Founder Mode Lessons from Instagram, Airbnb, and Coinbase | Sanchan Saxena

this is the biggest difference that I see in many companies verus Airbnb and apple that marketing and product management are cohesively embedded together every does two releases in a year and the reason they do that is they work backwards from a narrative that they want the customer to experience rather than forward from the MVPs that 16 different teams can ship right so typically this is what happen right there three or four different teams that are shipping some parts of it and the user journey is broken let's say sign up and it requires five different teams to work together one team says I can do this much the other team say other team says I can do this much the entire user Journey looks crappy it goes like this right but in case of do is we'll first design the user experience Journey the promises that they want to feel and then we're going to challenge the teams to rise up to that narrative so at the beginning of that year we will sit down and say okay next June we want the customer to experience and feel the following things from Airbnb if when I book and travel at Airbnb I feel extremely safe if something goes wrong I'm able to actually report that stuff very easily and protect myself as an example and then every team would be challenged to say look guys you got this much time is immovable the time is the same time but now your job is to rise up to the occasion and build the most amazing experience that you can together as teams to deliver this narrative to the customer all right sonan uh welcome thank you for having me Peter yeah so let's Dive Right In I

think you have a really amazing career you work with like three amazing Founders so maybe we can start there why don't we start with your in Instagram experience I think you joined a company pretty early so what was it like working with Kevin Mike yeah I joined fairly early I mean to give a measure of how early that was Instagram at that time made $0 in Revenue today by some sources it makes 50% or more of Facebook's Revenue at 50 billion plus dollars so it was like really early days I think there were only less than 100 employees you know maybe 70 80 employees if I'm not wrong and the context was very different it was just like every other startup it was a startup that had one product one set of features for one set of users and it was just taking off like a rocket ship and at that time as a reminder there weren't a lot of things that you see in Instagram today like shopping Etc right so back in the day it was just about joining a company that I really love the mission on love the product on and just waiting multiple hat to in that Journey you know people always tell me you know I'm want to try my next job I want to get this JD I'm going to apply for this job ET said no typically you don't it doesn't work out like that Peter you know typically happens is you join a rocket ship and during that Journey you get to enjoy and get to learn new things and try out new different things so first year I built the ads team so the idea was we made $0 in revenue and we wanted to scale that to a billion dollar in 365 days so help do that and during this time new ideas were coming around so Instagram shopping was a new idea that we wanted to try out and the way it was that people were hacking our system hacking the product on Instagram to actually do things that was not designed for which was to sell and buy from other people so all this time Kevin and Mike were the Steady Hand of the ship if you may and I think working with founder is an amazing experience that I highly encourage people get but in case of

Kevin and Mike there a few things that I want to share with you in the audience number one Kevin is a very systems thinker kind of guy you know he's not a Founder who just shoots from the hip you know and just hopes that things work out you know and that's a trend that I've seen in many Founders like Kevin Cam and Brian shesky they're very thoughtful leaders in fact at Airbnb we'll come back to it later but at Airbnb AB testing was a bad word I'll tell you why that similar things were around Instagram but you if as an engineer you just couldn't launch any and every feature that you had an idea around you need to have a cohesive strategy thinking on why this matters for your users and why should you do this cuz there could be 100 things you should be doing why this one and that's I think the biggest superpower of Kevin syrum is systems thinking this other second superpower is distillation you know I believe every problem at the end of the day can be distilled down to effective communication man you know you might have a great vision as a founder but if you can't do you can't communicate that ain't nobody joining your company ain't nobody investing in your company right and system superpower was the ability to distill down complex things in simple to understand terms and the litus test was if it's too complex to explain if it's too complicated to explain you haven't thought through enough you know and I always tell people you know I can tell if youve thought through what a problem enough or Not by the way you describe it explain it and if you are yourself complicating it you hav't T enough and that was Kevin srum superpower my ker on the other hand was very different my ker super power was like a laser focus on execution you know he was a guy who said a million ideas doesn't matter if you can't execute them right so it was an incredible pairing between sister and Mike where they could compliment each other one thinking about what to do how to do it and the other one figuring out to make happen and back then Instagram was like

a kind of like a very simple very beautiful product and they have a prin called do the simple thing first do you have any like personal experience with that like you know yeah absolutely I mean a couple of product principles over there one was do fewer things exceptionally well and the other one was do simple things first you know and if you think about all of these things there's something to be said about how Instagram became what it became the number one experience I'll tell you is you know in every company in every role you will find more ideas to follow than you will have resources and often times I see people chasing the next shiny idea the next shiny thing right and they end up doing way too much than they can so the thinking over there was you want to be world class in a few things then average in a 100 things and that was a decision-making framework which is okay should we do these 10 things right or should we just do these two things and become a world class added right the other thing I want to share with your audience is the power of intuition that had and the power of not just AB testing everything but rather AB testing as a means to get to it so I'll give your audience an example um or maybe two one is Instagram stories you know Instagram stories when it launched I mean imagine this you know when it launch at that time you could not add any photo or video from your camera rle you had to really live record that stuff right and that was a intentional decision imagine you're Kevin data science is coming to you and saying look I've looked at all the f in the war 99% of the content is not real time on their phone people have recorded videos from a month ago 2 weeks ago one week of when they were celebrating their birthday so we got to allow those people right otherwise you not going to have content us a research coming to you and saying look I talked to 99 people and I talk to 100 people and 99 of them said they would love to post an Instagram story from a month ago right but that's not what Kevin did was he said look our vision is to make Instagram Story the only place to go to see what's happening right now with your friends and community and if you allow people to post something that happened a month ago that vision is no longer achieved so we wanted to build the most live the most recent TV channel if you may using an analogy you know the most important broadcast channel so

this is an example of how Instagram and some of the greatest Founders including chesy and I can give you another story about chesy about the same thing operate with a strong vision and intuition about what the product should be and then figure out the ab test needed to prove that hypothesis versus looking at data deducing from user research deducing from data science and just say okay this is the most logical thing to do because this is the deductive analysis we have done and hence we're going to do that right so there's a difference in these two approaches yeah the difference between having a vision and like just not having a vision I guess yeah big difference right and also like that having the gut and intuition to stick with the vision right because in the face of data all the data is telling you no you should go left you still go right and you're doing that because as a Founder you have that ability and the intuition and the gut because you have immersed yourself in the product but also you have the permission to do those kinds of things you know sometimes operators struggle with that yep makes sense let's save the your a experience for later I would love to talk a little bit about uh your most recent experience at coinbase working Brian Armstrong what was he like you know what kind of leader was he like yeah I think chesy and arong were completely different leaders it's so funny you know these are incredibly successful founders right but they all took different approaches they all brought different superpowers to the table and this is a key message for anybody who's trying to be a Founder don't try to be yet like another founder try to be who you are try to bring your superpowers to the table now I'll tell you chesy and Armstrong could not be diametrically opposite on certain dimensions and could not be similar in certain dimensions for many of those who

don't know Armstrong was actually an engineer at Airbnb and he left Airbnb to start coinbase and he comes from a very analytical from a very analytically creative mindset chesy comes from a very creative mindset you know I'm using these terms Loosely and I'll explain to your audience what I mean by that Armstrong superpower are as follows he is a hustler even as a CEO he can do things what I mean by that you he's not this guy who doesn't know how to roll up his sleeves and get done you know he's not this guy who only manages a process and hopes that if they follow the right process the right Innovation will happen right that's a myth in many p mindset is that if somehow I can borrow the same spec template from Amazon somehow I can follow the same clan band process that Airbnb does if somehow I can do the same design process that Airbnb does or apple does I'll somehow magically have the right product that's not true it is the intuition the Judgment the gut and the data that these Founders use to come up with those things that matter the most so number one is he can roll up his sleeves and get done very few CEOs can do that number two he is highly Det detail oriented so that to this extent that he does he breaks down problems in very minute details so you can then act on it you know an example of this would be let's say there's a complex problem called climbing Mount Everest right I me it's very hard to imagine how you're going to climb Mount Everest but if you can break it down into subsequent pieces okay step one is to get to base camp what do I need to get there right how can I survive and train to get there that level of thinking is a superpower of Armstrong and last but not the least he's a leader who leads with trust TR a lot of Founders suffer from not trusting their own lieutenants that they have hired there's this backseat driving I call it you know the founders hired the driver you know the CPO the CTO the COO whatever it is but on the back seat they're sitting and say okay make a left turn make a right turn you know they're doing backseat driving Armstrong is not like that Armstrong hires really TR talented people and has a framework around which how he empowers them and that framework is very powerful which is for every decision we would never have a committee he hat the word committee decision by committee is the worst kind of thing you can do so what we would do at coin basis every decision would have a single decision maker and that decision Maker's job is to listen to all the diverse inputs all the diverse things that you can proberly uh hear from legal Finance marketing engineering design whatever that might be but at the end of the day it's the decide it's that dr's responsibility to make the right decision you know in that thing this is very unheard of in many companies I worked at Facebook and other companies as well while everybody wants to get to this model to the extent that coinbase is implemented is phenomenal right and there's no passive aggressiveness Peter you know let's say I go to the meeting I pitch my point to Peter and Peter is a drri he said thank you sanin for the perspective but I still going to do this and here's why I don't leave the meeting saying and you Peter you are the worst leader ever you know and I don't go to my team and say yeah dude just do the bare minimum because this is Peter's idea I don't believe in it right there is no such thing at coin with in fact pocket V is a fightable offense and creating that culture creating that leadership structure is one of the superpowers that Brian uh did that's amazing yeah because often when deciding by Comedia you to make a bunch of compromises and starts watering down the product you know this exactly and decision by committee as you know they result in a culture this is why I was talking in the last session Peter about feedback sometimes is not a blessing and what typically happens is you know in a committee like format where nobody knows who's the right decision maker you anytime I hear okay who's making this decision oh the VP of this product and together are making that no no no that cannot happen that just doesn't happen that's a committee and what you're going to see is in those scenarios the decision gets watered down because you're trying to optimize for the least common thing that will not annoy anybody else right so you start by saying this is my great vision but Anno this guy or this discipline or this thing right cuz they don't align with that so you keep watering it down until everybody can agree yeah I'm comfortable with that and that thing that everybody agrees you ship it the customer say what the heck is this you know I never asked for it yeah exactly it might yeah it might get really good pure feedback might be well liked but then your problem might be crap you know yeah it it'll be crap right so at coinbase and would try to empower the decision maker so they can go to building the right thing and the process make sure the culture is such that nobody feels annoyed everybody respects that decision everybody gets behind that decision and that cultural element is really important Peter because in many companies you will see passive aggressiveness set up sets in and people start to jeopardize each other's work yeah so let's talk about Airbnb I think

you mentioned that Airbnb is like you're one of your favorite experiences and you also help Brian basically build the PM function there maybe let let's talk about Brian at a high level what kind of lead leader is is Brian chy like yeah I mean just for the context when I got there I was working on Airbnb plus and then a few months in Jo bot was employee number 10 I believe at Airbnb was taking a backseat he ran the product management discipline and he said he selected me to take the batan from him to own the functional leadership role for all of product management so we had only 40 PMS we grew 200 plus p. m. and during this time I got a firsthand experience of working with Brian so there lots of things about Brian that are very amazing and very inspiring one he is wired in a way to obsess over the creative aspects of a journey much more than anything else what do I mean by that um his obsession is on what does a customer need and he will spend the entire meeting talking about that right what are the customers problem what are the things you need to build and then later on we can talk about finances headcount we can talk about the constraints Etc so his superpower is to imagine and think in an unconstrained way many PMS by the way suffer from this unconstrained thinking doesn't exist in many cultures and P let me give you a put perfect example if you ever look at any company and the PM comes and pitches you a new product idea there's one slide that say here's my vision this one SL right and everything else is here's my MVP everything starts with an MVP that's probably the worst concept to have been ever introduced in Silicon Valley in my opinion you know I think it has been abused so let me give you how Brian will operate un constraint thinking means you forget about the constraints of Technology resources time and first design and ideal experience for the customer right and it requires a different wiring period in the is that you're not constrained oh do we have this technology today right I'll give you a very perfect example that'll illustrate to your audience what we're trying to do at Airbnb let's say You're Building Airbnb lounges this is a real example by the way I ran a small uh test for this as well at Airbnb you book an Airbnb it checks it at 3:00 p. m. right but you flighted at 6:00 a. m. what do you do from 6:00 a. m. to 3:00 p. m. well here is Airbnb Lounge you can hang out over there there's going to be internet coffee you can check in your luggage at 3:00 you can get to your Airbnb so a traditional PM how would they approach this problem right they'll say let's build the MVP of a lounge what are they going to do they're going to find a small space wherever they can they're going to put whatever coffee Wi-Fi they can whatever chairs they can and see if there is a d there or not right at every s different so look we don't yet know how to scale uh these lounges around the world but we can figure it out how to build the best Lounge in San Francisco so what we're going to do we're going to go rent out the place right we're going to put the best high speet internet coffee in there we're going to put the best chair in there that we can right and test out that if you build something amazing will people come over there the thesis is if you send it to the MVP Lounge it's crappy ain't nobody coming back over there only going to get crappy feedback right but you can design an experience of one very beautifully very idealistically without constraints right cuz you don't need a lot of budget for that time for that and then we send customers over there and then we ask them what parts did you like not like the things that they did not like and resonate we cut them from scaling vers and that's how we arrive at the MVP that we need to do but the things that they love we don't compromise on that right if you love this thing I'm going to have to figure out how to scale that thing to the next level as I replicate over that so this level of thinking requires very different analytic and creative skills and as an example of this p in most companies here's most people will do right okay I'm going to build a lounge then I'm going to quantify if there's no internet what is the return rate of customer then I'm going to add Internet they want to test to see if I add coffee what is the return rate for customer so they're going to incrementally prove this value right that's how they think about it at airb you're not going to test ab test two lounges and send them with one with internet one without one with coffee one without to see how I can quantify that stuff you're going to quantify them at an aggregate level right got it this aggregate is amazing so it's almost like build a ideal end state for like even one customer than a shitty experience for like 100 customers exactly and that's what Brian and YC also say it's better to have 100 customers love you than a million customers sort of kind of okay like you right and that thinking is Brian's superpower it requires a different training of your brain to think UNC

constrainedly you know and like just point in practice I think air babbe has this like customer Journey Maps or like you know there's like can talk a little more about like how you guys actually start thinking about these products yeah so I think it all started back in the day when Brian read Brian is inspired by uh Walt Disney you know and he mirrors a lot of the things in software as if he's building movies and creative things you know so in a movie you first write a script and that script has like a story line and you know there's like there's a concept called Snow White at at Airbnb which is basically how the story Snow White was drawn and written so Brian H an illustrator from Disney and he said I'm going to do a story line for how a customer's experience should look like at Airbnb that was the Genesis of that thinking which is instead of going into a spec let's draw out the Journey of the customer experiences that they have and that thing is in Airbnb offices as well but how it manifests today is slightly different but also the same where this is the biggest difference that I see in many companies versus Airbnb and apple that marketing and product management are cohesively embedded together so what typically happens is at the big every does two releases in a year and the reason they do that is they work backwards from a narrative that they want the customer to experience rather than forward from the MVPs that 16 different teams can ship right so typically this is what happened right the three or four different teams are shipping some parts of it and the user journey is broken let's say sign up and it requires five different teams to work together one team says I can do this much the other team say other team says I can do this much the entire user Journey looks crappy goes like this right but in that in case of airbm what we will do is we'll first design the user experience Journey the promises that they want to F and then we're going to challenge the teams to rise up to that narrative as opposed to saying oh you can do this much let me write a freaking marketing narrative to tell the customer about it it's pretty backward right so in most companies but in airb that's not the case so at the beginning of that year we will sit down and say okay next June we want the customer to experience and feel the following things from Airbnb if when I book and travel at Airbnb I feel extremely safe if something goes wrong I'm able to actually report that stuff very easily and protect myself as an example right and then every team would be challenged to say look guys you got this much time is immovable right the time is the same time but now your job is to rise up to the occasion and build the most amazing experience that you can together as teams to deliver this narrative to the customer it's a fundamentally different way of doing this and by the way it's inspired part by Hardware companies product development life cycle and part by movies and how movies are built and part by software development life cycles got it do you think does this apply to also how the PMS are evaluated because like you have to make the whole journey work as opposed to just like your product yeah PM evaluation so when I got there PM evaluation was pretty up and down ini year it was not very consistent we were not sure if the PM discipline so is there so my one of my job was to find the soul of the PM discipline how we going to evaluate them who we going to hire Etc and one of the things we emphasized a lot on was this idea of Sol and the obsession about on the PM's part to think about the customer and how much time they're spending devoting to designing that experience thinking holistically thinking across team boundaries thinking about end to end experiences and I think the key element I would say over here is that when PMS today at most companies have to make a choice they end up invariably making a choice towards an inward shenanigan inward operation inward process inward meeting then it is about customer Obsession because time is fixed right everybody has to prioritize and at coin at Airbnb the thesis was if you have to make a choice make it towards the customer side go out there and spend more time thinking about them rather than missing a standup it's okay you know if the cond process is not happening it's okay you know those pieces are okay to message I'll tell your audience one thing actually two things every company I've worked at followed different processes of managing the internal every company managed different right in fact there was a time at Instagram and Facebook P never wrote prds there was no prds it was never written right so my point is if you believe your company's success is directly correlated to the processes you're following you're making a big mistake and let me give you an analogy for your audience to understand that I'm going to give you Peter the same utensils the same recipe that wal G Puck follows and I promise you the food you will cook will still be shittier than his because those things don't matter it doesn't matter you don't have to follow the Amazon process Airbnb process right those things are not that important what is important is are you solving the right problem for the right customer at the right time in the journey when they're experiencing those things that is the most important problem to and that Obsession of PMs and designers and Engineers should do that is one differentiates companies like Airbnb Apple from some of the other companies yeah I think it's hard right because uh

like it's like you know it's about what the company incentivizes like when I worked at Facebook maybe it's not the same anymore but when I worked at Facebook it was all about growing the numbers like every quarter you got grow on numbers right and that doesn't actually directly tie to solving customer problems sometimes right absolutely it doesn't and also there's very little focus on Craft you know PMS need everybody needs to understand there is a thing called craft you know and it is important to for you to understand people tell me a lot of times you know we will only do things if we can measure the impact of yes but you don't have to measure the impact of it for every little step you build measure the impact when the Taj Mahal is constructed don't measure the impact when Min is constructed right I mean you can measure cohesively those things but you don't have to measure every aspect of it to do that because that will kill the craft around there so incentives are really important and that's why when I advise Founders when I chat with them I always remind them to set the right incentives because right incentives lead to right behaviors at people right so I'm going to give you two extreme examples again I'm using extreme because it's easy to understand the extremes CU you can live within the gray area within those extremes extreme number one is obsession over growth metrics we need to have one norstar metric guy so we can all roll towards that I want to tell your audience one NSTAR metric is a idea you know one NSTAR metric results in just obsession over micro optimizations and it results in building a company that is not very holistic for the customer's perspective so very growth oriented numbers oriented companies you will notice invariably they don't have the craft element right incentive to pause and understand if this is the right thing for the customer right they are obsessed about meeting some sort of a Metro on the other side there lots of companies that i' I've seen and advice where the obsession is about the technology that you're Building look at how cool the technology is and then they figured out what use case does a solve for the custom right and there's also problems in those companies but there's so much emphasis on making the code and making the engineering so amazing there's value there is value to making those things amazing to a point beyond that point is diminishing returns right and until that point you absolutely invest in your engineering infrastructure but I'm here to tell everybody over there when I joined coinbase we had to rewrite the that we wrote five six years ago because nothing can scale and nothing can be that beautiful to get there right so what you do is you build what you can hand with what you have at that point in time to validate and figure out do you getting are you getting customers are you retaining them or not Etc right are you build the right product and then you keep changing that technology over time so these are two extremes that people have to watch out for when they're setting the incentive structure too much gold go or incentive structure which is growth at any cost single note St metric everybody R the same direction and forgetting about anything else as if a product is UN dimensional thing you know no human neither are products and the other side engineering is so important that you're just spending so much time doing that you have forgotten what problems it is solving in the customer's life yeah if you want to obsess on one thing you make it the customer I think you know that's kind of like the basics right yeah so like you're by yeah go ahead I think a lot of like product people and folks in these companies feel the same way right they just want to talk to customers and like build stuff and like have high quality craft but I think there is uh like a lot of internal politics and Optics in some of these companies so what's your advice for someone who actually cares about stuff but still needs to kind of navigate some of this uh internal Shenanigans as you call it yeah I me I'll break it this down into two buckets one is there is hope bucket and one there is there no hope so get the F out of there like just leave that job and leave over because you don't want to be the mod who dies and change trying to change the and just be clear like I said there's no one way of building companies and Products right so that company that you are in that is not caring for the these kind of things it's okay you know for them to do the way that they are doing it because there's no one way of doing things but this way that we're describing if you're passionate about that you have to drive those outcomes with your company and the culture on so let me give a couple of examples you as a PM first and foremost have to also

recognize whether you value craft whether you value building holistic experiences as well so it is actually true Peter what you said which is most people want to spend time with customer but I would also argue most people do not have the skill set or the eye or the you know the ability to do well in that I think it's important to recognize that what is your growth mind what is your mindset you know some people are truly more analytical than the other side right so it's okay you just have to understand where your weaknesses are where your Pros are not everybody can be Picasso it's okay Brian chesy it's okay but the question is where do you fall in that spectrum and just recognizing that you this is important for you to do that and from there starts the journey of resetting the culture three or four problems emerge a lot when I talk to companies and advise them in these kinds of things one is what you mentioned you know there's a lot of internal sh like Optics around there you know so I'm here to tell you that there is no company where there is no such politics you know or Optical Optics management even at Facebook Google Etc you have to manage some of those things and so what I'm trying to say to your audience is when you encounter those kind of environment it's your job to go out there and have a Frank conversation with the leadership your manager Etc to figure out hey are our incentives align give them examples of why this matters so you're not playing the Optics game cuz otherwise you get caught up in doing the Optics what is an Optics CM example how is my product review if everybody liked it I must I'll get promoted well nobody cares if your product riew is great or not because the product that you are shipping may or may not be good right what is really matters is the product that you're shipping doesn't matter if your product review was amazing one thing I look for is if I ever go in a product review and everybody unanimously agrees I send the PM back and say you didn't think for hard enough man you didn't push the envelope hard enough if everything makes sense to everybody in that room that was the most diluted idea we just discussed you know so you got to go back and think about where you're going to push the envelope a little bit number two I think there's a lot of things you have to do in companies to get promoted there are unspoken rules you know every company has this Matrix right to go from ic3 to four to 5 to six you got to demonstrate the following things right and I think sometimes people obsess say too much about that I had a PM one time in my organization who came with me with an Excel spe she said look here are the attributes and these are green for me these are red for me I said dude nobody looks at that in promotion cycle that's not how they evaluate right these are guidelines not rules right so there are unspoken rules that you have to understand in every culture absolutely and they vary right in some companies it is about great cross functional collaboration right what your peer say matters a lot more than what is in that thing right in some companies it truly matters what impact you delivered there are companies in this world where impact is very important right and what impact your product had was really important for them to deliver so you get promoted over there and the last thing I'll say is as you cross a director level B let's say you become a director any company Facebook Google whatever pick your favorite company you have to also understand the rules of games have changed for you as well so I always tell

people hard skills will get you to maximum GPM director you know but nobody ever became a VP because they wrote a beautiful product spec PRD they had a great meeting nobody ever got to them you know the soft skills needed to get there become really pronounced and you need to now start to develop those soft skill so what are some examples of this can your team at the top trust you to get done consistently every time you have to earn trust of those people you know these are your executive team this is your CPO CTO whatever those people are right two do you know how to manage your manager so he can do the right things for you know people think my manager is to manage me no you also have to manage your manager so he can he or she can manage you better right these are the kinds of things that people don't spend time on they would rather take a course to understand Canan than to understand personal skills on how to develop those things that allow you to do that yeah because I think at the senior levels you have to often work across Orcs or do something else to kind of okay done right it's not yeah game is completely different Let Me Tell at the top level Peter everybody is good at strategy everybody's good at writing spec everybody's good at effective communica those things are given you don't even get to cross that line if you're not good at those things those are like the Baseline things you know what I mean yeah like at that level right was like the Baseline thing I mean when you're playing in the high school football yeah skills matter a little bit here and there when you get to the top League at the top everybody has good skills man they're the best defender they're the best this and that right and there's something more and you got to start thinking about that something more because the game is different the rules of that game are very different yeah I do think it matters in picking the right company and culture to thriving because like I think I like going back to the pr review example right like I think some companies are like if you have a PR review where everyone was n behind their heads that you did a good job right and then other companies like you have a debate like if you just what's yeah what's Point even have a part if it just Noss their heads that's right and you have to look for that right company you know I talk I spent a lot of my time you know as you know people from Facebook Google Airbnb coin all reach out to me when they're looking for the next job say I've got these two offers which one do I prioritize right and I ask them both of them are great if you don't have any preferences right you got to sit down and figure out where do you thrive what are the superpowers of you where you will Thrive you know and different people have different superpowers right so it's really important to pick the right company that amplifies your superpowers rather than amplifies your weaknesses and you get stuck in that rat hole so to say trying to write that corporate letter got it

and just to close on this topic like you know when you were VP coin baser you know your previous jobs like what kind of PMS really stood out to you is it people who like can get done or people who like set up means with you good question so to me I have found people who can operate at the intersection of the yin and yang at the same time let me explain this concept to you I want people who are peacefully Restless can operate in that humbly egotistical you know meaning they are in that zone where they can manage to opposite things at the same time I'll give you an example no founder would ever be successful in changing the world and building crypto or airb like thing if they didn't have a little bit of ego to say look it hasn't been done before me but I believe I can do it they have this belief hasn't people thousands of people come to them and say you are wrong Peter but somehow inside of you they have this overconfidence that no I can do it even though 7 billion people around the world haven't been able to do it and many before we were not able to do it but at the same time that same founder turns around goes to a meeting looks at an expert and say man I don't know how to do this you're an expert I'm here to listen I'm humble enough to recognize that I'm not good at this right so I want to be the fast Le so what I've learned is amazing PMS are those amazing leaders let's call it leader cuz engineering is leadership and other things are leadership as well amazing product leaders and PMs are those who can operate at the intersection of these opposite forces so what are those opposite forces strategically big thinkers unconstrained thinkers go to the next meeting and get in the details and make happen right when a PM comes to me and said I'm very good at strategy you know but I need some a project manager to make my happen I'm like dude you don't know how to be great right I mean you got to be able to operate in those things I don't need PMS all my PMS cannot be good at strategy alone who's going to get done at the same time I don't need everybody to be good at sh get done so much so that they don't know how to do strategy and big picture thinking and constraint thinking right so I am looking for those people who can operate at these opposit with the right balance and can turn up and turn down the things that is needed to be Thal now to be clear when you start in your career period it's almost impossible to be good at this and you have to learn through your career to get good at this yeah you almost have to build this core competencies and then like you said turn it up and turn it down depending on the situ turn on yeah right turn up turn on like I'll give you one example communication is the job right Andrew boswood wrote a amazing blog who says communication is the job and I fundamentally believe in that if communication is the job are you able to turn up and down the details in your conversation when you're interacting with the CEO versus the IC engineer that requires turning up and down your skill set of communication in different amplitudes right when you're talking to the C you got 30 seconds maybe at best when you're talking to an engineer they want to know the details of what's happens when user clicks here and does something else can you operate on that and by the way I do not buy there are some leaders on there are some influencers on LinkedIn I won't name names who always say you're either this type or you're this type right there many post around that if you're a Storyteller you hate details that's not true right if you're a Visionary you can't be in the details I've seen Brian chesy Brian Armstrong Kevin C some of the greatest leaders who can be extremely Visionary and can get into the details as best as anybody else can be able to do you do you think there's like a natural area that you like people just generally like some people like just like to execute and some people just like to think the big picture like but you have to yeah I mean balance that skill right is what we saying yeah that's how you start most of the time by the way you know in every profession you generally start with certain things that you spike at and you're like okay I'm really good at execution I'm not good at Asal you can say yes when you're graduating from college when you like five years of experience maybe you're right but the game at the top is very different right you might have seen Lebron dunk in the front and 30 seconds later came all the way to the back and defend the dunk of the opposite team very really well he oh man I can't defend I'm just going to stand right here and not do anything right at that level of performance you need to be able to do multiple things right so my point is you're absolutely right you start there right and they're you're generally good at one or two things you know and then you're developing those skills right nobody's born from their mother's womb and Mak oh I'm a great Storyteller I'm a great strategist and I'm a great executor Nobody Does that right you got to develop these skills over time so my point is if you want to get to a director go ahead and spike in a few things you'll be fine but if you want to get to the CPO level if you want to be an executive building a company you're going to have to spike in multiple things that doesn't mean that as a Founder you don't want to hire a CFO of course you right but that's a different ball game you're playing at that point in time but as a leader if you can't talk let's say you're a Founder like chesky in one meeting he can talk marketing narrative in the next one he can talk product Vision in the third prod design and then the fourth one he can sit down with Engineers so what does it take to build this what are the challenges let's figure out how to scale it yeah that is a great leader that is the epitope of what senior leadership is all about got it that's really good takeway yeah so don't try to like profile yourself into like a certain area you just have to be the goat you have to be uh competing everything they yeah right and again it's not easy just to be clear I want to make sure your audience understand you don't start that way but the goal is to become that way over years of experience learning failures coaching mentorship to get there awesome man I mean do you have any uh other closing words of advice for folks yeah I mean I think a few things and you can decide how to use them one is I think this yin and yang concept is a personal favorite of mine I tell people to be able to hold opposite CA in their head and be able to operate in the middle of it I think I highly encourage everybody to do that the other thing I want audience to understand is somehow they believe a lot of people believe that if somebody is a CPO CEO CTO somehow they figured out a Playbook there's a five steps to Nirvana Playbook there isn't that's the secret there isn't a fstep to Nirvana secret book that all the ctus in the world followed all the CPUs in the world for all the CEOs in the world there isn't one thing like that so the biggest mindset shift I want everybody in Silicon Valley PM leadership engineering whatever design wants to happen is that they have to figure out that they cannot go and ask give me the fstep plan to alcohol reduction or whatever that is right there is just none right they got to figure out so how do you survive in that world look I'm here I'm going to teach you what many people will teach you that if you mix this spices in a certain way if you fry the food this is the flavor that comes out but then you got take those spices and flavors and cook the food that you want to cook to to sell and that is the genius skill set that everybody should focus on isn't to go and ask how did you do it give me the fstep plan is to say what ingredients did you have what ingredients did this C have what ingredient did this person have and how can I mix them all and from my superpowers perspective from my constraints and resources perspective from where I am perspective to create something new because there isn't one step path for any of those things makes sense yeah can just copy some framework it doesn't work it's very doesn't work if I had a Bitcoin for every time someone Bitcoin was $100 if everybody asked me give me a framework give me a toolkit give me I'll be a billionaire by now dude not nothing like that and I want everybody to understand that yeah I think that's what I mean a lot of the creators people are selling online right which is kind of bad way yeah it's literally there right I tell people and this so many people ask me this as well so what is a secret to your success like what is that magic trick right I tell them 80% luck 20% skills so now

question is Imagine Peter if I show up at a seminar where they're paying me a million dollars to speak and I said dude 80% of my successful was luck I'm like why am I listening to this guy there's nothing I can learn from it right so many people don't talk like that but let me tell you this in order to become have a great career you have to be lucky you absolutely have to be that so the next question is how do you get lucky and that is what I want to focus on for me as an example I transplanted myself over from India to Silicon Valley and I became lucky I found I put myself intentionally in the middle of action in a field that I was passionate about and all of a sudden luck started hitting me I wasn't searching for right so my point is every morning when you wake up think about in this situation that you're in how can you get lucky right what does that mean how can you optimize the surface area of favorable probabil in your favor to become the goal that you have to get to that's what you're doing right and part of this is not thinking about the worst case many people think about the worst Cas I did a video on my social Channel that I said always imagine the best case scenario you know when I was joining Airbnb uh the last day that I resigned my boss said to me you're making the biggest mistake of your life by leaving Facebook and Instagram to go to this company that sells spare bedrooms you know that was what Airbnb was at that time right and again not to follow them nobody thought Airbnb could be big right nobody thought it could be big but when you're making those kinds of decisions don't come up with an Excel spreadsheet that has two roles role number one if I stay at Facebook Google Amazon here's my compensation if I and here's my career trajectory I do if I go to Airbnb startup Etc here's my compensation what do I do you get paralyzed with that right because you're factoring in unknown probabilities instead act behave operate as if you're going to have the best outcome possible not the worst outcome possible but the best outcome possible and outcome that is Beyond Your Wildest imagination and act behave operate every single day as if that's happening don't prepare for failure prepare for success and you will see how you operate how you show up at work what you do is very different so that's life advice not product management advice that's very good advice man yeah I think that's part why I'm like somewhat active online because like you mean a lot of great people like yourself that I probably wouldn't have met I just like did what I did it was awesome chatting with you and your community hopefully they find in valuable