Deb Liu: evaluation

Transcript context

…Along those lines, do you think it's a good career move to do a zero to one thing within a bigger company? Or is it often a bad idea? Do you have any advice there for folks? It depends. It depends on your personality in the company. So the one thing I realized about my role was that I did a lot of... I had five different careers at the company over 11 years. And so most people don't realize that when you work on new things, you're constantly adding to your portfolio, subtracting from it, growing things, pruning them. And so you could just work on so many cool things except everything has similar... It's like it rhymes, but it's not exactly the same. So you learn the lessons of how to get things done, how to get resource, how to get support when the product is not working, how to not get prunes in the next culling. And those are really, really important skills. But I think for people who are just starting out of the career, it is a very high risk thing to do. So if you're very early in the career, I encourage people just learn the core skills first. You can learn the core skills when there's a lot of stability. This product is growing X percent, like 5%, and you're going to grow at 10. That's amazing. That is because you are there, you're going to change your trajectory of the product, or this thing has a hundred thousand users, you're going to get it to 200,000. Those are the kinds of things that are going to be successful for you and you can put on your resume. But I think it reaches a point in your career where you have to decide, when am I going to take the big swing? Because the big swings are the things that you write your career stories about. They're not just, I moved this metric X, but I changed your trajectory in this way. And so the big swings though have a lot of failures along the way. And so you have to understand you're making trade-offs in that. I encourage everybody to take some time, two, three years in their career when they're ready for the big swing, where if it doesn't work... If it works, you run the team, you run this amazing product. It doesn't work, you can always go back and go back to the core products. It's interesting how your strategy here is very similar to a product portfolio strategy where as a team should have a few big bets and then a lot of incremental stuff. And it reminds me about this awesome post called You Are in Control of Your Career. And the argument in your post is you should PM your career the way you PM your product. So there's a lot of synergy here. So maybe just diving into this post and advice around this, how should someone be PMing their career, the way they PM a product? What's your take there?…

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