Deb Liu: evaluation

Transcript context

…100% introvert. I've moved closer to extrovert and I've come across as an extrovert a lot of times, but I'm definitely a index introvert. The reason I ask is I have a sense that we are very similar. As a PM though, you're expected to connect the dots. You're the connector, you're the culture carrier, you're the convener of groups, you are in a lot of ways the defacto person who brings together the teams that build the products. I found that job really hard as an introvert because your job was literally to pick up the phone and call people back in the day when we used the phone, or to gather groups of people, really to lead from the front. And it was very uncomfortable for me, and I can see that in you as well as over the years we've talked. I don't think you have to be an extrovert to be a successful PM. You can be an introverted successful PM. However, you have to exercise the muscle of communication in such a broad way. And so if I told myself 10 years ago, 20 years ago that I would be doing this, speaking publicly and leaving a company, I would not have believed it, because I was so introverted. And I think that's probably true of you. You have been 50,000 subscribers, you showed up to meet up at events, I think that's not our natural inclination, but I also think that you and I have one thing in common and I hope that our listeners will know this, which is we also are people, who when the occasion comes, we will rise to the occasion because that's what needs to get done. And that's what a great PM does. I think sometimes we forget, it's easy to say, well, I'm fixed. I'm an introvert, I can't do this. I said, "Yeah, I was not born knowing how to write specs or doing customer interviews. I was not born knowing how to do strategy." Anything can be learned if you treat it as a skill, but if you treat it as a natural inclination, if you say, I am just this person, our height is fixed. That is very difficult to change, but our ability to learn something like speaking up, convening people, leading from the front is a skill that can be learned if we treat it that way, then it's no longer well, I am X height or I'm fixed here. Instead, we treat it as something that's learnable where we can grow into it. I love that, it touches on a recurring theme on this podcast that comes up a lot with guests is the power of being proactive and having high agency and not just defaulting to here's the way things are and here's who I am and there's not going to be much I can do about it. That just leading into that and understanding that you can use your strengths, whatever they are, even if they're not necessarily innately extroverted, you can accomplish a lot of the same kinds of stuff that someone that's more natural at it can.…

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