Vlad Loktev: evaluation

Transcript context

…I remember there was a project that we were going to work on. I'm like, "I think this is a big opportunity. Here's all my thinking on it." And what I didn't have is, "Here's the lift this could potentially drive." And so what you did is you just created this flow chart of all the levers of the business, and then you're talking about this sub-lever here, and if you move this 10%, here's the impact on the potential business. And you're right. It is actually a big opportunity, but this is how you want to show it. Yeah, totally. The other thing I'll say is also equally important is saying no to a lot of things. And it's actually really hard because we are basically trained and conditioned to say yes. You go to school. You follow the rules. You listen to your parents. You don't want to disappoint people. And so when people ask for help, you help and you want to be a really good teammate. But then at some point, you realize that's actually not the job. And if you were to say yes to absolutely everything that you have to do at a company, you would be distracted all the time with tons of things that will not make impact. And so I learned very early on how to say no. It was hard emotionally. I've gone to many different debates and conversations, but ultimately I think maybe it doesn't win you many friends in the short term, but in the long term, people realize that when you say no to something, there's probably a really good reason behind why that thing may not be as impactful today, and maybe we shouldn't even do it in the first place. And so I think doing the back of the envelope math and being really good at prioritization is one thing, but also not getting distracted with all the noise and all the different opinions that everyone's going to have at a big company is another big thing. Saying no is hard, so maybe two quick questions here. One is, do you have any tricks for how to say no well, where someone's not-…

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