Claire Vo: evaluation

Transcript context

…And along the same lines, designing an org around the person, I imagine there's not many very engineering background experience people that are also really good at product and can do design. I guess how deep do you need to be in each of these functions to be successful in this role? Because it feels really rare. Start a company and then you have to do it, in some ways. I've worked for both and they've told me, I've worked for two, they go, "I'm not a founder, but I'm the CEO." And I go, "That's fine. I'm an operator, but I'm going to bring a founder mindset." And so I think as a founder, especially early stage, you do all of this. You see how all of this is one person, because honestly sometimes it is one person, and sometimes that person is you. And so I do think working in a very small startup gives you the opportunity to experience a breadth of functional skills and develop a breadth of functional skills that can set you up for this kind of role much further down the line. I do think early stage startup experience is one of those shortcuts to getting visibility here. I think the other thing is, again, I said this earlier, so many people get siloed into, "I'm a product manager, and so my job is this, but it's not that. And I can only do this, and if designs are needed, I am blocked and I will just wait." And I just give permission for people to make... We have a leadership principle inside our team that's like, "There are no lanes." Our lanes are dotted. They're not solid in that you can shift over and pencil out a design, an engineer can write a spec. All those things are fine. They're natural, they're normal, and I actually think they're quite healthy. And it's that kind of thinking that probably is going to breed the type of leaders that could do this type of role. Awesome. It reminds me at GitLab. I just interviewed their head of product, or CPO, and they have a core value of, "Short toes." Don't worry about stepping on people's toes. Have short toes. Don't worry about people getting into your stuff. It's all good.…

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