Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - How to own your career growth and become a powerful product leader | Deb Liu, Ancestry (ex-Facebook, PayPal)

Episode Date: August 4, 2022

Do you put as much time into your career planning as you do into your product planning? Deb Liu has had an extraordinary career path, from Ebay and PayPal, to Facebook, and now Ancestry. She’s sat in on, mentored, and managed hundreds of product managers. In this episode, she shares poignant advice on how to intentionally find growth opportunities and drive your career forward. Join us.—Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible:• Flatfile: https://www.flatfile.com/lenny• Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/• Makelog: https://www.makelog.com/lenny—Where to find Deb Liu:• Twitter: https://twitter.com/debliu_• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deborahliu/• Substack: https://debliu.substack.com/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—Referenced:• Take Back Your Power: 10 New Rules for Women at Work (Deb’s Book): https://www.amazon.com/Take-Back-Your-Power-Rules/dp/031036485X• How To Change Your Life Through Resolutions: https://debliu.substack.com/p/resolve-to-progress—In this episode, we cover:[04:32] What it was like when eBay acquired PayPal[07:31] Quirky culture clashes as the companies merged[09:46] How incentives drive employee behavior[14:43] How Deb took on a product management role at a young age[17:51] PayPal’s hiring strategy for early growth[20:03] How to succeed as an introverted leader[25:29] What sets successful Product Managers apart from one’s who plateau[27:09] Specific tactics for unlocking growth in your Product Management career[32:06] How to find and create mentorship circles[36:30] The most important skill for early Product Managers to focus on[43:58] How to grow your confidence in communication[46:55] Deb’s upcoming book "Take Back Your Power"[50:35] One tactical tip from Deb’s upcoming book on how to improve your Product Management[52:09] How to get involved with Women In Product[57:11] How companies can recruit more diverse Product Managers[1:00:04] How Deb built Facebook marketplace from scratch[1:06:03] The blessing and curse of gaining a lot of users quickly This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

We don't talk about this, by the way. But if you look at the very senior people who rise faster in organizations as senior executives, they have this skill. And I noticed this as I got further and further in my career. I didn't realize how important this was. And then I realized that anyone who can go into a room and speak about almost anything intelligently without any preparation has a huge advantage in our industry. Deb Blue is maybe most known for incubating, launching, and scaling Facebook marketplace,

which is now used by over one billion people. around the world every month. But before Facebook, where she spent almost 12 years, she was at PayPal, where she led much of the product integration with eBay after they were required by eBay, and then she went on to lead much of the PayPal product team. Currently, she's the CEO of Ancestry. She's also on the board of Intuit. In our chat, we cover what made PayPal so special and what she learned from the people, the culture, and the way they built product that's informed her approach today. We also talk about how despite being introvert, she was able to excel in numerous leadership roles. What attributes she's found to be most common to PMs that do super well,

and also what skills she believes PM should focus on above all else. We also chat about Facebook Marketplace, her upcoming book, Take Back Your Power, and a whole lot of stories from the course of her incredible career. As you'll see, I so enjoyed my chat with Deb, and I'm really excited for you to hear this episode. Hey, Ashley, head of marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers? At least 40%. And how many of them screw that up? And what happens when they do?

Well, being still in their data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chock full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave. I am zero percent surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverages. opportunities for both sign-up conversion and increasing long-term retention. Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important.

Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify, and Zora are able to grow their businesses on top of FlatFile. It's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster. If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile. And Flatfile, and Flatfile, If you're setting up your analytics stack, but you're not using Amplitude, what are you doing? Amplitude is the number one most popular analytic solution in the world, used by both big companies like Shopify, Instacart, and Atlassian, and also most tech startups. Amplitude has everything you need, including a powerful and fully self-service analytics product,

an experimentation platform, and even an integrated customer data platform to help you understand your users like never before. Give your team's self-service product data to understand your users, drive conversions, and increase engagement, growth, and revenue. Ditch your vanity metrics, trust your data, work smarter, and grow your business. Try Amplitude for free. Just visit Amplitude.com to get started. Welcome to the podcast, Deb. I am really excited that we're finally doing this. I'm so happy to be here, Lenny. So you're currently the CEO of Ancestry, and before that you were at Facebook for about 11 years, where you led the Facebook Marketplace team, which is a product I love and I've used so many times,

and I've sold so many products on it. And you also did a bunch of the payments work at Facebook, led a lot of the teams that did the payments work. But before that, you were at PayPal for six years, where you led the integration between PayPal and eBay. and also let a lot of the product team at PayPal. And so my first question is around that. There's been a lot of writing coming out about the early history of PayPal. I read this book called The Founders. Jimmy, it's awesome.

He actually interviewed me. It's part of that. Okay. I missed that part and I will have to go read it. It's such a fascinating tale of the story of PayPal. And there's a story about Meg Whitman coming to the office when the acquisition was announced in her very corporate t-shirt. And everyone on PayPal is like, oh, no. what are we doing, joining this big company.

And so I'm really curious from your time there, and I think you joined right before that happened. What was it like to be on the PayPal side of this acquisition going through this acquisition by eBay? You know, I actually stumbled onto my career at PayPal. I was graduating from Stanford, and I saw this startup PayPal, and I loved PayPal. I was an eBay seller, and I went to the booth at PayPal and had at the Stanford Graduate's full business, and I just wanted to tell them how much I love their product. And they said, why don't you come interview? And I thought, no, kind of moving back to North Carolina.

I'm not sure what I want to do. And I ended up going to interview. And it was really incredible, just meeting the people. And they convinced me to join at the end of June. And we were acquired, I believe, the first week of July. Oh, wow. And before I joined, I actually had a sale dinner. So Peter Thiel and David Sachs took me on the dinner.

And I said, is there an chance we're going to get acquired by eBay because, you know, it would be really awkward. I actually interned eBay. I had an offer there. And I turned it down. And they said, absolutely not. We're going to stay independent. And about two weeks later, we were required by eBay.

And I actually started working with the same colleagues that I had worked before. But it was an incredible journey. I think PayPal was such a small, scrappy company trying to do so many amazing things with a few hundred employees. And it was just the adventure of a lifetime. But it was really different being bought by a company that was run in such a corporate way. It was a very corporate tech company. eBay was a wonderful product. And I had worked there.

And so I really loved the business. people there as well. But it was just the culture clash between the two experiences, between the two cultures, between the two teams. It was just, it was very alien, I think, to really have one culture. And at one point, they called it the mothership. It was that kind of culture. And PayPal was the smaller, scrappyer cousin. And it was just a very different vibe. And I think, you know, looking back, what made the product successful was the two things just belonged together, right? Commerce and Payments. And I think that it really unlocked a lot of value. But it think most people saw the value in lots. I mean, the value that you've looked at PayPal is now

larger than eBay from market cap perspective, which was what Meg had wanted at some point. But at the same time, so she was very prescient in a lot of ways. But I think the differences were the culture differences were really hard to overcome. And now, even as we talk about acquisitions, as I advise companies who do acquisitions, it's to remember that there are people and cultures and real human beings behind, you know, each of these products. It is not just you buy a company and you just loft them in like it's a stock. It is a completely different thing. And so there were a few of us who became very close during the integration.

So Han Nguyen, who now has the customer experience at Swinpley. You know, she and I stayed Brents over the last 20 years. And, you know, we talked about those days and how crazy it was and how we kept our teams from fighting it out, you know, and how successful it ultimately was. But I think that people kind of look at the story and it's very easy to just gloss over the details. But there were real humans that and a lot of, you know, detailed. How do we make this work?

Are there any stories that stand out of like culture clash and how different these two companies were? And then also just like, how did you as a leader help people through that? Because I imagine many people are like, I'm out of here. I'm not going to go work at eBay. How did you keep people excited and sticking around? Well, I just remember we did all of our product planning on one shared worksheet. It was a spreadsheet, like an Excel spreadsheet. And we had to check it out.

So it was on a webpage, an internal webpage. and we would check it out. And if somebody left it open, other people couldn't get in. And we would send each other haikus to get people to actually shut down, to close the worksheets to other people would get in. Wait, what's an example of a haiku that you send to key people? I need to find some of those haikus that I remember Yi Li, Brian Phillips. One of them would send haikus to each other.

They would send these crazy emails and they would say something like, I think it was like 575 and they would actually like beg people to close the worksheet so that was something else to get it. It was just so, it was kind of a cultural quirkiness. But eBay worked on the system that was an internal tool called Tracker. And it tracked train seats. So instead, we would walk over for engineer and say, how many days does it take to build this? And we would give them a spec.

You know, the spec would be a few pages. And we would link to it from this shared worksheet. And that was literally the entire product planning process. At eBay, they had this thing called Tracker. You would submit like a PRD and then they would have like tech specs. And it was just the whole system and you would book train seats. You had to go through Product Council. But before you went to product council, you had to launch.

lobby all the executives and product council to sell your product. So you'd have to set up a series of meetings. Then you'd have to book a time in product council. You'd have to get the green green green or green, you know, green agreements that you could go forward. I just remember us just being bewildered. Like we would drive down to eBay. One time we had a meeting, it was 9 p.m. And we're trying to get clearance and product council because it was the only time we can meet with somebody ahead of time.

I just remember all of us going, what are we doing? Like, how are we doing this all wrong? And there was just a lot of cultural differences in how you're booking a train seat. One train seek, by the way, was 15 days of engineering. Our estimates were like two, three, five days, like a big project, but this was 50 days. And it just, it was just so, so different. And we really had to navigate how to work at two companies at once that really had very, very different cultures, especially the teams that were kind of in between the two.

What did you take away from that experience that stuck with you to other work that you've done about keeping people excited and on board with some radical change like that? What I think the biggest thing I learned from that entire experience is that people are people, but they respond to the process and respond to culture in different ways. People would go back and forth between the two companies and completely go native. They would adapt immediately because you just had no choice to get through a process, to get through a system. You had to do that. And to realize that there's the same amazing people you worked with on the other side of you with different incentives.

And they were still the same amazing people you could go have drinks with. but their incentive system was completely different. Now it was like, how do you get through this process? How do you get booked? How do you get support? And I realized that sometimes we often blame individuals for things that are actually systemic process problems. Like if there's a process broken, we think, well, they just try it harder to work better

together. They just had a better relationship. And I'm like, no, actually, are you setting up a system where you're putting two people against each other, you're pitting them against each other and then saying you should collaborate better? And I realized that, you know, there were so many amazing people who went back and forth over the years, I went from one side of the integration. I ended up on the other side of the integration. And just to see how the perspectives were completely different. To be on both sides

of an integration meant that you could see why one team felt the way they did and another team felt the way they did. But they were completely immersed in their own ecosystem. Sometimes we just, we think that if we just had hired the ideal person, it would fix everything, but we never look at our systems, our processes, our cultures, and say, what are we doing wrong? what are we rewarding? How are we asking people to do their jobs and saying, actually, this is not about the people, it's about the water they swim in. That's such an important point in a reminder of just the power of incentives and processes and systems and how that more than anything influences how people work. There's like a story and an example that comes to mind of how that went well or didn't

go well or something that you changed or someone at eBay or PayPal changed to take advantage of that insight. I just remember we were working on a project called next gen checkout. It was the next generation checkout and I was about to go on maternity leave. And, you know, my son was going to be born. It was my first child and we kicked off the project. And then right after that, I went on leave. I came back. I actually handed my team over to my colleague who was a friend of mine and he was my successor, Mike Wu, and he took over the team and he was doing a great job and I didn't want to displaced him. So I went to corporate strategy. I worked with Rajeev, who was the CEO of PayPal at the time and kind of did strategy for

him and then eventually I started the charity and social commerce verticals at PayPal. I was in the verticals job for a while. Then I ended up going to eBay. And when I got to eBay, I led the into end buyer experience, including Next Gen checkout. And they were still working on it. I had actually, and we celebrated, we actually had drinks on the lawn of eBay and we celebrated when the project was done. And my son had just turned two. And so you think about that, we did the first interview. between the two sites. We actually planned it, my team and the teams at eBay, between the announcement of the integration, which was July, and we shipped it on October when the deal was

cleared. And so, and we had actually, like, we weren't even allowed to talk to each other for a long time because the deal was actually a due diligence. So we actually only did the integration in a very short period of time. And you think about the next gen of that checkout, took two years. And then after that, we shipped that product and it was successful. And then they said, okay, we're kicking off Unified checkout. We're going to integrate. the checkouts even more. And we looked at the roadmap and it took, it was going to be another two years. And at that point, I said, you know, I'm not, I can't do this again. I ended up leaving to go to Facebook at that point. But when I learned from that experience was that it wasn't for lack of trying or

care. It wasn't that the teams weren't working hard on both sides. Like, the team was eagerly eager to work on it from both PayPal and eBay. But each individual team had insufficient information and support to actually get it done. And that was the big issue. And yet there was a lot of misunderstandings in between. It was like, well, they're not supporting us. They're not picking our features. But actually, I was literally on both sides of the project. And that was not really what was happening. What was happening was there was insufficient support on both sides. And so thus you end up in a case where you end up fighting over privatization. And in the end, when you're starving, what you're focused on is what you need to get done on your side. And so really, I think instead,

you either fund something like that fully, get it done quickly, or when you elongate it like this where things are just, you know, you're just creating hostility between the teams. It's so cool that you're on both sides of this experience and saw how very different teams and approaches worked. Something that, I don't know if people know, is that you join PayPal when you were very young and it was maybe your first PM role and you ended up taking on some significant responsibility super quickly. I'd love to hear a bit about that part of your career and how you were able to take on such a big role so quickly and how you kind of skisks. Gilled and learned as you went. So I had come to the table at the career fair, and I saw Tim Wenzel,

who had put together a lot of the PayPal Mafia. And he was the recruiter. He's one of the first recruiters at PayPal. I think he might be the first recruiter at PayPal. And then Catherine Wu, she's the head of Airbnb.org today. And she was a year ahead of me at Stanford. And he said, hey, we have jobs in marketing and product, which do you prefer. I look at Catherine, since she was a, and kind of knew her. I said, what do you do? She said, I'm in product. I'm like, that sounds good. they'd no idea what a product manager did. I mean, at the time, it was just not a thing. It was not kind of the thing it is today.

And so thus, I ended up interviewing for product. And as I was interviewing, they would say, well, would you build? And I had all these ideas. I mean, as an eBay seller, I had many things I wished PayPal did. And so I would describe all these ideas, all these things I wanted to do. And then I started the job, and I went to the VP of product. And I said, what is the actual job of being a product manager? I have no idea.

I realized that I had taken a job. I had no idea what it had. tails. And she actually very patiently explained it. My manager, Dave Lee, also did, and just really kind of mentored me and showed me the ropes. And, you know, being a new product manager and having no idea what your job is, I was able to really kind of look at the product from a very customer-centric way. So a lot of PayPal employees were not eBay sellers. In fact, some in the company were hostile towards eBay. Whereas I said, this is the best opportunity. You have this marketplace of sellers who have their own websites. If we could just get them all on board, this is a, a

a massive win for both companies. And so I'm notated from a very different perspective. And I think that it kind of gave me this ability to see the role from a customer perspective, but also from a product lens. I turns out that I'm a very natural product manager, but I think if you had asked me at the start, I just had no idea what it entailed. I love that you decided to be a PM on the spot in an interview line talking to a recruiter. That's amazing.

And you were like in your early 20s at that point. And that turned into basically leading this integration between PayPal and eBay, right? Yeah, so at that point, I was pretty young and I knew very little about anything. And I was, you know, early in my career and eventually my manager left. So a couple years later, my manager left. I ended up taking on the entire team. So I was working on the integration for a long time. And then after a couple years, I actually took on his role as well.

And so it was just an incredible opportunity at the time. You know, I think that's what's really great about a career in tech is if you're in a high growth company, they give you so much responsibility that you have no business deserving the right to do. And yet you have this opportunity to shape a product that's touched by millions and millions of people and you can grow your career so quickly because you can have such impact in such a short time. And that was it for me was that I had this opportunity to build something that was really special and to be a part of a company at a growth phase that was so incredible. And to be part of one of the most really wonderful stories of two-pointed,

products that came together. And as Meg had said at the time, one plus one equals three. And that's how it turned out slash one of the ones became 10. The PayPal said. Just like thinking back to your time at PayPal any bit, what's like one or two things that you've taken to where you work now that informed the way you built product, hire lead teams, anything like that. What's like a lesson that you've learned from that experience? Well, it's really wonderful about PayPal is they did not look for credentials from a, you know, like you had, you need. 10 years of product experience to be a senior PM here. Instead, they, you know, the way they shaped their product team with, let's hire really smart people who have product orientation,

and let's just let them loose and we're going to build amazing things. It was just incredible. So few people had product experience at the time. And so they said, we're just going to hire amazing people with like, you know, with great ideas. And they did. And, you know, to this day, a lot of those PMs have now spread across the valley doing amazing and incredible things. And are now senior leaders across so many different places. And nobody had had any experience. And I think that that part is something which I think we overvalue experience over instincts and learning mindset. And it's something I have kept in mind is that you can have someone who is an incredible expert. It's tons of experience, but they're not growing. They're not scrappy. They're not pushing. But somebody who is

excited, someone who is passion, someone who understands the customer and really cares is going to see them every time. I remember one day we went to, we had to lunch a few years after, you know, all of this, we had joined PayPal. And by the way, the PayPal PMs, early PMs still have reunions, thanks to our friend Alan Tian, one of the early PayPal PMs. And we still get together. We're friends to this day. And we just, I remember one day we got together, this is when we were still there. We joke that none of us could get a job on our teams because we kept raising the bar saying, okay, you need this much experience to be an APM, to be a PM, to be a senior PM. And we said, we wouldn't even qualified to even be on our own teams. And at that point, we were all directors,

GPMs, pretty senior at that point. And we said, we couldn't even get hired here today. And that's the difference, right, is that we grew up in a culture and a company. And so I would actually say that as you look at the cultures and the cultures I'm going to build, I just want to hire a really amazing raw talent. It's great to have experience. It's great to have the credentials. But more than that, you have the passion. Do you have the ability to ask? actually show that you can grow. And I think that's something I really look for. I want to get more of your insights on hiring and leadership. But before we get into that, I wanted to ask you a question. I read that you consider yourself an introvert. And it was always a lot of work to kind of push

yourself into these leadership roles that you're in and have been in for so long now. For people going through this themselves that are just like, man, this is so hard for me. It's so unnatural for me to become a leader and to be the center of the team. Do you have any advice? Do you have any advice? for what helped you through that and kind of push through that innate aversion maybe to leadership in the limelight. Well, first, I want to ask you, Lenny, are you an introvert or extrovert? 100% introvert. Like, I've moved closer to extrovert and I've come across as an extrovert a lot of times, but I'm definitely a index introvert. The reason I ask is I have a sense that we are very similar.

You know, as a PM, though, you're expected to connect the dots. You're the connector. You're the culture carrier. You're the convener of groups. You're in a lot of ways, the de facto person who brings together, you know, the teams that build the products. And to, you know, I found that job really hard as an introvert because your job was literally to pick up the phone and call people back in the day when we used the phone. Or to, like, gather groups of people to really, to lead from the front. And it was very uncomfortable for me.

And I can see that in you as well as over the years we've talked. And, you know, I don't think you have to be. an extrovert to be a successful PM. You can be an introverted successful PM. However, you have to exercise the muscle of communication in such a broad way. And so if I told myself 10 years ago, 20 years ago, I would be doing this, you know, speaking publicly, you know, leading a company, I would not have believed it because I was so introverted. And I think that's probably true of you. You have 150,000 subscribers who show up to meet up events. And I think, you know, that's not our natural inclination. But I also think that you and I have one thing in common, and I hope that

our listeners will know this, which is we also are people who, if when the occasion comes, we will rise to the occasion because that's what needs to get done. And that's what a great PM does. And I think sometimes we forget, you know, it's easy to kind of say, well, I'm fixed. Like, I'm an introvert. I can't do this. And I said, yeah, I was not born knowing how to write specs or doing customer interviews. I was not born knowing how to do strategy. Anything can be learned if you treat as a skill. But if you treat it as a natural inclination, if you say, I am just this person, you know, our height is fixed. That is very difficult to change. But our ability to learn something like speaking up, convening people leading from the front is a skill that can be learned. If we treat it that way,

then it's no longer, well, I am at height or I am, you know, I'm fixed here. Instead, we treat it as something that's learnable where we can grow into it. I love that. It touches on a recurring theme on this podcast that comes up a lot with guest is the power of being proactive and having high agency and not just defaulting to here's the way things are and here's who I am and there's not going to be much I can do about it. That just leading into that and understanding that you can use your strengths, whatever they are, even if they're not necessarily like innately extroverted, you can accomplish a lot of the same kinds of stuff that someone that's more natural at it can. You know, someone is always going to be smarter than you. Someone is always going to be and have more

experience. Someone in the room probably knows more than you. But at the same time, if you say, you know what, that's okay. Someone is going to be more extroverted as well. But the question for you is what is the best version of yourself that you bring to your team, to your work, to your product, to your customers? And what are the things that you must do? And if that thing is, if I told you the success or failure of your product is you being willing to stand in front of 10,000 people and talk about it, you would go do it because you would, you would, you, you would, you want your product to succeed. You want your customers to be served. You want to fight for the resources that you need. You want to get the word out. But I think sometimes we can give ourselves a free pass.

So my friend Carolizes Zaki, she's a career coach. She says, you know, this is unintentional, ridiculous strategies, is we give ourselves a free path. We say, well, I'm an introvert, so therefore I can't. But in sand say, this is what's absolutely necessary. How do I rise to that occasion? You don't, you know, in the back of your head, you don't go. I'm just going to show up to this meeting and I'll say anything. But that's a, that's a ridiculous. strategy. But how often do we do that because we give ourselves a free pass? And so one of the things I encourage each of us to do is, as you said, high agency, like take control and say, what is the distance between here and there and how do I get there? It might be harder for me. It might be a

longer distance. I might have, you know, physical differences in ability. I might not have the same access and privilege. That's okay. I can still get there. And I find that a lot of times you do that thing that feels so scary and it always ends up being great. Like it always works out, you know, It's like, rarely is it the fear that you have that comes true. Usually it's like, oh, cool, that was a great presentation. Everyone loved it. All right. Well, why was I so worried about that?

Yes, absolutely. I wanted to ask you about your experience hiring teams, leading teams, promoting people. I'm curious, what have you found separates PMs that go on to be really successful and have really successful careers versus those who kind of just drift and stagnate and just don't go anywhere? what are you found to be like one or two common habits or behaviors or ways of working of someone that ends up being really successful as a PM versus not? I definitely think the growth mindset is absolutely the most important thing because someone who's constantly growing is going to listen to feedback. Someone who's growing is going to seek out information in areas they're not good at.

You know, I had one PM. He was an analyst. He went to move every PM. And he just, he's like, I don't have a design eye. So I gave him three books. We prep for the design interview. and now he is the head of product for one of the most design-oriented products in the world. But he said, you know what?

I know what I don't know. I'm willing to learn. And one of the things that we need to do is really have that mindset of, I'm not an expert in this. He wasn't even a PM. He was an analyst. And he said, but this is my dream. And, you know, just seeing the people who rise to the amazing careers, 10x careers,

are the ones who have that mindset of growth, who say, I don't want to just work on my strengths. I want to shore of my weaknesses. I want to grow in ways that are asymmetrical. And I see this in the best people that I've worked with. Is they're the ones who are the most hungry and are willing to do whatever it takes to get to where they want to go? And that hunger is just hard, right? It's not something that people can have that ambition. It's not something people can have at every phase in their life, and that's totally okay. It's to say, I'm going to push when I have the ability to push. I'm to take a step back when it's time to step back. But I think a lot of people are like, I'm okay,

I'm happy here. And if that's okay for different seasons of your life, but the most successful PMs are the ones to say when the time is right, I'm going to really push and I'm going to drink it all in and make it as possible to get as far as I possibly can during the season of my life. For people going through that are wanting to push through that and develop, and maybe in this example, what do you find is worth your time? Do you find like courses are a good way to improve?

Is it like mentors, coaches, just doing the work? Do you have a general mental model like, hey, I want to improve it? Say design, I don't know. Do you push people to like one direction versus another to actually get better a lot of these things? I think one of the most powerful things that we can do is actually first, start in a coaching circle. Because getting feedback is incredibly important. If you have an amazing manager and peers that give you feedback, that's amazing. But I think often you don't have that.

If you can find a coaching circle or mentoring circle of other PMs, they will actually help you see your blind spots. Because I think seeing your blind spots helps you to work on them. Second is actually taking that feedback and saying, okay, here are the three things I want to work on. So every year I do a news resolution. And this is not just for PM, but across the board, I write down, here's the things I want to improve in my life and here's what I'm going to do to do them. Like, have you written goal? And the goal isn't checking the box. Like, I'm going to do X. The goal is, I want more of this and here's how I'm going to get it. And every year I publish that, and then I give myself a score for the previous year. And it's really, as you know, if you measure,

you're going to get more of what you measure. Well, how many people are really measuring their careers? How many people are measuring the output of the things that they're learning? And I really encourage PM your career, like you PM your product. You put so much care into writing specs, having goals, having metrics, doing reviews. How is it do you think about your career? Not nearly as much. And so what I encourage PMs to do is your focus group is your peers.

That's where you're getting feedback from. Those are your customers. Your peers are the ones who are giving you. feedback who are telling you things you need to work on to make your product, your career better. The second thing is then what are you going to do about it? What is your roadmap? You know, often we don't have a roadmap for our career. We have amazing red maps, two year red maps, five year road maps, visions, you know, all of those things for our product. And then our blind spot is ourselves. I just tell people like, write out what you want to be

in two years and five years. Write out your pre-mortem for where your career is going to go. And then work your way backwards. Sometimes it's just very easy to drift from, oh, I have this opportunity, should I take it or not. You know, someone called me about X or this company, and not to be intentional, but if you say, hey, you know, somebody called me up and she said, I would like to be CEO by the time I'm your age. So I said, okay, let's work our way backwards. And we did the math, and she's not even a manager today, but she's 35. And I said, to be eligible to be CEO, you need to get on a board. You need to be a GM of a very large product. You know, how fast can you get there? She said, well, I'm probably a year or two away from getting promoted

and getting the opportunity to manage. And like at the pace you're going, you're not going to get there. And so I've been mentoring her and coaching her. And finally, you know, she found a new role. They're giving her banishment responsibility. She got it at a higher level. But she realized that on her path, her roadmap was going to elongate way further than, you know,

when she needed to ship. And say, instead, we worked on a new plan. But I think a lot of PMs are like her, not because she's an incredible PM, but she put so much more care into her product than she really thought about her career. I love all these tactical pieces of advice. I'd love to get even more tactical.

Is there like a framework or template that use for these sorts of exercises, either working backwards or your kind of resolutions? You know, that's actually interesting. One of my first post was actually about my resolutions. It wasn't a template, but maybe this year I'll put together a template. Amazing. But my first post is how to change your life through resolutions or something like that in my substack. So if you go to my substack.

Great. We'll put that on the show notes. You could read about it. But I use that as marking time and actually being able to make progress, just like you do for your product. what are your metrics? What are you measuring? The second thing, I do think that for your career, I should work on a template for this. I actually have like a pre-mortem I wrote when I first joined ancestry, for example, what I hope to accomplish in 10 years here. I had a template for how our product

would evolve over two years and five years that I started with and anchored the company against, and we show that every all hands, for example. And these are the kinds of things that are useful because you're now, you know, and then each of the PMs takes the vision that we put together when I first started with our leadership team and says, here's how my product contributes to us evolving our product to the two-year five-year roadmap. And so it's great to actually have an anchor. And it's the same thing, if you don't have some sort of measurement for your career, that every opportunity comes along, it has to be evaluated on its own. But if you say, my goal is to reach management by X, to have the opportunity to run, you know, to head up a

product by Y to do X, then you can say, does this opportunity take me closer or further away? You actually now have an evaluation criteria. And if you, you have a evaluation criteria. And if you think too often it's by instinct, right? Like you'd have too much instinct on, well, you know, is this the right thing? But it might actually take you off course. And so instead actually focusing on, you know, hey, that's group creep. Let's focus on what's important. The thing that matters most is what matters. Let's focus on that. Basically, it's like a personal vision statement or a vision for your product for yourself. I love that. Yes. You also talked about mentorship circles. What is that? And how do you, how do you create one? Yes. So, you know, I've had, I've had access to coaching

circles or mentoring circles. I've been at a couple lean-in circles. I'm in a couple, so now I'm in a kind of executive circle. And these are really your peers who help you think through problems, but also point out your blind spots. They say, hey, I think you're weak in X. And, you know, one example was in our lead circle, one of the things that was a huge challenge was, you know, there were a few folks who said, hey, want to get promoted. And someone else goes, we'll have you asked your manager. You know, and that's a very simple question, but that really lit up one of the women on the team. She said, you know what? I haven't asked. I was just kind of waiting for him to offer it. And, you know, instead she asked for it. And another woman was offered a position in a different office.

And we said, you should ask for, you know, what are they promising you? Can you get that written? You know, when do you have the opportunity to come back? What are you know? And made her really think through not just saying yes, blindly, but actually very thoughtfully saying if you have the option come back. Would they compensate? Would they cover your travel? Like, you know, what are the things that you need? And she said, you know, I never really thought about that. But I think having a group of people who are kind of brainstorming your career and your challenges with you gives you so much more perspective. And they're not there to tell you the answer. They're there to ask you the hard questions that you probably have forgotten to ask yourself because you're so deep into it. And so I've been a member of four of these circles over the years and they're just incredibly powerful because they give you very different perspectives. is one of the circles was the women VPs at Facebook. It was just great to be able to run.

If something happened, you could run it by them. They were your, they called it the leading ladies. And it was just an opportunity to have people who were in the same situation as you and you could run ideas by them. But they would also say, hey, I hear that you're having a rough day. Let's talk. And that kind of support is something that's really invaluable. And I think we don't use that enough in our industry, honestly.

For someone listening that's like, oh, I want one of those. Do you just create one? Do you find people? now let's start a circle or is there a place they can go to see what's out there? Well, there are some, you know, there are some more organized things like chief, you know, and things like that where you can join a more organized one. But I actually think like, for example, Lenny, you have an incredible community, right? I think your community should create circles amongst themselves, maybe local circles,

you know, in New York and San Francisco and Seattle and Chicago. I think this is a natural place where you find. Make sure, though, that they're your peers because it is really important that people understand at what place you are and differential in level. makes it really difficult to kind of have rich conversations. But having people who are your peers really kind of reflecting on you what you're hearing, you know, the thing writers use kind of these critique circles where they're all writers, they're all, you know, sharing and helping one another.

I think we should have that. And this should be something that's really standard in our industry. I think way more PM should be part of these circles. And it has been a huge unlock in my own career. Awesome. There's actually something in the works in our community. My community Lee Trey is really excited about mastermind groups. and he's looking for someone to help run those things,

so that might actually come together. And I love your advice and help as that comes together. Absolutely. I am here. I'm here to help. If a feature ships, but no one knows about it, did it really ship? Keeping customers and internal teams like sales, support, and marketing in the loop on what's changing across your product is surprisingly hard. First, you have to dig through tickets and pull requests just to see what's been done. Then you have to figure out what's relevant to each person, craft updates, and then share. share them across all of your channels. Multiply this by the number of things that ship every

week, and that's basically a full-time job just to keep everyone updated on what's changing. That's why high-velocity product teams like Moni Carlo, Armory, and Popsicle use MakeLog. MakeLog makes it easy to see what's happening across tools like Gira, Linear, Asana, and GitHub, and then to write bite-sized updates, which you can immediately share with your audience wherever they are, including within your app, on Slack, over email, and even on Twitter. our long, boring, blog-style change log post that slow you down. Just quick and easy updates that keep your users informed and happy. Try MakeLog for free today. Just visit makelog.com slash Lenny to get started. One more question before we get to Facebook Marketplace stuff,

which I'm excited to dig into a bit. If you had to pick one skill for an early stage PM to focus on to help them in their career, and then same question for mid-stage PM, What would you suggest they focus on most? I'd say for both, actually. One of the most important things that I think we lack is communication skills. Because, you know, I don't know if you, the communication is the job. You can't do anything alone. You're not coding the product.

You are not designing the product. You are not doing the research. You're not doing the data analysis. You're not, you know, your job is purely communication. And how good you are at communication is really, really critical. And I think we underestimate that. We think our job is something else. But actually, most PMs, the job is communication. Actually, many jobs. Your job is literally communication. And I think we underestimate how important that is. And so this is, you know, having clear and good written communication skills, but also communication skills around broad communication. Like, can you get up and actually convince a group of people that your strategy is the right one? Can you write a six-pager that seems so obvious that everyone's like, yes, we should do that. Can you communicate? the need for additional resources to get your team what they need. Those are all communication skills. One of the biggest challenges I see is it's actually not just the communication skills, but the

lack of courage to actually communicate. I get emails that say, I don't want to bother you, but, you know, or I'm sorry to waste your time. And I'm thinking, no, don't say that. You know, and I've coached a lot of people on this. I don't, don't say just. Don't, you know, don't devalue yourself before you picture idea. And so I do think that it's not, it's small things, but it's also the big things, being really comfortable in a room. One of the biggest biases we have in our industry is that we have a bias towards people who can speak intelligently about almost anything on the spot. We don't talk about this, by the way, but if you look at the very senior people who rise faster in organizations as senior executives, they have this skill. And I noticed this as I got

further and further my career. I didn't realize how important this was. And then I realized that Anyone who can go into a room and speak about almost anything intelligently without any preparation has a huge advantage in our industry. Is that fair? Absolutely not. There are a lot of people who are quiet and are very thoughtful or need time to process. And it is a huge bias against those people. And it's also a bias against people who, you know, English is not their first language or they're extremely introverted or they have other abilities. I think that I just want to acknowledge that here because if you have that skill, it will be rocket fuel. It will be so powerful for your career. And if you don't, it will hold you back. And so, you know, I don't think it's a fair. I don't think it's fair exactly,

but at the same time, you know, when you go to an executive review, and I've done these product reviews where we have multiple teams, like maybe 10, 15, 20 teams come in. And there's a huge bias to the people who can actually answer the questions on the spot. And a huge bias towards those who could riff with the leaders. You know, and it is. just something that's systemic. Now, I don't know how to solve that problem because the actual work matters way more in the day to day, but you're being judged on the 5%, which is your presentation or your ability to answer questions on the spot. And I think it is something that we need to wrestle with. And I do think it's something which will plague our industry. We might not have the best people

at the helm because we have this bias, but it is real. It is such a good point. I have never thought of it that way, and it's so true. And I'm not great at that. I'm much better. better when I can think about it and come back to someone with an answer. And that is not fair. Such a good point. Your answer about communication being the most important thing to work on, that's exactly my answer to that exact question always. I'm curious if you have any advice for how to get better at communication. What have you found helps people most other than just kind of doing it again and again and again? Well, so I was extremely introverted, as I said, when I was growing up, I grew up in a small town in the south. I was extremely quiet because people would

say go back to where you came from. You know, they would make fun of me and my sister and my family. I mean, we just had a lot of things happen. And again, it was a very different time and I hope things are changing. But, you know, and I just realized if I just stay silent, maybe no one would notice me. If no one noticed me, they won't say anything. And so I just learned that silence was, was my protection. And then I realized when I got to, you know, went to college and I studied engineering. You know, you're doing problem sets. You know, you do labs. And it's very easy. You never have to talk. There's no class participation grade. So it's great.

And then I went into consulting. And I sucked at the client part of client service. I was a pretty good analyst. You know, I understood how to do the analysis. That was pretty good strategy. But I was terrible at the client part. And they would say, you need to hang out with the client. I'm like, why?

I do really good work. And I realized that so much is not just, you know, if a great strategy falls in the forest and no one knew about it, like doesn't even matter. Right. And so I learned that I was not, I was failing at the part that was the most important part of consulting was wasn't just getting to the answer, but it was making sure you could convince people the answer. And I really struggled with that. And so, you know, when I got to business school, 30, 50% of the grade was class participation. I was terrifying because I had never really spoken in class.

I'd never raised my hand. And I actually taught myself how to speak up by actually having tally marks, how many times I spoke. And then I started rating how good the comments were. And it took, it was a practice. Like, I practiced it like a language. And it was a skill. And I think, you know, that is really important for somebody in the workplace today. You know, joint Toastmasters. I've seen a lot of success where people are very uncomfortable, joining Toastmasters and then being forced to do it, having a group of people around you, encouraging you and teaching you. That's really incredible. Another thing is really joining these circles. Having a safe place to speak up, let you try out different

things. And then, you know, you'll get more comfortable in speaking in groups and those give you more kind of confidence for the next conversation. And then I would say this, which is actually try what I did in business school. Like, go to a meeting and try a strategy where you really show up. And the strategy is, I'm going to show up and this is how. And this is the thing I'm going to do differently. And try it out, then get feedback. I remember that we did a two-day product review where a mirathon went through every product that we had. And it was like a couple of doesn't. And at one point, one of the leaders hadn't said anything in two days. I wasn't even sure she'd come and her manager came to me. She's the lead of one of our functional areas. And her manager

came to me and said, how is so-and-so doing? I said, you know, we had two-day opposite. I don't think she said anything. And I went to her and actually spoke to her about this. And I said, you know, you are an incredible leader. Your pulse scores are great. Your team speaks so highly of you, but we were together with everybody and you didn't say a single thing. And she said, oh, you know, you're right. And she goes, I didn't feel like it was my place. And I said, but then every single person from your function feels like it's not their place now because you're their leader. And so when I've said it that way, she started, she said, you know, you're right. And she started working on it. She wanted to be, she wouldn't do it for her, but I think she did it for them.

And to have a motivation, a reason, and then start working on it. And just like any product, like have a roadmap, have measurements, really understand whether you're getting, making progress. such good advice. I imagine part of this is also don't expect every time to go great. Like you have this tally and maybe like 50% of time it'll go great. 50% maybe not so great and that's okay. Right. Yeah.

Well, the other part is if you only speak once, it better be brilliant. But if you're part of the conversation, you're trying different things. You're part of the group. You're part of the discussion. And not every comment then has to be so fraught. But the less you speak, the more people when you do speak, put so much weight in what you're saying. And so in some ways, actually having a conversation, this is like growth tactics, right? If you only pitch once, you have to hit that home run.

But if you're up to bat a lot and you take lots of shots and growth teams take lots of shots, they're like, you know what, for the teams that only take two at bats, they better be doing, they better hit a home run each time. But if we have 20 at bats, you know, our hit rate only has to be, you know, more than 10% to beat the other teams that are doing that have to hit 100%. And so really kind of playing the odds and giving yourself a little bit more space than makes it much less fraud. And I imagine people may feel like they say one dumb thing and their career is over. They're going to be fired. Everyone's going to think they're terrible.

And in your experience, would you agree, it's not actually true? People kind of just like forget it and they would even ever think about something you said that you think is really dumb. Well, I always ask people, think about the last three meetings you had and somebody, I'm sure somebody's kicking themselves or saying something dumb. Do you even remember when it is? I bet you you don't. I think we're in our heads so much more than other people are in our heads. And so instead, really say, you know what, I want to add overall value. Every single thing doesn't have to be perfect.

It has to just come together. And not everything has to be ideal. Not every word has to be, you know, gold wisdom. Instead, actually say, you know what, I want to be part of the conversation and I want to be in this room and present. And I think we overthink the downside risk and we actually underweight the upside risk. you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. You're definitely going to fail if you say nothing. But if you say one thing that's bad, most people don't even notice.

You miss the shot. So what? But you took a lot of shots and you're able to think the ball enough that you're going to help win the game. I have a friend who was promoted to be a senior leader at a big tech company. And he used to be really nervous saying things in big meetings with all the execs because he thought they'd think about it and remember it. And he just thought about it for the next week every time he said some dumb. And then being on the leadership side, he's like, I don't remember anything anyone said, really.

What was I thinking? That they have time to think about my dumb comment? Well, you do two days of product reviews, you know, straight. Right. And it's like, you know, 16 hours. Do you remember any individual comment? Instead, you remember how that team made you feel. Are they moving in the right direction?

Are they scrappy? Are they fighting for their product? Do they understand their customers? What you feel as a leader often is not about the individual comments, but it's about, did they communicate the problem and the solution in such a way that I'm convinced that they should continue and they should get more resources? This is maybe a good time to chat about your book, which is coming out later this year, take back your power, which touches on a lot of these things. Can you just kind of share what this book's about and who might find it most valuable? And then I'll ask you a couple more questions about it.

Yeah, so I started the book actually almost four years ago now at this point. And I wrote it because, you know, I always had an open door policy. And for many years at Facebook, I had an open door policy where anybody could reach out to me. And I would just spend 15 minutes coaching them, mentoring them, whatever they wanted. I think for me, I always needed an ally. There were just times when I felt like I needed to talk to someone who wasn't my manager or wasn't someone who was really close to me. And I felt like I didn't have that.

And I ended up having these amazing coaching circles, but not everyone has that either. And so I said, you know what? If you need a friend, call me. And I did new hair training for many, many years. And every time a new hard training, like call me. It could be tomorrow. it could be five years from now. And by the way, there were people years later that I'm using your open door policy you mentioned years ago. And sometimes people are just in a tough situation.

You know, I got a lot of, am I crazy, but this happened. You know, my manager said this. What should I do? Or other people saying, I'm really not resonating with a product or, you know, something like that. I realized something, though, is that a lot of people were asking me questions that I realized I was repeating the answer, which was, hey, you know, people said, I feel really stuck. They said, want to get promoted. Have you asked? Are you surprised at how many people said no? Or how many people said yes, and when I asked them how they asked, they didn't really ask. And, you know, I realized that some of these lessons were really repeatable. And my manager, Boz, said, you know, write down what you repeat. And so I started compiling these things. And I pulled together the stories of over a couple dozen women also

and their lessons of how they succeeded in the workplace. And these were not all up into the right, you know, shiny, happy stories because there were a lot of people who faced a lot of circumstances. And the question about how they got there was that these are the ones who had the resilience to overcome and the lessons that they learned along the way. And so I wanted to share those stories and the lessons I learned as well. And so this book kind of weaves that together. But I would be able to hand people this book and say, you know what, what you don't need is necessarily me asking you the hard questions. You should just read this. Because I, you know, I've coached over a thousand people, but I only have so much time. I talked to someone last night.

because my kids and husband were in bed and someone texted me and I said, sure, happy to do it. She reached out to me via LinkedIn. And it was a simple thing, but I hope, you know, then I can increase the reach. The reach of a thousand people is incredible, but it's never going to reach 10,000, 100,000 people. I just don't have that kind of time or ability. And so really, you know, in tech, it's all about scalability, right?

You can write a beautiful email and one person reads it, but you can post a post and, you know, on your, on your substack and 150,000 people read it. It could go viral and even like millions of people could read it. And that's the point is scalability. And so I wrote this book with all those lessons because I just think, you know, in some ways they're really obvious and in some ways it's really important to remind ourselves. You know, it's like eating right and taking care of your health. People say, you should exercise and eat right. It's not like we don't know that. So they should sell no books about that. But instead, this is a reminder that these are the things we need to do. And here's a guide.

So it's 10 new rules for women at work. And it's just really focused on specific rules, what other women have done to implement those rules and how it really changed their career. When is it coming out and where can folks, can people pre-order it yet or no? Yes, so it's pre-orderable on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and all the big sites. Also, we can send you a link for your show notes. And then also, you know, it comes out the beginning of August, August 9th, and so it's coming right up. Awesome. We'll revisit it when it launches. is there like a tactical tip you can share from the book for folks listening to this right now

to give them a little peek at the kind of things they'll find in there? So I touched on this a little bit earlier is the unintentional ridiculous strategies. So my friend Carolizesaki teaches this and don't go into a meeting thinking, I'm just going to sit in the back and not participate. I'm just going to join the Zoom and not comment at all. It's, I'm going to pretend I'm not even here. Nobody goes into a meeting doing that. But how many times do you leave a meeting haven't done just that?

And so instead, really choosing intentionally for everything you do, what is the output you want? In this meeting, I want to achieve X, sending like five seconds before we walk into a meeting and saying, this is what I want to achieve, and here's how I'm going to do it. And just thinking about that, that's just something that's so important. And I think that we don't do that enough. And so instead, like, when you show up, really show up. Or don't go. Don't be a free rider.

And I think that's something which, you know, how many Zoom meetings do you kind of drift off in, you're kind of there, but you're not there. How many times do you go to a meeting, but you're kind of, you're mentally checked out. Instead, like, when you go, be 110% of yourself, like, really show up and be there. And I think that's one of the things that I see, which is, if you're going to do anything, make sure that it's worth your time. And if you don't, it's totally okay to say no. I like the option of not going. There's so many meetings people have, and it's, like, important to just recognize. You don't have to go to every meeting. It's fine. You got other work to do. Absolutely. Like, pick the things.

that you really care about. And it is absolutely okay to say no. Awesome. I definitely want to get to Facebook marketplace questions, but one last question while we're on this topic is Women in Product, which is an organization that I believe you co-founded and you're on the board and you run. And it's such an awesome organization that I look for every opportunity to collaborate with. We've been doing partnerships on meetups and be giving away subscriptions. And so I'd love to just get your, just like an overview what this organization is, what kind of work it does, and then just how folks can get involved if they're not already involved.

Women in product was born when we, when I was at Facebook, we actually had less than 10% women product managers. But I started out my career at PayPal. The head of product was a woman. The head of product at eBay was a woman. A lot of the directors at one point, Amy Clement, who was the VP of product at PayPal, 100% of her direct staff who are product managers.

All the product directors were women around her table. And when I went to Facebook, I was really confused, like what happened to all the women? And in fact, I'm going to actually entered through product marketing. And some of the most successful PMs at the company, Naomi and Fiji, also came in through product marketing. We could not be product managers at a company where eventually we not only ran our own product teams, but also engineering. And we were just wondering what happened. And so one of the things that we did was because we wanted to recruit more women product managers and we wanted to network with more women product managers, we started doing these dinners.

And we hosted these dinners for years. Our first dinner was years before we started women in product in 2016. The dinners started maybe in 2012. And for years, we would host quarterly dinners. We'd invite everyone we knew. We'd invite other people to invite other people. And we would just get together and talk and connect and get to know each other. And so many friendships were born in that.

And then one night we were thinking, you were talking about who was going to Grace Hopper. And we said, why don't we have a PM conference of our own? And suddenly a group of strangers at a dinner said, we're going to start our own conference. I don't know. It's pretty crazy to do that. But, you know, we got a group together and a lot of those women are still on the board. when we started a conference. And I remember when we were putting together this conference, you know, and a lot of the event

planners that were helping us from Facebook were like, you shouldn't do a conference. You're not going to have anyone who wants to come. Maybe you should just do like an evening event or something. But at that point, we had kind of announced it so we were committed. And so when we opened up registration, almost 4,000 people applied for 300 slots. And we thought. And I remember Ami Bora saying, that's what product market fit looks like, you know? And what do we do now?

And so one of the things that we needed to do was, like, to first put on a conference, we had no idea how to do it. We had no organization. We had nothing. And I just remember thinking, this is amazing. There's so much hunger for this. So we started a Facebook group. And, you know, we just saw women just started the community to form around it. We didn't do that much, but people would find each other jobs.

They would coach each other for interviews and they would help each other and network. And that's what's really incredible about these communities is they're organic, right? Very little that we did. And we continue to put on events. Now we have chapters in two dozen cities, which you talked about partnering with. And these are women who volunteer really put together a community in their local area to support each other. And it's just been an incredible journey. We started it because we wanted women to be able to connect and build community.

But the ultimate goal is to have more women in product management. Because what happens was the reason that companies like Facebook and a lot of other tech companies didn't have a lot of women and that we lost so many women was that a decision was made 2004 to require a, computer science degree to become a product manager. And only 20% of computer science degrees are actually over by women in America. And so a lot of women, including myself and a lot of the people I mentioned, couldn't get the next job because we didn't have a computer science degree. And so we went into other organizations and other roles. And so we swept out a generation of women who were already kind of pretty senior unless they were rising in their own organization. And then with the next generation of women, product managers didn't start. So we went from a field that was almost 50-50 to one that

was like drastically different. And now we're climbing our way back. And, you know, I started the community because of that. And I think that part of that work is to continue to bring more diverse voices to the table that we went from diversity, a lack of diversity and progress shouldn't be taken for granted. And so, you know, we're making a way back. We have, you know, worked with companies to drop the computer science requirement. We have encouraged companies to drop the technical interview. We encourage companies to create rotational programs or APM programs that people who would very, very different backgrounds can enter. But you think about where product managers go, they eventually become the investors and founders. They become advisors. They become board members. And so if your pipeline

for one group of people is much worse, you're just never going to equalize what products are built into the world because we don't have the diversity starting at the very beginning. And so that's the work that we've been working on over the last now six years has been. And we have a lot of work ahead of us. I had no idea that that requirement was such a big component of the lack of diversity in product. Wow. What can companies do if they're finding it tough to have a diverse PM team? Like I imagine step one has dropped that requirement. Don't expect your PMs to be technical. Is there something else that you'd recommend? We actually went through this at Facebook, so I was leading the recruiting, and I was working with the recruiting team. So I was the PM advisor

for the recruiting efforts. And first dropping the computer science or technical degree and seeking out people from a broad background because I've seen some of the most successful PMs do not have a technical background or any type of background like that, but could be incredible leaders. Second is not having a technical interview and not requiring, not having engineers ask about that. The third thing, though, was actually the way the interviews were conducted. The way that bias works is that one of the things we did we used to have is something called a futurist interview. And we found out that the futurist interview was actually not correlated with success as a PM at Facebook. But the futurist interview favors those who are willing to riff on the future. However, people who are minorities and women tended to be more realistic because they tended to be hired based on the realism of their plans and how concrete they were.

And again, it was not that the company was intentionally doing anything. It was just the way that we realized it wasn't even correlated with success. And so all we do is to drop that enemy. The other thing I think companies need to do is especially if you have low representation from women and minorities is to do one thing I did personally was I volunteered to interview every single woman PM who came through the pipeline for years because there were only four of us. So I was on every first person interview loop that they needed somebody. And it was because I read that, this was from Google, I believe it was from Rissa at Google or something like that. It said something like if if a woman is on the interview

panel, the candidate, the woman candidate is much more likely to accept the offer if they got one. And so I said, here's the thing. Like people drop out after the. the first round interview if they feel like these people are not for me. And so I made it a point to interview every single first candidate, the first round candidate that I could. And it was something I did behind the scenes. But as we brought on more women, a lot of them like, hey, I bet you in the first round interview. And I realized it didn't mean something to some people, you know. And so I do think there's a lot of these studies that have shown how to build more diverse workplaces. But sometimes we forget, you know, just like we have signals on our products, we should look at signals in our interview process, too.

To build a great product team, it's the same way you build a great product. And it's really looking at the signs. Where are you failing? Who are the people who are turning away? You don't look at who made it through. You look at who dropped out. Why is there a blocker for this person? Do we lack product market fit with this group?

And if we treat it that way, I think we would look at the problems very differently. Such good advice. Knowing how hard it is to do interviews and how time consuming that is, That is an incredible commitment that you made to be in every first set of interviews with every female PM. And that was at Meta, right, where they're probably interviewing hundreds of people a day. This was earlier on, but yes, it was when the only had a few hundred p.m. So it was a little bit easier. Today, it's like, you know, there's many more people.

Wow. Okay. I want to make sure we chat about Facebook Marketplace, which I keep talking about, that we will. And so just to kind of set this up, you basically help. come up with the idea for Facebook Marketplace, build the team, build the product, launch it. Now it's got over a billion monthly active users, as far as I know. Probably a lot more.

I think that was the last public number. You basically smoked Craigslist, which nobody has done before. And like I said, I've used it many times. It's amazing. It just works. It's like what you want Craigslist to be. And so just a couple questions here. One is, I imagine it was really hard to incubate and protect this really big bet

that early on was not showing any promise and everyone's like, no way this is going to work. We're not like an e-commerce company or social network. How did you keep it from being deprioritized and resources being pulled away in the early days before it show promise? Because there's a lot of PMs that are trying to do that for their own project, I imagine. So one of the things that was really important early on was that we didn't go full bore. We actually had a small team, but the leaders actually worked on other products. And I think that helped a great deal.

Because you don't put a giant target on something. When you incubate something, you want to start small, get product market fit, then double down and so on. And I think sometimes some companies are like, we're going to have 100 people at X. They're like, no, no, no, don't do that. Because when it fails, it's like such, it's so painful. Instead, actually start with two people, five people. I kind of get there. You know, a startup doesn't start with 100 people and $100 million with the funding.

It's the scrappiness. It's the seeking product market fit that makes it successful. And it is absolutely true in a company as well. I think sometimes you have the luxury of too much resources is actually a current. purse because it also becomes a target. And so instead, the way we did it was with small teams, testing out different things. I think the other thing was really the user research was incredible on this product. We would go around and say, we need to build marketplace. Here's what we're going to do. And so many people are like, why would you buy anything on Facebook? And what we realized

is there were two groups of people. People who bought stuff on Facebook, people who never could see anybody doing it. And I realized the difference does is because I'm a mom and I was part of all these mom groups. And these mob groups were people buying and selling things in the local community. So mom sale groups, you know, I bought a ton of things. I sold our stroller, our crib. Like we, before the open marketplace, these kind of secret mom groups would crop up and people would just trade, trade products with each other. And I think that that was the real power, which was, you know, the community built the product first, got to product market fit, and then we came in. And our question was, how do we take these local communities that were closed? And they were very close to outsiders,

example. So you couldn't get distribution. So yes, if it was a mom group, you could sell, you know, a crib or a stroller, but you couldn't sell, for example, a car because the probability another mom needed the exact car you had at that moment was very, you know, so we needed liquidity across a broader range of groups. And so what we were solving was we actually had plenty of supply, but the demand was very fragmented. And so we needed to think about actually how to drive demand liquidity. And that was a lot of the work we did in the early days. It wasn't a success in the beginning. It was a long road. And part of it was that we were just not, they were not a commerce company and that made sense, but it was, there was a lot of organic behavior, but how do you really harness it?

How do you actually pull it together? And there was also, frankly, I mean, like with every marketplace, you go through periods where there's fraud, where there's, you know, things that might be inauthentic, where there's a lot of issues and you need to make sure you put all this into place. And so we had to do a ton of the groundwork as well, something that the company had not been used to before. But as we built, it was really the stories of the people whose lives were changed. They really changed people's minds. People building businesses on marketplace, people sharing stories of how, you know, there was a woman in Claire's Greenhouse. She built a business. She's deaf. She works in the government in D.C. And she built a community around plants.

And she sells cuttings of her plants and teaches people to bring plants into their lives. And she became a wild success locally and sold thousands and thousands of plants. And her son is her translator. And it's just so incredible to hear these stories. And we would amplify those stories and say, you know what, these are the people were serving. And so, you know, internally it was really about communication, as I said earlier, how incredibly important that is. externally, it was really about drawing people in, having them come in and actually explore the product. And we sold our car on Marketplace within 24 hours. Literally, my husband listed it. He got so many contacts. He's like, how do I turn this off? He met two people, second person picked it up, we sold our minivan. And it was magical. And what was really

incredible is, you know, he had gotten a quote from CarMax or something like that, and we sold it for way more. And it was a very smooth transaction. He's like, this thing really works. So I was thinking, I work on this. Of course I work. But I think it is that kind of thing where people then, the word of mouth spread, hey, if you want to sell a car, you should go here. Because there's trust, too. People are like, well, I don't want to meet a stranger. But, you know, he has his profile picture was just him and our daughter. They were going to meet near our house. And it was really that trust element that was really different than other marketplaces too. It's not anonymous. It is like human beings. But people are coming and look at furniture at your house. They're test driving your car in

your car. And so, you know, that trust that Facebook offers, which is how long you've been on the site, whether you've changed your profile pictures eight times, whether your pictures are your kids, what you've talked about, all those things, the things you have in common. Friends, I've bought things from mutual friends, it turns out. And that level of trust was something that was the killer piece of the product that most people didn't understand. It was real identity, authentic people, and real connection. I love so much of this advice. Keep it small. Don't create a target on your back. Share stories of success internally because just like people always, I don't know, don't take one-off anecdotes that seriously as evidence, but they're so

powerful in getting people to just like buy into an idea early on. And so that makes a lot of sense. with the success of it, you mentioned a lot of things I was going to ask you just like, what was core to the success of this thing? And trust you talked about. Also imagine just like the fire hose of traffic that Facebook brings and being in the Facebook app. But I imagine that also has downside of like people are fighting for that real estate and trying to be like, what the hell is marketplace here versus my product. So that's probably a blessing Anna curse. Is that what you found? Yeah, I mean, that's, so here's the thing. The Facebook app is about relevance, right? And so you want to show marketplace the people who want it and you want to show business. And you want to show big. for the people who come for the videos and games of people who want to play games. And it was constantly like, how do you balance all the things? And so our team was just really incredible as saying, you know, we want the audience of the people who come here for this. Like, we don't want to take up space for no reason.

And so the team was very focused on that, making sure the audience was targeted and that the people who longed it got access to it all the time. But, yeah, I mean, it was, in some ways it was a blessing and a curse. But, you know, what made, what made marketplace successful was that it was part of Facebook. that the real identity, the history you had with the company, the relationships you have, you know, a separate, a different marketplace would be very difficult to build separate from all of the assets of what Facebook is, which is the history of 10 years that you've spent on the site, you know, doing other things, and your access to your messaging history, and your access

to your friend graphs, who you have in common. And so those types of things are absolutely what made you successful, which is also why it's not a separate app. People always ask, well, why is marketplace not a separate app? And that's why. Why? Because it's so embedded in the fabric of the community that you actually live in, that you're already in those community groups. You already know these people. And so it's really a very different take on the marketplace. What an incredible product. I imagine it's in the Hall of Fame of Most impactful products in the world. Like a billion people are using it. Like how many products have gotten to that scale? It's unbelievable. It's just, yeah, it was an incredible, incredible team and incredible experience to really build something that touched so many people.

lives. Like people made a living on the platform. People supplemented their incomes and were able to really build businesses. And that was what we were really excited about was that, you know, that people could get financial independence at a time when, you know, when things are tough, you can actually like build something. And it became a platform for a lot of people to really build their business all around the world. And, you know, I think it's in over 100 countries. Wait, is it more successful than eBay right now? I just realized that you worked at eBay and you basically disrupted eBay. Well, it's different because a lot of his local community, so it's a lot of local businesses,

local people trading. And the other part, I mean, I would say an absolute number is sure, but it's because there's access to the Facebook, like the Facebook community. But more than that, though, is that it was less about the absolute dollars. It was really about, are you actually, because a lot of the people, by the way, were very mission driven on the team, like being able to sell products that you no longer needed or no longer reuse and not create more greenhouse gases by, you know, getting it from the store, making things brand new. But instead of actually upcycling, recycling, recycling, reusing was part

of the ethos of the team. And when we talk about success, like, how do you define success? We define success. It was like how many people were getting value out of this. Not necessarily GMV, not exactly. I don't know what the numbers are today. I left almost 18 months ago. But, but I think that the most important thing, our North Star was not necessarily just dollars. It was really, are we helping the world? Are we connecting people? And the mantra of the team was connecting people through commerce. I love it. I love the product. Okay, final question, where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, learn more, and how can listeners be useful to you? I have a substaff, Deblu. That substaffed. I also end on Twitter and Deblu underscore as well as

on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn as well. I do post there and I'm on Instagram. I can send links for your show notes for all of those things. I would love to see is, you know, I would love to see your listeners talk more about their experiences to share more about their experiences. Because I think we learn warm when we have conversations and we're open. And I know we do that in smaller communities, but I do wish more people share it a little bit about their product journey and some of the challenges that they have because it's through those stories that we can learn ourselves. And I learned so much from people. I follow, like, for example, Will Lawrence. And he said, Dan Bunch, and one of her favorite newsletters. But he's the thing.

He was an RPM on my team, you know, a few years ago. But he's willing to, like, put himself out there and learn in public. And I love that about, you know, people like that. And I hope more people are willing to do that. Would you encourage people to tag you in their sharing if they post something on, say, LinkedIn or Twitter? Absolutely. I read what people tag me on. I absolutely am on those platforms.

And I want to learn more about your experiences, too. Awesome. Deb, this was so much fun. I learned a ton. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'spodcast.com. See you in the next episode.