Sachin Monga: evaluation

Transcript context

…Awesome. I'm curious, what are the biggest challenges with being in the position you're in? Are there any examples of a man that sucked? Or if you want to go in a different direction, is there a certain type of person that just isn't a good fit for this kind of role, had a product at a smallish company with a very product minded founder? Oh, let's start with the first one. I think the biggest challenge with this role/company phase, like I mentioned, we're going through this one-time transition from not really having a product function or a product process to having one, is almost by definition any time you figure out how to do a thing, you'll now reach this next phase of growth and it'll be obsolete. Something that I've repeated a bunch of the teams is I'm never too worried if we have the perfect planning process or the perfect execution cadence or the perfect communication process, whatever our process is, we're never going to have a perfect one. And even if we did, it would soon be obsolete because we did a really good job and now we've grown 2X or something and we have more people and the process needs to change. The main thing I care about is are we just getting better every week, every month, certainly every year. I think that's easier said than done. It sounds good in theory, but then when you're in the thick of it. you're constantly basically feeling like you don't know how to do the thing. Because as soon as you figure it out, it's obsolete. It's just really hard. I think that's true of basically just startups in general, high growth companies. Doing the thing well means that you're not going to know what you're doing. Maybe that leads into my answer to the second question, which is that's not really for everyone. I think there's almost like a personality type that has to be okay with being humbled all the time and feeling like you don't know what you're doing. I think you could be an amazing product manager at a company that is a bit more stable and consistent and get really good at what you're doing and someone who's going to be really good at a company that is on a bit of this trajectory, for folks who aren't watching the video, making a motion with my hand, that's not growing too fast, it's kind of a different job. The rate of change is a huge factor. The point you made about how things are going to keep changing as you grow is such an important point that I don't feel like comes up as much as I thought would come up on this podcast. People are always asking me for advice. How do I structure my product team? How do I prioritize? How do I do planning? The main thing I've learned is no matter what you end up with, it's going to change in three to six months anyway because you'll learn more. The advice is just do the best thing you can think of right now. Don't assume this will last anyway, and that's good enough. There's never the perfect way to do it. It's always the best way you could do it at this moment, and then you learn how to evolve it.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.