This Framework Will Change How You Think about Your Career | Shishir Mehrotra (CEO Coda)

he says sure I just I think I think you're wrong about this and I said why what am I wrong about and he said I think you've misunderstood the problem so the problem actually has nothing to do with the product or the buying experience or anything the problem is the name the problem is that the name of the product and I said what does that mean and he says but you call skippable ADS but like whose value proposition is skippable ADS it's a value proposition to the end user but who pays for advertising The Advertiser pays for advertising why would an Advertiser want their ad to be skipped it's like reinforcing all the worst nightmares about what's happening to their ads is that people aren't paying any attention to them and it's just a really bad way to frame in the problem so he said I think I'm not going to focus on the engineering getting the product ship or so on I'm just going to focus on the name and my first reaction was this is what I get for putting a salesperson into product this is you know this was a uh clearly not going to work out and it turned out he was totally right so they rename the product to True view so the value proposition is you only pay for True views from the sales team perspective this went from being the product that the sales team didn't ever want to talk about to the number one most requested topic for the sales conference the following year the product went from Z to a billion dollars in about 18 months it was one of like fastest growing things we ever did if you skip the ad then obviously the viewer benefits but it turned out the advertiser benefits too because the advertiser gets this much more engaged user who chose to continue to watch this video all right so my guest today is

shashir the co-founder and CEO of Koda and former Chief product officer of YouTube shashir is writing a new book called rituals of great teams that I'm really excited to dive into welcome shash here thanks for having Peter yeah

so one of my favorite Frameworks from you is the pshu framework or you call it maybe the PC framework I don't know what you call it but it's such an amazing framework for thinking about your career I share with everyone that I talk to so maybe you can just quickly briefly recap the framework again for us yeah so the acronym is p problem solution how execution and I have I've tried many times over the years to come up with a better acronym that is you know just a word or something that's easy to pronounce and I've never been able to come up with one so we just call it the push framework and for people who are old enough to remember DJ Jazzy Jeff and the fresh prints it's the same sound that they use when they introduce themselves to each other was push nice so I can explain the concept and the you know this came out of a set of discussions when I was still at Google in 2011 or so Larry took over Larry Page took over a CEO and he got rid of the functional organization structure and we had all these business units then and YouTube became a business unit so on but one of the things that caused was um some conflict around what do we how do we decide who is a good product manager engineer so on and keep it consistent across teams so I got particularly involved in the team working on product management but actually turns out this framework has very little to do with product management and at the time the main way we judged product managers was on scope so there was some function of how broad an area you covered and so you know I cover the a feature or a group of features or 10 Engineers versus 100 Engineers or you know $10 million of Revenue versus a billion dollars of Revenue or whatever might be and that just turned out to be a really poor way to judge product managers there are a

few problems with it you know first off it naturally led to divisions with fragmentation so like the Google search team hated it because Google search was like one big product and the ads team the Google ads team loved it because it was lots and lots of little products and ads it also felt a little bit like an input not an output is you know you ask people hey this person should get promoted look how much scope they cover and You' say well but actually they have that scope because their manager gave them that scope it really isn't it isn't you know it's a little bit of an indicator but they should have to do something with that scope for it to be to rewarded and the biggest problem with it was that scope was sort of LED people away from Risky projects because the riskier projects we some of our best people were working on things we didn't know yet is this going to be a feature or going to be some giant thing we didn't really know um and so we had a lot of discussion and we ended up coming up with this framework uh that like I said has uh kind of a poor acronym but it's stuck it's okay so psh so I'll explain how it works and then give you some observations about it so let's imagine you're a junior product manager then the way we like to describe it is we hand you a problem solution we hand you the how and your job is just to execute so it might be we say talk to this person write this document hold this meeting do this research whatever it might be and you just have to execute on that plan at some point advance in your career we hand you the problem we hand you the solution you figure out the how and so this how the team should run and how the mstone should be set and how the Cadence should work so on at some point we hand you the problem and you have to come up with the solution and figure out how to solve that problem and at the top of this pyramid we hand you the space and you have to come up with the problems and so I might say hey I think the problem here is activation and you come back and say oh no actually I figured out the problem is retention or the problem actually nothing to do with those things it's engineering quality or the problem is our marketing or whatever it might be and the idea is that this sequencing is a more effective way of judging people sort of independent to scope and so there was this really interesting exercise that you know we came up with this there were eight product leads that Google at the time and one of them went off and calibrated their team her name was Jesse she calibrated her team on both these axis so an axis of scope and an axis of this psh and what emerged was this really interesting S curve so it turned out that early in people's careers when they had they were mostly on that e part the execution part of psh they mostly grew by increasing scope so we would hand them instructions and they would do it on sort of bigger and bigger features or bigger and bigger areas so on later in career seemed the same we hit this P part and you're handed spaces and you know now we hand you bigger and bigger products or sets of products or so on but in the middle the curve sort of turned the other way and she put a big circle around this and said this is the trough of disillusionment and so why is it she said well it's where from the employees perspective it kind of feels like you change the rules on them like up till now you kind of instructed them that you know just bigger and bigger scope that was the goal but all of a sudden that didn't matter as much it was some other axis that was harder to explain and then from the perspective of the evaluator from the manager or the calibration committee all of a sudden your rubric has changed because two people with the exact same scope you know may not really differ on the scope but they differ dramatically in how they do the job and that frame sort of changed how we thought about product now it turns out this has actually nothing to do with product so I came back

started applying the same thing for my engineering team and you know if you want to know who the best engineer on the team is you'll say oh the engineer who can see around the corners the best indicator of the really amazing engineer or if you ask the marketers or the designers kind of very similar and the one that was the most challenging was sales because in sales the general Viewpoint is that sales is already quantitative you don't need any of this any of these rubrics you just look for whoever beat their quota by the most or brought in the most Revenue but then you go ask the team and you say oh you know so and so she must be the best because you know she's at 400% of her quota and her team would Snicker and say n not really she got lucky got the right customer got the right moment so on i' say okay so great so who's the best person and then they the way they would describe it is well you know so and so she's definitely the best salesperson you know and I'd say why and they said well because she can handle anything she can take a product that works and a product that doesn't work a category that's growing a category that's shrinking you know a region that's working a region that's not working a great team a not so great team and she'll just figure out the right problems identify the right Solutions figure out how to implement those Solutions and execute and deliver all those results and so since then I've come to this framework psh as not only a great way to judge product talent but also as a way to judge people employees generally so I kind of use the same rubric everywhere it's kind of like going up the PS she is kind of like dealing with more ambiguous problems and having the autonomy to drive it yourself without looking for a lot of help is that kind accurate yeah I mean we always struggled with what name to put on that axis it's like PSA what's the name and you know there were lots of different labels put on it probably the one that stuck the most was called leadership which I don't really love because I think it like lots of implications in leadership I often called it the training wheels access so is what is the most ambiguous uh framing you can give someone without having to give them training wheels on exactly what to do next and the and I think that was kind of a good way to think about it another is certainly true of product people but it's kind of true of all roles is at the end of the day our jobs are to create I me eventually our job is to create results but on that path it's generally to create what I call Clarity out of ambiguity they we're all handed situations where the Signal's not perfect the data is not perfect the me is not perfect what whatever it might be and our jobs is to take ambiguity and turn it into Clarity and so in some ways the psh access is a measure of how effective is someone at turning ambiguity into Clarity so let's talk about like how we put into practice right so like let's put some hypothetical situation maybe you have some real examples like let's say you're a prod leader you've being assigned to specific area and you're doing a good job at it but you actually don't think this is the most important area you should be working on for the company so how do you talk to your manager your management chain like hey actually we should be working on this instead like H do you have an example of this or yeah I so there's one that comes to it's not perfectly matching the way you frame the question but I think it's a good example so the example that came to mind is I

had a product manager named Lane Shackleton he's actually now the head of product here at Kodak but at the time he worked in sales at YouTube and and he came to me one day and he said hey I really want to be uh a product manager and the at the time we had this kind of crazy rule that you couldn't be a product manager at Google unless you had a computer science degree yep and it was just something that Larry and Sergey felt really strongly about and so I told him this is really hard I don't really know what to do because I can't really get around this Rule and he said come on that's silly I write code in my free time I'm just as technical as any anybody else ask any of the PMs and he said let me prove it and I said okay I'll let you prove it but I need you to do it on a project that you know I pick and I need you to oh the other I said is you need to do it in your 20% time but not like 20 80% time but like in 100 120% time like you can't I can't have your boss mad at me about the job you're doing he said oh yeah no problem that's fine and he said so what's the project and I said I want you to go work on skippable ads so maybe it's like sort of broader context when I got the way I got to YouTube was sort of this interesting path of I had written this paper about what's broken with video advertising and to be honest I knew nothing about video another the time but I had this idea that if you put a skip button on ads then it would totally change the incentives of that advertising system and it just seemed really obvious to me you put a skip button on ads you say if the user skips then the advertiser doesn't have to pay but now the publisher in this case YouTube has an incentive to pick better and better ads it's very similar to the same philosophy that makes Google AdWords works and why the ad system there is so effective I just thought this was really obvious we should clearly do this I'd written paper about it roundabout Story how I ended up at YouTube to actually work on this but it turned out that the sales team thought it was a terrible idea we not like a little bit bad idea but a terrible idea and their logic was really simple they said you know this you're gonna put a skip button on ads people are going to skip 80% of the time and we're just going to lose 80% of the money and we were already as a business YouTube was really struggling at the time this you probably don't remember this time period but there's a time period where YouTube was seen as Google's first stake in acquisition like we had all these other successes but this one was seen as a failure we were losing billions of dollars a year we were you know grainy videos big lawsuits so on and so the idea of tanking Revenue like that made no sense to anybody and I was told that you know every year there'd be the sales conference for all the salespeople and I was told shashir you're allowed to come speak as long as you promised not to talk about your stupid skipable ads idea so this is so I told Lan hey you're going to take a project this is the project want you to take and because he was sort of new to product and like thinking psh terms I handed him the whole manual so I said look here's the problem it's really obvious kind of what I just framed here I have the solution and the how has turned out to be tricky but I have the answer I have this friend who works in the ads team and she's going to help you make sure this gets shipped into the ads product in a way that you can sort of secretly get some momentum behind it and then you know people will start buying it and they'll just start working and just talk to this person and then come back to me next week and so he goes off he comes back to me the next week and I say so did you how'd it go did you talk to the person is it you working on adward and he said yeah I talk to the person I'm working on it but I'm not so sure that's the right path I said really and I said no you should talk to this person tell them this and it it'll work out okay and said okay he comes back the next week and kind of say how's it going and he says yeah I know like I'm doing those things but I'm not so sure it's gonna it's going to work and here's some of the signals I'm seeing and then finally the third week comes to me and he says sure I just I think you're wrong about this and I said why what am I wrong about and he said I think you've misunderstood the problem so the problem actually has nothing to do with the product or the buying experience or anything the problem is the name the problem with is that the name of the product and I said what does that mean he says but you call it skippable ads but like whose value proposition is skipable ADS it's a value proposition to the end user but who pays for advertising Advertiser pays for advertising why would an Advertiser want their ad to be skipped it's like reinforcing all their worst nightmares about what's happening to their ads is that people aren't paying any attention to them and it's just a really bad way to frame the problem so he said I think I'm not going to focus on the engineering getting the product ship or so on I'm just going to focus on the name and my first reaction was this is what I get for putting a salesperson in product this is clearly not going to work out it's okay the product has already been on the shelf for three years it's okay well there it goes and it turned out he was totally right so they renamed the product to True view so the value proposition is you only pay for True views and it like very much lined up with at the time people were very you know the idea of YouTube view counts was like one of the best rubrics for everybody but certainly for advertisers that was a it was a well-known thing that you know your ad was so good to get tens of millions of views and said hey this is what how we're going to align the advertising model call a true view from the sales team perspective this went from being the product that the sales team didn't ever want to talk about to the number one most requested topic for the sales conference the following year the product went from zero to a billion dollars in about 18 months it was one of like fastest growing things we ever did and it turned out that it wasn't actually anything about the concept the basic idea of the concept was totally right you know the idea of if you skip the ad then obvious the viewer benefits but it turned out the advertiser benefits too because the advertiser gets this much more engaged user who chose to continue to watch this video and it turns out that the stats were right about only about one in five people watched the ads it was about 80% skip rates but the price that people paid per view was about 10x higher so overall the unit performed 2x better than anything else we were doing and it was a significantly better user experience for the user but the whole reframing and in this particular case the person that was wrong turned out to be me but it was all you know Lane I think did a really nice job of find in a problem and describing to management why we had gotten it wrong I thought was I thought it was a very good example wow and it came from sales right and so it was probably he had to convince sales that this is like the right thing to do right so it kind of makes sense I mean and right turns out lane a fantastic product leader and I do think one of his skills is deep user empathy and so he's a really good eye for when you've got a problem and you've kind of misheard or misunderstood the customer problem it's often customers will describe their problem in ways that are you know not that clear but like no nobody you know the customer generally would say things like it's a big problem that people aren't watching my ads so I need you to make them bigger harder to skip I need you and so the idea of like let me find a way to rechannel that and say actually that's not what you care about is that the right people watch your ads and that you pay for those cases where they really do and it you know kind of worked and like that's awesome I didn't realize he was in sales cuz he's so levelheaded but I guess that helps what about is like

you know big organizations like YouTube and maybe C it to a lesser extent but like sometimes you see this obvious problem that you're like you know someone needs to solve this right and then you want to take initiative and just solve it but then there's someone else working on it or like you know like team on it I don't want to like become territorial or something like how do you navigate that kind of stuff or yeah I think the short version I'd say is be selfless and I think people can spot selfishness miles away actually the example I gave how I got to YouTube was I wrote this paper about what I thought was broken with video advertising that the paper was titled why doesn't television feel like the Super Bowl every day that was the concept was the Super Bowl is the one day of year where we all watch the ads we're really happy to watch the ads we rewind and watch them again we tell our friends about them what causes those incentives to be so good that one day of the year and interestingly I didn't know anything about advertising I'd never bought or sold an ad in my life I didn't really understand what the Dynamics were would probably made it for a more interesting paper and to be honest I thought the thing was kind of obvious and so I just sort of handed it off to people and at the time I handed it off to the guy who's running product at Google and he kind of convinced me to come work at Google and then Chad Hurley was running the YouTube team and he read it and said oh that's kind of interesting and I was talking to Hunter who was running the par team there and because he could spot that I wasn't like lobbying I wasn't lobbying for the job I wasn't trying to take any credit for it I mean I sent it to Hunter and said you can do whatever you like with it I think that people will see it they'll see are you like intellectually engaged are you engaged with teamwork are you seeking credit are you giving credit but I think people see selfishness a long ways away and if you find yourself in that situation which will happen a lot for the for you know as you think about the p scale the people who are in that P mindset will often identify problems that are not in their direct control yeah right so now what do you have to go help people see why that's a problem they should care about and if they suspect it's because you have some ulterior motive then they'll know but if you can show them this is you know the greater picture of what we're trying to get done that particular you know that particular thing that doesn't seem to come up now it doesn't always work if I had to give a single lesson out of it is you know if you think you're if you think it be perceived as even a little bit selfish you need to back off and make it feel as selfless as possible give it to them secretly take the influencer make sure it's their idea like dumb little trick add them to the list of people who wrote it who wrote the right up or make it just from them and because if you really care about solving the problem you know your job is there's an old saying that everybody's job is to make your manager look good and I don't think people really understood the logic of that you know why is that so important and it's amazing how many people don't do that they sort of compete with their own managers they teammates and they the moment people spot that your ideas don't win and what you want is to focus on the ideas not on the person I love that because I think the natural reaction when you see something it's a problem it's like you know the person in charge is incompetent so I'm gonna Point him out that he's incompetent right but like I think this approach is much better you build trust so much more with the other party yeah that's right I'll give one more tip actually since you mentioned the build trust part one more quick story so I get asked a lot the variation of the question you asked I get asked a lot is actually between PMs and Engineers so you know how do you convince you know some other team to go do something is one variation but the most common team you need to convince is actually if you're a product person is the engineers and H and it's really tricky for product people because they think they've been told that you're the boss you know they read some article and said oh the PM gets to be like the GM or the co it's like complete misinformation of what the job is actually like and they'll come to me and they'll say my Engineers won't listen to me what do I do can you tell them they have to listen to me he's like no that definitely is not going to work and you know the first thing I'll tell them is tell me about the relationship and in particular like if you just imagine a world where the engineers didn't exist what would you do the answer is you probably do very little I say okay let's go the other way imagine the PM didn't exist what would the engineers do like they might build the wrong thing but they would definitely continue building so who's optional here is really important for you to recognize like you're optional the product manager and basically every company if you sort of boil companies down especially tech companies to people who make the stuff write code and so on and the people who sell the stuff everything in the middle is optional like it has to earn its right there and so they'll say okay so what do I do and I said well listen your relationship with your engineer is framed or is grown slowly trust grows slowly and in particular for product managers I think it grows in these four stages so this I call it not notetaker broadcaster collaborator leader so first you're the notetaker you say hey Mr Mrs engineer that's a really great idea good job coming up with it I'll write it down for you so you can just focus on writing the code at some point you graduate to broadcaster and say not only will I write it down I'm going to go tell the rest of the team about it I go tell customers about it you can just focus on building some point you become collaborator and the engineer says hey we really want to wait and hear what the pm has to say and the PM says he yeah don't worry but at the end of that I'm gonna like we're gonna do what you want to do and I'm going to go write it down and broadcast it and I'll do it exactly what you want to do and at some point you grow in that relationship and you become leader and people sort of pause and say like no you should probably decide what are we gonna do and interestingly if you think about product managers you know that whole progression sometimes it happens in three minutes weeks sometimes it happens in three years sometimes it never happens yeah and it happens slowly and it can fall off a cliff and you can lose it in an instant and when people come to me and say my Engineers won't listen to me often say go back to being not taker start again and interestingly what people hear sometimes is they'll hear I don't want to be the notaker I mean it's like the most insulting thing you could say to the PM it's like oh the PM they just come and take notes and that's all they do and I said why would I want to do that and I said no you don't understand no taking that's not I'm not saying it as if euphemism I'm saying it because it's the core skill what does no taking mean no taking means that I can write down what you say in a way that explains it better than you said it I heard you so well that I can explain it to others better than you could now that I can explain what you mean better than you could now I have a chance to interject with something else but I earn

my right to be able to participate by restating opinion so note taking is actually like the skill for PMS and by the way like every role has the same like designers you'll I'll ask designers all the time they'll say oh my PM all listen to me or my this other designer will listen to me and I'll say and I'll go to the same speech which one's optional all the same things except with designers the bottom of that stack is you're the mock monkey and they'll say I don't want to be the mock monkey that's like that sounds terrible I'll say you completely misunderstood what is your core contribution you can visualize anybody's ideas faster than they can you're going to take all their handwavy stuff and you're going to make it literal visceral understandable and by the way if you can do it really fast you can visualize their ideas and the other person's ideas and your own ideas right next to each other and you earn this right to be able to get there so sometimes I think this like this question you asked of how do you convince people I think being selfless is important but I actually think this idea of bidirectional listening repeat back so I think people talk about it a lot but in every role there's a core skill there if you can restate the other person's Viewpoint better than they can you earn the right to add your own and it's a really important skill in how you convince people things yeah you always want to make it seem like it's their own idea right that you this yeah you said this thing that's really brilliant like it's got all these amazing parts and by the way this one thing you said maybe you could twist that a little bit and all of a sudden all of the rest of it makes sense it's uh just kind of it's just like summarizing the PS framework like you know if you're not good at executing your own product area it's hard for people to listen to you have a bunch of opinions about other product areas right same thing you got to build your trust that way that's true too yes you get a lot of credibility out of the stages of your own execution too for sure cool so let's talk about strategy

and planning you know when a lot of people think about strategy they think about you know wow this is taking a long time this is like taking time away from like telling to customers building the product and you have a similar kind of like wild prop process that can make strategy and planning more efficient may we can start with that yeah I mean it's I kind of like this um this analogy so in the book I'm writing on rituals there's a whole chapter on strategy and planning and one of in that chapter we talk about a bunch of different concepts about strategy and planning and how planning systems are sort of similar and sort of different across companies and I gave a talk about a month ago now with Yuki yida he's the chief Park officer are at figma and we talked about uh we called it wow planning and the sort of headline of the talk was planning cannot only be wow it can be wow and the idea is if you can imagine wow with a W and nine O's and then another W the whole talk was kind of built up to that idea so I'll explain what that means so first off if you think about planning processes every company does it like you say it's often the thing that is most iconic and most hated in a company yeah ask people how a company runs they'll often talk about the planning process and you ask them if they think it's going well and there's very few companies that think they do a great job with this the interesting thing is if you were to take everybody's planning process and sort of compare them with each other you there's a few elements that are very similar you could almost put it in a Mad Lib if you remember those Mad Libs when you were a kid where you get like four blanks in a sentence and you can fill them in so there's four blanks in every planning algorithm we run a blank planning algorithm every blank time frame that produces a blank output which we execute with a blank accountability protocol right so if you think about it in terms of this WOW framework we think of the W as the first part the planning algorithm so a lot of people describe a planing algorithm as a w where you sort of push down some guidance they push up some plans you push down some new guidance or reframing or you do some alignment and then you push up to get a new cohesive plan sometimes people do it as an M a w we chose W because wow sounded better than mom so we picked W so that's the first step we have some planning algorithm then you have some output so like at the top of that W there's a thing there there's a we're done with planning when this is produced and that might be it might be like a list of priorities like sometimes people use big rocks it might be a list of assignments sometimes a very common technique is okrs sometimes planning isn't done until the budget spreadsheets done and there's a big spreadsheet and says this is who's working on what and this is how many dollars they go in every Division and so on but whatever it is you do the W to produce this dot this output then there is some accountability protocol so oh we're done with planning and now we're going to check in and you know you maybe check in every week you check in every month you whatever it is and you try to make sure you execute and stay on that plan it's very important because what's the point of planning if it doesn't actually influence execution there's way too many companies where you come in you say hey we did all this planning and then they'll say yeah we do we kind of forget about it all and then before the next planning cycle we go back and reread what we said we were going to do and we kind of like grade everything and we say oh we got lucky we did some of that but the great companies obviously find a way to keep it front center this is what we said we're going to do now let's keep it front center so that's the O so it's you know you get you do a w of planning and then you do these Loops of execution and then the last part is the time frame so how often do you do this and one observation is you ask teams how often they plan you say like hey many companies do annual planning so I'll ask them when does annual planning start and you know let's imagine you're on a normal January to January cycle many companies say oh we start in September some companies will say August July I I've heard companies go all the way back to May April and you say oh if you think about that in terms of what you're doing is are you're planning sometimes for a third of your time sometimes a half of your time but that's a long period of time where not only are you distracted by you know the planning of what's coming next you kind of like the moment that planning starts you kind of it signaled that the old plan is no longer valid it's like we're not willing to reopen this thing and you know so you could end up spending with half your time on that and so we have this philosophy one of the things Yuki and I talked about in this talk is the idea that planning should take less than 10% of execution time so if you are planning for a year is 52 weeks you should spend no more than five weeks planning if you're planning for a month say a month is 22 working days you should spend no more than two days uh planning if you're planning for a quarter is 13 weeks you can spend a little over a week planning so that's one way to think about it and the reason for the wow is that we said you shouldn't be wow you should be wow and the reason is it's a w followed by 9 O's and the idea is the W should only be 10% of your time it's kind of an interesting frame for how to think about planning and what about like planning incentives right like you know

every Le leer wants your project to be P0 and going back to like the selfless concept right like you know there's incentives to just like hey I'm going to grow this business to a billion dollars so you're GNA give me like a ton of head count and my objectives is like number one private priority but how do you get people to actually think about the bigger picture here like not just like fight over head count yeah I mean I think it's interesting the W one of the little jokes in the talk we gave was that W does not stand for win and it's amazing how many people view the planning process as a gain and I'll see especially in larger companies I'll hear statements that'll almost sound crazy where somebody will come and say they say how did planning go and said oh it went great I won like what the hell does that mean how can you win planning and they'll say oh yeah I got allocated all the head count I wanted and you know we can go celebrate now and it's such an interesting way that people have set up incentives is by making planning feel adversar you actually create a dynamic that leads to significantly worse plans and so this idea like the W's not for winning is really important so how do you build that in your planning process is a real Challenge and I think something that this is one of those topics where people who have done this a lot will resonate very quickly with how hard it is to execute in an environment where planning becomes adversarial and it's hard because there is a constraint budget there's a there are some constraints it's like we can't do everything and so there's some judgment appli of like hey you propos this idea and you know it was a good idea and therefore you get X resources or X dollars or so on so my view is that when you think about the W the planning part of the planning process part of the overall planning algorithm the I think of it as your main goal is to get people to think outside of their own self-interest or their own team interest so my favorite technique for doing it is something called $100 voting and it's a really simple idea and we do it at COD all the time I actually do it with my board which is kind of interesting tell you more about that in a second but the idea is very simple I started doing this at YouTube years ago I say everybody these are the we're going to gather the list of all the different things we can go do and now everybody you're going to get $100 to allocate among each of these bets and then we're going to use it as a signal we're going to go and take the sum of how many dollars we put in each part and we're going to use it as a signal of what we're going to work on but there's one really important rule is that I want you to use the $100 as if you were me the CEO or boss or so on I don't want to see anybody $100 all just going to their team and you can all spot it right right away it's like oh you put all your money there that's like and I'm not saying you can't put any there but I want you to think like me and defend like me and the way we do it at Kota is you have to write a reason so you can't just allocate the dollars like for each one it's like I think we should I would put $50 of the dollars on this because I found this argument to be the most compelling or because I think this problem is the most important problem to solve or so on and it turns out that process of take off your team hat and put on your company hat or put on your Co hat is just crucially important because it removes all that sense of like my job here is to fight for my thing it's make this team successful if that happens to lead to the thing I'm working on is you know over staff or under staff or so on that's fine but if not I shouldn't feel bad about it because this was the right thing for the company to do in fact it's like important signal to me because now I can go reorient a bit and say maybe I can help that other thing a little bit more because that's clearly more important for what we're trying to get done as a team or a company or so on so that's my favorite ritual for dve to making sure the W is not about winning I love that yeah and have you seen like uh

just like quick follow up on that have you seen like smaller teams like there's a belief that the more head count I get the more I can get done right but have you seen actually smaller teams move much faster and get more done oh my gosh all the time I mean there's an old there's a famous old book called the mythical man month by the way I think this is very true for zero to one teams when you're early building a product I think actually compactness is a particular Advantage I actually think it continues for a long time that the especially in the tech world the you at the end of the day we were talking about earlier psh it's about creating taking ambigu ambiguity and creating Clarity that's not only an individual thing it's a team thing as a team you know if we can turn ambiguity and Clarity then we move fast right we we're always on the same page we don't and I think density really matters so the this ability to have people a smaller group of people that perhaps cover a little bit less capability but are able to stay on the same page more often the closer you get to use an old concept of hive mind the more they act as one brain the better chance you have of them moving fast and so I think it's very important we started a new project here at Kota we're building for the first time we're building a second product we called Kota brain and it was one of my key goals that team has to stay really small and it was a lot of question about it because you know generally the Viewpoint is like add more people that's how you make it go fast and it be clear like once it got clear what they were doing we started adding more people but in the early days very important small team get on the same page fast give them space to run and then you'll get much faster execution yeah so kind of goes back to you manage all these great PMs and leaders in at YouTube and at Kota now I think there's a certain person who just really loves to build zero to one or like likes to Craft products right and they don't want to like align 50 cross functional people to do this so how do you think about career path at Koda like to kind of account for these folks I guess you kind of given them opportunity work on kot brain yeah I

think one of the things I love about the psh framework is it pulls this the scope element out of the question and it turns out that some people's way of doing the psh is by Leading large teams some people are very good at it they're good at you know selecting people motivating people coaching people working with lots of people so on there's others where that's not their that's not what they want to do that's not what they're great at but you know by Framing the world in terms of psh instead of in Terms of scope you give a path for doing that and you kind of need to do it in every role you need a way you know and Google is pretty famous for really celebrating the IC the individual contributor path for engineers building up a ladder for it you could become a technical fellow distinguished engineer so on all those signals are really important and I think it's just as important to do it in every function you do it in product marketing you do it in sales it's sort of this it's an interesting Dynamic that leads to this feeling of only the manag are rewarded and by the way I think there's a bunch of signals that lead to it I mean it's how you structure team meetings so if like if your team meetings are structured around your management hierarchy people get this little subtle feel of like o I'm only rewarded if I'm managing large teams and so therefore I'm going to opt to do that you do it in your compensation philosophy you do it in titles like there's a whole bunch of little signals people get of is this a place that allows different ways to create impact and of course you know as you're thinking about what you want them to work on yeah sometimes you put them on the small thing sometimes you know there's people that are they don't need to be on the small thing they're quite happy being on the big thing they just don't want to be in charge of it and so I think there's lots of different ways that plays out but it starts with a Viewpoint of if you start with a view and there's many companies that have implicitly built it into their whole process that unless you're managing large teams you're not valued the that will lead to a certain type of person not feeling you know motivated excited won't want to work there and you gradually you lose them do you see a shift with your other CEOs other product users to TOS a company type person more you know I think people say it but and I definitely think that in the last 20 years I've watched companies become much more okay with it I do think that some of the bad habits that lead to it are hard to shake I'll give you an easy example at both Kota and YouTube managers aren't allowed to see their employee salaries and this is like it's pretty counterintuitive because at many companies you're given a team and a budget and say your job is to figure out how much to pay everybody and if you can do with a little bit less or a little bit more it's kind of part of the resources you're managing and what I found is that if managers are responsible for their employee salaries you'll very you won't get inversions so you won't get cases where the individual makes more than their boss it's just really hard they pay some worth for you more than you make yourself it's not impossible obviously there's lots of places where it happens but it's harder and it's a hard thing for them to deal with and so the moment you do that what you've created is an environment where yeah we can say all sorts of things about why the individual is valued but at the end of the day you're manag like it's sort of a monotonically increasing compensation that the person who works for me definitely makes more than me and the person works for the and then you kind of work your way up and so you get a signal and so that's a kind of an example of some it's a very small thing and it's very hard to implement by the way if you pull that control away from managers you have to build a whole different apparatus for how you think about comp ation I think it's a healthier apparatus anyway but it's an example of the type of thing that company cultures struggle with that lead to this feeling of unless I want to be on the management track and managing large teams I can't be effective got it yeah there's a lot of like you can say it a certain way like the you know TR way but there's a lot of like a lot of little signals that people send in the daily work yeah so I respect over time so last question you've had such a great at YouTube and kod I want to bring the theme back to being selfless right like there is some people get disillusioned with this whole corporate thing like they're like oh you gotta play politics you gotta for head account you gotta do all the stuff to rise up but like do you have any advice for someone or how someone can be a selfless leader and kind of grow their career in a selfless way well you've talked about a lot already but any closing words of advice I mean I

think the uh for a lot of people being selfless there's a soft line between feeling like selfless and being taken advantage of and so it's really important to frame it differently and for me the best frame forward has been paid forward so I think if you know a lot of times one of my favorite questions to ask people when they're they come they ask for career advice they ask for you know problem advice and so on I'll ask them about who the role models are who do you feel and my way of asking the question is somewhat specific if you could take anybody's past and make it your future and feel totally happy about it who would you pick and like it's an interesting way to think about you know what how you frame your goals your way of living so on and people talk about the role models and interestingly when you think about Role Models the I think this so first off if you pick role models who are selfless then it'll help you understand why it's okay to be selfless one of my favorite Role Models I worked with was is a guy named Bill Campbell he passed away unfortunately a few years back but Bill they wrote a book about him few years ago called trillion dollar coach he ended up becoming you know when I started working with him he was the coach for the Kleiner Perkins the Venture firm he coached a number of CEOs there I was you know this was back in 2000 I was 21 years old so I was kind of I was very lucky to have him as a coach over the years he became more and more slought after he's Steve Jobs's primary coach he was and Sergey and Eric primary Coach Jeff pesos lots of interesting people anyways I got to meet him much earlier and you know what and he became you know one of my key role models so he was my coach at CRA that was the name of my first company and he used to come and help us out he would sit in my staff meetings he' give lots of advice he gave me lots of feedback and so on and one day I realized we were having a hard chat and I realized that we never signed an advisor agreement with him he just come he shown up and he just started helping and I said oh Bill we should sign an ad agreement with you and you know I'm just so thankful for your contributions I'd like to find some way to compensate you and we can give you stock in the company or so on and Bill looked at me and said I don't want any of that and to be honest I was offended I is the what's wrong with my stock why don't you want my stock and the and he said well he said first off don't feel bad if you give it to me I'm just going to give it to charity so if you wanted to give it anywhere you should just give it to charity directly but he said that's not what I'm in it for and I said oh that's interesting like you know you're surrounded especially in the tech world you're surrounded by a lot of people who are you know that they make money they like it seemed like as a reasonable thing to do like who's this person that doesn't seem to care about that and he said no I just don't measure myself that way and I said okay so how do you measure yourself and he said well I look at the list of people I've worked with I've mentored I've worked for me and I just count how many of them are successful CEOs now and this was back in 2001 and he listed I think 20 of the CEOs of the top 100 companies or so that I knew had all like worked with him and it was like it was an incredible list and this is well before Google and Amazon and so on so the it just like a really interesting way to think about how he measured himself that he measured himself through the progress of others and that was his sense of success and honestly like once I saw it I recognize it in lots of people it's like the people I like to work with are people that feel that way that they don't view it as Z some they view it as when somebody else succeeds you know even a little bit through my help their success is My Success so not stealing from My Success it is my success and so I think that idea of you want to be selfless you know think about role models and for me the my role models have all been ones that had a Pay It Forward view that they're they were mentored by somebody great that help them selflessly they turn around and do it for others and they feel like the universe balanc it out and it always does as you think about it think about Role Models very helpful frame for it that's amazing yeah that's probably I mean you probably don't remember other advisers who took stock from you or took money from you but you remember bill right because yeah exactly do this yeah so sh when is your book coming out and where can more you know the problem with a book like this so I'm on year three of writing the book now I thought it was going to take nine months the book to be fair it's about 60% done and if anybody's interested rituals ofre teams. com I publish about a chapter at a time and so people can go and read a bit although it's been a couple months since I published one the problem with a book like this is it's an Ever growing book like every time I talk to people I get a whole bunch of new rituals that I want to put into the book and so the book scope grows and grows so I've been really hoping to get it out this year but we'll see like the scope keeps growing so we'll see what you should publish a book but you should also have like a Koda Wiki that just kind of grows and expands the book is obviously written in Koda so it will be published online as a Koda doc as well awesome well thanks so much sh learned so much uh about being selfless and everything thank you so much for your time thanks Peter great chatting with you