Deb Liu: belief

Transcript context

…By the way, for your PM audience, I want to say this, which is a lot of the greatest PMs are the worst PMs of their careers. They love products. They love the crafts. They love the customer research, the data. They have plans, they have timelines. And then when it comes to career, they have none of those things. They just drift from job to job. "Hey, should I take this role or this role? How do I think about this?" But if I said you had to write a spec for your career, what's in there? What are your milestones? What are the skills? What are the features that you want to have of your career? How are you going to get there? What does success look like? You actually have metrics for your product, and yet you don't have metrics for your career. I coach a lot of people and when I coach them, I ask them, "Well, where do you want to see yourself in five years? Where do you want to go?" And half the people have no idea. I think that's really tragic because when you PM your career, it's about intentionality. But I'll tell you the story of my career and how I was the accidental PM and then eventually... I told you how I accidentally fell into PM, but also fell into so many of the things that happened in my PM career. And if I had to go back, I would think much more deeply about what I want to accomplish. So I ended up at PayPal working for a guy named Dave Lee who reported to Amy Clement, and then he left. And so she offered me his role. I had only managed people for, I don't know, 15 seconds. I was two years out of business school and I was definitely not qualified to do his job. He was the director of product. I wasn't even a director and I was running the team for eBay. So basically the PayPal part of eBay, which was basically half the company's revenues and profits. Totally unqualified. I ended up in this job and I do a good job. I ended up doing it for several years. I built up the team and we have a great relationship with eBay. Our team was very close and we were able to actually build something really lasting that worked really well. And then I had a baby. And so this happens in a lot of women's careers. I was turning 30, I had my son, and I had to leave for six months. So I handed my product to my successor, Mike Woo and he ended up taking over. He did such a good job while I was gone, I didn't want to displace him when I got back. And so I thought, "Well, I'll go and look for another role." I couldn't really find a product role I liked, I mean, because there weren't that many product director roles. And so I ended up in corporate strategy. So I worked for the amazing Rajiv who was CEO at the time. He since passed and I wrote his speeches, worked on strategies, I worked on digital goods and charity, and ended up building that into a vertical for the company. So charity, social commerce and digital goods. And I thought, "Okay, this is an interesting job." es, I worked on digital goods and charity, and ended up building that into a vertical for the company. So charity, social commerce and digital goods. And I thought, "Okay, this is an interesting job." So I create the job, have a couple product managers, wasn't really sure where this was going, and then one day I was like, "You know what? I'm not feeling this. I have a child at home." I had gotten into what Cheryl Sandberg calls that kind of between kids situation where I was bored of my job. I was working one of the VPs I worked with and I resigned. I said, "I'm leaving tech, just I'm going to stay home and maybe start something small." He convinced me to hold off and he said, I'll find you a job. He calls me a week later and he said, "Found you a job with Stephanie Tilenius leading the buyer experience at eBay product." And I said, "Oh, that sounds interesting." So I said, "Sure, as you notice, I do not have a plan. I'm just drifting. I'm so fortunate that I had amazing mentors who gave me opportunities, but end up working for Greg Fant and Stephanie Tilenius at eBay for two years. I led the buyer experience. We did some really good work there. And then went on maternity leave again. And I get a call from a friend, my old engineering manager from PayPal, "Hey, I'm at Facebook. Do you want to come? You can't come into product. You need a CS degree for that, but we have a product marketing job open." I was like, "Sounds good." Drop into Facebook. And so again, no idea what I'm doing back in product marketing. So I spent a few years doing that. Eventually was invited into product and so on and so forth. And each job that came along was organic, but also kind of accidental. I see that happen in a lot of careers, which is my story when you look back, looks great. It looks like it all worked out, but I had almost zero intentionality in any of these. And I think that had I had more agency and I thought about what I wanted, I could actually measure is this the thing that would get me further or not? I ended up extremely lucky, but not everybody does. And so I think having a plan allows you to compare every decision. It's not like when you're offered an admission to college, we're looking at three different offers maybe with financial aid or not, and you can make a decision, "Oh, they're offering me this department, but I can't get into this department." This is how far it is from home. But jobs and roles or nothing like that. Someone calls you one day, "Hey, I'm at Facebook. Do you want to come? I'm actually on maternity leave." And he's like, "Just come talk to me. " I'm like, "Why not." And you end up dropping into different parts of your life and I think sometimes by saying, "Here's where I want to go and here's how I want to get there," you can have such a better career. And so I do encourage everybody to do this and to think about what does success look like in five years and how far am I from that and am I heading in the right direction? What's interesting is I also had a similar path to you where I had zero plan or intention or goal and also just follow things and things worked out. I wonder how often that happens and I wonder if this idea of having intention and planning a roadmap is something you do if things aren't working out because maybe there's some good to not overthinking it and just following pull. I don't know.…

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