's a Christian writer.
I used to read a lot and it was life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent what you
How you react to it.
And I just looked him up uh recently and and uh he he actually published a book with that quote. He actually had that quote in a previous book of twenty years ago.
And I just think that's so important. You know, you don't get to choose everything that happens in your life. So much it is just
It just happens.
And but it's the people who choose.
A way forward.
to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones as I said, somebody who actually says, you know what?
I didn't get the job that I wanted and I'm just going to figure out another path.
Those are the people who have the most successful and satisfying careers.
they're zigging when other people are zanging, you know, vice versa. And I think that they're
You know, are the ones who are the most resilient and happy in the long term.
It's such a good uh circle back to one of your first pieces of advice of just
Most successful people are people that are
Resilient and don't
avoid failure, but embrace it and find a way to turn it around.
I think it's such an important point. It's so hard to do, I guess, just I don't know, just to follow through it a little bit. Is there anything that has helped you
Build that, or has that always been the way your mind worked?
I imagine like coaching helps this helps people with this. There anything just like Coaching is
Incredible for that. We joke it's work therapy. But really I think it's
You know, for a long time I just
I saw failure as this like catastrophic thing. Like I was one of those kids who's like you never gotta be
Until I you know, then I got to college and I was like, Wow, this is harder than I thought.
And so I got two Bs in college and I'm like, I'm never doing that again.
You know, but I was that kid who always got the aid, who got the great scores. I just
thought that my life would end if I got a bee. You know what I which by the way is super unhealthy.
And looking back, I realized that like work is not like that at all.
And every time I got bad feedback, I'm like
This is catastrophic.
But if you look at feedback as an opportunity
Then it's very different. It's like this is a gift, right? But you can't
I would just I would be crushed every time we get a review, no matter what rating I got, I would read the
Things that people would say, and I was like, Oh my gosh, I'm a terrible person.
And I had to really rethink that. And I think coaching, leadership coaching has really helped me through that to say
No, how do you process this?
And how do you get to the other side?
And that has been so transformative for me is to have that outlet to actually talk through.
No no no what they're saying is not that you're a bad product.

It said you need to do a better job communicating or connecting. And and I really struggled with that. I was very transactional. I was not a connector. I was not warm. I really struggled with relationships. And a lot of the feedback I received for many years was this relationship issue. And it took me a long time to realize that people aren't saying this because I'm a bad person.
Or that they hate me.
But because they want to connect. And I was actually making it hard.
And I think sometimes we take things so personally.
that it becomes kind of this thing. It's like you're
It's
It is your white whale. It's like the thing you're chasing.
But then what if you say, you know what, I don't need to do that.
I don't need to chase that.
Instead I need to figure out what's behind the feedback.
And what are they trying to say?
Yeah.
And then actually change yourself over a long period of time towards that.
I I had similar challenges where I had this
pretty real imposter syndrome for a while when I got when I started doing well.
And a coach is the key was the key for me to help me get over that and
See that if I made a mistake, things wouldn't crumble.
And that it's very normal to make mistakes.
Nobody I think perfectionism
Is
A curse we place on ourselves.
And it's a very dangerous thing, particularly for product.
product leaders, because product managers, you know things are gonna go wrong.
This literally part of your job.
And yet, when we have perfectionism
It is a lack of trust in our ability to bounce back and our ability to actually adapt.
But the more adaptable you are, the less you have to be perfect every single time.
Just to leave people with a tactical piece of advice. Say they are like, Oh man, I need a coach.
You have any advice for how to find a coach, how to explore that route?
Yeah, so I actually wrote an article because one of the things I I struggle with, coaching is very expensive often, and not every company provides it. My husband actually works at a coaching company called Sounding Board to make it more accessible. But
One of the things I encourage people to do is there are other ways to get coaches. So one is
Go you know, I'm in a lean in group.
And we're just like we support each other.
I'm in a coaching circle and YPO, so um that's like a a group of CEOs.
And I'm in a number of these coaching kind of circles, which give you an opportunity to
Learn from each other.
And to get pure coaching. And I think that's a good great place to start, especially early in your career when you're seeing kind of the same people making the same mistakes. I think as you get more senior,
you know, having an individual coach helps because the the situations are so much more unique.
But I do think that having that outlet, having a place to say, Hey, is it me?
Or is the situation not right?
And how should I think through this?
That's so incredibly important.
I'm least I'm listening to this bo or
Reading a book called Listen.
Right now that a previous guest recommended, it's a parenting book.
And it's about just the power of listening and how much that
solves many problems so with your challenges or with your child when your child is having a problem just listening to them.
Uh, there's a lot of power. This came from a coach that was on the podcast recently, so we'll link to that. Definitely
Yeah, read it or listen to it. I know it's weird. I'm like reading, it's called listening. Yeah. He's like, This is the parenting book, the only parenting book you need, really. It solves all the problems that we deal with.
So anyway.
Uh that was an awesome final nugget that wouldn't
Uh I'm glad we got there.
With that though, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?
Let's do it. Let's do it.
First question, what are two or three books that you've most recommended to other people?
So um I love the book from uh Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer. I speak in his class now, but I read it way before that. It's called Power Who Has It In Why and I love
The book he actually has the more practical one, seven rules of power.
Which came out more recently. And so
Just
It's a book that reminds us that, you know, power is not accidental, that people often
get it for different reasons and how you should think about the play field.
Um, another book is The Conversation. Uh, Dr. Livingston wrote that about race in America. And I just love that it's a very honest assessment of race in America. It is a
Really tough.
You know, it's hard to have that conversation. And I love that he uses a lot of facts and, you know, and encourages people to open up and have conversations around it.
And then the last one I would say is
Well, Susan Kane's quiet.
I
Adore the book because
You know, I do have introverted kids. I myself am introverted, and just to read
You know.
The power of introverts is a reminder that we do have amazing people who don't communicate the same way.
And I love that it's a tribute to those those uh the success of those.
Even if our workplace is not adapted to it. I do think we need to adapt to it so that we can bring the best in everybody, but her book is a reminder that
So much power even in silence.
Uh, the first book you mentioned, Jeffre Pfeffer, he's been on the podcast. I think he may have mentioned you in our conversation or
That was such a
That was a f fun conversation'cause I came into it very nervous.
For what his advice would be.
And then came over the being like this is great. This is He is very wise.
It's very wise and just very uh
I don't care what you think, I'm just gonna tell you the reality of the world.

Oh man.
Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed?
Okay, so I I know this is like so this is a fandom thing, but I love
Fallout.
So I played the game Fallout Four last year.
And then the m the show came out and it was amazing. And I know that sounds so nerdy.
But it was incredible. And I know that video game movie ad adaptations tend to be terrible, but it was so great. And having played the game, it was even better.
I you know, so
That is was that super nerdy? No, I I
I've s I watched Fallout. I have no I don't know anything about the game, but the show itself was really fun. Just I had no idea what I was getting even g even getting into.
So no.
Acceptable dirty level.
Uh there's n I don't know if you can get too nerdy on this show.
Next question, do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you just really like?
Well so actually what's really interesting is I never got into Twitter.
I just couldn't figure it out. And then recently I really got into threads.
And I didn't think I would. I was like, Well just post some stuff on it.
But really I just love the I just I could never figure out Twitter. Like you follow the wrong person the whole thing just
It's terrible.
And you know, it's somebody's posting about posting too much or too little.
But there's something about the threads algorithm that's really worked. The first
you know, a few months wasn't quite there, but I just feel like it's
spawn on and now I see the magic of it.
That's so interesting. I've I've seen some stats that it's like
Bigger than X now slash Twitter.
And I wonder if that's true. I gotta look that up, but I've seen more activity on threads.
So maybe I need to go back there. I spent some time. I'm cheering from the sidelines that it's successful because I use it a lot now. And I guess I had never had a place for kind of real time news. And it's not exactly meant to be newsy, but maybe it's just who I follow. But I love kind of just seeing like
Seriously, five headlines you probably missed. I was like, Oh
I know they're trying to downplay politics, but I just love that it just feels like
You know, it feels like you kinda get a glimpse of what's going on in the world in five minutes.
Okay, two more questions. Do you have a favorite?
life motto that you often
Think about come back to you, share with friends or family, find useful in work or in life.
Mm.
That's a good question.
I would well actually you I would say that it's very similar to the Chuck Sandel one, right? About life. So
We can use that.
Great. That's what I imagined, uh,'cause you yeah, you shared that one early on.
And I imagine that was gonna be your answer.
Final question.
You started Facebook Marketplace, you built it, now it has a billion users more than that.
What's the most interesting thing that you have bought or sold on Facebook Marketplace?
The best thing I ever sold on there was I sold my minivan.

And it's in four days. I made my husband do it'cause I wanted him to test the product.
And we were selling our minivan and I'm like, just try Facebook Marketplace. He's like, I don't know about this.
And he's like
There's too many people contacting me. I need to I need it to stop. So it worked really well for us. Um
I think I have bought
so many things on there. It's actually sort of embarrassing. I recently my daughter wanted the same desk as I had for her new room.
And I
couldn't they no longer sell it at Costco and I found it.
For half the price.
From a woman who is moving and she's like here and I
I love it. So I but
Probably way too many things.
Um on Facebook Marketplace actually.
But it's a great thing. I actually use it as a great rental for kids stuff because you buy a kid's bike and then when they outgrow it, you sell it back.
And the rental fee is almost free.
And I don't have the store element.
So I love every part of it and I still am an admin user and I send a lot of feedback back to that team still.
That's amazing.
Deb, this was amazing. I'm so happy we made time for this. Thank you so much for coming on.
Two final questions, where can folks find you if they wanna reach out, maybe read about stuff you're doing, where's your substack and anything else people can check out? Yes, a Deblu.substack if you wanna if you wanna look, you can post you know, I post probably about once a week.
I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on threads.
So please do find me.
And then uh the actual final question, how can listeners be useful to you?
Well, I would just love to hear kind of what you heard from today that resonated with you and what you're gonna do with it.
Mm. And how would they share that uh like LinkedIn? I'm happy to read your comments or send it if you wanna uh send it to me.
If you've actually subscribed to my Sustech, you can just reply to the first email and then
I get it. Awesome. But uh the easy way, as you said, of replying YouTube comments. There we go.
Get people to YouTube, click that subscribe button.
Deb, thank you so much for being here and thank you.
Thank you so much, Lenny. It was great.
Hi everyone.
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