Mihika Kapoor: evaluation

Transcript context

…Everyday? ... meeting time. Yes. We basically work together like this, but he also told me that when I joined the company, he was like, "Who is this girl and why does she have so many opinions?" And so I think that something that I have learned to do over time, and I think that's something that's a good sort of thing to lean into if you are a PM who has strong opinions, is to be very direct about how much you care about your opinions. So now, I'll do this thing where I'll be like, "Oh, I think we should do this, but I feel like medium confidence on it." So if you feel stronger like, "I defer to you," and always being very, very, very explicit about like, "I feel really strongly about this," or, "This is my hypothesis," or, "I do not have an opinion here. I defer to you." I think the second thing that I would mention that is really important in order to do this correctly is... So I have a very direct communication style. I will never sugarcoat anything. I'll never say I like something if I don't like something. If I'm in a meeting and someone tells me they don't agree with me, I will tell them I don't agree with them back. In return, I really like it when people are very direct with me. And so I think that whenever I join a team or whenever I start working with a new person, I always let them know. I'm always like, :I am very direct and if you disagree with me, I want to know that. " Because I think sometimes what can happen is really strongly minded PMs can go into a conversation and can be like, "Oh, I think we should do X," even though they actually feel medium confidence about X. And then the rest of the room is like, "Oh, my God. That PM feels so strongly about doing X that I'm not going to say anything because they clearly have so much conviction in X." And what you actually want is for everyone to feel comfortable speaking up. And so creating that culture where everyone feels comfortable giving their opinion and communicating their level of confidence is really important. So this direct communication point you made, somebody shared this quote, Alice Ching, who I think your EM said this about you that she's in awe of how direct you are, especially how you can make it not personal and help people focus on the matter at hand. Any other advice you have there for people to, one, either be more direct and successful in that being directness? Or is there an example you can share where, because I think people hear this, they're like, "Oh yeah, I'm going to be direct. I'm going to be so direct, it's going to be great," and then it's so hard to actually do, so is there maybe an example that comes to mind of here's something you did recently of like, "Oh, wow. Okay, I see what she's talking about"?…

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