Mayur Kamat: observation

Transcript context

…. We're building a caller ID app and what we wanted to do was when somebody types a phone number in Google, we want to be the first link to say, hey, is this a spam call or not? Or whose number it is. And if we could then we could get them to download our app. That was the hypothesis. So I present at the executive team meeting to Alex, like, "Hey, I have a team. I want to hire a product manager focused purely on SEO and because I think that's one of our highest leverage areas right now." And Alex is like, "Hey, the whole White Pages, I built based on SEO. People who type people's name and the first thing used to be a White Pages link. I'm one of the best people in the world to work on SEO." I'm like, "Yeah. So?" He's like, "Let me run this product." I'm like, "Okay, what do you mean?" He's like, "No, no, I will be the product manager for this for however long you need it." I'm like, "How's [inaudible 01:10:54]?" "They don't worry about it. Just tell me about the engineers." So again, he moved his desk to where that product team sat, and for the next three months he was the product manager on that scrum. So he would come to my product team meetings, give us update on what's happening with the SEO scrum, and then an hour later I would be in the leadership meeting giving my update to him, and truly he was operating it saying, this is high leverage area for the company, high leverage for my yards. It should be high leverage for me. I'm the best person to do it. I'm going to be in the details and do it. CZ, same at Binance, there were a lot of products that he would just sit on himself. There were very few people at Binance who would say no to CZ, but one of my lead PMs who worked on the products that CZ worked on, he would tell them no all the time. They would just baffle all the other executives, how is he saying no to CZ and none of us are doing it? Hey, that was his product area that CZ was working on, and there was that mutual respect there that, hey, we know this thing and he is going to say no to me because probably not a good idea. So that humility and attention to detail is required to work on the high leverage problems. A lot of the high leverage problems are not, as I said, not strategy decisions. They're not language markets to go after and stuff. A lot of them are like, why is this thing not working as well as it needs to be? And a lot of time the devil is in the details and you need to be over there. I think combining that, knowing what is high leverage or not, and two, both having the humility and the patience to be able to go dig deeper and solve that. Some of them are quick ones. Like if I'm looking today at, let's say how many of our signed up users convert into a long-term monthly daily active user, that could be something I focus on for a month. Because we're running a lot of experiments on early onboarding screens, early rewards, early incentives, early loyalty program, and at some point it might be like, oh, the team's got it. I've given all my... What I could do there. It's functioning. We have great PMs. I trust their execution on this. ves, early loyalty program, and at some point it might be like, oh, the team's got it. I've given all my... What I could do there. It's functioning. We have great PMs. I trust their execution on this. Let me just go focus on some of the compliance challenges that we have or fraud issues that we have in France. Those kind of being able to kind of... The only way that works for me is I keep a very three calendar because you cannot do this without that. If you have hundreds of meetings, hundreds of one-on-ones daily standards, a lot of recurring meetings, you just can't find time to go work on high leverage problems. So that would be my kind of other stuff is you should have plenty of open spaces on your calendar. A full calendar is a badge of shame, not a badge of honor. These are awesome stories. Just the metaphor of the moving desk is so good. That's the epitome of a... Like what you're describing is what people now call founder mode, where the founder just goes in the details working on the problem. Brian Chesky actually did this at Airbnb while I was there. He took on a new product and was like mini CEO, essentially. I don't know if he'd called himself the product manager 'cause I don't think he loved product managers. He kind of famously got rid of product managers, which he didn't actually... But yeah, he did that very much and he sat with the team, kind of created a whole space for the team that he was in. These are awesome stories and really good example of a founder using their power to unblock and finding the highest leverage opportunities. To kind of start to close off our conversation, I'm going to take you to a couple recurring themes on this podcast, recurring segments on this podcast. First, we're going to visit AI Corner and in AI Corner I ask, what's a way that you have found to use AI in AI tool, a bunch of AI tools in your work to work more efficiently to work to create better quality work?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.