Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Books, apps, and tools
book / recommends
“The Year of Yes, by Shonda Rhimes. I almost never read nonfiction. I love Shonda Rhimes, made an exception for this one. It's about just saying yes to things and finding your voice when you do feel like you're sometimes the first or the only or the different, and what that feels like. And it was very life-changing for me, actually.”
Claim ledger
28 transcript-backed records
01 / recommendation
“The Year of Yes, by Shonda Rhimes. I almost never read nonfiction. I love Shonda Rhimes, made an exception for this one. It's about just saying yes to things and finding your voice when you do feel like you're sometimes the first or the only or the different, and what that feels like. And it was very life-changing for me, actually.”
02 / belief
“I think anything you do to make it less stressful is useful. But then there've also been times in my career where I would keep the room itself small, but because we were all trying to calibrate on specific principles, I would record or broadcast the reading to anyone who wanted to see it, just so they could all see the principles by which we were decision-making and get calibrated on that.”
03 / uncertainty
“I really, one the metaphors was sitting around in your family room when you think about how to make calls work, where when you're sitting in a family room, you're not scheduling it, you're not, I don't know, having this cold corporate feeling, the way you do with a conference where there's heavyweight interactions, and instead there's just, you can join and leave.”
04 / belief
“I mean, I think for what it's worth, I think I still do a fair amount of product pitching in the past few years because there's always someone else to convince.”
05 / belief
“Sometimes people ask me who are working in product, what's the one thing they should do to be successful at product? And maybe the thing I would say is, especially as an org scale or a company scales, there's just a lot of distractions that get between you and the customer.”
06 / belief
“You don't want to create a metric that's disconnected just to make a team feel good. It really does need to solve the customer problem and that's reflected in company's performance, but you can usually break it down into smaller pieces and I think that breaking down into smaller pieces and assigning those out to teams, that's really helpful.”
07 / uncertainty
“I don't know, we've built a mythology around strategy being the most important thing.”
08 / belief
“I think where I landed is I wouldn't give that feedback to someone else. And the way I do give that feedback, actually, because I think there is a lot of really useful information in that.”
09 / belief
“Exactly, very similar. And I think the thing that was helpful for me there is that really unlocked what I was looking for from my managers because otherwise I wanted them to be exactly like me.”
10 / belief
“I think that a lot of founders think, I need a CPO, I need a VP of product, I need someone who's really senior, when often the founder has a bunch of the vision and knowledge, and what they really need is somebody to build the product.”
11 / belief
“Let's talk about which of these we should try, let's talk about maybe context you don't have for why these don't make sense or why we don't do these. And that was such a gift because I was able to build such a great relationship, a trusting and complimentary relationship with Max and the rest of the exec team, and also that he took seriously things that he really didn't have to that I have so much respect for that, and I think I got really lucky in just finding a great CEO and exec team.”
12 / belief
“I think the thing that gets hard is you often cut out the middle, where if it's a working team presenting to the senior leaders on something important, it's really hard because it means people's managers are not in the room and can't help the conversation or other things.”
13 / belief
“I for a long time felt like I was held back because I don't have a plan, but I realized that probably the most important thing is to just acknowledge that that is true for me.”
14 / belief
“Yeah, I mean, I think the hard part is just sublimating your ego a little bit and saying it's more important to get to the outcome than to be right. And I think all of growth is a battle with yourself, but this is one of the hardest ones because we all want to be right, we all want to protect ourselves and it served us, many of us for so long to be right.”
15 / belief
“You're focusing on the execution of the system a little bit more, but you got to stay connected, I think, to the customer and to what you're bringing to them.”
16 / belief
“I think when you just take a pause, your body calms down, your mind gets a chance to breathe a little bit, and then your response is going to be better, but you got to take the pause because the immediate visceral reaction, is not always...”
17 / belief
“I think again, even at high levels, maybe the strategic directions become more important to get mostly right, but I think still most of your time is making sure they can make it to market.”
18 / uncertainty
“I don't know, just by being great, by being kind and nice and making the world slightly better.”
19 / belief
“I mean, actually I think Boz has written about a bunch of this, and I probably most agree with him.”
20 / belief
“I think about it all the time where I'm like, okay, if I want to have this kind of impact, I'm going to have to do the work, I'm going to have to try new things, I'm going to have to feel uncomfortable, and sometimes I don't want to do those things.”
21 / preference
“I do have biases toward execution and being directive and things like that, but I think learning how to interpret and respond to feedback has been a really important point for me and making my choices of, just because I'm getting feedback doesn't mean I immediately need to respond to all of it.”
22 / preference
“I got feedback, I got a lot of feedback over the course of my career and some of the stacking of feedback was basically like, you could be the smartest person in the room, but it doesn't matter if people don't like you, which is very complicated feedback and I wouldn't give that feedback to anyone else, but I took it very seriously.”
23 / evaluation
“I would say coming to Faire, I mean, one of the things I always think about is that especially as you are more senior, ramping on anywhere feels terrible because you expect to be as good at your new job as you were when you left your last job, but you forget that at your last job, you were there for years, you had years to build up the vocabulary and the cultural context and the network and the product knowledge, and then you're stepping in somewhere where you know none of that, but you have the same expectations of yourself of being able to have an impact and improve things and help your team.”
24 / preference
“I mean, I think a lot of us are just like, you have a spreadsheet in your head of the axes and certainly when you're choosing between jobs, for me it feels like, oh man, the rest of my career hangs in the balance of making the exact right decision and getting the exact right job.”
25 / evaluation
“For me, the hill climb is all about the difference between the local optimum and a global optimum. That sounds very abstract, but I think a lot of the time when we're doing our job, when we're doing life stuff, whatever you're doing, you try to just get better and better and you optimize your current system and then you feel really good about it, and that is great.”
26 / evaluation
“Sometimes when you give people direction, you're like, okay, everybody just go get revenue or everybody just go get GMV. And it seems obvious because that's the thing you have to do as a company, but there's only a few places where you are guaranteed to get that and it's measurable and you can do it.”
27 / preference
“The thing that changed there is me just saying it's more important for us to get to the outcome and I very selfishly just like to learn more things. And so by deciding that I already knew everything, I was cutting myself off from learning the things that other people were really good at and it's so easy to just open the door instead and say like, hey, you seem to know something that I don't know yet.”
28 / recommendation
“What you really want to bring to any forum, whether it's a product review or a written inform or anything else, is the minimal amount of information that you need to make a clean recommendation because then you are forced to be opinionated.”