Nikhyl Singhal: preference

Transcript context

…Can you actually talk about this community that you've built? This could be a good time to talk about it. It's called The Skip. Is that right? Yeah. It's funny, it's all kind of fun products. They were always a reaction to something. They weren't really intentional. I, as you opened the podcast, did really enjoy teaching and coaching. I learned just as much from coaching others as they learned, I think. And yet I couldn't really scale. So I had this summer where I had just come off of being a head of product, and more and more of my people I was talking to were also head of products. What would happen is, I would have these conversations and they would ask me a question. I would say, "Well, that's the same conversation I answered on Tuesday." What you realize is, it's a very lonely job. Being lonely at the top is not just an adage. Really, everyone's so busy now. It's like, how do you have time to connect? Everything's a single player, you don't really have community. So I thought, "Well, what if I took the half a dozen people I talked to this month?" And I just said, "Hey, all of you are all interested in talking through how to navigate this crazy world of year one, year two, chief product officer. I think you would really gain. I know all of you and I think you can be safe with one another. Why don't we spend some time together?" So we did a WhatsApp channel and we brought a Zoom call. This was during the pandemic, so you really couldn't meet up. And we started talking. We started talking every month, and people were so empowered by the fact that the problem they were hitting was not just them. It was, "My crazy CEO is telling me this." And the next person is like, "Oh yeah? Let me tell you what my person said." And then they would say, "Oh my gosh, that sounds worse than my situation." But then, we would sit down and say, "Hey, the third person said I actually kind of had this and now I figured out a way out, and here's what I did." And you're like, "Wow, that's amazing. I'm going to try it." The next day they come back, they're like, "It works." And we started to connect and we built this trust, and community building is interesting and powerful work. So six went to 12, and then 12 went to 15, and now we have 28 members. A lot of folks are interested in these types of communities, but I'm so worried about scaling it because it's the enemy of trust and authenticity. So for all of you that are building communities, it's like tree balancing act. But I do think that the goal is to find ways to take all of this sort of like-minded folks that are in these same situations and connect them together. Late stage chief product officer happened to be one of the ones that had some of the most substantial importance to me because of all the coaching I did for that group. If someone's listening and they're like, "Oh, I need to join this thing," how do they find out about it? How do they potentially apply and try to join?…

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