Deb Liu: belief

Transcript context

…We'll start with my career in tech. So I had worked in consulting before business school. I went to Stanford for business school, came out to California, didn't know that much about tech, but I really loved using eBay. So I interned there my first year in business school and then when it came to finding a job, I really wasn't sure what we wanted to do, but we wanted to move back to the East Coast. And so I wasn't looking and I couldn't find a job. I think it was really hard. It was 2002. And so I ran into Tim Wenzel and Catherine Wu. So Catherine Wu was from Airbnb as you might know her. And Tim Wenzel put together the PayPal Mafia. He was the recruiter for PayPal. Went to this table and I said, "Absolutely love PayPal, use it all the time. I'm a big seller on eBay," and he's like, "Do you want a job?" I'm like, "No, I'm actually going back east. "And he's like, "Just come in and talk to us." And so I said, "Okay. Well, what kind of jobs do you have?" And he's like, "I have jobs in product and I have jobs in marketing." Now, I've taken marketing class obviously in business school, and I said, "I wonder what this other product job is." So I look over at Catherine and I've seen her around Stanford before, so she was a year ahead of me and I said, "Well, what do you do?" She said, "Product." I'm like, "That sounds good. I'll do that." And that's actually how I fell into product management. Well, I actually, and I'm embarrassed to say faked my way through those interviews, because during the interviews they're like, "Well, what would you build?" And since I was an avid user of both products, I could really richly say, "Here's the product feedback I have. Here are the new products you should build. Here's my feedback on things that we should be doing differently." And they said, "Congratulations." And they gave me the job. And embarrassingly I went to the first day of work and I said to Amy Clement, who was the VP of product at the time, and I said, "Okay, I literally have no idea what this product job is." She showed me the ropes and she was so incredible. She actually showed me, she said, "All those ideas you had, all that energy you've had around building these things, we go do that. Let's go do it." And I said, "Well, how do you do that?" And she said, "Well, you write down what you want to build and you work with the engineers to do it." And I just remember thinking, "This is crazy. I have no idea what I'm doing." It was such an incredible adventure though. Those first few years, I just learned so much about the craft of building, how to really think through product use cases, how to think through what customers wanted, not just the customer of one, myself, but really what true customers and customer cohorts wanted. And so it was really a time when I felt like I was really blossoming, but I didn't come in with mastery. t just the customer of one, myself, but really what true customers and customer cohorts wanted. And so it was really a time when I felt like I was really blossoming, but I didn't come in with mastery. I came with a curiosity and I think that's what made me a great product manager was that I didn't have a set way of doing things. There wasn't some playbook I was trying to play. There wasn't some framework, but instead I was willing to learn. So one takeaway might be from this, the phrase, fake it till you make it. Any thoughts on just how to... I imagine many people right now are like, "Oh, I'm trying to get a job as a pm. How do I do this? That sounds great. I'm going to pass this interview, figure out the job after I joined."…

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