Mayur Kamat: recommendation

Transcript context

…Let's follow this thread on accelerating your career, and talk about where you're at today, N26. As you know, I've been doing a bunch of research on which companies hire and produce the best product managers. I've done a couple passes at this, and N26 has come up in the top five of both ways of approaching this, essentially which companies alumnis go on to do the best in their career. N26 is way up there. I want to come at this from a couple directions. One is what N26 as a company does to hire and incubate the best people, but also just you personally, what your advice is to people and how you help them become great PMs. Let's actually start in that second bucket. What is the most common and most impactful career advice that you share with product managers that you manage, that you find most helps them move ahead in their career and get unstuck in their career? I think the number one thing I shared before, the best thing you can do is find companies that are growing fast because it compounds your learning at a much faster interval. Just the basic compound interest formula, even if your interest rate is low, if you're compounding daily versus compounding yearly, after two years, you will be at a whole different stage at the end point. Companies that are growing fast just lets you get that learning much, much quicker. I remember joining Microsoft first in my career. Some of the products I worked on during my internship had not shipped till I left Microsoft three, four years later. That's a very, very low rate of compounding. Microsoft's a whole different company now 20 years later, thankfully. Then you contrast that something like Binance where every day or every hour, every minute you're shipping something and then learning from it. The faster you can compound your learning, the faster you will grow. The second piece generally is, you need to optimize for what you're great at. Now having two kids, I'm fairly in the fact that your strengths get defined very, very early, right? I'm looking at my nine-year-old and twelve-year-old, and they have a whole different set of strengths. If you're 25 years old early in your career, it's very hard at that point to say, "Oh, here are all my weaknesses and I need to improve on those." A lot of the career feedback typically tends to be around, "Hey, here are the things you need to be better at. Why don't you do more of that stuff, right?" Formally in the camp that you need to know what you're great at, what are your superpowers, and you need to find jobs where success is determined by how much of that superpowers you get to use. Early in your career, you can't get away with the fact that there's some stuff you're not going to be great at and you just have to manage around it. If you get higher up in your career, then it gets easier because you can build a team that complements your strengths, but again, if you're early in your career, find places that, if you're a great creative person, if you can look at a product and think of 100 things you can do better, you are always about what's the next best thing and how quickly can I implement it, you need to be working in teams that have a high experimentation culture. You need to be working in growth teams in large companies. If you work in a FinTech company on a compliance side project or launching a new business vertical, you're going to struggle, right? On the same time, if you have extreme management structured thinking, you have great stakeholder management, you have high EQ, you should work in teams where there is a large amount of complex people management and process management. You would struggle in a growth team where the expectation is you're doing things really quickly. I would look at first very introspectively, what are my true strengths? agement and process management. You would struggle in a growth team where the expectation is you're doing things really quickly. I would look at first very introspectively, what are my true strengths? What do I, and then look at jobs where that has a much higher profile of winning. Thirdly, largely I would say do not optimize for compensation, especially early in your career. If you're truly on a track to become an executive someday or found your own company and make it successful, you will find that the compensation is so much backloaded that you would make 90% of your compensation in the last five years of your career, so optimizing for 10%, 20% early in your career. If you have two jobs, I would rank in your first 15 years of your career, I would say do not look at the compensation. Then the last one, this was strange. I never thought about this longer, but now I think this is probably the most interesting advice I can give people is determine very early in your career if you truly want to be a C-level someday, you want to be an executive someday, because it's almost like if you're ambitious and successful, you enter product management. You are in top of your, it's almost an expectation of you that you would become that and you'd never really challenge or question yourself, is this the thing that needs me, that I need to do to get there? Is there something I'm going to truly enjoy? Not just the destination but the process to get there. A lot of people think that and they make suboptimal decisions based on that. There's incredible careers you can build and incredible lives that you can live by just being great at what you do, doing more of that stuff. You end your career maybe as a director, maybe as a group product manager, but throughout the stuff, you have built a holistic life that doesn't revolve around your work and gives incredible meaning to you, or you can be saying, you know what? Work is a huge part of my identity. Somebody asks me what wakes me up in the morning and what gives me that energy? It's my work. I can't separate my identity from your work. Then maybe you should pursue that C-level path because it'll truly be fulfilling and you would be able to make those challenges and sacrifices that are going to be asked of you to make that. If you can calibrate that early and have that true conversation with yourself like, "Yes, I want to go down that path and I want to do," you would make different career choices. In that path, I would definitely say don't look at compensation. There are two jobs. Look at the three things. Is it going to give me high compounding of learning? Is it high overlap with my strengths, and am I going to have a lot of fun doing it? If you have fun doing it, then it becomes a virtuous cycle and you do more of it and you're great at it.…

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