Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/d871758669079fc7

My probably most spectacular failure was the first PM1 Hangouts.
We had thousands of people working for me. We had entire power of Google.
Yeah, Larry literally sitting with us saying we can do anything we want Chrome to do and we still
didn't manage to build a great messaging product. The main kind of learnings from that is don't take on projects that are gonna be six months, a year.
Because you just generally don't have control over the macro. The challenge with being a product manager is everybody thinks they can do their job. Anybody who uses the product thinks ideas. So at some point in time you're like, what is my discipline? Like what is my science?
The moment you build experimentation, you're now made it scientific. A lot of new people in their career are like, oh I just want to think about strategy. I'm gonna think about the big picture. Strategy is a little bit overrated for product. For most product managers, your strategy should be how fast can I go from hypothesis to data.
Today my guest is Major Comet. My is chief product officer at N twenty six.
Оних стартапс і на world.
And which in my research came in amongst the top five companies in the world who are hiring and producing the best product managers.
Prior to N twenty six, my Yure was global head of product at Binance.
VP a product at Agoda, which is over a hundred billion dollar company based in Thailand.
and a PM at Google and Microsoft.
In our wide ranging conversation, Mayor shares what he's learned about hiring and developing great product managers.
What he learned from his time working at Binance, which, as you'll soon hear, was one of the wildest and most unique ways of working.
What he learned from the failure of Google's early attempts at hangouts, where he was the first PM.
Also, the pros and cons of working in Asia versus Europe versus the US, and why you should be starting your career on the west coast of the US.
Also why comp early in your career does not matter, and so much more
This episode is so full of golden nuggets and advice for product people throughout every stage of their career. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.
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I bring you my your
Comment.
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Mm

Major, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
Thank you. This is uh this is super exciting. Thank you for having me.
I wanna start with your time at Binance.
So you've worked at
Google, you worked at Microsoft, you work at at a company called Agoda.
Now you're at N twenty six.
I imagine Binance was the most unique place that you've worked at.
And I've also never heard much about what it's like to work at a company like Binance. I was just looking them up on Wikipedia.
Uh I saw they started in China, they moved to Japan.
They moved to Malta and now they have no official headquarters.
What was it just like working at Binance? How was it most unique from other places you worked?
Yeah, so maybe just a background for Binance because I think a lot of people have heard it, some and
In positive connotation, some not so much.
The scale of Binance is is pretty mind boggling.
So just to give like the history, they started in twenty seventeen.
Uh as a crypch. Coinbase.
And within six months they became number one.
Right. So that's unprecedented. Like that's like launching a search engine today.
And then six months later beating Google.
And then they went within five years.
to at a peak valuation of somewhere like four hundred billion or so.
With two thousand employees.
Right. So that's zero to
Four hundred billion in five years.
So it's it's at a scale that's never been done before. Like Google couldn't do it, Facebook, none of the names that you hear it.
And so it's
It's remarkable. When I was there as the head of product
My
KPI, my top line KPI was the trading volume.
And my monthly KPI was in trillions of dollars.
Okay.
That's just the the scale was mind boggling. We had
Teams of ten, twenty people running multi billion dollar profit businesses.
And that brings it with it like a first like how did they do that to that scale.
And two, what kind of culture requires to keep that running.
Both are very fascinating. I think we could we could spend a lot of time talking about it.
Uh but the truly interesting thing the first one is this you can't do this by having a traditional log structure.
Uh so C Z the founder and CEO
At one point had like fifty five direct reports.
Uh and his direct reports.
had about the similar ones.
So for a large portion of the history of the company, there was just one level between the individual employees and the CEO.
Right, and that leads to like an extreme level of decision making and execution.
You cannot have one on ones when you have fifty five direct reports.
So there's a culture of one to many.
And doing that as often as possible.
So the leadership team, for example, met every day.
And because the leadership team was spread across the world, we met
at like eleven PM.
When I was in Singapore every day.
That includes the weekends, holidays. Like the leadership team was there eleven PM.
Every single day.
Which meant that none of the decisions were blocked for more than twenty four hours.
And s most of them we made it on chat even within those twenty four hours, but
If there was something big.
It was escalated, decided.
We executed largely based on
This concept that I now take with me.
I call it the running products via daily meeting.
So
We would pick a owner for something really urgent.
At the uh the nightly
Leadership call and then that owner
would be expected to have like all hands on deck.
For however long that problem is.
Every single day.
And then report the updates on the on the daily call.
And some of these were like really massive topics, like
How do we get fifteen financial licenses in fifteen countries in the next three months?
Right. So it wouldn't be at a scale that was
They go twenty four.
Yes.
And people did it. Like it's it's
Extremely
Interesting to see that when you have really smart people
You give them really hard problems.
You have no constraints on
what can you need to solve them, whether it's money people
Except time. Time is always
uh at the premium.
Ah, people s can move mountains in in small amount of time.
And that's that extreme ownership culture.
I think probably was the most fascinating part of
Uh looking at binance that
I've now tried to take the some good parts of it.
Uh in terms of attention to detail, being able to pick
uh certain areas and own it irrespective of what your title is and how many people report to you.
uh there's certain downsides in terms of the amount of randomization that it can cause teams.
Uh, especially if it's not super well thought through.
So I'm trying to see what are the great parts of that that I can bring to different roles.
Um, but that concept of daily meeting, if there's something super urgent.
Uh how can you own it directly and run it yourself?
Where you are in the details. So your team knows that you they need to be in the details.
And then then be able to execute that.
So I think that's probably the the most fascinating
There's several war stories. I was there for two years and the
the amount of uh interesting stories that happened during that time.
Uh is is a lot, but then maybe we can
I can follow up later if your specific questions there.
Uh, I would love to hear a war story. This is uh definitely as interesting as I was expecting it to be. So just what I'm hearing so far is just things that worked well for them to operate at this insane
pace and scale is
uh the entire leadership team meeting every single day, eleven PM your time. Uh hopefully better times for other folks around the world.
Well there's some people in Sydney, Australia, so it was one AM for them. Okay, great.
Uh this idea of a flat structure, uh yeah, it's interesting'cause I imagine that doesn't that's not necessarily
Great for other reasons.
And then this idea of being in the details.
Uh let me ask about that actually. What does that actually look like? You
Because I think a lot of people a lot of leaders are like, Oh yeah, I'm in the details. We should be in the details. What does it actually look like?
In real life at Binance.
So let me give an example. So one one of the areas that's when I joined one of the biggest kind of product problem we had was
Like crypto before was
fairly unregulated, so you could just sign up with an email address or even just a wallet.
And start trading. Like there was almost zero friction.
And then it suddenly became regulated where you had to almost have a a full KYC flow like a bank.
Uh and that just meant that the conversion rate dropped from let's say hundred percent to like two percent.
Uh and now we had to solve this problem. This was the
the daily meeting level problem.
Uh um
It's it's okay if you're operating in one country. You can do it easily.
operating in two hundred countries where there's not even a standard for what a

uh acceptance criteria might look like.
Now you have a s a significantly larger problem.
You cannot say, Let's work with a K by C vendor and
And
Do the onboarding.
So we would need to we had to s literally have this
The top fifty countries
the top ten document types.
So there's there's
spreadsheet of basically five hundred sales.
The conversion rate at each level.
And then we are looking at
Okay, a password in Kazakistan.

Low level of conversion.
What can we do about that?
Do we need a new vendor? Do we need better imaging technology? Do we need a new SDK from a vendor?
Uh and then we go cell by cell based on
Um
Let's say if if I was running a typical product team, I would say, Okay, let's just look at maybe the top ninety percentile of our users.
Oh, but this was Binance and then C Z like
No user left behind.
Even that one user in Congo is important.
Because this is financial inclusion for
So then all of those five hundred cells matter.
no matter how low their impact of the conversion rate is.
So that's a little bit of violence waver there.
uh extreme customer focus.
And it doesn't really matter. It's not that customers are not a number.
It's a person at the end of the the screen and we care about them.
So you would need to know like hey well you would get questioned and like why is the
the driver's license acceptance rate in Kenya falling suddenly.
Right. So when you have
And that's just one piece of the problem in a large product with like eighty different products.
It's still
Uh you would of course cannot do it for every single product.
But the
The concept of like what is the most
leverage decision you could be working on right now.
And if it is for your growth, it's the the onboarding
Then you better know exact every single screen of the flow.
Why is there a drop off and what are your teams doing for it?
So that that level of detail.
Uh and
You just do it on different l different products at different
Parts of your of your journey.
I imagine there's people listening where they're like
There's the team responsible for the onboarding flow and KYC flow of their product and it's
And it's like so hard. They're like, Oh, there's all these problems with our flow.
Uh imagine in that.
for like a hundred different versions of the flow across a hundred different countries and
And documents. So it it gets the it gets great.
It gets very tricky, but it's uh
But we also had resources. At one point in time we said
I wan we had like a team of twenty people working on KYC.
And we said for the next three months we won five hundred.
Which has its own downsides too.
Has its downside, but if you're running in this kind of extreme
More?
And you're less
Not as worried about just the team stress and and personal development aspects of it.
We're just purely looking at the execution of the product.
Uh there's a surprising amount of uh power that comes with it.
Uh this was probably the second time in my career where I had that
Wow, you can do this.
'Cause in other companies it would take years.
Uh to do it.
The first one was just going back at at Google, I don't remember I joined Google.
Was my first day at onboarding.
And I was the product manager for
Gmail for mobile.
For saying.
And
I was in my
my onboarding room meeting when they pulled me out and said, Hey, we have an issue.
The service is down.
uh and Wall Street Journal is writing an article that Google, Microsoft, Apple not working together causing the service to go down.
So we need you in this war room right now.
And it was a bug in IOS four. This is a long time ago.
Which cause every single user
To pull the entire Gmail inbox.
Releasing the whole inbox.
So the bug on the Apple side is gonna take two, three weeks to fix.
And
It was causing like a thousand X load to our servers.
So
And I remember Connie Woods who was the head of
Infrastructure Ed.
At at Google.
And he's like
Sure, he slipped a button and there were thousand X servers.
That showed up for the next two weeks.
And I was like, wow, that is curious
Right. This was my second time kind of feeling that
Wow moment, but like oh
We just put five hundred people in and solve the problem.
Uh it's less about having the finding people and being able to maneuver them that quickly.
Uh I've d I don't think I've been able to do that at at any other company.
To close kind of the loop on some of these uh sort of radical ways of working, this idea of fifty reports per person.
And this idea of caring about a person in in Congo not being able to sign up.
Do you think that's a good idea? Do you take those in the way you work now, or is it just in this particular situation it's important, other places maybe not?
If there are several preconditions. One is you're growing really fast.
Right. So the y the growth for the employees comes just from seeing
Problems at scale that are growing every day.
that it needs less of a manager's attention to figure out what you need to grow.
The best way to grow in general is that you work at a really fast growing company.
Right so
Uh if that's true to your
Your people are extremely well compensated.
So they care about the KPIs more than they care about what's the next stage in my career and
How do I get promoted?
Because uh
I mean our bonus structure went from like
Zero percent to like five hundred percent.
Right, so
lot of people didn't really care getting a ten percent, twenty percent pay. They just want to do incredible work.
Because they know they would be taken care of.
And three, there's like some you mi it's a mission driven company you still believe at the end of the day
That you're doing this just be on beyond the KPI.
So at Bylas there was a very strong belief that a eighty percent of the world doesn't have access to financial tools.
They don't even have an access to currency that they can trust.
Uh and when we see look at like s live in Europe or in in US and we think about crypto
It's largely about speculation or bitcoin.
for most of the world they just need access to a US dollar stablecoin.
Right, and just knowing that my currency is not getting
Kind of.
be inflated because of
Things beyond my control. So everyone having come from these kind of lot of our employees were across all these countries.
they had a very strong mission, believe that
what we are doing will truly empower billions of people.
Uh and there's there's a power in that. Like a lot of people like go through
Uh like hey, I'm gonna move mountains because it's not just about the money, it's just not about my career.
It's about doing something that's that will
That will change the world.
Let's follow this thread on
Accelerating your career.
And talk about where you're at today in twenty six
So as you know
I've been doing a bunch of research on which companies hire and produce the best product managers.
I've done a couple passes at this and and N twenty six has come up in the top five of both
Ways of approaching this of
uh essentially which companies alumni go on to do
the best in their career.
And twenty six is way up there.
I wanna come at this from a couple of directions. One is
what N twenty six as a company does to hire and incubate the best people, but also just you personally, what your
advices to people and how you help them become great PMs. So let's actually start in that second bucket.
What is the most kind of common and most impactful career advice that you share?
With
product managers that you manage.
that you find most helps them move ahead in their career and get unstuck in their career.
In the number one thing I shared before, the the best thing you can do is find companies that are growing fast.
Because it kind of compounds your learning at a much faster interval.
Uh just the basic compound interest formula, right? Like it's
If even if your interest rate is low, if you're compounding daily versus compounding yearly.
After two years you would be at a whole different stage at the end point.
Uh companies that are growing fast just lets you get that
That learning.
Much, much quicker.
I remember joining Microsoft first in my career at the some of the products I worked on during my internship.
And not shipped.
Till I left Microsoft three, four years later.
Right. That's a very low rate of compounding.
And Microsoft's a whole different company now, twenty years later, thankfully.
Then you contrast that something like Binance, where every day or every hour or every minute you're shipping something and and learning from it.
So
The
The faster you can compound your learning.
Uh, the faster you will grow.
The the second piece Jungli is like
If you need to optimize for what you're great at.
Uh
And now after having two kids, I'm like fairly in the
Fact that
your strengths kind of get defined very, very early.
Right. I'm looking at my nine year old and twelve year old and
They have a whole different set of strengths.
Uh so if you're like twenty five years old early in your career.
It's very hard at that point to say, Oh, here are all my weaknesses.
And I need to improve on those.
A lot of the career feedback typically tends to be around like hey, here are the things you need to be better at.
Uh, why don't you do more of that stuff?
Right, firmly in the camp that you need to know what you're great at, what are your superpowers.
And you need to find
jobs where success is determined by
how much of that superpowers you get to use.
And early in your career you can't get away with the fact that there's some stuff you're not gonna be great at.
And you just have to to
Manage around it.
Uh
If you get higher up in your career, then it gets easier because you can build a team.
That complements your strengths.
And uh but again if you're early in your career
Find places that
If you're a great
kind of creative person, if you can look at a product and think of hundred things you can do better.
Uh you're always about what's the next best thing and how quickly can I implement it.
You need to be working in teams that have a high experimentation culture.
need to be working in growth teams in large companies.
If you work at
in the fintech company on a compliance side project.
Or launching like a new business where to go
You're gonna struggle.
Right?
At the same time if you have like extreme management, like structured thinking.
You have great stakeholder management, you have high EQ.
You should work in teams where there is a large amount of complex
People management and process management.
Uh you would struggle in a kind of a growth team where
Expectation is you're doing things really quickly.
So I would look at like first like very introspectively.
What are my true strengths? What do I
Um
And then look at jobs where
That has a much higher profile of
uh of winning.
Uh and thirdly, like largely I would say do not optimize for compensation.
Especially early in your career.
If you're
If you're truly on a track to become like a
A an executive someday or found your own company and make it successful.
you will find that the compensation is so much back loaded.
Uh that you would
make ninety percent of your compensation in the last five years.
Oh, off your career.
So optimizing for ten percent, twenty percent early in your career.
Uh so if you have two jobs and
I would like rank
in your f first fifteen years of your career.
I would say do not look at the the compensation.
And then the last one this was kind of strange. Like I never thought about this longer, but now I think it's probably the
The most interesting advice I can give people.
is determining very early in your career is you truly want to be a C level.
Some day.
You wanna be an executive someday.
Uh because it's almost like if you're ambitious and successful
Uh, you enter product management, you're in like top
Of your

An expectation of you?
That you would become that.
And you'd never really challenge or question yourself like
Is this the thing that needs me that I need to do to get there?
It's that's something I'm gonna truly enjoy.
Not just the destination, but the process to get there.
And uh lot of people think that and they make suboptimal decisions.
Based on based on that.
There's like incredible careers you can build.
And incredible lives that you can live.
By
Just being great at what you do.
Uh doing more of that stuff.
And you end your career
Uh, maybe as a director, maybe as a group product manager.
Uh, but throughout the stuff you have like built a holistic life that's doesn't revolve around your work.
And gives incredible meaning to you.
Or you can be saying, You know what, work is a huge part of my identity.
Somebody asked me
What wakes me up in the morning and what gives me that energy, it's my word.
I can't separate my identity from your work, then maybe you should pursue that that C level path.
Because it will truly be fulfilling.
And you would be able to make those challenges and sacrifices that are gonna be asked of you.
Uh to make that.
So if you can calibrate that only.
And have that true conversation with yourself, like
Yes, I wanna go down that path and I wanna do
Uh you would make different career choices. And in that path I would definitely say don't look at compensation.
The two jobs look if at the three things. Is it gonna give me high compounding of
Of learning is it high overlap with my strengths.
And is it uh am I gonna have a lot of fun doing it?
Because if you have fun doing it, then it becomes a virtuous cycle and and you do more of it and you're great at it.
On the question of
Do you want decide if you want to be a a CPO, essentially.
Is the the implication there is if you do that's like a big sacrifice, you're gonna be stressed, work life balance is worse.
Yeah, is that is that the kind of thing. No, absolutely not. Absolutely. It's like
If
You truly enjoy your work and what you're doing, it won't feel like a sacrifice. Right? When you're constantly
When you look at a new product, you're walking down the street, you see a new product.
Uh, you're on the app store, you see a new product.
And you're like, Oh, this is cool, oh look how they're doing the onboarding, oh look how the app store entry looks, but sh if that truly fills you up
Fills your cup.
Okay.
Like every moment you're looking at why things can be better, how you can be better, how a certain thing
You would be
the the sacrifice will not feel like sacrifices it will not feel like you're working long hours
you not feel like, hey, when you're talking to PMs and giving them some
uh guidances when you're building teams, when you're recruiting new people.
All that stuff feels it like fills your cup.
That it doesn't drain it.
And uh then you would be
You would have incredible fun on the journey.
So it's less about the that your sacrifices or work life pattern. The moment you start having those conversations
you are probably not on that track. Like you should not be on that track.
Because the moment the word work life balance comes
Uh I think Jeff Bezos has this thing that
He hits the word because it means like they're opposing things that need to be balanced.
Right, it needs to be work life awesomeness.
Something like that, where every moment is awesome, whether you're working or you're living.
Uh
But for some people that comes naturally because that's
That's how they're right.
And those people should absolutely pursue it because it would be incredibly fulfilling.
And the things that are challenging would also feel not as onerous.
Uh, whereas for everything else it would feel like a sacrifice.
would feel like something you need to balance.
And then you would
Again, even if you're great at it, you're not gonna have fun doing it.
And at some point you will not be great at it.
For folks that are
PMs today.
Like there's almost an implication their career is heading towards
CPO eventually, that's kinda like the ladder they're on.
What are the
Say top three most common
Other options you've seen, other paths you've seen a
Folks that you manage.
So that people can think about, okay, I don't need to maybe just keep climbing this ladder. There's these other directions I can go.
I mean the number one and that's I think back to your original question on N twenty six, like
If you work in
In incredibly high growth companies, especially
FinTech.
Where there's a higher
reason uh pe people end up being founders because
It's probably a whole different kind of track we can go down on.
Uh
the founding your own company is probably the
Um the most
kind of obvious slash
Exciting alternate path.
Uh the only thing I asked there is like
Again, the same question, like what
You are good at
And what you love doing.
The challenges with founding a company is like a large portion of running a company.
has nothing to do with building a great product.
Especially as the company gets bigger.
Um
The I've worked for founders now for
Seventeen of my twenty year career.
Right so
Even at Google and stuff, like Nikhil was my boss at Google, used to be a founder.
And
The CEOs now the thing they tell me when they hire me is like, I wish I had your job.
Right. That's because that's what I used to do. That's what I
Have loved doing.
And now I spent ninety percent of my time doing stuff that
Is not the stuff that I truly enjoy.
Uh but
Folks enjoy like building stuff. There's there's a PM, there's a lot of things you don't have control over.
Uh and you feel like hey, that's what's sp stopping me from growing, that's what's stopping me from truly enjoying.
Founding is a great part.
Right, you have that control now, you own the decision making.
Uh, there's rarely times you can say, Hey, I this did not work because of that person.
Right. If you're constantly hitting that.
then founding is a great part for you. Because then you you have the ball control, for better or worse.
Um
The other is just like I mean it's it's less about being a CPO and just like growing your
Your
Your bread?
And your depth instead of just the ladder.
Right. So you're incredibly uh
either getting specialized in a specific domain.
Where there is now enough value for you to separate yourself from the back.
Right, whether it's uh like in FinTech now we have folks who are onboarding experts with K Vice.
Yeah, people who are fraud experts.
Yeah, but who um
really great understanding of how card schem and how master cards work and where can we get the
The right incent is for the user.
The folks who are experts on customer loyalty and retention.
Like you build that domain expertise and then you realize that everyone needs that.
Right. Uh, and that could be like an incredible way to specialise.
Uh so you may not be you may need growth at certain team even though you're not a CPU.
Right. So that's kind of the the second way of doing it. And the third one, again, just not to knock it out is
You have you realise that
Work is not gonna be my big part of my identity.
My identity is who I'm as a parent.
Who am I as a community member, who am I as a
As a son to my parents.
Why my as a
as an artist or a contributor
And that's what my de
Is gonna be a well rounded person.
And a job is is it is great, I'm great under it.
Uh, but I'm gonna do it as much as it's needed.
And the value and meaning the the top part of the mass loss pyramid.
comes from everything but work.
And
Then you just lead a kind of a balanced life.
Because then work is a certain portion of it.
And the rest kind of fills the picture.
So just to summarize these four really good pieces of advice for how to
Essentially
keep your career going and get unstuck and accelerate it is
Uh
Work at companies that are really high growth.
because your learnings will compound. And also the network you build
Uh you didn't even mention that. That becomes really valuable because especially if the company does well. Sometimes companies grow really well.
And
There's extra benefits there. But even if they aren't, you still earn a lot. Absolutely.
Well that's N twenty six like one of the reasons why they have so many founders.
is the fact that it was a category defining
Like we were the first kind of mobile bank.
Right, so a lot of the problems we saw in early days
Nobody else saw that.
Right, so every product manager had to solve it for the very first time in history.
Uh, and that kind of is a whole different level of kind of trial by fire.
Uh, same thing with the Revolute. Like they're about started about the same time. Those are the companies that show up and like
the top rankings because
You did this before anybody could do it.
And now and you learn by by literally mowing mountains.
Ah, I think two is also the fact that you see
Uh we have this whole PayPal mafia, right? Like when you see this early success.
Like everyone sees it together, so when they go
They have that network, as you said, built in.
Uh, these are like maybe it's a product manager who starts a company, but maybe there is a
a a a business development manager who's also started his company and now you can you can collaborate and have partnerships.
So that that success, the mutual success.
which a lot of early startups see, that creates a kind of a
a more denser network than you working at a large company where
not all of you see the success at the same time.
Um
And three and comes down to the founders as well. Like they're
Incredibly mission driven founders.
I always find it super admiring now when I look back.
uh at at Valentine and Max here at N twenty six, and I look at C Z.
Like
They have reach
From a
Whatever metric you can define of success.
Whether it's the size of the company, whether it's the personal network.
uh beyond like what whatever anybody would think success means.
Right. And then to wake up every day.
And to do this
Hours and hours single day, every single day.
The
It's you you are driven by a whole these are the
These are the voyagers of the folks who would go explore new planets in the future.
Other folks who sailed out on the seas in sixteen hundreds to discover new land.
And that's
that being access to these people
Directly?
Is uh is extremely, extremely empowering me.
Uh, you not just learn from it, but you get inspired by it.
They do if you have
An X definition of success.
Now your definition of success is ten X.
You automatically push the boundaries more.
So I think those two things are those three things. Early start category defining companies.
uh mutual success and creation of network dense networks.
And just being inspired by by incredibly, incredibly successful and talented
You pointed out this really interesting insight that I forgot to mention with the the list of companies that seem to hire an
Create the most
the strongest PMs. There's a lot of fin tech representation there.
And I think you touched on why that might be the case, because all these problems are extremely complicated and never been solved, and you're solving at scale.
Here's the here's the thing about FinTech which is probably the most interesting is
FinTech, you have two customers. You have your usual customers and you have your regulator.
You need to keep both of them happy.
And usually what w makes one happy it makes the other one
Less happy.
Right. So you are constantly dealing with trade offs.
Like in most PMs and most companies you have some trade offs, but they're not existential.
Whereas in FinTech, like every trade off is existential. Like when you found a company, every trade off is existential. You may not exist as a business if you make a wrong decision.
In fintech, a lot of the PM see that day in, day out.
Uh, and that probably kind of conditions them to a whole different level of
uh like juggling balls than than you would be a PM at other company.
Yeah, that's such a good point. Just like really good stakeholder management influence.
Dealing with all this uh all these trade offs. I think that's a really good point.
I'm gonna come back to the strength stuff'cause that's really important and I've been meaning to come back to it. So just to
reflect back the four things you pointed out are really
What you want to look for.
to accelerate your career.
Companies that are growing really fast.
Working on things that you're good at and finding a role that leverages your strengths.
versus things you're not good at.
Not optimizing for comp early, such a good point there. Your point essentially is you'll make most of your comp later.
Like probably the fifty percent
the second half of your career probably make, I don't know, ten times more than you make the first part of your career.
And so optimized for
The future comp, not today's comp.
And then this idea of making sure
Ask yourself, do you wanna be CPOs? Do you wanna go down the C suite route or
Do you want to
Maybe
Probably plan to start a company, something else.
And that informs the role you're in.
Coming back to the strength stuff.
How do people figure out
their strengths. Do you have any advice for someone sitting around? They're like, What am I actually good at? I don't know.
So there's several ways to do it. I remember I I read this book. This was
I don't think it's shaped my my understanding of it because
I was already operating in that mode, but
It used to be called like now discover your strengths.
And now it's called like strength find two point oh.
It's still like twenty years old now, but there's a lot more newer
Ways to do it.
The two things I've done
And they're both kind of I'm not sure how accessible they are.
I'll give you the examples. So go down.
We used to pay a psychologist.
five thousand dollars for every single PM we interview.
Right. So after you finish your BM rounds.
We would send you to this
psych assessment.
It would be a six hour psych assessment.
And they would tell me
What your strengths are.
Not just that, it would be an IQ component.
Um, so we would know what percentile you are. And not just like an IQ score like Einstein or not, like but IQ score across different across pattern recognition or structured thinking, across numerical ability, verbal ability.
Right. So
Lot of people say they hire the smartest people.
At Agora we literally hired the smartest people.
Because we we pay the psychologist a lot of money to tell whether they're smart or not.
But other than that, they also give you your strengths and weaknesses.
Uh it used to be call I know if the company's still around, it's just called Q four.
And it's called Q four because they had this
There's four cordings on two axes.
One is on dominance and one is on warmth.
Right. So you want people who are high dominance, high warmth like the Q four cauldron.
Uh, and that as you can realize if you also want smart people
to find those who land in that quadrant is literally
Looking through a needle to a haystack.
But when I
I almost didn't do it. Like I was like
This is like I've been doing product for fifteen years. This is insulting that I need to go do a six hour
The only reason I did it at that time was
My son was like four and a half years old.
And I was teaching him like
'Cause you're gonna go to kindergarten or starting like do some math with him.
And then in like six months he knew all the math that I knew.
Like he was solving quadratic equations and stuff.
And we thought oh we have a genius in the house, we gotta get him tested.
So we were testing him and that's the only reason I took this test.
But I thought hey it would be interesting to understand what this process looks like.
But then when I got the results.
I was like
It was so spot on.
It was incredibly spot on its own areas where I would do well.
Areas where I would struggle and need help.
Uh so that's one way to do it. It's super extreme.
Uh a year two years ago we had
The opportunity is
C is good friends with Rey Dalio, so we had
Ray Dali will come to our executive offside.
And he walked us through how he
And his company does
strength assessment. So he has a that one is a lot more accessible. I think it costs like fifty dollars. We can go to
I think we search for A Dalios trends.
There's a website that you can go and
Uh the way it works slightly differently for executors because
You do it.
So there's a your components tells you how good you think you are.
And then it has your leadership team vote you on certain different aspects.
So there's a two layer assessment.
How good you think you are?
And how good everybody else thinks you are.
And then the overlap is where your two strengths are.
And as a CEO I can say, Oh, Mayer's great at design.
Everybody else knows that my use greater design.
We should give design problems to Mirror.
And so
That's another way of kind of
So there's a scientific doing this?
Yeah, it's look got a lot better since
I read that book a long time ago.
Again, if if you're truly, truly curious, it's
It doesn't take that long and now it's not more accessible.
That's one way to do it.
And it kinda separates in terms of execution and some sort structure thinking.
Innovation and design, creativity
Stakeholder management.
Yeah.
A little bit of a more
Like scientific picture on what your strengths are.
Uh but there's also a simpler way, right? Like you know
There is as a PM you do
Pretty much a large portion. Everybody does the same few things.
Right, do you think the you're designing the roadmap?
You're coming up with
What do you think is the product strategy?
There's a lot of time around just managing engineers, making sure they do stuff.
There's stakeholder management, marketing, compliance, whatever.
There's launch and just tracking data analytics.
So this part is true for most PMs.
Some jobs require more of one versus the other.
And you just know when you do these things.
Which one's one you're truly great at and sure have a lot of fun doing.
Right. Maybe you just don't like Jira and the ticket tracking and just following people on that and
That's the worst part of your job. Like
Stay away from like more structured, complex stakeholder management jobs.
Or you find that hey you're
do really well at that and
and somebody ask you like, Hey, what are the fifteen things we're gonna do next week to improve our conversion?
You kinda think.
Have a hard time to sit down and spend hours thinking about it.
Uh then then maybe that's that's
That's not your strength and you
So what time you kind of build this self calibration?
on uh areas that you have fun doing and areas where you don't have
Uh, and then when you look at the next job, just cry and gauge. Like
Are they hiring me because
I did really well at some of the stuff that I didn't love doing.
Um and if that's what they're hiring you for probably
You're not gonna have a lot of fun or
Or high high acceleration if you go there.
There's so much there. There's a uh I think an important point that I'll add. I and I'm curious if you agree.
A lot of new
People or like new people in their career, like, Oh, I just want to think about strategy. I'm gonna think about the big picture. I don't wanna just sit there and
optimize the roadmap and like, you know, be in Jero, but
It's actually that's your job when you're just starting out. Like
Like you need to earn the right to
contribute to the big to the vision to the strategy. This is one of the and as a pre conversation we talk about contrarian view, like
Um
Like
Product strategy by definition seems like a
Yeah, this is gonna be a controversial make.
Not really those those two words.
feel very
At odds with each other for me.
It like a product
You have
You have hypothesis, you know.
And if we can test it.
You don't need a strategy.
Right. If I say, Hey, if I build this.
And I c know this will add this much users and this time with this conversion mate.
This customer acquisition cost and this L T V.
That's your hypothesis.
And you could test it in the market very quickly.
And if it works, you have your strategy.
Keep doing more of it.
Strategy is always like keep doing more of it or don't do it.
Right. There's that's all there is to strategy.
Uh the key part is just figuring out which one goes in which bucket.
And if you're really executing fast enough.
in a kind of a structured experimentation given manner.
The strategy becomes largely
Largely solved problem.
It's so for most
Like
And that's a challenge. A lot of people think like strategy is about like
Uh looking at porter sport forces, lot of slides.
We're looking at some data and slicing it and saying we need to go here or there.
Uh
All of it is largely
a some sort of package intuition.
And the challenge with that is usually go with the loudest voice in the room.
And if you're a junior in your career
It's a very frustrating exercise because you think you know the strategy better.
Uh but it's all it is. It's
It's
a a sense of package intuition.
And then the guy with the loudest biggest title or the loudest voice is gonna go do it.
It was very early in my career Jonathan Rosenberg was the head of the
It's the CPO at Google. Like all the PMs reported to him. He was not called the CPO back then.
And he had this one thing he would say all the time.
that uh come to me with data. If you come to me with
Ideas will go with mine.
Right. That was the same.
You can come with any ideas.
We're just gonna do what I think.
But unless you come with strong sensors.
Cool.
To overright me.
So again, strategy is a little bit overrated for product.
Uh for market expansions, for
Investments for licenses.
Compliance. There's some several areas where it makes sense.
And it's it's kind of useful.
Uh, but for most product managers, your strategy should be how fast can I go from hypothesis to data?
Right, the the faster you can go there.
Uh the the easier your strategy gets.
That is certainly a hot take.
So the idea here, I'm curious how this o how you operationalize this.
with folks at N twenty six is it just like
I don't need to see like a whole strategy for the year.
Just give me here's the plan, here's what we're gonna test, here's our hypothesis.
Had he actually
What do you tell your PM team?
we use this tool, I'm gonna give a shout out to to Statsig'cause they're awesome.
Uh the J was just to run the experimentation at Facebook, he's spana.
Now has this tool.
Uh there's several of those, but
Uh if you're running proper
proper experiments. I just look at the stats and dashboards.
Right.
uh experiments, I'm looking at what metrics they're moving, I'm looking at the P value, I'm looking at how quickly can they get to to statistical significance.
And I'm like, Oh, this is working, let's do more of these.
Right. So uh
Now there's some areas where you can't do it, like in compliance, in uh like legal aspects.
In Europe, especially pricing.
Uh in US you can run pricing tests in y in Europe.

Uh so those areas you would need to have a lot more
kind of deeper thinking, understanding of your cohorts.
You're coming up with like more
structured reason for why you should do it.
But you can't really test and know within a couple of days or a couple of
weeks at Max, whether this was a good idea or not.
Those if they're
Irreversible decisions.
Or they're just extremely time consuming to find out.
Then do some pre work. We look at uh largely
Find a lot of companies really look at data without looking at cohorts.
You make completely bad decisions.
Right.
Your if you look at your dashboard is a mixture of
Users over
Ten years, twenty years.
Even six months, and they all behave differently.
Uh if you look at a cohort level development of certain users, you generally end up making better decisions.
But even over there it's still
lot more there's a lot of noise between
Moment you start tracking it, then moment you start making decisions based on it.
The world has changed.
In that meantime.
And Binance this was kind of a very foreign concept when I brought this in.
I'm like oh the conversions
down now, even though the product's done really well.
Because Bitcoin has crashed.
Right.
Nobody wants to go sign up for an exchange account.
So if you just measure pre enforced.
you would think that you have done something wrong.
And the product.
If you measure it as an experiment, you would know that yeah, the between that variant and control
It's still doing great, even though overall conversion is down.
So largely the more you kind of
Uh
One of the first thing kind of doing
When I take on a role.
the company already doesn't have an experimentation culture.
That's largely why they hired me in the first place, right? So
So for now the first thing is to say how can we bring it in?
Uh first the kind of right culture, the right incentives and the right tools.
And then once it's set up it gets it gets a lot of fun.
Get a lot of fun for the PMs.
Because uh you've kind of democratized
Performance.
For the product managers.
Yeah.
I tell my PMs now, which
Uh
It's just truly kind of empowering if you think about it.
The challenge with being a product manager is everybody thinks they can do their job.
Right. You go to the the CFO might have an idea.
The head of kind of accounting has an idea.
Anybody who uses the product tools, they have ideas.
Right. So
At some point in time you're like what is my
What is my discipline? Like what is my science?
Right. Nobody goes to the accounting guy and says, Hey, this is have a great idea for how to cook our books. Right. Nobody does that because there's a science behind it.
There's a science for financial forecasting. Even in technology
Like a lot of the times people just don't go and say that hey, just jump this thing in.
That she used this code that the AI code generator has used, right?
It's there's a s a little bit of science there. Whereas in product, like you largely find that it's
a combination of data and ideas and stuff, and anybody thinks
More g build experimentation.
You have now made it scientific.
Right. Now somebody comes up with an idea, say that's a bad idea.
Yeah. This is why it's a bad idea.
Because we have done this experiment six times.
and it has failed across this user groups at this
Exact level of
Like impact created.
It's so it kind of gives the PMs the kind of
Yeah, I listen, I'm not just a a general purpose technician, I'm a a specialist now.
So uh and it's it's extremely empowering once we can it takes a long time to move the team in that direction.
Uh but once you get it there, the PMs just
It's a natural kind of dopamine head.
Every time you run an experiment.
And and see it more metrics.
I'm a I'm a huge fan of experimentation. Uh
I think most guests on this podcast uh are are on your side of the
the debate. Uh I feel like we could do a whole podcast episode on just how to
create an a culture of experimentation, how to change culture.
This episode is brought to you by Vanta, and I am very excited to have Christina Cassiopo, CEO and co-founder of Vanta, joining me for this.
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Thanks for that, Christina.
Thank you.
I wanna come back to the the question of what N twenty six has done well to create and hire great PMs.
So you spent a bunch of time on
Here's career advice that I
often give and what has helps people most in their career.
Is there anything else?
Just to kinda close this thread, is there anything N twenty six did or is doing?
that either from the hiring perspective or from training
I know you haven't been there from the beginning.
Just like as a business as a company that they've done really well that other companies may want to copy.
Some of it is just a hiding philosophy, right? Like we
Game
Like
One of the advantages you get for being like a big fish in a small pond
Is you get
to have the your pick of the cream of the crop.
So in Europe here, where we don't have like the same level of
Unicorn or decacorn density you have in the Bay Area.
being one of the first ones or the few ones.
You do get
A little bit of that branding working in your favor.
So some portion of that is just the input.
Right, if you take in really smart people, like very chance at ten twenty six they will become they will stay smart.
Um
Two is uh again the level of problems that they work on are
Are are harder.
Uh just the Pintech angle we mentioned. And now with this whole experiment.

There's also a new kind of tool.
Toolkit.
That dig head.
Uh, especially if they're going for like larger big growth companies as the next step of their career.
Once you kind of
This is still so
Like of them all the people, companies I talk to
the amount of companies that are truly world class at experimentation is so low.
that if you work in one of these companies and you build this tool set, you can build a whole career on this.
Right, you can go to any other company and say, This is what I'm gonna bring to the table.
Uh because there's no growth without, as I said, without compounding.
Vens faster. Nothing compounds vents faster than experiments.
And there's no sing no company out in the world that says we don't want to grow.
Right. So that is an incredible kind of
brand that you can build.
Uh along alongside with it.
And then the third piece is just the the scale.
In one of the other
interesting aspects of banking is a what I call a hundred percent product.
Right. It's actually more than hundred percent. There are more bank accounts than human beings.
Right, because a lot of people have more than one bank account.
So you never run out of target addressable market.
Your your it's it's as big as as it can get.
Uh which means that there's no upper round on how much
But at some point, like if you're I don't know, building in
Kind of an AI code generator.
The capped.
And maybe developers or people want to be developers.
Uh or your building, I don't know.
A W S. It's may it's a massive market, but it's still late.
all the company that need online hosting.
Look at banking. Oh, everybody needs
And the fact that it's
oldest or the second oldest, depending on
uh how risky you are or not or profession known to man.
Nave.
It is uh
It is a self hedged
Product like when
Things get tough on one side of our business, the interest rates let's say go high.
Uh spending goes down, but we make money on deposits.
When interest rates go down, spending increases, so we make more money on interchange.
Made than an investment.
It's a very self hedged business.
Uh that lets you kinda go through the troughs and the the peaks.
I just.
Better than most companies.
Uh and that
Understanding that how do you build naturally
Hedged products.
It's probably another
Kind of reason why.
just influences how you make decisions and how do you kind of scale your co core product portfolio?
Uh just one example like we
For longest particularly about a year and a half ago, we were largely a bank with a card.
Right. And that was
We were the first mobile bank and that was a big enough market.
But in the last year or so we have just flashed out that product portfolio. We have a big lending portfolio now.
Uh we launched savings last year. We invested heavily in savings.
Uh, because the interest rates were high. It was a super
Amazing tool to attract new users by offering high interest rates.
But as the interest rates are going down now.
Just investing heavily in lending.
Because now you can get loans for lower prices than which was super hard to get last year.
Right. So like being able to kind of
Build products that
Compliment the macro.
uh also gives you that kind of additional um
kind of balancing act that
You don't get in typical single focus companies.
I think it's a combination of few of those things.
Uh, being able to get great talent.
being able to kind of train them now more soon, especially around experimentation.
And just see the
how you can build a product portfolio that
Complements each other, but also naturally hedges.
Against each other.
Uh just gives you a better kind of well balance.

I think this explains something really interesting, uh as you as you're talking, it realized
That a lot of these companies that
Uh
produce the best PMs are
To your point, uh non US based, but incredibly successful in their location. And so it draws in the most
talented people in that region. So like
I and now Intercom, I think technically is so Intercom was number one on this list of companies that produce the best VMs Intercom Palantir Revolute.
And then N twenty six chime stripe drop box were kind of at the top.
And four of those essentially are
Uh or three of those are are non
Like Intercom, I think was Ireland for a a lot of their team is based in Ireland, then Revolute is the UK.
And then
Then you guys so it's interesting that that's
That explains some really interesting insights of just
Be the best, be the big fish in a small pond.
draw in the best talent and then work on
really hard problems and be really successful. There you go. There's a formula. Yes. Yes. It's it's it's it's very simple when you put it that way.
Oh man.
Okay.
You
interestingly, have worked in a lot of different places. I want to spend a little time here. So you worked in the Europe, you worked in Asia, you worked
In the US, obviously.
For someone that is maybe thinking about moving out of the US
Or maybe moving to the US.
What have you found are kind of the big trade offs?
Yeah, so I would say like early early career you wanna be in
Like intensely talents dense areas.
For all the reasons that we mentioned before, uh, finding the high growth companies, finding the the networks that will make you successful.
uh there's no
For general tech, there's no better place than West Coast of the US.
No not everybody doesn't have the option, especially now with the immigration policies and so forth.
Oh
I mean things were always hard, they seem extremely harder now.
Uh, so if you may not have that option, but if you do have that option, like I would encourage everyone. There's no
uh no better place than than West Coast to to start your career.
Uh, there's some exceptions, like for crypto, I would say Dubai is is a like very strong, very great.
Uh has a really high density there.
But again it's a very
Industry specific.
Uh Bangalore if you're Indian.
Uh has
Manage to recreate some of the the magic.
uh of Silicon Valley, not at the same scale, but
Getting better.
Um, if you're in finance, maybe there's London
uh Singapore and in Asia has now at least
Not as much.
New innovation, but each of the big companies has has a presence there. So
at least secondary talent densities there.
Uh those would be our options if you're
if US is not available early in your career.
And
Some ways it it it helps define you, right? If you work at Microsoft or Google or OpenAI or
Some of these companies that become brands later.
Uh it's something you can take with you.
When
Going by second part of your question.
is when you if you decide to mow
having that bad experience and that brand and that
kind of uh
Achievements there.
Can help you kind of
Make
The find great opportunities.
Elsewhere.
I mean I've been a little bit privileged that some of these opportunities have found me.
Like an grand six year in Europe.
Or or Binance before in Asia where
It's
It w I wasn't really in that super talent dense area in the first place.
Uh, but like luck's not a great strategy, right? So if you're planning for it.
I would say build it.
uh well your early career in the US.
Uh and then
Honestly, when we moved to Thailand twenty eighteen, it wasn't a
At that point I didn't think I was making a great professional decision.
Uh, we were just struggling in the the US with
Both me and my wife working, both her kids.
in in Seattle were tiny
Uh, my daughter had asked them at that time, it was like
And she was just constantly sick and it was a struggle for us to kind of manage.
both work and life and
Um
When I talk to Agora, I'd never heard of the company.
Oh
And
the the only reason I ended up taking the job was like hey Bangkok's a hot place I mean
My daughter might not have lost them there.
And uh we might have some help in the house, so
we could probably balance some of the things that are really not
adding value to our life right now.
Right.
And that was the hypothesis there that we would be uh I can do a lot more on Word because I was l literally not able to focus as much on it.
With everything else that was happening.
Yeah, and as I said, everything got on experimentation. We just hit a home run on all the hypothesis.
Right, the my daughter, like the heat cure asked law.
uh my just having like
You support structure.
allowed us just as a family to spend a lot more time with each other and allowed me a lot more time to work and beyond my career.
when I'm not doing dishes and not doing laundry and not clearing up the trash and not mowing the lawn.
They just
So much hours that show up in the day.
that you could be doing things that you're great at and kind of add to your
Uh add to your career.
Uh, and then Agora just turned out to be just a
Like a
almost like a boot camp for understanding how an experimentation based product culture might work.
'Cause before that I worked at Google, I worked at startups, my whole fame to fame was like
Building big stuff.
Uh, and I would have just taught me like a lot of the growth comes with like incredibly small things done faster.
Uh so it's part of booking holding, so if you heard of booking dot com.
It's a hundred and
Seventy billion dollar company.
And what's interesting is that
Ten years ago it was a ten billion dollar company.
Which sold flights, hotels and cars.
Like
Ten years later, it still sells flights, hotels and cars. It's a hundred and seventy billion dollar company. Oh wow.
It's an incredible growth story.
Uh and that tells like you really don't need from a strategy perspective to do something completely different.
uh if you can truly compound your growth by by optimizing every single thing really, really well.
Uh
So
That are
The pros that come with as I said when you move
Uh
most of the time you're building products that are global, especially if you're based in the US.
Uh, very few times you're building product that just work in the US.
Now that's not true for a lot of the countries like
In India, like lotta products are only designed for Indian market, lot of products in China.
Only designed by Chinese market.
But in the US you're designing product for the world.
And a lot of the times you don't experience the same constraints.
Or you don't empathize with the user at the same level.
Because um
You just haven't lived.
Just haven't lived that.
Uh that uses life.
Uh so in terms of just being able to
Calibrate yourself on what a global product might look like.
Being able to live in different places and
And understanding some of these constraints first time.
Uh definitely a pro.
You get to have said
Especially if we have built that
early reputation, you get to work at some of the best companies when you go abroad.
Um
And
So that's
Uh there's a hit to compensation, at least initially, for sure.
Like nobody pays anywhere close, especially here in Europe.
Oh
But as I said before, don't optimize for compensation.
Uh early in your career.
Oh or even middle part of your career.
So if you if you follow that advice.
It will not matter.
Because you will have kind of a
Mm.
It's something unique to offer, even if you come back to the US later.
Right. Having kind of work in different having understanding, especially if you're in
In fintech where
The the actual laws are different in different countries.
And you that one you truly do not appreciate working in the US.
Uh, even at Google and stuff, when we would launch products like I would be like, Oh the lawyers they're just making life difficult.
Like you just
But the menu of now have a true appreciation of how how different
Uh
The the world truly is.
Oh it just makes you a better stakeholder.
When you talk to the Negum team, when you talk to compliance team, when you talk to marketing.
Uh so I think those are all the pros. The compensation could be the the con.
The other big con is that
Like today if you're in Silicon Valley, like I spent fifteen years in Seattle. I worked at four companies.
I could change jobs and stay in CM.
Right? Because there's enough companies there. It's they're all gonna run a ceiling.
At some point, Bay Area there's no ceiling.
Right, you can keep growing.
Uh the challenge now is that
Uh, if I'm in Bangkok and working at a road, at some point I need to find a new
new job or because
If I let's say I'm at the CPO level, I wanna be CEO now.
Agora already has a CEO.
Right. So I need to find BSEU or somewhere else.
Guess what? That company's not gonna be in bankrupt.
Right now I have to mow and move my whole family.
Right, to Singapore, which I did.
Right. Then you hit someone over there, or then you hit another CD.
Now you need to move back or go somewhere else to Thailand, which I did.
And then you're like, Oh, maybe there's a great opportunity in Europe which will give you like a whole different scale.
Then you need to move to Spain, which I did. Right. So this at some point your family's like, What what's happening?
Right, we're uh it turned out to be it was what turned out to be one step to go from A to B.
Is now just uh every year journey.
And um
So that's something to calibrate, especially later in your career.
That uh
It's extremely hard if you like the job.
And don't like the location or vice versa.
'Cause they usually come as a package deal now.
Uh you see this in Bangkok now where there's not that many great tech companies.
Um and if you're at Agora and you're doing really well.
Uh, but it's it's just one company.
Makes.
You just don't have options.
Uh and if especially if you love Bangkok, which is a great city.
Probably my
What for the best place to live in the world.
Uh
That's a struggle.
Move your pro uh your career ahead, you need to go somewhere else.
So interesting.
Uh, I feel like Thailand is very popular right now with uh white lotus.
Uh just B.
I think White Lotus had like the most views of any show or some crazy had some
That was very popular. I feel like there's a lot of tr tourist tourism coming to Thailand, more is more than they've had. Yes.
Yeah.
I wanna I wanna come back to one piece of advice that
that uh we were chatting about before we started recording that I think might be helpful to people, which is
And this is kind of in a different direction, but I want to make sure we touch on it, is uh Shreas Doshi's
point about leverage. I know this is something that you think a lot about. He has this really good advice. And we'll point the to the episode if people want to dig deeper.
Around the finding the highest leverage opportunities.
For it.
You to work on as a as a PM?
Can you just share that advice for folks that haven't heard this before?
This is true for no matter what what part what level of career you are in, but you have a finite amount of time and largely you have more problems than you have time to solve them.
Uh
The question is which ones you work on.
Right. And
This becomes even harder like let's say you're a CPO now.
Because all of them are important.
Right, otherwise they would not come to you in the first place.
Question is is which one do you work on?
And and the principle is simple. Like you work on problems that have
a ten X positive or a negative impact. I mean the number can be ten, five, three, hundred
Depending on Binance, it would be hundred.
Some companies might be three.
Uh
And in most Mintank companies one of two problems, is a growth problem or a compliance problem.
'Cause both of them can have a negative or positive ten X impact.
And uh that's what you focus on, right? That's what you spend bulk of your time.
What was interesting for me, my first executive roles, I was Google as a product manager.
I joined what was White Pages back then as as a VP of product. It was my first kind of
Uh and
I'm Mike Page's Alex
Algun s Seattle founding legend, three companies, all unicorns now.
Incredible very good personal friend and mentor.
But what was truly interesting when I joined it, they're like, Okay, this is this is your desk, this is the product area. So we had two offices.
This is when everybody worked in office five days a week, right?
Uh
And I'm like, Okay, where does Alex sit?
Right. And he's like oh he's sitting with accounting rate.
And I'm like
I didn't think about it because I thought his office is near accounting, right? Then I find out he doesn't have a office. He has a f like a floating desk.
Uh it's
All the other desks were like fixed, but he had a mobile desk.
Right and he would move his desk.
To one of the departments which you think had
the highest leverage opportunity. And he would sit there
Uh at that desk in that department.
Till that either problem was solved or the opportunity was realized.
And then he would literally move his desk.
And then go to product or tech or finance.
And that was his um
His way of
Like you could literally visualize him working on the highest leverage problem.
By his desk moving.
Um
Yeah.
And then that combines that with what we talked before about details.
A little bit I think it didn't mention it about the humility.
that you need to have to be working the detail.
Lot of the times, especially later in your career, you're like hey
This is above, this is beyond me, this is below me.
Right? Why do I need to do that?
Like I have so many PMs or data analysts, or somebody should do it. Like why is it
Why would I do it?
Right.
That was kind of
Again.
Just a quick story there.
Uh I remember we were
Trying to figure out a growth channels.
And we found out that heavy kind of
Really are you tapping out on
On paid, on so social, on referrals.
But SEO was something
We just hadn't work on.
For a while.
We're building a caller ID app and what we wanted to do was when somebody types a phone number in Google.
We want to read the first link.
to say hey is this a spam call or not, or is this whose number it is?
Uh and if we could, then we could get them to download our app, right. That was the hypothesis.
So I present at the executive team meeting to Alex like hey, I wanna
Uh
Wanna hire the product manager?
Focus purely on SEO.
And um because I think that's like one of our highest leverage areas right now.
And Alice is like
The whole white page is I built.
Based on SEO.
But people who type people's name and the first thing used to be a white pages link.
I'm like one of the best people in the world to work on SEO.
I'm like, Yeah, so he's like
Let me run this product.
And I'm like, Okay, what do you mean? He's like, No, no, I will I will be the product manager for this.
However long you need it.
And I'm like, how's it going on? Don't worry about it.
Just tell me what the engineers.
So again he mowed his desk.
to the to where that inject that product team's had.
And for the next three months he was the product manager on that scrum.
So he would come to my product team meetings.
Give us update on what's happening with the SEO Scrum.
And then an hour later I would be in the leadership meeting giving my update to him.
Right. And but truly he was operating it saying this is high leverage area for the company. High leverage for layers.
To be high leverage for me.
I'm the best person to do it. I'm gonna be in the details and
And do it.
C Z same at Binance, like there were a lot of products that he would just sit on himself.
uh work. There are very few people at Binance who would say no to C Z.
Uh but one of my lead PMs who worked on
on the products that C Z worked on, he would tell them no all the time.
It would just baffle all the other executives. Like how is he saying no to C V?
Um and none of us are doing it.
Because
Hey, that was his product area that C was working on.
And uh there was that mutual respect there that hey, we know this thing and he's gonna say no to me because
Probably not a good idea.
So that that humility and attention to detail
is required to work on the high leverage problems.
A lot of the high leverage problems are not.
The said not strategy decisions.
They are not like which markets to go after and stuff. A lot of them are like
Why is why is this thing not working as well as it needs to be?
A lot of time the devil is in the details and uh you need to you need to be over there. So then combining that, knowing what is high leverage or not.
And to both having the humility and the
The patients.
to be able to go dig deeper and and solve that.
And some of them are like Greek ones.
Like if I'm looking today at let's say
How many of our signed up users convert into a long term
Long the monthly daily active user.
Right.
That could be like something I focus on for
For a month.
'Cause we're running a lot of experiments on like early onboarding scrolls.
early rewards, early incentives, early loyalty program.
And at some point might be like well the team's got it.
Like I've given all my
What I could do there. It's functioning. We have great PMs.
I can tr I trust their execution on this.
Uh, let me just go focus on some of the
compliance challenges that we have or fraud issues that we have in France.
Those kind of uh being able to kind of
Though the only way that works for me is I I keep a very free calendar.
Because
Uh
You cannot do this without that.
If you have hundreds of meetings, hundreds of one on ones.
daily standard, the lot of like
Recurring meetings.
You just can't find time to go work on
On high leverage problems, so
That would be my kind of other stuff is like
Keep your
Should have plenty of open spaces on your calendar.
Uh a full calendar is a badge of shame, not a badge of honor.
These are awesome stories. Uh the just the metaphor of the moving desk is so good.
Like that's the epitome of a
It like what you're describing is what people now call founder mode, where the founder just goes in in the details working on the problem.
Brian Cheski actually did this at Airbnb while I was there. He took on
A new product and was the
Like mini C op, essentially. I I don't know if he called himself the product manager, because I don't think he loved it
Product managers. He kinda famously got rid of product managers, which he didn't actually, but
Uh but yeah, he did that very much. So and he sat with the team, kind of created a whole space for the team that he was in.
Uh these are awesome stories and and really good example of just
Oh.
Uh
A founder using their power.
to unblock and the and finding the highest leverage.
opportunities.
to kind of start to close off our conversation, I'm gonna take you to a kind of a couple recurring
Them on this podcast, recurring segments on this podcast. First we're gonna visit AI Corner.
And
An AI corner.
Uh
I ask what's a way that you have
Found
To use AI.
an AI tool, bunch of AI tools in your work.
to work more efficiently, to work to create better
Quality work.
I still haven't found a game changer for me personally.
Uh something that I use right now and
Uh
And I'm a little bit more than a little bit.
Not sure that am I not doing something right, but the other people are.
Or I'm
A little bit.
Too jaded for it.
But the so we have a lot of s we have Gemini across the work. So
for meeting notes and stuff works great.
Especially for folks who don't meet it.
Use a tool called Writer for our copywriting and UX teams.
Forge, especially because we are operating in Europe across several languages, so being able to generate that very quickly.
Uh especially for illustrations and uh and in app messages and stuff that's being a
Uh there's several tools now, but Writer just has kind of
Cop like the copywriting market is is is really well done.
Uh over there.
If you ask me across N twenty six
But even at when we did this at Binance or at Agora, there are three areas where AI is complete game changing.
Right.
One is on on coding.
Uh
Yeah.
Again you can use
Whatever latest tool
for prototyping or not.
Most
value especially for the companies I have worked at, which are fairly large companies, very large code bases.
Uh
having some sort of
co pilot that's integrated with your
With your repositories.
rough data maybe somewhere between eighteen to twenty five percent productivity boost for a developer.
Which is fairly massive, right? So that's one category, game changer.
Customer support game changer.
Uh whether we should do it at
Or at scale or not.
It's a different kind of more
Ethical slash human question to ask there.
But for solving like the bottom seventy percentile problems
Uh, why is my card decline?
Why is uh they'll hold on Macon?
What happened to the placement card I shipped.
Uh why is it not arrived?
Like basic questions, AI automating now almost fifty sixty, seventy percent of that.
Customers getting their real feedback.
Uh
Game changer.
And the last one is on just on fraud.
uh and being able to just understand patterns better on real customers versus not.
Um and Binance we had
We had this product where users could
Exchange crypto with each other.
Right, like I could pay you bitcoin and get like Thai baht in return.
Huge amount of fraud.
And they're like using AI just to understand language patterns of fraudsters versus not fraudsters.
Massive.
So again at the company level
There is an incredible set of advancements across these three areas. Developer productivity
Customer support and fraud.
But for me personally, like I'm like what would I use that suddenly makes me a better CPO?
Uh I'm I'm still struggling a little bit over there.
Well but
It's
It's it's not re I don't think we need something at
At that level.
'Cause largely what still remains the
The domain of humans is decision making.
And uh taking
Taking the brunt of the

The impact of what decisions you make.
Because I would love to blame AI for some of my bad decisions. You can still do that. You can still do that, even if it's not
Yes, yes. So
But uh again hopeful to
Generally not a big fan of like
Like the thing I call a little bit jaded, like
You have tools now that you write

Like a long essay for it.
And then you have tools that compress long S into a few words. You could have just said few words in the first place.
Right, and saved the whole round trip. It's like a reverse zip. Remember when we had zip and it was a game changer?
But there was a big file you needed to send over slow network, so you compressed it.
And sent it and then expanded it. We're doing the reverse now.
Right? We have a small thing, we make it big.
And then send it over and somebody's making it small.
Uh so that's um but on these three areas if you're
at all scale companies. Like if you don't have a great tool for developing productivity.
You're not looking at like
Essential basic
uh l L L M bots were deflecting customer service and not looking at patterns and on
User transactions or user communications to detect fraud.
Uh like that's the first area I would focus on.
Okay, I'm gonna take us to another recurring segment on the podcast. It's called Fail Corner.
And the idea here is folks like you come on this podcast, there's all these winds kill an anti CPO this and that and just
move into Thailand. It worked out incredibly.
What a what a win all the time.
In reality, that's not how things go.
So the question to you here is just what's the story of uh of a failure in your career when things
Didn't go well. And
It was a big deal for you.
And then what you learned from that experience, how that actually impacted you.
Yeah, so from the product side, like my probably the most spectacular failure was
That was the first PM on Hangouts.
Uh
And if you ask Michael he will probably say he was my boss then.
It was
An effort decide.
Size I've never seen before in the
or after in my career we had thousands of people
uh working for me. We had entire power on Google.
Uh
We had Larry literally sitting with us saying we can do anything we want Chrome to do
And we still
didn't manage to build a great messaging product.
Uh so when I look at pure like
Product sense.
Product.
uh decision making.
Uh
поза
And there's several reasons now I had luxury of fifteen years to analyze that.
on solving for the wrong audience.
Uh solving for the wrong DNA of the company.
Uh I have this
That certain companies can never succeed at certain type of products.
Right, like Microsoft with mobile or Google with social or Facebook with enterprise.
Right. It's just the DNA of the founder actively
acts against you succeeding there.
Uh I would have said Google with enterprise as well.
Uh, but then Sundar came and Larry was no longer the CEO and that's when the enterprise took off.
uh then we had to change the CEO to kind of
When in certain certain segments.
Uh but more uh and
Then again, I worked in Nagoda during Covid. So travel company during Covid.
Binance during its probably most tumultuous uh area of
Of compliance and and government scrutiny.
Uh a lot of missteps uh there around
Externalities.
Uh I think one of the
the main kind of learnings from that is
Uh just don't take on projects that are gonna be
Six months, a year.
Uh because you just generally don't have control over the macro.
uh things just move way fa way more faster.
And that's probably cemented my kind of now
product philosophy of just doing small things so very quickly.
Spending most of the time doing that. You still launch big products.
But even over there we try and kind of
Get early signals.
As soon as possible.
But because
Agora like one of the big projects we launched was
Uh we wanted to control the payments.
Uh infrastructure for all the hotels.
And we thought if we
Had that.
That device in the hotels to
Desk.
Not only for bookings made online, but for everything that
Happens at the hotel.
If we control that that infrastructure.
Not only would we make money, but we had a touch point with the users that g went be beyond booking the travel.
Travel as you know is not a
a high frequency activity. You book once, then you book six months later.
Most of the time people would not come to a God.
They would just go to Google and go to some other website.
So we wanted that like touch point that stayed with them and thought payments would be a great great avenue to do that because that's something you do every day.
And again.
We had we did it in the Goda style. So we did it experiment. We started very small.
I literally went to the mall and bought these fifty dollar Android devices where we ran our software.
That people would
Could uh just scan the
the credit card via camera and charger.
It was incredible. We have thousands of hotels use it.
And then COVID hits and then there's literally nobody going to hotels anymore.
Uh, but it took us like six, nine months because of the licenses and so to launch it.
And um
And
In hindsight, probably
I mean you couldn't have
Thought of Covid with that times, but
still the amount of time it took to launch the product.
Was uh
Or something we could
We could have done better.
So learnings for most of it is don't take too long to launch.
Don't take too long to validate your hypothesis.
The hangout story is amazing. I I uh
It's like a classic product people now make fun of if it's just Google, Why can't you get this right? And it's been changed, names have changed a hundred times.
Interestingly meat ended up being really good. Oh, okay.
Like after we build the hangouts, they're like, Okay, this is not going anywhere. We're gonna start this new product called Alo.
Right.
Which also didn't work.
Um.
Yeah, but then I said you know what, like we should still I'cause I used to work for for
Android Enterprise team before. I'm like
What if we just made it an enterprise garden?
Like let me at least
Write the spec for it.
On hey, what would we do definitely?
for I still called it Hangouts for Enterprise. They rebranded it later.
But that was my salvaging moment for uh
But from the sense I mean we the hangouts team invented Web RTC.
Right. Now every single communication in the world happens on Web R D C.
So if you think from the cultural and technological impact that
That the Hangouts team had.
Uh is is insane.
Right, like
Every this tool we are using, every single meeting product, every single
WhatsApp voice calling, video calling, like every Zoom, everything runs on Web R D C.
So uh
So may
Technology side, I think that was a pretty massive win that the team came up with that. That's the the power of having Chrome, having a browser also.
Just introducing.
Yes, absolutely.
Final question before we get to our very exciting lightning round.
Is there anything else that you want to leave listeners with, or maybe a point you want to double down on?
Just to kind of leave in little last little nugget.
Before we get to the lightning round.
I mean just summarized, it depends on the audience. A lot of the folks who

From a perspective of
Like here, how does this help me be better at my job tomorrow than I was today?
And for them I would say again, like if you're if you're truly working in areas where you think you're
You're optimizing your strengths and having fun.
Just keep doing it.
And just keep that as your kind of North Star.
Uh as you look at new pieces.
uh when you talk to new companies, try and evaluate the overlap of superpowers.
Right, what is your superpower, what is the company's superpower, will they feed each other?
If you get a very strong resonance there.
Uh
I think that that would that would be a great career step.
Irrespective of whether it's in Bangkok or Spain or however the compensation is gonna be.
Because uh truly you will find that you grow much faster.
Uh because it's a it's a kind of a a self fulfilling prophecy at that point.
Um
But just just keep looking for s overlapping superpowers all the time.
Not just
in in professional life, like in in in in even the
Transcends beyond
Maybe even for relationships and stuff like
Folks were
Extremely complimenting strands.
And with superpowers feed each other.
Make for great life partners.
Uh, so there's maybe
Maybe
That
analogy can be extended beyond your career.
Well.
That's a powerful point right there.
Uh what a cool way to end that. Well with that, my Ura, we've reached our very exciting lightning round.
I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?
Yeah, let's do it.
What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
The one that I read most recently. So I'm I'm generally don't read a lot of books because I read a lot of
Content, like small content.
Tweets.
And tweets and and subtacks and Discord and WhatsApp messages.
Uh and so book takes a
Like a mind.
She has shift for me to go to read a book.
Uh the one I read most recently, which I thought was
Pretty amazing and not of overlap with what I said today.
The five kinds of wealth.
Uh
That while was
very well articulated.
Especially the last point I made very early, like
one of the potential paths is you just do well on your job and then you find meaning elsewhere.
Right. This book is probably an incredible structured way of thinking around it.
What is your wealth in terms of your health, your physical health, your mental health, your relationship health?
The community.
And then your wealth that you're generating financial wealth is
How do you think holistically?
Because at the end of the day you are what you optimize for.
Right, if you optimize for financial wealth, you will become wealthy.
But you might not be wealthy.
In a full spectrum manner.
The strengths finder two point oh I said uh very early on.
It's still an interesting book to just think about how you would think about your strengths.
Um but
Again, if you don't wanna read the book, I would just do one of these kind of online
online quizzes for it.
But the five kinds of wealth and it's ten find or two point or maybe maybe
What I would suggest.
The first book's by Sahel Bloom for another podcast. We'll link to all the stuff.
I forgot to mention the story briefly about the strengthfinder stuff, so actually
when I was leaving Airbnb and looking for my next thing and even thinking about leaving
I took a strength test.
And
I was working with executive coach and I saw the results
And she's like
What do you see in these results? What are these results telling you? I'm like, I don't know.
She's like, This tells me you should start your own company and work on your own. All the strengths that are popping up here are things that you as a
Founder
Need.
And that really helped. What's what's your what's your one person data point on that? Was that a good one?
Was it what is a good decision, you mean?
Yes.
Oh, relying on that strength test to make a career. I am such a huge fan of strength finder. And
And and any kind of strengths test. And interestingly, people may be afraid of taking them'cause they'd be like here's
What I suck at. It just it always makes you feel good. It's like here's the stuff you're good at.
And it's not like here's what you're bad at, it's just here's the stuff you're
Best at.
And it's always positive. It's never like you suck at the stuff. It's just not the your strength.
So it was a huge win for me. Yeah, highly recommend it.
Especially if you're trying to make a career move. So yeah, fully aligned.
Okay, uh, next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or T V show you really enjoyed?
The one I saw that kind of
Like T V shows usually I watch to kind of give a downtime. So usually I watch just
Periodic.
Shows.
the house or big bank area and stuff. The one I that saw recently
that kind of shook me a little bit was was adolescence.
Again, it's it's a tough topic. Uh on
Teenage
Mental health and
And violins and schools and
Just the way it was shot. Like I would see the first episode even if it's not your genre.
'Cause it's shot in a single camera motion.
And the whole episode for an hour.
This the there's no cut.
Camera just keeps moving.
And it's just makes like a bizarre feel.
We feel a little different than watching it.
Irrespective of the topic, which is also pretty intense.
Just visually you feel different.
Uh, and if you're emotion sick like me, like you really feel different. Yeah, it's wonderful. Like what a
I would watch that.
Okay.
I need to watch the white lotus because everybody keeps bringing it every time I tell them I'm from Thailand and I haven't seen it yet.
So I'm I'm behind on my on my mean mean culture a little bit. Yeah, you are.
It's like you and like no one else has not seen it. I think you're the only person left. Yes, I'm the only one.
Okay. Uh do you have a favorite product you've usually discovered that you really love?
So product so I spend most of my time using banking and trading products.
Um
And I would give a plug here if you're in Europe.
Try N twenty six or even Revolute incredible product.
If you're in in the US, Robin Hood, just there
The motion design they have done and the onboarding
Uh is
Just enjoy to use, whether you use it for banking or trading or just for their card.
Uh I just find the the
product design and motion.
Especially as you touch and swipe.

Anything that Nikita Beard launches, so I just downloaded Bible study or Bible chat yesterday. It's time to tweet about that.
Yeah, it's like in the top ten of all.
Social apps. It's like a Bible study.
And I can tell why. Like I've got three messages right now to treat my anxiety by reading Bible today. Uh and one other time I was feeling slightly anxious. So maybe maybe there's some some magic there. Uh but the one I'm that I would just like for personal. I used to write, like in in in Hindi I used to write poems growing up as a kid.
And uh that was
Just now this uh app Suno dot com.
I can like make songs from them.
And they are incredible songs, like at least I think so. Uh
Nobody else thinks it so far. Uh but I just just the fact that you can write something and now you have a song.
Uh
It just just magic and like the first time that I saw a use case.
Again, I said it's n nothing so far that makes me a better CPO right now.
uh but as an artist or at least uh the bachelor artist
Uh it's just incredible that you can think of something, put it down there and
You can actually
Uh, see what uh what would a professional singer and a band and a musician if they were to compose it, what it would look like.
Um
So that's probably like the most
Wow, that have been like technology in the recent times.
The Suno dot com. Uh
The onboarding flow shocks and their growth product is
If I were the PM on Suno, I would do things a lot differently, but the core tech
Is magical.
I'm heat fan.
One of my favorite things to do with Zuno, I think it's Zuno.ai also.
Uh is just ask it to make a song in the style of a sea shanty.
It's so fun.
And they give you like a few options so you could be like here's this version, that version. Yes, yes.
Okay, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful in work or in life?
One I kind of relates to the things we talked about is
There's no right or wrong decision, they're just slow and fast decisions.
Now there's some extreme caveats to that around if you're doing something that
might kill your user, like healthcare or
Military or
Are you in compliance, which can kill your company.
Don't use it.
But everywhere else in generally goes back to the strategy thing we talked about as well. A lot of the times the
Like if it's uh if you make a wrong decision, if you make it fast enough.
you would know it was wrong and you would correct it and he would still do it faster than thinking months for the right decision.
Right. So for anything that's irreversible, anything that's not gonna get you in jail or kill your company.
No right or wrong decisions, just slow or fast decisions.
Final question.
You've lived in a bunch of places. You've lived in Spain, Thailand, Mumbai.
Seattle, I think Texas even for some period for school. College. Okay.
There's probably other places.
Which has the best food.
Bangkok.
No no question. Barcelona comes closer.
For some.
But Bangkok you can have a three Michelin star, like
Th one of the top five restaurants in the world.
Spend like
five hundred dollars a meal, or you can have a one dollar street food
Uh stirred fried orc and rice with basil.
Incredible. Just the the the the spectrum of
And higher from the cheapest food you can think of or the most expensive food you can think of.
In that same like one kilometer walkable area.
uh having like thousands of these.
Uh, literally this the density of food like no one
No one comes closer.
Uh Barcelona is an incredible restaurant, like the best restaurant in the world.
It's like a block away from here. It's called the Sprutar. Takes like two years to get on the
On the wait list there.
But
It's
That's on one end of the spectrum.
Barcelona probably comes close second.
But that cheap get down to AM, walk down and have an incredible meal for a dollar.
Like nothing comes closer to to Bangkok.
This uh episode's a great ad for Thailand. Let's let's go.
Uh and you definitely gotta watch White Lotus. Myur. This was awesome. We covered so much ground. I feel like I I got to know you so well. We covered so many
Thank you so much.
Yeah. We're not done yet. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, maybe
Check out if there's roles at N twenty six.
And then how can listeners be useful to you?
Finally, uh just one other thing being old is I was one of the first users of LinkedIn, so LinkedIn.com slash Mayer.
Uh
My only basis of Facebook, so Facebook.com slash comment.
Uh or n twenty six.com, MK at n twenty six.com. Like if you're especially curious about how we do stuff here.
Uh we are hiring, we're we're growing really fast. And I said banking's a great business to be in.
Um not gonna go out of flavor for the next few thousand years, so
Uh
If you're thinking of a career, you're thinking about Spain, or thinking about Berlin.
Uh
It's just a whole different interesting lifestyle, uh and different kind of
Product thinking.
Oh, please reach out.
Uh on any of those channels.
Oh if you're in Europe, uh download our try in twenty six, like we go by the motto love your bank.
Uh our founders say that people would rather go to a dentist than to a bank.
Branch.
And that's why we build those.
Uh we truly feel like for an everyday banking, like it's
Just you use the app and you feel like
I want to use my banking app every day.
Uh, there's a some bit of magic which I didn't have that much contribution yet. I made it a little bit simple and seamless, but
Magic was there before.
Uh and so if you're in Europe, you're looking for a new bank account.
Uh
N twenty six dot com.
There we go.
Mayor, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you. Thank you, Lenny, and thank you every
Bye, everyone.
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