Mayur Kamat: commitment

Transcript context

…Great. Not really... Those two words feel very at odds with each other for me. A product, you have hypotheses and if you can test it, you don't need a strategy. Right? If I say, "Hey, if I build this and I know this will add this much users and this time with this conversion rate, this customer acquisition cost and this LTV," that's your hypothesis and you could test it in the market very quickly. And if it works, you have your strategy. Keep doing more of it. Strategy is always keep doing more of it or don't do it, right? That's all that is to strategy. The key part is just figuring out which one goes in which bucket. And if you're really executing fast enough in a kind of structured, experimentation-driven manner, your strategy becomes a largely solved problem. So, for most, and that's a challenge. A lot of people think strategy is about looking at Porter's [inaudible 00:43:18] forces, a lot of slides, we're looking at some data and slicing it and saying, "We need to go here or there." All of it is largely in some sort of package intuition. And the challenge with that is, usually you go with the loudest voice in the room. And if you're a junior in your career, it's a very frustrating exercise because you think you know the strategy better. But it's all it is. It's a sense of package intuition, and then the guy with the loudest, biggest title or the loudest voice is going to go do it. It was very early in my career, Jonathan Rosenberg, he was the head of, he was the CPO at Google. All the PMs reported to him. He was not called the CPO back then. And he had this one thing he would say all the time that, "Come to me with data. If you come to me with ideas, we'll go with mine." Right? That was the saying. You can come with any ideas, we're just going to do what I think, but unless you come with strong sense of proof to override me. So again, strategy is a little bit overrated for product. For market expansions, for investments, for licenses, compliance, there's several areas where it makes sense and it's kind of useful. But for most product managers, your strategy should be, how fast can I go from hypothesis to data, right? The faster you can go there, the easier your strategy gets. That is certainly a hot take. So the idea here, I'm curious how you operationalize this with folks at N26. Is it just like, "I don't need to see a whole strategy for the year. Just give me, here's the plan, here's what we're going to test, here's our hypothesis?" Are you actually, what do you tell your PM team?…

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