Bangaly Kaba: recommendation

Transcript context

…I love that advice. Let's talk about the other side of this equation. We've talked about environment, let's talk about skills. What do you advise there for folks that want to improve their skills? The skills part is really, really big and it's something that requires I think, consistent evolution of your own abilities. And so I broke it out in that blog post kind of communication, your ability to influence your leadership, strategic thinking and then execution, actually getting things done. The communication above these, again, not all of these are created equal. I think communication is the one that tends to be the most impactful. And you see this in a lot of ways. You see this for people who are poor executors but incredible communicators and they seem to continue to rise and rise because they can tell a great story, but when you look under the covers, there's nothing there. There's no substance there. So communication for better or worse is one of the most important things. But building out your skills I think is really just kind of a, it is an interesting time to be in product and to be in tech right now because you have so many more ways to build out your skills than what previously existed. Just so many incredible blog posts like your podcasts and blogs, there's so many incredible people who've come on here who tell you things like how to go to market, how to think about B2B SaaS and metrics. And so listening to you, reading Ben Thompson, understanding his mental models, if you go to look at Elena Verner or whoever, there's so many thought leaders who are out there. So I think being a voracious reader is really, really critical because it helps to build your toolkit and you need arrows in your quiver to really understand how to think about the right framework and the right mentor at the right time. One thing I also tell people is people think about mentorship as like, I have a mentor, Lenny is my mentor, or John is my mentor. I tell them, it's actually better to have a stable of mentors. You want to have three or four. And ideally, what you do is you meet with each one of them once a month on a different Friday of the month. And so you might have three or four people on every Friday you're meeting with someone different. And the reason why this is so important is because if you, Lenny, are a mentor to me and you're busy one Friday and we only meet once a month now I don't have anyone to talk to for two months. And you're going through a lot of things and you're not really able to bounce ideas, or build skills or learn how influence others, but if you have three or four mentors, you have someone different to talk to every week. And if one or two of them cancel, you still have two people to talk to that month and you still can continue to grow and to build your thinking. So that's something I always recommend. And then the last thing I actually talk about is, when it comes to execution, I think people don't, especially product managers, don't do enough of watching and learning from others. There's an art and a science to product management. talk about is, when it comes to execution, I think people don't, especially product managers, don't do enough of watching and learning from others. There's an art and a science to product management. And in a lot of ways I come from a background of education and in a lot of ways in product management, it's very similar. You want to watch how well the people hone their craft, how they deliver, how they lead teams and kind of steal things from them. Figure out, well, wow, Lenny did this really, really well when he was at Airbnb. It was really incredible. I'm going to take that. I'm going to take how he runs that team, or how he landed that framework, or how he communicated this message and note it and use it in my own toolkit later on. And so if you're really a student of product, you can't just be a student of theory, you've got to be a student of practice too, meaning you're going and you're looking, it's like, "Hey, I'd love to sit in your team meetings. Can I come watch? Or your PM meetings or your leadership meetings." And you are really like doing that for the sake of learning is really, really incredible. And that's some of the ways I talk about building skills.…

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