Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…We're definitely going to talk about interviewing and career and kind of come back to these topics. But going back to Asana, you look at this journey that you took and it sounds amazing and went great. And someone that's kind of starting out, they may feel like, man, how am I ever going to not make any mistakes along my journey and get to a place like Jackie ended up? And so a question is just, is there like a mistake or some wrong turn you took along this journey that you can share? Yeah, I'm sure I've made lots of mistakes. One of the ones that comes to mind is that in probably my first or second year at Asana, I very much saw the PM's role is like a person who wants to say no to everybody. I was like, all these people want us to do stuff and we would do way too much and we would like never get anything important done if we just said yes to them. So I need to say no to people. And I kind of got into this defensive mindset and sometimes people would come to me with ideas and I'd be like, are you telling me I can't do my job right? And like, I would just try to say no to them as efficiently and effectively as possible. And I did this one day to my boss and he had some idea for a design that I thought was a bad idea. And I was just like, no, we're not going to do that. And he's like, Jackie, you have to stop shutting me down. And I was like, what? I'm about to get fired. Like, I was like, Oh, I have really, really messed up here. And like, it definitely like made an impression on me. And I was lucky enough to have a coach at the time. So I went to her to talk to her and really started to rethink how I saw the role like this, like, urgency that I felt of like I need to shut people down as fast as possible to save time as opposed to like take the time to consider that other people probably have good ideas and even if their solution isn't what I think is going to be the absolute best solution the problem they're talking about is probably real and I can interpret their solution as a way of sharing the problem and like exploring and brainstorming around that and so it wasn't an immediate change but I remember at one point she challenged me to like for the next two weeks say yes to everything and I was like I can't do that. I wouldn't be doing my job. And she's like, I think you can find a way to do your job and still say yes to people. Right. And so you can say like, yes, I agree. That is a real problem. Like, yes, I think we could test this design with users and just see what's different with two weeks of saying yes to people instead of no. And I realized that this like protectiveness and like lockdownness that I had really wasn't something I needed and wasn't something that was serving me because it meant that I couldn't have real collaboration with the other people around me. Wow. I love that story. A little thread I want to pull on there. Two questions. How far into your time at Asana did this happen? Because it's surprising how often things like that come up really late in a career and you're like, oh, shit, this kind of fundamental thing that I imagine isn't maybe as true as I thought in changing course there. So maybe let me ask that question. Just like how far into your career was that?…

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