Mayur Kamat: recommendation

Transcript context

…This is true for no matter what level of career you are in, but you have a finite amount of time and largely you have more problems than you have time to solve them. The question is which ones you work on. And this becomes even harder, let's say you're a CPO now because all of them are important, otherwise they will not come to you in the first place. The question is, which one do you work on? And the principle is simple. You work on problems that have a 10X positive or a negative impact. I mean the number can be 10, 5, 300, depending on finance it would be a hundred, some companies might be three. And in most FinTech companies one of two problems, it's a growth problem or a compliance problem because both of them can have a negative or positive 10X impact and that's what you focus on. That's what you spend bulk of your time. What was interesting for me, my first executive roles, that was Google, I was a product manager. I joined what was White Pages back then as a VP of product. I was my first kind of... And White Pages, Alex Allgood, Seattle, founding legend, three companies, all unicorns now. Incredible, very good personal friend and mentor. What was truly interesting when I joined it, they're like, "Okay, this is your desk, this is the product area. So we had two offices, this is when everybody worked in office five days a week." And I'm like, "Okay, where does Alex sit?" And he's like, "Oh, he's sitting with accounting." And I'm like, I didn't think about it because I thought his office is near accounting. Then I find out he doesn't have office, he has a floating desk. So all the other desks were fixed, but he had a movable desk and he would move his desk to one of the departments, which I think had the highest leverage opportunity. And he would sit there at that desk when that department till that either problem was solved or the opportunity was realized, and then he would literally move his desk and then go to product or tech or finance. And that was his way of... You could literally visualize him working on the highest leverage problem by his desk moving. And then that combines that with what we talked before about details and a little bit, I think I didn't mention it about the humility that you need to have to be working in the detail. A lot of the times, especially later in your career, you're like, hey, this is beyond me. This is below me. Why do I need to do that? I have so many PMs or data analysts or somebody should do it. Why would I do it? And that was kind of again, just a quick story there. I remember we were trying to figure out our growth channels and we found out that, hey, we are kind of really tapping out on paid, on social, on referrals, but SEO was something we just hadn't worked on for a while. 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. . 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.…

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