Anneka Gupta: uncertainty

Transcript context

…As a PM that might be listening to this, feeling like, "Okay, yeah, that sounds great." But then I make a bad decision and then Anneka is going to be like, "You messed up here. You've shipped the wrong thing here. It didn't work." How do you create a culture where people don't feel that and aren't as afraid of making bad decisions and making decisions with 70% of the information? I think part of it comes down to making sure there's a strong hypothesis that everyone understands when you're making the decision. Or it might not just be one hypothesis, it might be a series of hypotheses and assumptions that we're making that are informing the decision. So it might be a hypothesis that this segment of customers is going to be willing to pay for this product because it's solving an urgent and important enough need for them that they're going to go do it and this is the evidence we have to find it, but this is also the stuff we don't know. Then along the way, we learn whether that hypothesis is true or not. And so at the end of the day, if something didn't work out, we can go back to the original hypothesis and say, "Well, this is what we learned in this process that our hypothesis was actually not true, and we learned all of this after the fact." I think the way to make a culture of risk taking and people willing to make these bets and go out on a limb is to reward the learning versus the outcome. That's what I try to focus on is if we're constantly learning, it is okay if we make bad decisions, but we learn from them and we get better for next time. Even in making this bad decision, we learn something about our customers or our business that we otherwise wouldn't have learned that we can use in another context. First of all, I love that this comes back to your strategic lesson of just if you have a strong why behind something, that's incredibly powerful and people will be confident that you're thinking strategically. Two, I was just at a talk with Zuck. He's being interviewed at the Chase Center, the Acquired Podcast at this whole event, and his main thing that he talked about that he values most in the culture of Facebook is learning faster than anyone else. Shipping stuff that isn't perfect, but just so that you can get one more turn and learn something faster than someone else. So, that super resonates that's Facebook's culture. Is there an example of something you worked on where you did that, where you kind of ship something that you weren't fully confident in and you learn faster?…

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