Sachin Kansal: belief

Transcript context

…A lot of stress. Okay, that was a great answer. Today's episode is brought to you by Coda. I personally use Coda every single day to manage my podcast and also to manage my community. It's where I put the questions that I plan to ask every guest that's coming on the podcast. It's where I put my community resources, it's how I manage my workflows. Here's how Coda can help you. Imagine starting a project at work and your vision is clear, you know exactly who's doing what and where to find the data that you need to do your part. In fact, you don't have to waste time searching for anything because everything your team needs from project trackers and OKRs to documents and spreadsheets lives in one tab all in Coda. With Coda's collaborative all-in-one workspace, you get the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, the power of applications, and the intelligence of AI all in one easy to organize tab. Like I mentioned earlier, I use Coda every single day and more than 50,000 teams trust Coda to keep them more aligned and focused. If you're a startup team looking to increase alignment and agility, Coda can help you move from planning to execution in record time. To try it for yourself, go to coda.io/lennytoday and get six months free of the team plan for startups. That's coda.io/lenny to get started for free and get six months of the team plan. Coda.io/lenny. I'm going to shift our conversation a bit to general career advice. I've got a bunch of questions. I actually asked the community, my newsletter, Slack community, what to ask you, and they had a few really good questions that I want to run by you. So one is just, what are some of the most impactful and recurring pieces of advice that you share with early career product people that you find most helps them get unstuck and most helps them move to where they want to move in their career? One is go to a job where you can ship multiple products as fast as possible. Comes back to cycle time where you can ... Let's say over a period of two to three years, you can go through three to five product cycles as fast as possible because you want to put that under your belt. Don't worry too much about how you show up in a room. Don't try to spend too much time on being the smartest guy in the room. Just define the product, work with your engineering, with your design team, with your data team and ship that product. Rev that product, iterate on that product, ship the next product. What you will find as you do that over those two to three years, three years later, you'll suddenly realize that, "Wow, I've actually shipped a lot." And the other thing that I strongly believe is what makes a great product manager is not the five amazing strategic ideas you had over those three years. It's the thousand micro decisions that you made, not the five macro decisions that you made, but the thousand micro decisions that you made. Where should I put the button? Should I put the screen there or not? What should the copy say? Do I launch this product in Atlanta or in New Jersey? You go through these and what you want at the end of that is you'll start developing an innate sense of judgment. So you want to increase your cycle time to be able to get to judgment as fast as possible, because when you make a similar decision the 10th time, you don't even have to think about it. It just happens. And we constantly talk about experimentation versus gut or data versus gut. As you progress in your career, you want to develop that gut as fast as possible, because in my opinion, that's what differentiates a good product manager from a great product manager, that they have developed some extra level of gut and they're able to make the correct decisions because of the experience that they have had over that time. Another way to label what you're describing as product sense, which is something a lot of people are always told they should be building and are very unsure how to go about building it. And what I love about your advice here is this, is you find a place where you could just ship over and over and over and that keep that cycle time down. And there's almost like implicit advice here is if you're working at a company that takes a long time to ship, this is probably not a good place to be starting your career.…

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