Deb Liu: evaluation

Transcript context

…I wanted to ask you about your experience hiring teams, leading teams, promoting people. I'm curious, what have you found separates PMs that go on to be really successful and have really successful careers versus those who just drift and stagnate and just don't go anywhere? What have you found to be one or two common habits or behaviors or ways of working of someone that ends up being really successful as a PM versus not? I definitely think the growth mindset is absolutely the most important thing because someone who's constantly growing is going to listen to feedback. Someone who's growing is going to seek out information in areas they're not good at. I had one PM, he was an analyst, he went to move over to PM. He just, he's like, "I don't have a design eye." So I gave him three books. We prepped for the design interview and now he is the head of product for one of the most design oriented products in the world. But he said, "You know what? I know what I don't know. I'm willing to learn." One of the things that we need to do is really have that mindset of I'm not an expert in this. He wasn't even a PM, he was an analyst and he said, "But this is my dream." And just seeing the people who rise to the amazing careers, 10X careers are the ones who have that mindset of growth who say, "I don't want to just work on my strengths. I want to shore up my weaknesses. I want to grow in ways that are asymmetrical." I see this in the best people that I've worked with is they're the ones who are the most hungry, and are willing to do whatever it takes to get to where they want to go. Enough hunger is just hard. It's not something that people can have, that ambition. It's not something people can have at every phase in their life and that's totally okay. It's to say, "I'm going to push when I have the ability to push, I'm going to take a step back when it's time to step back." But I think a lot of people are like, "I'm okay. I'm happy here," and if that's okay for different seasons of your life, but the most successful PMs are the ones that say, when the time is right, I'm going to really push, and I'm going to drink it all in and make it as possible to get as far as I possibly can during this season of my life. For people going through that are wanting to push through that and develop, and maybe in this example, what do you find is worth your time? Do you find courses are a good way to improve? Is it mentors, coaches, just doing the work? Do you have a general mental model of, "Hey, I want to improve it," say design, I don't know. Do you push people to one direction versus another to actually get better at a lot of these things?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.