Lane Shackleton: preference

Transcript context

…You mentioned in your early career ... We talked about your Alaska guide phase. Something else I saw is that you were on the AdWords approval team. You basically were reviewing ads people submitted to run on AdWords and that's how you started in tech. So I guess first of all, is that true? And then second of all, how did you graduate from that phase and become this Chief Product Officer of one of the fastest growing, most interesting companies in the world? That was a really memorable time. There's an amazing cohort of people that started in tech. I think there was 200 or 300 of us at that time and then eventually thousands that started in Sheryl Sandberg's organization. I guess maybe some quick context. Before running ads on google.com at that time, you had to have them manually approved by a human before that was handled by machine learning and outsourced to other countries. And so there was this process where basically an ad would show up on your screen, you would mark it family safe, non-family safe, porn. And then based on that, it would either run or it wouldn't. And actually, funny enough, some of my most successful friends were terrible at the approval event. They failed the rote task of approving ads. They just couldn't handle it and they went on to be really, really successful. So after working on ad approvals, at that time, I moved to chat support. It was basically when AdWords was launching chat support. I remember very fondly having two chats, chatting with two advertisers at once. Moved on to phone support. That was eight hours a day of talking to AdWords customers. Really a total rollercoaster ride. It was basically one minute you would pick up the phone and it would be someone from a Fortune 100 company trying to spend millions of dollars on AdWords and then the next minute you would be on the phone with a psychic or a taxi driver that was warring with their compatriots over some really specific keyword. I think there were two lessons that I would draw from this. One is I had a mentor at the time and his advice when I was starting my career was basically you have to get customer facing from the very beginning because you're going to end up serving a customer your whole career. Even when you're the CEO of a company, you're going to be serving a customer. So you better get really good at being in any customer scenario and being able to handle it. And so I think that that turned out to be insanely good advice. And if I think about a piece of advice that I give out to people who are early in their career, I've definitely recycled that advice. I think the other thing that I took away from that experience was it's just a great lesson in when people don't actually care about your product. So in AdWord's case, people did not care about AdWords. You were the expert on it and you're trying to tell them about ad groups and how this ad format works and blah, blah. And most of the time people are like, "Dude, I'm a small business owner. I'm trying to get people to come to my auto mechanic store." Or, "I'm trying to get people to come to my taxi service," or whatever it was. I don't care. Basically the product had to get out of the way and really just drive impact for the customer. It was like they just want more phone calls or they want more people in the store. So those are I think two pieces that I think about from those days still. And then I worked in a variety of other roles. was like they just want more phone calls or they want more people in the store. So those are I think two pieces that I think about from those days still. And then I worked in a variety of other roles. I worked in a role called product specialist, which is an awesome role back when there were 15 product specialists at Google. For me, that was an amazing time because I was getting to sit on seven or eight different core product teams. And in my observation, these days, most PMs don't get to sit on other people's core teams. And so I had these three or four years of just ... I call it a masterclass in PMing because I was getting to watch what was working for some PMs and what wasn't working for other PMs and just taking notes behind the scenes. So that was a really influential role. And then went on to various PM roles at Google and YouTube.…

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