Jessica Fain: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. So much of this is about just coming into it with like, here's what I ... It's just like having the same information. And I think there's a point about just believe they know what they're doing is so underappreciated. There's a reason they're in this role. There's a reason you're not there. There's a reason this company's doing as well as it is. And even if they are wrong, they believe they're right. So it's important to understand what they think and know and what information they have access to. Yeah. And I think the other piece of this is for anyone thinking about how they grow their career, how did that person get into the role that they are in? They broadened their context. They saw, sort of had great peripheral vision, and that is a way to show up in a room that is much more senior than you are, is keep your domain expertise, keep the things that you know best, but broaden your perspective, broaden your vantage point to think about it in the context of the whole ecosystem, the whole organization, the whole industry, which you often don't get a chance to stay in. And what happens at that point is you get seen as a strategic thinker. You get seen as somebody who really cares about the company's success and not just your own. And so it is actually a really, really important tool for growth, especially ... I had told April when I originally pitched her on being our chief of staff that I wanted to take the job because I wanted to know if I wanted to be a CPO when I grew up. And it's true. I still don't know because it's a really, really hard job and I have just way more respect than I ever did before that. But I think that if you want to grow into a product leadership role, expanding your viewpoint, expanding the way that you see problems, and thinking about it from a global perspective is a way to show up as that strategic leader that you say you want to be. I love this advice. Just to make it very clear for people, because it's easy to just like, "Yeah, okay, I'll just expand my horizon," basically, the advice here is just think on behalf of the entire business, not just your feature, not just your little goal. It's like, what is the business trying to do? Here's how this fits into it. Here's what the CEO broadly is thinking about. The epitome of this to me is Jeff Weinstein, I think is how you pronounce his last name, or Weinstein, at Stripe. He's just like a PM on a product and he's just constantly tweeting and sharing Stripe as a business. He's just thinking about Stripe as the company and then here's this thing I work on that helps the company.…

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