Jag Duggal: belief

Transcript context

…This point you made about it's the PMs job to push back and stop bad things from happening I think is such an important one. A lot of PMs are just told here, build this thing and they kind of know this is not going to work, this is a bad idea, but either they don't think they should be pushing back or they are not good at it. From the PMs you've worked with that are good at convincing and pushing back, like we should not do this yet, do you have any tactics or ways of communicating that you found effective for pushing back to, like you said, all this pressure that's coming down on them? One of the things I've learned relatively later in my career, I wish I'd learned it decade earlier, decades earlier even is how important culture is. And we talked about the five cultural tenets, but this idea of we are owners, not renters. You're an owner of that product as the product manager or the lead engineer or the lead designer or in fact anyone on the team. If you really don't think it's going to work, don't tell me what I want to hear. It's incumbent on you, it's expected of you as an owner to tell me the bad news and tell it to me early, even when it's convenient, even when there's a promotion at stake, these dynamics get very real very quickly then look, I don't think it's going to work and here's why, or it's not working and here's why, or we should kill it and here's why. The second thing I would say is senior leaders at companies that have gone, especially startups that have scaled well, you usually have people who have been in that boat who have seen products that weren't working who have killed them or who have pivoted them pretty dramatically. And there's a lot of respect for someone who has a real clarity of thought and brings a high bar and is not simply going with the flow. So I think that's the main thing, is bringing that ownership mindset. And the second is bringing clarity and bringing data and understanding that most senior executives in whichever company are strong-willed and bring strong opinions. That's part of the job description. That's okay. It is your job whether product or design or engineering or whatever function as a leader to if you think you are practicing for one of those senior jobs, it's sort of let's say a mid-level, it doesn't come miraculously when you get a C-suite title, it's something that's going to be practiced. And it's something that is expected and I think that's not just a Nubank thing. Certain cultures promote it better than others, but I think it's pretty universally important. And so I would just encourage people to try it, understand the trade-offs, understand the challenge, articulate the other side, but if you genuinely believe it's not yet ready to scale your products, at the end of the day, the big mess is a thing you're still going to owe and we're all going to forget that we told you to scale the thing. We're all going to still blame you at the end of the day. So you might as well bite the bullet earlier, pivot it when it's easier to do and it'll work out better in the end. I want to come back to one more thread and then I'm going to go in a different direction. You talked a bit about talking to customers, finding innovative ideas, not just listening to what they're telling you. There's this whole skill of user research and interviewing customers and finding the pain point, figuring out what to build. Do you have any just, I don't know, tips or tactics or lessons you've learned about just how to do this well, how to uncover the pain point and then figure out what to actually build when you're interviewing customers?…

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