Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're early growth PM at Facebook. You're a head of growth at Instagram. You're a VP of product at Instacart. You're now director of product management at YouTube. And I've heard that you've had a lot of impact on a lot of different cultures. I found this framework travels with me. It's got like these five components to it. Vision, skills, incentives, resources, action plan.

Starting point is 00:00:18 And you need all of those to have change. And then within those buckets, you've got to figure out what are the right levers that you need to pull. What are the things that are missing? You're really big on something you call understand work. What I call the anti-pattern of what we want to do. Someone says, hey, you know what, this would be great to build. Then you go pull data to go justify why that would be great to build. Call that, identify, justify, execute.

Starting point is 00:00:39 First, you have to really understand from first principles. What is actually going on? So understand identify execute. You wrote this legendary blog post called How to Choose Where to Work and What to Work on. There's impact that you're really trying to drive. And the impact is only achievable by looking at a set of variables related to the environment, the set of variables related to your skills. Today's guest is Bengali Kaaba.

Starting point is 00:01:04 Bengali was an early growth PM at Facebook where he was responsible for how people make friends on Facebook. He was head of growth at Instagram, where he helped scale a platform to over 1 billion users. He was also VP of product at Instacart. He's also worked with tons of amazing startups as a growth advisor, including Twitter. He's now director of product management at YouTube, where, from what I hear, he's already made a huge dent. This conversation went long because there was so much gold to be extracted from Bengali. his head and I could not stop myself from learning everything I could in our time together. This episode is for anyone looking to level up their product and growth chops or also just

Starting point is 00:01:40 do better in your career. We dig into his framework for how to choose where to work and what to work on, the importance of spending time on something he calls understand work, his adjacent user theory and how it can help you drive growth, a bunch of advice for coaching product managers and managers of managers, tons of lessons and stories from his time at Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously.

Starting point is 00:02:12 With that, I bring you Bengali Kaaba. Bengali, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. So many previous guests have recommended that I get you on this podcast, which I already knew. Funny story, when I first launched this podcast, I asked you to be honest. it, you're like, sure. And I included you on my launch poster of all the guests that were going to be on the podcast. And then you decided to take on very hard work and jobs that kept you from having time. And so I'm really excited that we're finally doing this.

Starting point is 00:02:47 I'm glad we're finally making a reality. Sorry about that, Lenny. No sweat. You actually mentioned to me that somebody came up to you in Zurich and was like, I'm excited for you on Lenny's podcast. Yeah, it was crazy. I was like, you know, visiting a team that I managed there, about to get back on a plane to go back to SF. and just standing there, you know, doing some work, and riding my business, and I get on the plane, I'm talking to a colleague, and someone comes up to me, I don't think I've ever seen them before and said, hey, sorry to interrupt you.

Starting point is 00:03:13 I am so excited for your podcast with Lenny. Like, I can't wait for it. And then just walks away. And I was like, what is going on right now? Lenny is a big deal. I don't even know how this person knows me. It's like, and that's how I knew Lenny that I had to reschedule with you because I was like, if people are coming up to me

Starting point is 00:03:30 and telling me that they're excited, I was like there is a lot of anticipation and Lenny, like the power of your reach now is like legit. That is hilarious. That's like a new strategy for me to get people on the podcast, just say they're going to be on the podcast and then the pressure will start. Oh yeah. I mean, totally.

Starting point is 00:03:45 Okay. So there's two broad topics that I want to spend our time on today. I want to talk about career advice and growth advice. And they're both essentially growth oriented one's career growth. When is product growth? How does that sound? Sounds perfect. This episode is brought to you by Wizard.

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Starting point is 00:06:38 that a few people have mentioned to me was really impactful in their career. And just to remind people of your career path, which they'll hear in the intro, but just to give people a reason to listen to your advice on career. You were early growth PM at Facebook. You were head of growth at Instagram, your VP of product at Instacart. you worked with a ton of amazing startups as an advisor, including Twitter. You're now director of product management at YouTube. This is a career that many people would dream of having.

Starting point is 00:07:05 So it's just spent a little time on this topic of how to choose where to work and what to work on. And I know you kind of have this framework in this post. And maybe that's a good way to start of just kind of how you broadly think about where to work and what to work on. Yeah, that blog post that you're referring to actually came out of a personal struggle that I had. when I was at Facebook and trying to decide what my next move should be, I felt like I was kind of stuck. I felt like I was working harder, but not getting, seeing incremental kind of benefit to the work that I was doing. And I knew that I needed to change, but emotionally I understood that, but I couldn't really have an objective way of thinking about it. And so I really pushed myself to figure out what is actually going on with my situation.

Starting point is 00:07:49 and how do I create a way that I can rely on objectively to understand what's actually going on? And so I looked at that situation and I wrote that post and it's, you know, the framework is really that there's an impact that you're really trying to drive. And that is the thing that is the most important. And the impact is only achievable by looking at two sets of kind of variables, a set of variables related to the environment, a set of variables related to your skills. And really breaking down each and understanding, what's happening in the environment bit by bit and what's happening with your skills and where you

Starting point is 00:08:25 hindered structurally within the environment, where your skills kind of lacking, and what do you have control over, and using that whole kind of output, that framework to decide what makes the most sense. Why is impact the key output of this equation? I think for a lot of people, that isn't necessarily the intuitive variable that they think is important to focus on. Why is that so important in your experience? Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, I didn't really know how to think about what the right thing to optimize for was initially. And I realized that it's not compensation.

Starting point is 00:09:02 Compensation is a reflection of the input, the impact that you're having. And so, and you're leveling, like how lupsia you are, how much scope you have, is, you know, a derivative of how much impact you're driving. The more impact you're driving at your company, more people feel like. like you can operate independently, you can drive real results, the more that scope they'll give you. So really, impact became the thing to optimize for. It is the import and compensation becomes an output based on it. I think this is a really important point that is easy to miss.

Starting point is 00:09:35 And this is what I always tell people when they're looking for ways to get promoted and do well. And companies just find ways to have more impact. Can you maybe make it even more concrete? Like, what does impact mean to you when you talk about impact? Yeah. I mean, so impact can be a lot of things. But I think for a product manager, for example, it's really one helping to get, drive extreme clarity about where there is, where the problems with the product, where there's opportunities, and what is the right focus and prioritization. Right.

Starting point is 00:10:04 Like that is actually a form of impact. Just creating the clarity that people need to understand and believe in the investment. The reason why I name this, and it feels a little counterintuitive, is that the more senior you get, the more there are questions of are we even investing in the right? place. Is this area, is this team, is this org the right investment? So being able to even create the clarity that there is opportunity, it is the right thing to do, it is strategically and structurally important, is a form of impact. And then actually delivering on that impact, showing that you can make progress quickly, that you can deliver fast lane wins, as Casey Wenders would say, or medium and slowly wins. And then actually showing that you can do this again and

Starting point is 00:10:46 again, is how you actually validate the impact that you can see where the opportunity is and what's going on. Awesome. Okay. So this equation is impact equals environment type skills. Can you talk a bit about how to work on these two elements? So the environment was the one to me that I think is most people overlooked and I overlooked when I was first thinking about this. Environment in this case, I think I kind of discreetly named a few things. One is your manager. Then there's the resources. So, you know, What kind of team do you have? Is your team staffed appropriately? Do you have the right P&L or whatever budget to get the things done that you need?

Starting point is 00:11:26 Then there's a scope. Like what is in your remit versus not in your remit? Because if you don't have enough scope, then you can't actually focus on the things that are most important. The team itself, you know, the skills of relative skills of the team, your compensation in some ways is part of the environment. Because if you're not compensated failure, you don't believe you are, then it's hard to feel like the work that you're doing is meaningful. And then there is the last part is the company culture. So to what extent is the culture a place where you feel supported, included, you feel like you can do your best work?

Starting point is 00:11:56 And so you're really looking at each one of these variables. And I look at this every year. And I say, how is my manager doing? How do I think about my manager? How do I think about the resources I have, the scope, the team, the conversation, the company culture? And to what extent? And I score them, right?

Starting point is 00:12:12 I score them as a one means it's kind of new. A two means like I'm greatly, greatly benefiting from this situation. And like something even closer to zero is not in a good place. So I assign a score in quarter point increments. 0.25, 0.751, up to 2. Every year, and I really ask myself, you know, what is the state of each one of these? And to what extent do I believe that they can and will change?

Starting point is 00:12:39 Wow. I love this. Okay, so there's this formula. Impact equals environment time skills. within environment, there's these five variables, and they add up to 10 if they give you two points. That's so cool. Okay, so the five, just to be clear, your manager, the resources you have is team, teams number three? Compensation and then the culture of the team. And then you scope as well.

Starting point is 00:13:03 And then scope, okay, got it. Oh, there's six. Okay, got it. It's up to 12. And, okay, so the idea here is you score each of these of how you're feeling, how the environment is contributing to the impact that you're delivering. And if one of these is not a great score, that's an opportunity to improve your impact, which will improve your career. That's right. And you have to really be honest. I think part of what makes this framework so

Starting point is 00:13:30 powerful for me, at least, is that it helps you to be honest around what are the things that are limiting your ability to have impact and for your skills to really land. And to what extent do you believe that you can help to change or try to influence the change in the environment? Because, you know, no one wants to be in a place where there's a bad culture and a culture is a bad fit for you. But if you're not really thinking about it objectively and naming that, or maybe it's the culture of the team

Starting point is 00:13:59 that is not the right place for you. So it really forces you to evaluate what's going out around you that's limiting your impact. Is there an example from your career you could share one of these was not where he needed to be in either help change it or realize, you had to get out of there? When I was actually at Facebook,

Starting point is 00:14:16 I was running the team that does all the people recommendations. And it was a great team. I actually had a massive, massive team. I had 30 engineers that was working with 15 machine learning engineers and 15 front and backing engineers. And so great team, incredible team, a lot of resources, a ton of scope.

Starting point is 00:14:37 In some ways, it was too much scope. And to me, that was problematic because I really needed to build out, I felt like, multiple teams to support the work that we were doing or to break it up because it was, I mean, the pace, the velocity you can imagine at Facebook was incredible. And I felt like between all of the work that we needed to do, the amount of engineering capacity that we had and the amount that was on the table, I felt like I wasn't resourced in a way where I felt like I could actually deliver on all of the things that were necessary. without burning myself out. And I felt like I was burning myself out and I couldn't really see the forest from the trees because there was so much to do. And so that was a situation that I didn't really understand how to navigate at that point in my career. And there were like two or three manager changes concurrently. Right. And so I didn't have a manager to lean on that I felt like I had a

Starting point is 00:15:32 relationship with to help me to navigate that space. And I felt like scope was actually too much for what needed to be done. And so I needed to find a better kind of fit for me. It was a nothing wrong with the team was like a great learning environment, but it was like the confluence of scope and manager and all happening at once. It just wasn't a good fit for me. A lot of people are in these situations where they'd say they go through this score. They identify, I have way too little scope, way too much scope, kind of like you described. And there's always this question of can I actually make a change or is this just not, am I not in a position, especially I see product managers. There's just always a lot of like, I can't actually change anything. What do you often

Starting point is 00:16:11 tell people around this that just feel like there's nothing I can do here and my manager sucks. What am I going to do? Well, I do think one of the things that I recognize is your manager, not all of these variables is created. And manager is the most important variable in the environment because a great manager who is empathetic, who is aware of what's going on, who is a great communicator, has the ability to move the chest pieces around and to like fix some of these four units. either immediately or in time.

Starting point is 00:16:43 There's no one other than the manager who can really help to increase your scope or to help make sure that the team has the right pieces in place or dial in some of the issues that you might see in culture. And so that's why people say, they don't leave a job or leave a manager because the manager is the one that has a lot of the power

Starting point is 00:17:01 to fix a lot of these variables. And so really the question becomes like, to what extent have you been able to clearly articulate what of the, you know, and dispassionally articulate what are the challenges that you're having you're seeing across some of these variables within manager, help them to tie it back to how it's impacting your work and like see if they can help you to create a plan to like alleviate some of these things. That's super interesting. Then your experience of the manager is kind of the core of a lot of these variables. Is there anything you recommend to people

Starting point is 00:17:34 if their managers is not someone they like? Is it just like try to find a new manager or potentially leave. You're never going to always like your manager, really. That's not the goal isn't to like your manager. Ideally, you respect them and they respect you. You feel like there's things that you can learn from them. Finding a new manager is always an option. But I guess sometimes the real question is actually spending time to try to understand what is your manager optimizing. A lot of times I think there is a big disconnect between an IC focusing on their discrete area and try to optimize for a local maxima versus understanding, okay, my, my manager is thinking about these things, and this is how I fit in, and understanding maybe they

Starting point is 00:18:14 have a gap to understanding why your area is important, or maybe there's stuff that's on your manager's plate that is actually adjacent to your remit, that if you understood that they were optimizing for, you can take that on and you would find more synergies with what they're trying to do. I love that advice. Let's talk about the other side of this equation. We've talked about environment. Let's talk about skills. What do you advise there for folks that want to improve their skills? The skills part is really, really big, and it's something that requires, like, I think, consistent, you know, evolution of your own abilities. And so, you know, I broke it out in that blog poster, kind of communication, your ability to influence your leadership, strategic thinking, and then execution, right? Like, actually getting things done.

Starting point is 00:18:56 The communication of these, again, not all of these are created equal. I think communication is the one that tends to be the most impactful. and you see this in a lot of ways, right? You see this for people who are poor executors, but incredible communicators, and they seem to continue to rise and rise because, like, you know, they can tell a great story,

Starting point is 00:19:14 but when you look under the covers, there's nothing there. There's no substance there, right? So communication for better or for worse is one of the most important things. But building out your skills, I think, is really just kind of a, it's an interesting time to be in product

Starting point is 00:19:27 and to be in tech right now because you have so many more ways to build out your skills than what previously existed. Just like so many, incredible blog posts, right? Like your podcast and blogs, there's so many incredible people who've come on here who tell you things like, you know, how to go to market, how to think about B2B SaaS and metrics. And so like, you know, like listening to you, listening to you,

Starting point is 00:19:47 reading Ben Thompson, understanding his mental models, you know, if you go to look at Elena Werner or whomever, right? Like, there's so many thought leaders who are out there. So I think being a voracious reader is really, really critical because it helps to build your toolkit, right? and you need arrows in your quiver to really understand how to think about the right framework and the right mentor at the right time. One thing I also tell people is people think about mentorship as like, I have a mentor. Lenny is my mentor or John is my mentor. I tell them it's actually better to have a stable of mentors.

Starting point is 00:20:20 You want to have three or four. And ideally, what you do is you meet with each one of them once a month on a different Friday of the month. And so you might have three or four people on every Friday you're meeting with someone different. And the reason why this is so important is because if you, Lenny, or a mentor to me, you're busy one Friday and we only need one's month. Now I don't have anyone to talk to for two months. And you're going through a lot of things. You're not really able to bounce ideas against build skills or learn how to influence others. But if you have three or four mentors, if you have someone different to talk to every week, and if one or two of them cancel, you still have two people to talk to that month.

Starting point is 00:20:57 And you still can continue to grow and to build your thinking. So that's something I always recommend. And then the last thing I actually talk about is when it comes to execution, I think people don't, especially product managers, don't do enough of watching and learning from others. There's an art and a science to product management. And in a lot of ways, I come from a background of education. And in a lot of ways in product management, it's very similar.

Starting point is 00:21:23 Like you want to watch how other people hone their craft, how they deliver, how they lead teams, and kind of steal things from them, like figure out, well, wow, Lenny did this really, really well when he was at Airbnb. It was really incredible. I'm going to take that. I'm going to take how he runs that team or how he landed that framework or how he communicated this message and note it and use it in my own toolkit later on.

Starting point is 00:21:45 And so if you're really a student of product, you can't just be a student of theory. You've got to be a student of practice too, meaning you're going and you're looking. You're like, hey, I'd love to sit in your team meetings. Can I come watch? Or your PM meetings or your leadership meetings. And you're really like doing that for the sake of learning. is really, really incredible. And that's some of the ways I talk about building skills.

Starting point is 00:22:04 Is there an example of that latter lesson that you learned from someone that comes to mind of watching someone and like, oh, I'm going to do that? Earlier in my career, when I first got to Instagram, I wasn't the first peer in but I was one of the first. And the guy who was there before me, the name was Georgia Lee. He actually stood up the growth team and ended up leaving six months right after I joined. but like I watched George was like a really good listener. He had just a really incredible ability to be in a room

Starting point is 00:22:37 and hear what was going on to recast it back and make sure that everyone felt good about where we were and what was being said in the path forward and really crystallizing the action items and also like how people felt about what the next steps were. And walking out of that meeting, it felt like he always had buy-in and clarity. and it was like helpful to build trust.

Starting point is 00:23:03 You can see him almost like winning trust in every like in every moment of that meeting. And that was something that I really kind of admired and learned and kind of sought to emulate later on in my career. That's an awesome example. It comes back to the skill of communication that you talked about, just the power becoming really good at that. And this is such a simple skill you just described as just recapping. Here's what we talked about. Here's what we're going to do. Here's the decisions we made.

Starting point is 00:23:27 Here's action items. It's like not actually difficult. It's just. It's not actually. Yeah, but like what was magical about the way he did it. It's like he would name people and their contributions and show how all of this came together into what is the path forward, you know? And it's like, you know, it's the communication, but it's also the other side.

Starting point is 00:23:44 It's the other coin, the side of communication, which is eliciting to figure out how you communicate back to others. So good. Following up on something else he talked about, which was mentors, anytime someone talks about finding mentors, everyone's always, how do I find a mentor? Well, how do you, what advice do you share with folks of like how to find a mentor to help you say once a week or once a month. What I see people find the most success is they ask, they tell people what they're working on or what challenges they have.

Starting point is 00:24:11 And they say, you know someone who I might be able to learn from who has done this or has good thinking about this recently. So instead of just going to someone saying, hey, can you be a mentor? So coming to me and say, hey, Bengali, I'm actually trying to figure out how do I change the way this team operates because we need to go from this model to that. model. But here's some of the challenges. So do you know someone who's actually really good at changing the way teams work or really good at communicating a new vision that I can talk to? And so that, I think, is really important because what you do is you're creating a seed. And the seed is,

Starting point is 00:24:48 you know, there's like a triad. And you have the person who's looking for the mentor, you have the recommender, the recommender, and then you have the potential mentor. And the recommender is basically saying, here, there's common purpose between the two. you and I can see it and I think this is important. So I want you all to come together. And that triadding in that moment creates a higher affinity, highly likelihood that the person who needs the help and the person who you're connecting them with are going to see mutual benefit for one.

Starting point is 00:25:16 Right. And I think I find that like just doing that and seeding that and being really focused on what the opportunity or the challenge is tends to lead to better connections as opposed to just reaching out and saying, hey, I like your style. we'll be able to. So essentially share with folks you trust. Here's what I'm working on. See if they recommend someone that could help you with that specific skill versus assuming

Starting point is 00:25:37 that there's this person that can help you with this skill. That's right. I love it. Going back to your advice on career, something that you wrote about in your post, plus folks have told me you're really big on. Is this something you call Understand Work? Does that ring a bell? Yes, yes.

Starting point is 00:25:53 Talk about that and why that's important. I certainly cannot take credit for Understand Work. This is a part of an old Facebook framework of Understand, Identify, execute. What I probably will say is I guess I've been the shepherd for Understand Work and other companies. Like I've taken it from my time at Facebook and Relink Institute or rigorously at Instagram, then at Instacard, and when I worked, helped with Twitter now at YouTube. The way I like to talk about it with my teams is that, you know, first I tell a story, actually. And the story is, you know, we've all had a moment where we have worked on something with a team.

Starting point is 00:26:28 team, super excited, finally we launches, and we go out to dinner and we celebrate. And, you know, we're celebrating. Everyone's juiced. You know, it's a great night. You go back to the office the next day and you look at the metrics and the metrics are flat. And everyone's a little bummed, like, why did this happen? Why are the metrics flat? What happened when we work so hard?

Starting point is 00:26:49 And ultimately, when you unpack it, you realize that you built something that you thought was going to be a good idea, but you really didn't understand a lot of key companies. of what people really needed, what pain points really existed, or what were the alternatives and what the real value of those alternatives were in the market, or exactly how the product needed to work, what the flywheel or what the experience needed to be. And so that is what I call the anti-pattern of what we want to do. And I call that identify, justify, execute. When you identify something, someone says, hey, you know what, this would be great to build,

Starting point is 00:27:24 and you identify that. And then you go pull data to go justify why that would be great to build. And then you sink an ungodly amount of time working on it in order to make it work, but it ultimately doesn't succeed. And that is the anti-pattern to what is kind of like the Facebook kind of way of thinking, which is understand, identify, execute. So first you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on. So when we talk about understand work, there's a few ways to think about it.

Starting point is 00:27:50 One is it is an intentional affordance in your execution to do the work that helps you to de-risk a project and to learn what's going on. When I say an intentional affordance, meaning you put it down, like Lenny is going to work on this thing. Lenny as a product manager is going to write a strategy. Janice as a designer is going to design a prototype, like whatever the thing is, and you put it down as actual an item, as opposed to assuming it's going to happen in the background. We don't make an affordance for understand work, then the work doesn't get done, and everyone's just sprinting on execution.

Starting point is 00:28:27 And so it's a planned intentional time to the team's bandwidth to figure out what is it that we need to do to understand what's happening. And so, you know, for example, at Instagram, we did a lot of understand work of what makes for a good connection. Like, how do we want to think about that? How do we want to make sure that we're actually growing a graph, a social graph that makes sense.

Starting point is 00:28:48 And so I might work with data science to do understand work to pull a funnel and look at the different types of connections for different types of users and make it make sense, right? And engineering might do understand work to instrument logging, to make sure that we have the data that we need in order to tell the story. And so you're doing this understand work to basically better understand the gaps in knowledge. What's also really interesting is that Understand work helps you to clarify what is a root cause,

Starting point is 00:29:19 or what is a job to be done, or what is the right use case. And because the team adopts this mentality, it becomes this forcing function for execution. So when someone says, you know what we should build, we should build this, you have a team that's enabled and empowered to say, that's a good idea,

Starting point is 00:29:40 but we don't actually understand these three things. things before we start working on that. So maybe we should do understand work to make sure that that is actually the right idea. Right. And so what you end up getting by embracing this concept is two things. You get parallel paths of work. So every sprint, let's say you do a three-week sprint or a three-month roadmap, you're executing on the things that you have a lot of conviction around,

Starting point is 00:30:06 and you're also doing understand work in parallel. And so at the end of the sprint, you have learnings from what you executed. while that test or that launch worked really well, we should double down. Or while that Tesla launched didn't work, here's how we should pair it. And you have insights from the Understand Work. And you use both of those

Starting point is 00:30:25 to plan the next sprint or roadmap. And so because you have this parallel path, you end up getting this velocity multiplier over time. So the next sprint and the third sprint and the fourth sprint, every subsequent sprint, you've de-risk new ideas. You've gotten more clarity. You do more execution, you do better execution, and you move faster. And the things you ship, you have a higher win rate on the things you ship.

Starting point is 00:30:52 Right. And, you know, you're shipping. I remember when I left Instagram, this is many years ago, but we had like, I had 15 teams and we might have been running 12 to 20 experiments, a quarter a team. And I would say probably 60 to 70% of them were like positive and shippable, which is incredible. I mean, you would think about multiple out of magnitude of that. And it was because we were so effective at derisking and understanding what was going on.

Starting point is 00:31:17 This is really interesting. I imagine many people listening are like, we put time into understanding. We run experiments. We write strategy docs. We do you use a research? What is it that you think people are, where do you think they're missing? Is it that you dedicate people's actual time? Like, you're just doing understand work instead of building a new thing for this next sprint.

Starting point is 00:31:37 You're just going to be telling us what the problem here or opportunity is. Like, how do you actually operationalize this versus just what people probably already do, which is use research, data dives? What I found is a couple things. One is when your team does not fully understand a problem space, the balance of work tends to be higher. Like, I think when I started at YouTube, we were doing 60% execution, 40% understand work. And over time, as we understand more and more, the mix shifts. now my teams are probably doing 80% execution, or 85% 20% to 15% under the same work.

Starting point is 00:32:18 And so it's not just about writing a strategy. It's about saying, okay, if we have these themes of stuff that we want to work on, what do we know with confidence because the data tells us? And what do we need to understand because we don't have the data, we don't have the research, we don't have the insights. And really being honest with yourselves around, like, what are the things that are, low to medium effort, but high likelihood of being impactful because you have the data.

Starting point is 00:32:46 And what are the things that you are interested in perhaps doing? But because you're missing something, you're missing research or feedback from users or data or some insights or strategy, you should actually say, I'm going to go do this before I do something else. You know, an example of this is one of my teams does ships paid virtual goods in the live experience on YouTube. And that's a really, really important and hard problem cities. And when I joined, we didn't really fully understand the whole lot of ecosystem, like how we lived in that live ecosystem, how our products worked, where the biggest opportunity was. So the first and most important piece of Understand work was instead of shipping iterations to the current product,

Starting point is 00:33:31 we needed to actually get the funnel of what was happening, right? Like what's happening with how many people are watching live every day, how many people are clicking through, how many people are seeing our experience, how many people actually buying it. We didn't really fully have the experience mapped out and to understand where were the gaps and where the problem places is in. Like, where should we be focusing?

Starting point is 00:33:52 And so, you know, we had to do that. And that was understand work for multiple people, for multiple teams. We had to do on the engineering side. We needed data science as analysis. We need the PM to go and dog through the experience to figure out what was broken. But all of that was intentional

Starting point is 00:34:05 and an affordance on our roadmaps. What's interesting about this is that this is very counterintuitive to how people would probably approach, hey, we need to speed up execution. We need a speed up growth. We need a ship more, more execute, go faster, do more. And what you're saying is you find the impact comes from actually slow down how much

Starting point is 00:34:26 we're doing and spend more time understanding to execute more intelligently. That's right. Slow down and speed up. Fascinating. Because it's interesting. I have a bunch of questions that emerged out of folks that you've worked with. And many of them are around how you turn a culture around, speed things up, and drive growth in a really meaningful way. And it sounds like this is one of your key strategies is get people to spend more time understanding before diving into a bunch of stuff.

Starting point is 00:34:54 It does sound counterinsurative, but if you actually think about it, what is a better outcome? Is it a better outcome to just ship more faster now, but most of the things aren't unimpactable? Right. Or is it a better outcome to ship fewer things, but really work on making sure that you're shipping them in the best way and de-risking a lot of other things so that a year later, your win rates higher and your velocity's higher. Yeah, I think countertutive is the wrong word. I think it makes sense. I think it's just no one does this. Usually everyone's like, move faster.

Starting point is 00:35:26 We need more ship more experiments. Well, I mean, this is the irony of growth as people think growth is overnight success. And it's not, right? it is a lot of short wins and short-term execution for a longer-term gain and really understanding. You have a lot of short-term turns towards the longer-term outcomes. So that people can take away this lesson. Can you help people understand just when you say understand work? Like, what does that look like generally? Is it just dedicated time to dive into data and answer a bunch of questions you've sent them? Is it, uh,

Starting point is 00:36:04 running experiments to test hypotheses? Like, what does that usually look like when you're here? Let's do 40% understand work. The understand work sometimes comes for me, but most often comes from the teams themselves. And every function can do and should be doing understand work at some point. And so it really depends on what the function is. So for an engineer, it could be looking at the code and saying, okay, we want to improve this.

Starting point is 00:36:31 I need to do understand work to understand. and do we need to refactor this code and how scalable is it? And what do we need to do to make sure that we can execute fast and make sure that we're not going to have a lot of starting steps? That could be understand work. It could be actually instrumenting the data and making sure that we actually have full visibility and what's going on.

Starting point is 00:36:50 Data science, like we work a lot with data science doing activation metrics and like understanding proxy metrics, right? Like that's understand work, because it helps us to figure out what we need to build and where to focus. for product management. Sometimes understand work is figuring out the partnership strategy ahead of actually launching the product because you need to go figure out how the pieces are going to come together.

Starting point is 00:37:16 And so it really just depends on what the function is. But when I say it should be coming from the bottoms up, what I mean is I encourage the team when we plan a sprint or plan a roadmap to ask a question to identify the key themes that they need to work on. and when they ask a question on a key theme, also ask what else do we need to understand to make this happen? And to in that planning session,

Starting point is 00:37:40 to make sure that you're including cross-functional partners. So it's not just product, it's not just product design and data science and Inge. You also include go-to-market. You also include marketing. Because if you're not inclusive, then you don't really understand what the issues are. My MPM brain is afraid of creating too much understand work

Starting point is 00:38:00 and nothing getting done. How do you find that balance? So we're just sitting, we're going to be understanding for hours and days and weeks and months and not shipping much. How do you do you do you want? I tell them you have to ship.

Starting point is 00:38:12 I mean, you always have to ship, right? Like it's, sometimes I give them, sometimes it's helpful, especially early on because it is a, it takes a while for people to get their head around, why this is so critical. I say, you know,

Starting point is 00:38:26 we should choose, sometimes I'll give them guidance. We should choose. choose three to four understand projects that are going to really help us this roadmap and figure out what they are. So choose your top three or four and then let's talk about it and I'll give them guidance. Or I'll say, figure out, there should always be some execution. So initially, you know, you're looking for low effort, high impact things to execute against.

Starting point is 00:38:53 Right. And so build a portfolio of work to do every sprint or every roadmap, some of which should be low effort, high impact, some of which should be medium effort, high impact. And sometimes understand work actually looks like doing a cheap test, doing a task that's going to help us to learn as fast as possible that we think is like a good enough experience that can enforce, right? And so identifying ways to do that. And so it's really about just managing expectations and helping people to be clear that the goal is to ship a product, but you want to ship the things that you have more confidence and understanding versus that.

Starting point is 00:39:28 So I think a big takeaway here is if you want to have more impact, move faster, try to spend a little more time understanding the problems you're going after in the opportunity space. That's right. Right. Like I'll give me a very tact, for example, is when I joined Instagram in January 2016, believe it or not, the onboarding, the sign up flow at Instagram had literally no logging to it. It had logging of how many people started.

Starting point is 00:39:55 and how many people ended. And I joined in January and it was like, we had to write a roadmap. And so the roadmap looked like this. Okay, we know this amount at the top of the funnel and this amount at the bottom of the funnel. And there was eight steps in the funnel, and we don't know what is going on. Right?

Starting point is 00:40:10 So the first bit of understand work was we needed to do, like the instrumentation of like that funnel as fast as possible to get the data to figure out where the drops were happening and what to fix. But because we knew, of what was happening at the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel, we can go and play around with the experience

Starting point is 00:40:31 and see what was broken. So we ran a bunch of tests of stuff that was obviously broken to see what would improve, right? And so it was like a mix. And so what we did was a setup time where we did the beginning of like first couple weeks, add the logging, ship it to code, reevaluate in the middle of the quarter,

Starting point is 00:40:49 look at the full funnel, and then add more things that we can do later on once we got that. But like in order to get that done, that involved Understand Work with growth marketing to figure out what was the schemers for the instrumentation, right? The engineering to actually do that locking, right? Data science are like pulled together funnels and that board. All of that had to come together all at one point at one time. I really like just this concept of calling it Understand Work. I think that alone is a powerful tool is we're going to spend more time on Understand Work. It feels like it gives meaning to

Starting point is 00:41:16 stuff that otherwise people would pressure side. Right. Or it's just like, no, no, let's just ship stuff. Let's just try stuff. Let's just test this step. We'll see what happens. Is there anything else you have seen and often do to help a team you join, move faster and grow bigger? And I've heard that you've had a lot of impact on a lot of different cultures. So I'm curious if there's anything else that is really effective. I've found myself in a bunch of interesting situations where I had to come in and help improve cultures that change cultures around teams. I found this framework. I don't even actually remember where I got it from, but it travels from computer to computer with me.

Starting point is 00:41:54 the team the team. And it's called Managing Complex Change. I actually think I got it from my business school or something. And it's really interesting. It's got like these five components to it. There's vision, skills, incentives, resources, action plan. And you need all of those to have change, right? Like you need to team needs that vision.

Starting point is 00:42:17 They need to have the skills. They need to have the right incentives. Sometimes some teams are incentivized to do some things versus others. you need to have the right resources and right places. And you need to have a clear action plan. And what I love about this framework is if you can visualize it and maybe you can share it with your podcast. Yeah, we'll put it up on the screen on YouTube so folks can see what you're talking about.

Starting point is 00:42:36 Basically, what it does is it shows where if you're missing any one component, you get different outcomes, right? So if you're missing the vision component, you end up in a state of confusion. Or if you're missing the incentives, you end up in a state of resistance because people aren't assigned to do the right work. or if you're missing an action plan, you end up in a state of false starts. So I use this, and I think about this a lot, actually, because when you come in as a leader, as someone who's supposed to influence change, you have to really observe what's happening

Starting point is 00:43:09 and figure out what are the challenges, like anecdotally and what he's observing. And then I figure out where I can plug in and what I can do to make the teams better. And what I tend to find is, you know, moving from the right side to the left side of this, like action plans are easier to institute. Right. So, you know, if I see a team that's like struggling to execute, I wonder, do they have the right type of PRD framework? Or are they communicating well?

Starting point is 00:43:34 Do they have the right type of team meeting structures? But those are like kind of lower hanging fruit. It's a lot harder to change vision and skills. It will come in time. But what I also have done over the course of my career is I've built this like, this deck that comes with me of like different, like how do the different skills that matter. Like what are different skills?

Starting point is 00:43:56 What are different frameworks? How do we think about it to help up level teams fast? Because I find that sometimes you walk in and not everyone is grounded in the same mental models of concepts. You know, one example of this I talk about a lot is, you know, Instagram, I have just this fantastic culture of thinking about how to reship high, high quality products.

Starting point is 00:44:17 And what does product craft mean? And so that is something that, you know, I came, I came to YouTube, and my team's particular, they didn't have a mental model for product craft. So I found myself talking into an echo chamber in some way. So I had to build a deck that, like, showed, okay, here's how I think about product craft. Here's a framework for it. Here's how I think about, like, all of these different things. And so now we have a shared language, shared communication for an repository of skills that we're going to build.

Starting point is 00:44:45 So I'm looking at this image that we'll have up. So in this case, their skills weren't necessarily there, which in this framework leads to anxiety. And so what I'm hearing essentially, you come into a team. You're like, what am I feeling is a confusion, frustration, the wrong thing? And that kind of tells you which are these buckets to spend time on. That's right. And then within those buckets, you've got to figure out what are the right levers that you need to pull, what are the things that are missing? How do you really focus?

Starting point is 00:45:13 and where do you kind of like spend your time? So interesting. I love that you, this image is just like this very grainy. So old screenshot from some old McKinsey deck or something. It's like a 2006 PC or something. I love it. So you have this thing,

Starting point is 00:45:27 you have this deck, you just come in with all these tools in your tool belt. Is there anything else in that list of things that you bring with you to help change culture and help teams? I think, you know, one thing I think about a bunch is,

Starting point is 00:45:42 you know, I come from my background's a little bit different than a traditional tech executive. There was actually three phases to my career. I was in education for six years, taught in inner city, D.C., and then it was a dean of a boarding school in Switzerland, which is a little bit of a plot twist. I went to business school, and I worked on Wall Street for a bit, and then I left my job on Wall Street, quit, and started a startup. Startup was a glorious failure, as many startups are. But, you know, it was like a very non-traditional path towards tech. and, you know, I think a lot of my time in these other industries actually shapes the way I think about product management and actually changing teams and, like, building teams.

Starting point is 00:46:21 And what I mean by that is, like, you know, I think there's a lot of similarities between education and product management, believe it or not. You know, when I was interviewing for my first set of jobs in tech, recruiters would say to me, how does your background relate? Like, I don't really see it. And I would tell them, you know, when I was in education, I would walk into a classroom of 24-70 year olds and these kids owed me nothing. And I needed the only way I could be successful or impactful is I needed to be able to be a strong communicator. I needed to be able to have a clear vision of what was going on. I needed to be able to influence them in a believable way, such that they would get on board

Starting point is 00:47:05 with what needed to be done for 270 days of the year. It's like, you know, when you walk into a room as a product manager, engineers, designers, researchers, go to market, nobody owes you anything. And the only thing that you're going to do in order to be successful is you need to be a strong communicator. You have a clear vision of what's going on, and you need to be able to influence them to do the things together of what matters, right? It's very similar skill set, just different domain expertise. And so because of that, right, like, I've really adopted a mindset of, like, how do I coach my teams? How do I enable them because it's really about the sum of the parts versus me being a top-down leader saying, you have to do this and you have to do that.

Starting point is 00:47:44 And so I think a lot about that in both approach and the processes that we create. And to give you a couple of classic typical examples of this, there's two things I want to call out. One is, you know, there's actually this education framework. It's called Bloom's Taxonomy. I think it's changed over time, but when I learned it was basically a pyramid. The pyramid was, Bloom taxonomy describes what's there at different levels or order of critical thinking you need in order to be a master of something. And at the bottom of the period was knowledge, and then it's comprehension and then application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. And so going up the pyramid, it means it's higher order thinking. And I think about that a lot in trying to understand where are my teams struggling?

Starting point is 00:48:34 Do they have the core knowledge that they need? Do they understand it, but they can't apply it? Are they applying it? But they're not able to analyze it across different business segments, right? And you can use this framework not only with the ICPMs and the teams themselves, but also for your managers, like what is breaking down? And then using that and attaching that to like the skills that we want to build to figure out how do you fill in those gaps. and it really is a grounding for me a grounding mental model

Starting point is 00:49:02 for how do you build teams that are actually effective and how you meet people where they are as opposed to just saying, hey, you need to figure this out. I find that too often in tech and also in product, people ask to figure things out but not giving the support to get there and there's no way to really like to really connect the dots for them.

Starting point is 00:49:21 Amazing. I'm pulling up the Bloom's taxonomy. So essentially, if you see a PM struggling which you try to do is figure out which of these things do they not have? How are you not supporting them? How can you support them better? So it could be they have the skills, they don't have the understanding. What are some of the other things that often you find that may be hinder of product manager success? A lot of times they might have the understanding,

Starting point is 00:49:45 but they haven't had a chance to apply it to a variety of different scenarios or haven't seen it and applied to multiple scenarios. So oftentimes you might understand a concept like machine learning, but you haven't actually worked on it. it in multiple against multiple scenarios. So you maybe have one way of doing it that doesn't make sense and you need to like have two or three. And you don't even know that two or three ways of doing exists, right?

Starting point is 00:50:08 Like that is like often a common failure point, right? Or it's maybe you know how to apply it, but you can't synthesize why this thing that you're doing actually matters for the business context, right? Like oftentimes that becomes like a challenge with managers. It's like they know what to do, but they don't understand how to tie it back to the business context and the overall strategy needs, and so where to prioritize it. And so what I find is that, like, you know, when you're trying to manage managers, you're really trying to live at the top of the pyramid.

Starting point is 00:50:38 You are responsible. Our manager is responsible for basically owning that pyramid for all of the areas that they operate, but they need to be able to live at the top of the pyramid across all of them. They need to be able to synthesize and evaluate what's happening for each product team that they own in order to kind of make the bigger picture connections. By the way, I love your metaphor of product managers or like this group of seven-year-old where you have to learn how to manage influence, communicate. That's great.

Starting point is 00:51:04 Yeah, I mean, they're not like a group of seven-year-olds, but I think it's actually it's... Yeah, the same skills. The same skills. Same skills. I mean, I think it's true. Like, I found it actually significantly harder for me to get 24-70 years to believe in what I was doing than to walk into a room with Kevin Sistram and Mike Krieger and explain to learn what's the strategy for growing the next 100 million users on on Instagram.

Starting point is 00:51:25 Like, these are very logical adults who, you know, can reason with you. And, like, you've got a classroom of kids that's not quite the same. So, you know, those skills are really critical. I love that. I definitely want to ask about your Instagram days. Is there anything else in this bucket of wisdom of you kind of talked about things you've learned about how to manage product managers and managers of managers? Is there anything else there that might be helpful to folks that you've learned? One thing, they also think about a lot.

Starting point is 00:51:53 And I don't know if this is just a me thing. But I think about PM as a team sport, right? It's leading product teams is really about being the coach and helping other people to like kind of see what their role is on the team and to maximize them. People talk a lot about product as a, you know, you're the CEO and I'll actually fully believe that analogy. You know, if you think about as a team sport, there's a few things that kind of shake out. One is not everyone's going to be a star player, but not everyone needs to be.

Starting point is 00:52:25 you know LeBron James or Kobe Bryant, right? You need role players. You need really strong role players. You need people who feel valued in their role, and you need to understand how to groom those role players and how to make sure that they have the right seat at the table in the right place. And so I think it's, yes, you're the conductor of the orchestra,

Starting point is 00:52:43 but you're really more than that. You're really like kind of the coach of the team. Another thing I think about a lot is, you know, I have a good friend who's a college basketball coach, and he taught me about kind of this idea, of your coaching tree. And this is a really important concept, especially in college basketball.

Starting point is 00:53:01 It's like you as a head coach, you take a lot of pride in who were your assistants, who was your first assistant, the second assistant, the third assistant. And where do they go on to be head coaches? And what legacy do they have because you were able to install a bit in them? And so the coaching tree of a Mike Shosheski,

Starting point is 00:53:19 the coaching tree of a John Caliper, these like esteemed coaches, not because of what, not only because of what they've done, but because of the tree, that they've built. And I like to think about this as well, because I think it's really important for product leaders to think about what is their like in leadership tree.

Starting point is 00:53:33 Like, who have you helped to build up and help to grow and help to get to their next role, right? And so I think about this a lot. You know, I have people who I've worked with who are running growth to stripe or the CPO chief or now running stories at Instagram that were all my team in the earlier days. And, you know, their success is my success.

Starting point is 00:53:55 and I'm proud for them, right? And I'm happy for them. And I think it kind of like reinforces this mentality. It's your responsibility to coach people up to greatness. So what I'm hearing is you've put a lot of value in your team on them coaching folks, whether their managers or even ICs is helping them understand that it's important to coach folks on their team and help them develop, that it's part of your job, essentially. That's part of your job.

Starting point is 00:54:22 I mean, you're trying to build a repository of skills. in a repository of like knowledge and of team velocity. And the only way you can do that is everyone is like, so rising tide has to lift all votes. Amazing. And interestingly, that probably teaches you how to do your job better because you're in teaching. You actually learn things a lot better.

Starting point is 00:54:40 That's right. It forces you to like figure out how can you get things off of your plate so that you can go work on bigger things. Yeah. And how good does it feel when folks that you used to manage and go on to do bigger and better things? That's great. I want to talk a little bit about growth within YouTube. I heard that you haven't been there for that long.

Starting point is 00:54:57 And apparently you've already two-ext or three-ext or more, something important within YouTube. I don't know exactly the details. And people are very impressed with the impact you've already had. And apparently a lot of the success there and other places is how you think about growth through flywheels. You always look for the flywheel that helps drive growth. Can you just talk about it either at YouTube, ideally YouTube, whatever you can share? Because that's pretty impressive, especially for a company at that scale that you're making so much impact.

Starting point is 00:55:25 or other places, just how you think about white wheels and growth? Well, it's very generous of you. I wouldn't say, like, we've done some really good work, some good work so far at YouTube, and it's been, you know, a journey. I think, I do think a lot about flywheels. I think it's actually a lot of growth is really understanding what is the value profit, all of the different points of the experience, especially if you have a multi-sided marketplace, right?

Starting point is 00:55:54 like a multi-sided marketplace for YouTube is like, you know, the creator and what the creator is trying to achieve both from a engagement perspective, but also for me for a monetization perspective. And then for the viewer or the purchaser, like, you know, where is that? Like what are they trying to do and where are they missing the opportunity? I can't really go into specifics a bunch with YouTube, but what I would say is this is that, like, you know, one thing that I always do when I come in is I try to push my team to really dog food products. in their adjacent user state, if you will. And what I mean by that is often a product that you and I use,

Starting point is 00:56:34 that we've been using for years, isn't actually the product that we're building for other people. Like a power user who's using a product has so much history and there's so much informed knowledge on how that product, for that product to actually create a great experience for you, that if you were to go and create a new Gmail account and look at YouTube today, I guarantee you it's a completely different and significantly worse experience. And there's a lot of obvious opportunities missed,

Starting point is 00:57:07 especially with what is the flywheel and why things are working or not working, if you don't actually go and use things in a new state. An example of this when I talk about YouTube is a lot of the YouTube graph for searching stuff is based on what have you watched in the past. So if you go in searching, you search history, it's going to be about, like, well, what have you watched in the past or what have you searched for, and what can we show you that's going to be what we can better predict. But if you don't have a lot of search history, then they're not going to do as good of a job. So that's not a direct translation for what we were doing. But for me, I work on freedom monetization, and there are really important flywheels around, like, what does it take for a creator to make content that can help them to monetize?

Starting point is 00:57:50 how do we get that content to people and where and to what extent are we getting that content to people? And how do we make sure that people feel good about what they're receiving the people who are paying? And all of those flywheels have to work. And so part of what I've been able to do is really think about, like, how do we connect the dots in a story that the teams can uniquely understand can help them lean in even more and have clarity and purpose of work, right? Sometimes what's super important about the flyways actually is enabling for your teams to know, what to work on and what not to work on, right? And then it also helps us to understand what do we know and what do we not know about creators and viewers

Starting point is 00:58:27 and monetization operations so that we can do the understand work to improve the velocity and to prove the impact. And that's really where we're in focus. And so I did a lot of this in YouTube, but I also did this in Instacart, really thinking about when I joined Instacart, one of the big questions I had was like, how are people in their daily lives? How is it a daily life actually reflecting

Starting point is 00:58:49 in the purchase experience? Are we making it easy for them? Because when you buy groceries, you're not going to go on grocery shopping because you want beautiful ingredients in your fridge. You're going grocery shopping because you actually have a meal to put together. Right. So like, are we actually reflecting the real job to be done, which is I want to buy tacos? I want to make taco Tuesday. Can we make it easier for people to find ingredients in tacos, right? As opposed to having them sort for tortillas and tomatoes and avocado. So it's really thinking about what is the job and then what is the fly worth to make that happen and how we make this come to life. There's so many things I want to follow up on here.

Starting point is 00:59:27 First of all, I realized that all of the things you worked on, I am a daily active user of or a weekly active user. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Instacart about a weekly active user. I think that might be, yeah, wow, nice job. Got me in the fly wheels of all your flywheels. It was not intentional, but I'm glad my efforts had improved. prove a joy just a little bit. Nice work. Ideally. Okay, so a couple

Starting point is 00:59:51 takeaways here. One is you think about the value prop at every interaction of both sides, if it's a multi-sided marketplace, or if it's just like, why would I be doing this? So it's like, why would I send an invite to my friend? Why would I share this photo? Why would I open up Instacart? And then

Starting point is 01:00:07 you think about the jobs to be done during the day of a potential user and how can we flow into that versus like not connect to their actual day-to-day experience. And is the product actually working? Like, as I'm doing this, I'm looking and saying, like, is the product actually set up to deliver these things? Like, do we actually see it work or not?

Starting point is 01:00:25 I think there's a lot of assumptions that the product works. But a lot of times, teams will surprise and we build the pieces of a flow, but not actually build the experience, the output. Like, they don't design it in a way where you're getting the real output that you make. That's such a easy-to-miss point you're making here, which is you just think about, hey, I have Taco Tuesday. I'm actually as a product manager on Instagram. I'm going to open up the app. app and use it in this use case and see how it goes. That's right.

Starting point is 01:00:51 And most people don't do that is what you've realized. Those people don't do that. Another example of this, right? Like this is years ago, but on Instacart, Instagram made it really hard to reorder stuff. Super hard to reorder. And it was shocking to me because when I thought about it, when I go to the grocery store, 90% of the time I'm getting the same stuff.

Starting point is 01:01:11 Right? It's like, you know, maybe not any trip, but over the course of a month or two, you've got a list of things that are part of your stable and then occasionally, you know, like holiday time I want some peppermint bark chocolate or something, you know? But like it's not. Like it's like there's like random snacks you're going to throw in.

Starting point is 01:01:28 But like there's and so when we looked at the data, it turns out like after five times you go to Instacart, 90% of the order is the same. Right? But like when you wanted to reorder, at least back then, you couldn't go and reorder easily. You had to dig and find it like seven or,

Starting point is 01:01:45 this eight clicks. And when you did reorder, you had to reorder the whole thing. You couldn't take pieces. You couldn't take, I want to take the milk and the blueberries. Right. And so, you know, you think about growth, right? You think about what does it mean to grow in Instacart? What does it mean to, like, actually drive better retention? Well, it's actually really important to give, make it easy for people to make the next order. Right. And so like, like, the product wasn't really built for that, though people had the best intentions in life. The adjacent order. Yeah, exactly. I imagine that was maybe one of the biggest growth.

Starting point is 01:02:15 wins in his Instigart history is just the reorder the same thing because I do that all the time. Yeah, you would be surprised. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC2, ISO-271, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market-leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risk. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI.

Starting point is 01:02:56 Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com slash Lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A-com slash. Lenny. You mentioned this concept of adjacent user kind of adjacently, but I think it's worth spending a little more time here. It's like this term you popularized and you explained it somewhat, but maybe explain a little bit more because I think it's really powerful for people and how do you think about growth. It was, you know, this was something that came out of actually my time at Instagram.

Starting point is 01:03:32 It was a kind of a framework that we came up with because Instagram really was at that time, I mean, we grew so fast that the people who were using Instagram in February were completely different than people who were using it the following October and then the next January. I think when I joined, we were at like 445 million monthly actives January 2016. At the end of that year, we were at 636 million. We were like 47% that year. And so, you know, when we talk to users, first half of 2016, you know, when we talk to women in the U.S. their 30s, they're like, Robert, I have an Instagram. I have a Facebook account. Literally people said that. Right. It was that long ago. Right. And then like a year later,

Starting point is 01:04:15 it's like, of course I use Instagram. Like Instagram is my everything. And the world changed so fast. And so when you're in a hypergrowth product, it's really, really important to understand who your users are today and the persona of the user, what motivates them, why they're using it. But then also to understand who is the next user, who is the user who could be using this product. for some reason, it doesn't work for them, right? And understanding who that adjacent user is and when you're actually starting to see that adjacent user adopt the product.

Starting point is 01:04:48 And one of the ways you start to see their adjacent users starting to adopt the product, especially with the data, is you start seeing cohort curves decline. You start seeing the people who sign up today, three or six months from now, they're signing up and they're doing worse job. Nothing's changing the product,

Starting point is 01:05:07 but just the understanding of how the product should work is different. They might be less tech savvy, right, on the scale of an earlier doctor versus like late majority. They might be closer to the late majority. And so we saw this at Instagram, right? Like we would always be working on registration flow. And at one point, we were converting at some insanely high percent. And then three months later, it would go down by 15 percent, right?

Starting point is 01:05:31 Not because anything was broken, but just because we'd broken into new markets. You're bringing on people in India. or you bring on people in the Philippines. And their understanding of how it works, the phone they use, et cetera, are all different. So really the core of their adjacent users are a few things. One is like, you have to understand who is using your product today and why. And when you're growing at some really strong pace, 30, 40, 50% or more per year,

Starting point is 01:05:56 you've got to be on top of who is your next, who you believe the next user is and why. And then you also have to be the adjacent user. You definitely use the product life done and see how it's. what's working, what's broken with it. And so at an Instacart, the adjacent user, the original user might have been like, you know, an office admin who is going to buy this thing every week because of during happy hours and team staff.

Starting point is 01:06:21 But then the next adjacent user might have been the mom of three or four or the dad of three or four who's home with the kids and they are, you know, they need to depend on Instagram, right? Bersays, you know, like later on it might be there are a single person in New York. who does this out of convenience, right? But like what they're optimizing for, how they use the product all changes, and the functionality and the abilities are fundamentally different. So you have to be them,

Starting point is 01:06:47 you have to watch how they use the product, you have to talk to them, and then you have to visit them and literally see what they're doing in real time in order to make sure that you're enabling the right jobs for them. I love just the visualization of the adjacent user. Basically, your growth is going to come from not existing users. It's the users right outside that circle of where users are today,

Starting point is 01:07:06 and you need to think about what do they need that existing users maybe don't need. You said that this is most powerful for hypergrowth companies. Is this something you think people like all companies should be thinking about or is it a lot less important if you're not a hypergrowth business? So it's a great question. I think it's essential, it's mandatory for hypergrowth.

Starting point is 01:07:25 I think it's very helpful if you have a product or company that is not growing what you want it to be. And so you're focused on capturing more share of wallet instead of expanding your audience. And so sometimes you can imagine like a cosmetics company, for example, right? That's like digitally enabled. You can imagine that like they've hit a ceiling in terms of like the growth of their users. And they're really just trying to get people to buy more product. But maybe they're missing like the people who want to use their product are missing something from your current product.

Starting point is 01:08:01 Maybe you're missing different skin tone shades, right? Or maybe you're missing certain types of tools. So really talking to who is just outside of your current user base, who's coming to your product and looking around and not buying and understanding what are their needs and figuring out how do you enable for them? How do you build the right experience for them in order to become adopters of your product? So what I'm hearing is spend some understand work to figure out who your potential and the users are and then use the product as them and see what is missing.

Starting point is 01:08:30 I imagine user research goes into this. You're not actually going to understand necessarily all the things they need. So it's probably fine folks in that cohort and see how they use the product. Awesome. The question I had on my mind as you're talking, you've come into so many companies and help them with growth. What do you find most of the opportunities often lie? Is it like onboarding activation?

Starting point is 01:08:53 Is there a trend like that? You're like, here's probably there's going to be opportunity here, or is it super mixed back? usually it's somewhere in the onboarding to like habit building experience, right? Like what does it take for someone to actually understand the value, that first moment, that first aha moment in the product? And a lot of teams, it's shocking how many teams don't really understand what that moment is for them.

Starting point is 01:09:21 And then also, how do you get them to build habit around the product? oftentimes a lot of people equate growth to top of funnel and that is also critical. I think having the right top of funnel motion is really critical in the building on that. So I think there's one part of it's like once you have the right top of funnel motion to get people to come in, how do you help to make sure the refining value and the building habit and they're retaining? Because that's the thing that helps you to compound over time. Like if you're bringing in a lot of people, but they're not staying around, then you just have a leaky bucket. And it doesn't matter how big it's off the phone was.

Starting point is 01:09:59 So making sure that that first month and two-month, three-month experience is great. And then the other part is really figuring out how do you build compounding growth loops where it's not just one way of acquiring people, but you're building two and three and four ways that lay on to each other that help you to really supercharge your engine of like acquiring people. So at Instagram, if you kind of look at where Instagram is and what how I said Aaron grew, there's a lot that goes into it. But if you actually unpack the top of funnel for what worked at Instagram, there's certainly a component of it, which was our core component, which was invitations. We're like people inviting you and making sure that those invitations work and they work well

Starting point is 01:10:43 and that people's, their friends are coming on and get notified. But, you know, another part that goes unspoken, still critical to the, day was like the celebrity partnerships was critical, right? Because basically, you know, they had this wonderful partnerships team that basically took Instagram and taught celebrities how to use it, how to make it work for them, how to tell their own story and be their own brand. And that was a critical growth funnel because with that, you had the ability for them to create these celebrities and celebrity creators to set the norm for how the platform gets used. They also were getting picked up by the news and the media, right, for, you know,

Starting point is 01:11:28 all the stuff that's happening in celebrity world, which then added on to this other growth level which had, which was SEO. Right. And so every time a news article came out, they would link to the creators, like, or the celebrities' Instagram account or that particular post, right? And so you have this whole SEO engine that worked. And the SEO engine was because you have both web, which we launched, at Instagram, which created the canonical kind of like SEO tables. And then you had the, you know, all of these inbound links from these celebrity sites and news media. But then what you also had is you had embeds for Instagram and all of these different sites,

Starting point is 01:12:08 right? Like a news article, whatever, but posts, you know, Lenny's podcast, Instagram account. And those embeds help with SEO juice. And so you have not just the invites, but now you have the celebrities, now you have the, you know, the SEO component. And then we would do a bunch of paid media on top of that, using a lot of those signals. And so we would have, and then we have our own content.

Starting point is 01:12:29 And so you have all of these different kind of growth engines compounding each other. So every time the invitations got better, every time we got more celebrities to adopt, every time the SEO gets better, it's like magnifying the top of funnel. And at the bottom of the funnel, like or midfutle, we're making sure that people are retaining and getting value and staying around over the long term.

Starting point is 01:12:46 That is so interesting. I had no idea. This was such a core part of the early growth strategy. Everyone's always talking about morality and word of mouth all these things. And you're saying partnerships was a key part of the early growth strategy. It's huge. That's so funny because it's never something people talk about in growth as partnerships. So he's like, oh, there's a couple companies that really had success from partnerships and BD.

Starting point is 01:13:08 How early was this a big part of the strategy? Like how early in the history of it? I mean, the partnerships team was there before I joined. It was a very savvy and astute thing that Kevin and Mikey set up. they really kind of they made the partnership team drove a lot of word of mouth

Starting point is 01:13:24 around Instagram but it was the partnerships work in combination with the product work that actually helped to allow a lot of that to lane right

Starting point is 01:13:32 like it was our ability to think outside the box and understand that we needed to have a web presence because it was critical for international growth and it also helped

Starting point is 01:13:41 with SEO right and so the idea of launching web really drove and actually increased Instagram's growth by 10% the minute we launched it. And it was something that, you know, George Wang, who was there before me, had the idea

Starting point is 01:13:54 around. It wasn't really something that Kevin and Mikey believed in initially, but we had to prove to them that it was really impactful. And once it launched, then they understood why it was impactful and all of the effect of it. But the web was really critical for, like, driving so much SEO, which helped support a lot of the celebrity work and the partnerships work. because now every time a creator or a celebrity did something on Instagram,

Starting point is 01:14:21 every news media article picked it up and it like just helped to drive searches and Google searches, which helped to make Instagram part of like the cultural zeitgrass. This is so interesting because everyone imagines Instagram reality word of mouth. Like SEO and partnerships sounds like a core part of Instagram's early growth, which I don't think anyone ever talks about. That's huge. Wow. I mean, it was part of Facebook's growth too, right?

Starting point is 01:14:42 But I think a little bit differently is not as much partnerships. But when you Google someone now, you go to go with someone's name. Oftentimes, like, Instagram is like one of the first five things that comes up for the average person. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Starting point is 01:14:52 Right. LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter. That's right. Do you ever see the video of Alex Zhu talking about TikTok's growth strategy of this whole? He had this metaphor where, and he was trying to grow off of Instagram. So his metaphor was, Instagram is like you're in Europe and you're killing it. If you're in Europe and you're king, you don't ever want to go to America. There's no reason for you to give it up.

Starting point is 01:15:14 And America is TikTok in this case. He's like, how do we convince people to come to America and try moving everything there? He's like, we need to go after the people that are not doing well in Europe who want to be the king. And we're going to help you become that king in America or in the president. So he used the adjacent use and theory on us. Basically is what you're saying. That's right. You did.

Starting point is 01:15:34 He's drink, drink up your shake. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, and I think the reason that strategy worked differently is there was already a place. So they couldn't execute what you did because there's already, celebrities are already there. And it's not like, come here. There's no point.

Starting point is 01:15:49 I already have a huge following. So you make your own celebrities. Make your own celebrities. Exactly. And they went after like the B-list, C-list people. Right. So it's interesting that people look at it and say, I'm like, cool, we're going to do partnerships, SEO.

Starting point is 01:16:02 But I think it's important to realize things change. When the market is a different dynamic, you can't just do the same thing. You won't work as well. Is there anything else from the Instagram early days that maybe people would know or it would be interesting to share because you were there. quite early and now it's maybe the most thriving social network in the world. One thing that is actually, I think, interesting, there's an interesting story that doesn't talk about a lot is,

Starting point is 01:16:23 I think the early Instagram was built where, it was built in a way where every follow was created equal. And what I mean by that is, you know, if I followed you, Lenny, or if I followed Kim Kardashian, or if I followed Selena Gomez, all follows were treated like, you know, they were equally important. And this is actually a really important fact.

Starting point is 01:16:50 There was a really important factor for a couple of reasons. One, early celebrities who adopted Instagram obviously benefited from that because, you know, a celebrity is going to get a follow before an average person does. It doesn't mean that, like, you know, their follows weren't meaningful. It's just that, like, you know, when you have a machine learning that's just optimized for a click through or follow, then like, you know, that matters. But what ended up happening is we ended up looking at the data. And I can't take credit for this.

Starting point is 01:17:22 My colleague at the time, Rob Andrews, had identified this. He was the head of growth marketing. He was a peer of mine. That, you know, basically, this is 2016-ish days. The average person would come on Instagram and retain, but then leave after seven, eight, nine months. We saw like, we'd see a flash. flattening in a retention curve, but then we would see it like dip again, which was very weird.

Starting point is 01:17:46 I mean, like, why is this happening? And it turned out that what was happening anecdotally is that people were wrapping on Instagram, following a bunch of people, following a lot of celebrities, actually, because the celebrities were being shown. And then when they actually went to make their first post, a few months later, none of their friends were following them. And so there was, like, posting into an echo chamber. And anecdotally, people would stop using the product because they'd, They felt bad.

Starting point is 01:18:13 We hypothesized. Like, no one was liking or following, like, or, you know, we're commenting on their post. And so we had to do this thing. We called it the connections pivot, right? In, like, 2016, 2016, where we had to convince Kevin and Mikey that it was actually not the right thing to do to prioritize celebrities to everybody. Because we were basically biting on, cut was it, bite your nose to spank your face,

Starting point is 01:18:39 whatever that is. Like, you know, because the regular person, wasn't having a great experience. So it doesn't mean that we shouldn't recommend celebrities, but Jeff recommend celebrities to people who are already on there, they already have their graph. And the most important thing to do is actually get regular human-to-chewing connections in the first, whatever one, people first sign up

Starting point is 01:18:58 so that when you, Lenny, actually go write your first, make your first post, like, your friends would see it and you would be validated, and you would feel like, okay, this is a police for me. Right, like, I have a community here. And so that connection pivot was crissue. critical. It changed. Literally angle changed the retention on Instagram. And so if you like Google Instagram growth, there was like a tech crunch article about Instagram's growth that, you know, I think 2017, 2018, when we're going 40, 50% year over year. And obviously there was a lot that

Starting point is 01:19:29 went into that skyrocket. People think that Stories was the sole reason why we grew and story brought us a lot of people. But I mean, we literally our retention doubled over the course of like a year and a half. And if you could imagine, imagine if like, you know, your bank account, like the interest rate doubles like every month. You know what I mean? Like it was incredible. Just this shift in making sure that people got connected with their friends early on changed the way that like people perceived the value. And so a lot of the top of funnel work that we did, a lot of the activation work that we did really like paid off in speeds ultimately. Wow.

Starting point is 01:20:06 I'm curious. What's the most impactful thing you've shipped? slash let 2 in terms of impact and experiment launch. At Instagram, you know, we saw this big problem where people were logging out and not being able to get back into their account. It was crazy. Like hundreds of thousands of people a day could not get back into their account.

Starting point is 01:20:27 And it was because, and like when I say it could not get back into the account, I mean they literally would try. And 28 days later, we'd never see them again. And we thought it was a problem because they didn't remember where their email was, which email they signed up with, or what their actual handle was or what their password was. And so this was, you know, we were losing 10, 12 million people a year from what we called account churn, account access churn. So we worked on this problem and we had spent a lot of time in South Asia and Southeast Asia trying to understand how to grow the product. and from that time we realized that it's important actually for people to be able to log out. We don't want to restrict people's ability to log out because there are many people in the world

Starting point is 01:21:19 who don't want to use background data because they own prepaid phone plans or they don't have a lot of money and they want to share their phone with a sibling. And so they log out and so it's really important. So we don't want to take away that behavior. but we did have to do a better job of helping them to get back in. So we did two things. One was like, there used to be a time and you can probably find it on Google

Starting point is 01:21:44 if you did like an archive search. If you wanted to log into your Instagram account, there would be a tab for your email, and then there would be a tag for, like, your handle. Right? And we didn't really make it easy for you to log in with your phone number either. You had to get to the right tab and the right place to get the right thing. And so we did this Omni Box experience where it was just like,

Starting point is 01:22:04 email phone handle, put it all in one place. and we made it super simple for you. And the second time, if you tried it twice and it didn't work, if we knew that you were on a trusted device, we would just send you a text message and say, hey, are you trying to log it? That's solved like half the problem. And then the other half, what we did,

Starting point is 01:22:24 and this still exists today on Instagram, when you log out, we say, hey, Lenny, it looks like you're going to log out. Do you want us to save your credentials on your advice so you don't have to worry about your password? right and then we later added an ability to have a passcode and that's all basically the other half right and so just like being really thoughtful around like what is actually the core job that people are trying to do because a bad experience would have been like hey let's make it really hard for people walk out right and then how we like one or two experiments really help people to get back into experience and so what was interesting was that like we were able to solve this and it's actually called drive probably like 15 20 million extra monthly active users a year, but was also super interesting was that it helped us to realize that getting people back into their account more drove more account, like content creation or incident in ways

Starting point is 01:23:20 that we didn't expect. And so because we were getting people back into the account, people getting into their second account and getting into a third account, and they were going into their fenced their account and creating content more. And so that actually led to the creation of a multiple accounts team, which is what has made it easy for you to navigate between accounts on Instagram today. And so that was understand work actually coming to life, right? Like it was, hey, we're going to do the understand work to figure out how to solve account access issues. And we're going to solve it.

Starting point is 01:23:53 And solving it when we looked at the data, we're like, hey, why is all this account? Like, why is all this content creation happening? That was not what we were expecting. And where is it happening? and it was happening from second and third accounts and so that made us realize that oh, people were not only getting worked out of the first accounts, but they were actually creating a lot of in the second and third accounts.

Starting point is 01:24:11 How can we make it easy for them to get and navigate between their first account, whether it's like your account and a business account, your account and a fence account or like a bakery account, you know what I mean? And so that created a multiple accounts team, which I ended up owning, and that ended up even becoming like a bigger after I left.

Starting point is 01:24:26 That's like an example of like, under Fanwork to solve a real problem, real solving, solving, massive solution. massive impact, creating new, like, data that you didn't expect. They drive new understand work, which creates a whole new team to, like, allow you to kind of move around your Instagram account more seamlessly. You can see this now, like, when you go to post, you can decide, okay, I want to post as Lenny or I want to post as this other thing.

Starting point is 01:24:48 Or when I want to write a story, you know, you can change anywhere. And that was all an effort that came, originally came out of this realization. I love how many of these huge impact stories are just like such straightforward, simple things, like just let people log in more easily, help them log out more effectively, find, show them their friends versus celebrities. Like, so many of these stories

Starting point is 01:25:09 are often just like really simple ideas that lead to such profound change. The logout example is interesting. At Airbnb, we found the logout was actually causing a lot of turn also. But they went there. Initially, they went with the simple solution of just extend the session

Starting point is 01:25:25 logout length instead of like a week, make it two weeks or three weeks or four weeks. You pointed out with Instagram. People actually wanted to log out. So we're like, let's leave that alone, start with making it easier to log back in. That's right. Amazing. Man, you're so full of amazing stories.

Starting point is 01:25:38 I'm curious with Facebook, maybe just as I wrap up here, is there anything there? Because you were in early PM, growth PM at Facebook. You worked a lot on friends and helping people discover their friends. Is there anything there that would be interesting to share? In my time, so I joined Instagram or Facebook in 2014, and I was responsible for people recommendations globally. And at the time, Facebook was at scale and big and dominated North America. And so really the focus area at the time was South Asia and Southeast Asia. And, you know, we did. And we noticed a lot of really interesting things, especially in India.

Starting point is 01:26:14 Facebook seemed to be broken from a people graph perspective, right? Like we just didn't, the data was telling us like people didn't have as many friends in common, right? Like in the U.S., it might have been just making up a number. Like, when average, we saw a 20, two friends in common when you make a friendship connection, but in India was like seven, right? And then there was a lot of friending and messaging or friending and unfriending. We're like, what's going on here? So we had some hypotheses from the data. We ran a bunch of tests. Nothing seemed to work and like be a breakthrough. So, you know, actually at that time I had to propose and, you know, they agreed to do this. Like we needed to do understand work. So we were

Starting point is 01:26:52 literally on the ground in India every three months, took a team of engineers with me. Like I'm talking like we're in Delhi in people's homes in Mumbai, and we went to go kind of investigate what was going on, like watch people, make friends, watch them, like use people you may know and really understand what was happening and see what was going on because we felt like there was context that we were missing. There was a lot of things that we learned. It was mind-blowing. But one of the most interesting things, landing, was that we watched people try to make friends and we said, hey, wait, like, that's their profile page. Why aren't you looking at it?

Starting point is 01:27:29 And they would say, well, that doesn't have any relevant information for me. So I need to go look in the pictures. Like, well, why doesn't the profile page have relevant information for you? That's where information's supposed to be. And they're like, listen, this guy's named Amit Kumar. I have 10 friends named Amit Kumar, right? Like, what is this page going to tell me? Also, and they would scroll down, they'd be like,

Starting point is 01:27:53 all of these fields are not relevant to me, right? And so you look at Facebook at the time, it's very Western-centric. It's probably still it is. It was like name, it was like school you went to, like job title, right, like affiliations, that kind of stuff. That's all Western paradigms. And like, some of these people are like, my friends sell jeans at a market. Like, none of this is relevant. Like we didn't, you don't like, you don't even know the name of the school sometimes, right? It might be a number or something. And so all of the descriptors that we take for granted were not relevant. And the name was, were very common. This was really illuminating. So what they would do is go look at pictures and say,

Starting point is 01:28:27 is this my friend's car? Or is this my friends, like, can I see my friend's animal and what's available? And it was interesting because, you know, the understand where at least more realization, so we went back to Menlo Burke with the data, turned out, we said, okay, let's look at the data in a different way. What are the most common names on Facebook? And we looked at in the top ten common names are Indian names. And like the most common name was Emmit Kumar. and there was like 250,000 people a month who used Emmet Kumar. Like, who were like real people? So imagine you're in Bangalore and you're trying to find your buddy,

Starting point is 01:29:01 name of Mitt Kumar. It's probably 5,000 that we could possibly recommend. Right? So, like, super interesting. It was like the cultural context was so different. So we had to get creative, find creative ways to figure out how to solve it. The power of understand work shines again. We have a recurring segment on this podcast called Fail Corner,

Starting point is 01:29:18 where I ask guests to share a time they failed. in their career and what they learned from that experience. Because a lot of people look at your career and your story and just like, holy shit, what a journey. I will never be able to achieve this. Is there a time when things didn't go well and something that you took away from that experience? Probably for me, I think my time at Instacart was probably not my best time. I think I went to Instacart with a vision of what I thought the product could be or should and it was, I think, a big story that I deeply believed.

Starting point is 01:29:57 But I was not, I think, aware or in tune with what the DNA of the company was at the time, which was, it was like a company that was really great at operations. And because that was the core what they did, and they were really building out a lot of their product experience and a lot of what, like, the new function. And so I think what they needed at the time was a much more tactical in the weeds, kind of like get your hands dirty, do, do, do, because they had really seen that before. And what I wanted to deliver in that experience was more kind of like building the right systems, the right people, the right processes so that we can like figure out how to institutionalize the work.

Starting point is 01:30:45 I think for me that was like probably my biggest oversight is that like I think I think they needed more technical and I was like kind of more I don't say in the clouds but more think about like where do we want to go with the experience that we need to build versus like let me get deep in like the funnel data right felt like it like became loggerheads where like I didn't feel like I was like probably either delivering what they wanted or being supported in the way that I wanted to be supported. Is the lesson there to spend more time and understand work before you take a job to make sure you're aligned with what they're looking for? That is actually a lesson. And I think part of that is doing that one of my takeaways is do that not only with the people there, but with the people who've left to. But the people who've left the company will give you a perspective that is raw and different and much more, I think, aligned with what you want to hear. And it may or may not be the same, but I think that people, and it's not. This isn't specific to instance of course. Like whenever you talk to people who are at the company,

Starting point is 01:31:46 they always try to tell you the best version of the company. The people left will tell you what the worst version, or their version, and it's on you to like triangulate that information. But you need both sides. Love that lesson. Bengali, is there anything else that you want to share or leave listeners with

Starting point is 01:32:02 before we get to our very exciting lightning round? No, no, I think we've got a lot. We have. With that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got six questions for you. Are you ready? I am ready to go. First question. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

Starting point is 01:32:19 A few. I've recommended most of them over my shoulder actually like range by David Epstein. I think of really critical PM work really being able to be a master of a lot of different things or somewhat deep in a lot of different things. Deep work, Calumport kind of clearing space to be focused and do the things thinking about the most important work in a deep and like undisturbed way. And then start at the end by Matt Waller. There's a kind of behavioral scientist, somebody in mind. Really thoughtful book helps you kind of really think about what you're building, but in a way that's like more holistic.

Starting point is 01:32:49 Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates when you're interviewing them? It's got a relatively new one that I love. It is, so this works exceptionally well, I believe, for more senior hires, whether they're like group product managers, directors, or even like kind of senior ICs. I go through when I think about what are the, for usually five skills that are really critical for someone to have in this job. And I think about them myself and I think about the archetypes of like who are, like, what,

Starting point is 01:33:24 like what is the ratio on one of these? But then I ask them, I say, hey, take out a piece of paper or take out your laptop. I'm going to give you five skills and I want you to stack length them for me, one to five, right? So one being the one your stronger stack and five being the one you're relatively weak as that. So like it's way better than saying, giving your strengths and weaknesses. It also forces them to contextualize it against the skills that you're looking for. But it also helps you have a meaningful conversation around how they think about themselves and their self-awareness. And to what extent they're ranking these skills based on the context they're in, right, versus their own ability.

Starting point is 01:34:02 Sometimes you rank something at five because like something you were just weak at because you haven't had to do because there's a strong function at that company. Right. And so when they stack rank it, and then people are like, I've asked this part before four or five times on a recent role I hire people like, ooh, this is really hard but really good question. And then you can learn,

Starting point is 01:34:20 I usually will dig into like, what if like number two, right, and what's number four, number five and why? And it really helps me to one, calibrate, like am I looking for the right person and two, are their skills actually match for what we need at this time? I love when I hear a question.

Starting point is 01:34:34 I've never heard before. That is genius. Next question. Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really like. I think one that I've enjoyed quite a lot. Actually, it's really kind of really simple, but amazing. Is this app called Flighty, you know of it, F-L-I-G-H-T-I?

Starting point is 01:34:52 It is a travel app, and it is, it manages all of your flight itineraries and your Flynn's friends' itineraries. But the reason why I love it is it goes two or three clicks deeper than the average travel app or like your airline app. And it tells you when your inbound plane is running with it. It helps you to understand, like, where the gates are my wife was just in Madrid last week. And she texted me saying, hey, I'm at the airport, but no gate is announced. I looked at flighty.

Starting point is 01:35:20 I'm like, your gate is E-67. It's actually been assigned, but it hasn't been announced. And this happens a lot in Europe, right? Like, you'll be there and they don't tell you the gate until, like, an hour beforehand. So it gives you so much information right before it's actually publicly announced, which is really helpful, especially if you really need to be somewhere, because oftentimes I know if my plane's going to be late and if I need to rebook before anyone else does.

Starting point is 01:35:41 Which helps you, gives you a better chance of getting somewhere. Or I will be able to get to a gate. I get to SFO and it might not be on the board at SFO, but I know exactly where it gave you. So we agreed out. Can't say enough about it. I'm downloading it right now. It's got a bazillion reviews, five stars.

Starting point is 01:35:58 Thank you for the recommendation. Incredibly useful. I'm trying out a new question. You've joined a bunch of different companies. What's one thing that you've done in the first? first 90 days at the job that has made a big impact. I go and I sit in team readings and see how they operate. I just listen.

Starting point is 01:36:16 I talk to not only the PMs, but the NG, content designer and everyone, and I try to get to know them by both name and story. And what I mean by that's like, oftentimes people, execs come in and they're like, what are we doing? What are we prioritizing? Why does it matter? and they don't really take the time to actually learn who the people are, what the story is, like what they care about,

Starting point is 01:36:42 what they're passionate about, both professionally and personally, and really try to understand how the team is working from that person's perspective. And what I find is actually when I do that, people are way more willing to hear when it's time for me to share my thoughts. They're way more invested because they believe I'm invested in them. that. I love that. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you really like and find useful and often share with friends or family in worker in life? I'm not big on models. There's one that I've actually been repeating. I don't remember where I got it. It might have been like Adam Grant or someone

Starting point is 01:37:22 on Instagram, but it was a it's one. I said it to a colleague of mine. He's like, wow, that really hit differently. It's that like, I think it goes something like this, like, you know, um, people and teams don't really reach, they don't actually reach their goals. They fall to the level of their systems. And that, to me, was really powerful because, like, I struggle a lot with, like, just being balanced in life, right? Like, working out the way I want to and getting the right rest

Starting point is 01:37:50 and making sure that I'm spending time in all right places. And that's really, like, it's a goal of mine, but, like, the problem is that, like, I don't, my system for that specifically, I tend to, like, you know, not, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I'm not, rigorous with it is one I need to be. But on the other hand, at work, I'm very rigorous in the systems and processes. So really like that saying to me really like kind of hits because it is both applicable to your life and how you want to live your life, but also how you want to win your teams. Final question. You mentioned that you were a dean at a school and a boarding school.

Starting point is 01:38:24 Is there something that you take away from that experience that's going to stick with you? I know you mentioned one thing about treat PM's skills or similar to teacher skills or anything else there. Actually, so I was a dean of a boarding school in Switzerland, which was like actually one the most fun and interesting times in my life. It was American school in Switzerland, just outside of Lugano, Switzerland, the Italian-speaking section. And I'd say, you know, what was, I learned a lot about myself during the time. I learned a lot about just like relationships and people. I actually had a call with one of my old students this morning. She's like in her 30s now, this was like 20 years ago, So I still keep in touch with them.

Starting point is 01:39:03 And I think that's, you know, the comment I'm made about knowing people why name and story matters a lot. Like, you know, it says a lot that 20 years later I'm still talking to some of these students, you know, who are like their own adults running their own businesses. But also, you know, I think the human, like human challenges and human connection, human problems is very universal, right? This was a really interesting place where you had kids coming from a variety of different walks of life. some who lived in Azerbaijan or Kosovo and felt like the families felt like, you know, they couldn't be safe there so they wanted to send their kids somewhere else. Some kids whose parents worked at the U.S. embassy and just were kind of there for a little bit of time. And what I found to be true is that like, you know, just spending time with people and understanding

Starting point is 01:39:48 their own story and family life really led to a lot of kind of like shared interests and passions. and it helped really me to see that the world can be very similar in so many ways. And it is very much reflected to me in my day-to-day life and tech. Because as you know in the Bay Area, there's so many people who come from so many walks of life who end up in this journey, building these products and companies, and just help me to value so many different voices. If you want to build world-class products, if you want to build a product that can scale around the world, if you want to build product that's going to be hyper-growth,

Starting point is 01:40:23 you have to be inclusive of so many voices. And so you have to build that skill to be able to acknowledge and learn from and to live in tension with different voices. That is beautiful. I love that we're ending there. Bengali, I feel like we've done a lot of understand work.

Starting point is 01:40:37 And I think we've helped a lot of people with a lot of things. We talked about so much. Two final questions. Where can folks finding online if they want to follow what you're up to? And how can listeners be useful to you? For as much as I've worked at social companies,

Starting point is 01:40:48 I actually don't use my social products that much. I'm on Instagram. Like, if you look at I-M-B-A-M-B-A-N-G-A-L-I, Google that, all of my, like, socials, handles all have the same kind of like link, including LinkedIn, so hit me up whenever. And then what can people do useful for me? I don't know. I mean, I think I don't have, like, a short list.

Starting point is 01:41:13 I would say I love to hear people's stories. I love to give advice. You know, obviously, my time is a little bit limited occasionally. but I think if people can share with me things that they're learning or things that they see in the market or if they have questions, I always love to hear it. And so I think for me, like, you know, just hearing other people's stories and learning what other people are doing is probably the most rewarding for me. Bengali, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. This is amazing. I really appreciate you, money. Bye, everyone.

Starting point is 01:41:41 Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast, 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 lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart)

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