Sachin Kansal: commitment

Transcript context

…Another tactic that I heard that I want to ask you about, someone anonymously said that you ask for live demos. And here's the question, he always insist on doing live demos that make everyone nervous when they present. The question is, why? So I think they may be talking about when we do product announcements. So when we do product announcements, externally, on stage, et cetera, I do insist on actually live demoing the product. Part of this comes from, I grew up as a product manager back in the day in the 2000s at Palm. Palm where the Palm Pilot. Palm was cut from the Apple clock. There were a lot of ex-Apple people there and we were in the consumer electronics business. And every single year the way you would announce your product is you would get up on stage and you show the product working. And leading up to that moment was a lot of massive amount of work to make sure that it actually works on stage. Now, I will say there's an internal reason and an external reason to do this. The external reason to do this is you have to tell a story. One of my other beliefs is, which I may not have shared before, is no one actually really cares about the feature that you want to talk about. People are way too busy. You are obsessed about your products, you, your products are your life, but for your end users, your products are maybe 10 minutes of their life once a week. So their life does not center around your products. They don't care. How do you make them care? You have to tell a story and that story comes from actually showing the product in action rather than a lot of slideware and pictures. So that is my belief that I don't want to have hubris about my own product. I need to be able to tell a story about how an end user will actually get value out of that. That's my external reason for why I insist on live demos. My internal reasons for why I insist on a live demo is while it is a lot of work, I think it creates a certain level of rigor ahead of time before the product is ready to launch. Because if it is going up on stage, it has to work. And two, you may ask the same person who asked you this. It creates such a sense of pride amongst the product team and the engineering team to actually see their product live on stage and now it's on video and it'll stay forever, to see the product that they put their blood and tears into actually working. I think that's a huge moment of pride and I take it as personal responsibility to make sure that I can help bring that moment. But yes, leading up to that is a lot of work. A lot of stress. Okay, that was a great answer. Today's episode is brought to you by Coda. I personally use Coda every single day to manage my podcast and also to manage my community. It's where I put the questions that I plan to ask every guest that's coming on the podcast. It's where I put my community resources, it's how I manage my workflows. Here's how Coda can help you. Imagine starting a project at work and your vision is clear, you know exactly who's doing what and where to find the data that you need to do your part. In fact, you don't have to waste time searching for anything because everything your team needs from project trackers and OKRs to documents and spreadsheets lives in one tab all in Coda. With Coda's collaborative all-in-one workspace, you get the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, the power of applications, and the intelligence of AI all in one easy to organize tab. Like I mentioned earlier, I use Coda every single day and more than 50,000 teams trust Coda to keep them more aligned and focused. If you're a startup team looking to increase alignment and agility, Coda can help you move from planning to execution in record time. To try it for yourself, go to coda.io/lennytoday and get six months free of the team plan for startups. That's coda.io/lenny to get started for free and get six months of the team plan. Coda.io/lenny. I'm going to shift our conversation a bit to general career advice. I've got a bunch of questions. I actually asked the community, my newsletter, Slack community, what to ask you, and they had a few really good questions that I want to run by you. So one is just, what are some of the most impactful and recurring pieces of advice that you share with early career product people that you find most helps them get unstuck and most helps them move to where they want to move in their career?…

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