Anneka Gupta: evaluation

Transcript context

…First of all, I love that this comes back to your strategic lesson of just if you have a strong why behind something, that's incredibly powerful and people will be confident that you're thinking strategically. Two, I was just at a talk with Zuck. He's being interviewed at the Chase Center, the Acquired Podcast at this whole event, and his main thing that he talked about that he values most in the culture of Facebook is learning faster than anyone else. Shipping stuff that isn't perfect, but just so that you can get one more turn and learn something faster than someone else. So, that super resonates that's Facebook's culture. Is there an example of something you worked on where you did that, where you kind of ship something that you weren't fully confident in and you learn faster? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot because anytime you're shipping products, there's so many different things that could go right and wrong. There's a situation where we created a really amazing high value product and we decided not to monetize it, and then we realized after the fact, "Wait, we should have monetized it. So, we're trying to figure out how to package some new capabilities to monetize this thing that we know has a lot of value without taking away what we've already given to existing customers." So that was something we learned along the way that we originally didn't think, oh, we should monetize this, but then we realized that there's actually an avenue to do that after the fact. There's been other things where we've developed a set of capabilities thinking that it will solve for this new persona's problems, but then we misunderstood how easy it was going to be to go sell to that new persona within our own organization. I've made that mistake many times actually. And so now I think now what I've taken from that is really know how you're going to sell something and who's going to do the selling before you actually go build out the product. Because if you don't have that right focus, you may build out the best product and yet it's going to get zero adoption because no one in your organization is ready to sell it. So there's tons of stuff like that where it's like been okay, yeah, we've learned something from this, and it's not all throwaway, it just means that we've got to do something differently for this product and we need to do something differently for our organization going forward. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next-generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. And Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform where I could set up experiments, easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time and accessible UI for diving deeper into performance and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com/Lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/Lenny. I want to come back to something Rachel also shared with me when asked her what questions to ask you. By the way, first of all, she spent a lot of time raving about how amazing you are first. That was the first set of conversations, and then she came up with a bunch of questions to ask you. And so her other question was about how good you are at navigating very difficult personalities. She showed this quote that she constantly saw you interact with and bring together several leaders who had much higher egos and very disparate points of view who are not informed or thoughtful or as gracious as you were, and she also said you have very low ego. She wanted me just to ask you for what you've learned about how to navigate very difficult personalities and help people align when it's not neatly what they want to do.…

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