Jason Shah: commitment

Transcript context

…Sweet. Casey Winters, podcast plug. Okay, so something else that you're really good at is you don't kind of focus career-wise on working your way up the ladder and being like the top PM, and you seem to be really good at kind of following with what's interesting to you and your interest and your curiosity. Is there something that you've learned there, something you could share for folks that are just like, "Oh my gosh, should I just keep in with this job and work my way up? Should I try something new?" What have you learned about that sort of thinking? There's the framework I like is ladder versus map, and I think that you can be either person that any point in your life. Sometimes there's a bit of a set mindset that somebody might have one way or another, but I like ladder versus map. Ladder is about moving up. It's more influence, more power, a higher title, things like this, whereas map is I just want to go wherever's interesting, right? I literally think of it, I think of my career very similar to travel. I want to go to Greece. I want to be hungry, walking around in India, sweating in a hundred degree weather. I want to go to Australia and kind of get locked out of my hotel and see what that's like. I'm okay with discomfort because it's interesting. Sometimes, for better or worse, maybe this is a privilege, it's certainly a privileged thing to say, but I care more about living a really interesting life than let's say a good or comfortable life. I think that's where the growth comes from. That's where the stories come from. That's to me the things that I'll remember the most. And so, when I think about product and I'm on my deathbed, I'm going to care about the products I built and how they affected people. Nobody's really going to be looking at my LinkedIn, hopefully for their sake and mine, at my funeral. Sorry, it's a very morbid analogy, but I think thinking of the future provides a lot of clarity about what am I going to care about a long time from now, and I think that applies to all facets of life. That's how I thought about my life partner. That's how I think about my career. That's how I think about where I want to live, San Francisco. San Francisco, a lot of people like to talk negatively about it, but I believe in the community. I believe in the place I'm interested in the long term, even if you know the short term it has some challenges to it. So, I personally believe really strongly in this kind of ladder versus map distinction, and I think a lot of people are very intentional in the micro. They think about their next job, their next title, how much salary and equity there is. In good ways too, they think about the team that they're going to work on next with, but they're very unintentional about the macro. What's the big picture? What do I care about as an individual? There's not a lot of classes for that. There's not a lot of blog posts in the product management field about the touchy-feely side of this, and who are you as a person, where do you get energy from. So, for me, I found that really clarifying and it makes career decisions that have seemed risky to other people seem inevitable to me. Is there a story of or example of how you use this approach to make a decision at where you end up going, and/or or is there something that you maybe regret or are really happy with in terms of the kind of the fork in the road, looking back, using this way of thinking?…

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