Vikrama Dhiman: belief

Transcript context

…It's interesting that when you saw Crystal being incredibly good at working with data, you just realized, "Hey, maybe I'm actually not very good at this." And your reaction wasn't, "God damn it, I'm really screwed and this is really depressing me", it's, "No, instead I'm going to try to get better at this." And that reminds me some of the feedback I get with this podcast, those people are like, "Man, these people are so good, I'm never going to be this good. It discourages me from thinking I will ever be super successful in this career." Clearly, you have a different approach. Do you have advice or guidance to folks that are sometimes discouraged seeing people being so incredible and helping them actually continue to level up in this rate of change you talked about versus just like, "Nope, I'm never going to be that good?" I think as product managers it becomes difficult because a lot of your growth is being determined because of feedback of others. And because product management is so ambiguous and still not defined, the stakeholders can also give feedback on variety of dimensions. Some of them may not even be important enough to give feedback on, but they are important enough for them and so therefore, they give you feedback. And therefore, you have to shape that feedback in. But you also have to consider that there are these eight access that we spoke about, the data access, the design and research access, the technology access, the strategy access, communication access, collaboration access, organizational skills access, and the community access. You need to channelize feedback into okay, is this an area that you are targeting for growth or not? And one of the most important things that I learned was that when I joined Gojek or even earlier, there would be so many different areas that I needed to improve on and still need to improve on. You can't improve on every single area. That's what overwhelms you. You need to pick which is the area which is the maximum leverage for you and improve on that particular aspect and then move on to the next area, then move on to the next area and so on. Obviously, if you are floundering in something, if you're really negative in something, then you fix that first because that will give you the highest leverage. But if you are picking up data and design and strategy and technology all at the same time, that's when you'll overwhelm you. So to summarize the advice there is one, be actually very open to feedback you're getting. It's easy to say that, it's hard to actually listen to people criticizing you and act on it. So I think that's an important takeaway here is just actually, feedback is a gift and actually understand that and try to act on it. I have a great interview with Jules Walter who's a PM at Google now, and he has this awesome quote about how whenever people give him hard feedback, it's like internally he's just melting, but that's externally he's like, "Thank you so much for that feedback, I really appreciate it. It's very valuable." And so that's a good way to get people to keep giving feedback. Okay. And then the other piece of advice you just shared there is pick a focus area. Like say you're getting all this feedback, your strategy isn't amazing, your PRDs aren't great, just find one thing to focus on. And I don't know, do you try to do somewhat quarter? Somewhat year? Do you have a heuristic of how long to spend on one thing?…

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