The Exchanges

Q one of those roles is a dream for a lot of people. And so I wanted to start with just this question, and I want to see where the conversation takes us. If you could give one specific piece of advice to someone that's looking to do well in their career or to do better in their career based on what has worked well for you, what would that be?

A Always be learning. And I tell this to everybody. So I often tell people someone who's always learning is always going to exceed someone who's the expert today. You're going to find people, you know, the one thing about school is that we go to school and there's a such a thing as getting a hundred on the test, a perfect score on the SAT, graduating with a four point O well, there's nothing like that in careers, right? We think it's actually a non-linear experience and there's always someone better than you at speaking or presenting or strategy or execution. But if you're always learning, learning from the best, getting feedback, you're always going to get better every single day. And that's what I have always held, which is each job I took, I didn't necessarily qualify for it. I wasn't necessarily the very best at it. And so I became a student of being better at that job. And once I mastered that, I was a student for something else and something else and something else. And so I always balance learning and impact, which was you can have the most impact at the job, you know, the best, but then you stop learning. And if you're learning all the time, you're not necessarily having impact. So how do you keep going back and forth and back and forth so that you're not going straight up a ladder. You're actually laddering back and forth into different things where you're having an amaz…

AI assessment note: “Always be learning. And I tell this to everybody.”

Q Along those lines, do you think it's a good career move to do a zero to one thing within a bigger company, or is it often a bad idea? Do you have any advice there for folks?

A It depends. It depends on your personality in the company. So the one thing I realized about, about my role was that I did a lot of, I, I had like five different careers at the company over 11 years, you know, and so most people don't realize that when you work on new things, you're constantly adding to your portfolio, subtracting from it, growing things, pruning them. And so you could just work on so many cool things. Except, you know, you're, you're, everything has similar kind of, it's like it rhymes, but it's not exactly the same, right? So you learn the lessons of how to get things done, how to get resource, how to get support when the product's not working, how to, you know, not get pruned in the next culling. And those are really, really important skills. But I think for people who are just starting out of the career, it is a very high risk thing to do. So if you're very early in the career, I encourage people to learn the core skills first. You can learn the core skills when there's a lot of stability. This product is growing, you know, X percent, like five percent, and you're going to grow at 10. That's amazing. Like that is because you are there, you're going to change the trajectory of the product, or this thing is, you know, this thing has a hundred, you know, a 100,000 users. You're going to get it to 200,000. Like that, those are the kinds of things that are, you …

AI assessment note: “It depends. It depends on your personality in the company.”

Q Such a good point. As we wrap up our conversation, just a couple more questions here. So first is I want to take us to contrarian corner, which is a segment on this podcast. And my question is just, is there something that you believe that you think most other people don't believe something that you think is a contrarian perspective?

A So I don't know if this is a contrarian perspective, but I tell, um, I go to speak in a lot of, um, universities. I speak at Stanford. I'm going to speak at Duke. And I always tell people, especially young people, the most important career decision you make is who you marry. And it's not something we think that much about, especially I started dating. I met my husband. I was 18. My first weekend in college started dating when I was 19. I, we had no idea what our life was going to be like. And yet every single day, like this week we had our board meeting. I was in Utah the whole week. I come home. And, you know, he's taking care of everything, right? And it's that, you know, you will have a much more successful career if your home life is in balance. It's like a yin and a yang, right? If something is out of balance, it, it engulfs the other side, both your job and your home life. And especially, you know, we have three kids, really, really balancing that is very hard over both of us having demanding careers. And I think we just, it's not something that's contrarian, but it's something which we don't think about at all when we make that decision. We think, is this person fun to deal with? Is this person, you know, somebody we see ourselves with? But my question is, what is the impact of this relationship on your career? Is this person lifting you up or pushing you back? Is this p…

AI assessment note: “the most important career decision you make is who you marry.”

Q so just to double click a little bit, cause I think this is a really powerful point. What actually have you found helps people get over that? Is it like someone like you in his corner being like, you have really great stuff to share. You should actually do it. Don't be as worried as you are, as you think you might be. Is there anything else that works there?

A Actually, what worked for me when I was working with Boz and I talk about our relationship in my book, Um, but I, you know, we, we made a contract when I started reporting to him and Boz, for those of you who don't know, is currently the CTO of Meta. At the time he was the head of ads and then our team moved into his team. And so I was reworked into his, his organization. And as I said, you know, we did not have the best relationship before that. And so we made a contract to work together and I had written like, here's, here's how I want you to take care of my team. Here's how I want you to support our products. And I wrote them like this long. My part of the commitment. And then he wrote back, here's what I'm asking of you. I want you to write and publish something every month. And I was like, what are you talking about? Like, why would you say that? And he said, you have so much to teach people, just do it. And I said, I don't really have that much to say. And he's like, just trust me on this. You'll figure it out. And so his advice was write what you repeat. If you'd say something more than once, just write it down. And then just, you know, then the next time someone asks you, you can just hand them. And he has a great blog if you haven't read it. I just remember thinking that is a weird thing for your new manager to say after you had a lot of conflict together before that. …

AI assessment note: “his advice was write what you repeat. If you'd say something more than once”

Q I, I've, I watched Fallout. I have no, I don't know anything about the game, but the show itself was really fun. Just, I had no idea what I was getting even, even getting into. So, no. Acceptable nerdy level. Uh, there's, I don't know if you can get too nerdy on this show. Next question. Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you just really like?

A Well, so actually what's really interesting is I never got into Twitter. I just couldn't figure it out. And then recently I really got into threads and I didn't think I would, I was like, well, I'll just post some stuff on it. But really, I just love the real, I just, I could never figure out Twitter. Like you follow the wrong person and the whole thing just, it's terrible. And you know, it's somebody who's posting about posting too much or too little, but there's something about the threads algorithm that's really worked. The first, you know, few months wasn't quite there, but I just feel like it's. Spot on. And now I see the magic of it.

AI assessment note: “recently I really got into threads and I didn't think I would”

Q Something else I've heard you talk about in terms of something that contributed to your success is, is, uh, being okay with failure and just bouncing back quickly versus avoiding failure. Is that something that you've come back to a lot?

A Well, here's what I noticed about everybody in, you know, I have coached a ton of people in my life. I have managed big teams and, you know, the people who are most successful are not the people who had no failures, who's who would live charm lives and had up into the right careers and got promoted every cycle. The people who were most successful were the ones who actually through adversity learned to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones. They were the ones who got hard feedback and then came back stronger because now they learned what to do differently. They were the ones who products failed, but they said, you know what? I'm going to turn this failure into success. I'm going to take those lessons and make this company stronger. The ones who, you know, when you live a charmed product life, you always work on everything. That's easy. You don't actually, you know, trees are strong because they bend in the wind because they're tested because it's cold, because it's windy, because there's conditions and that's how a tree goes, grows strong and, and, you know, Tall over many generations. And I think sometimes we think, oh yeah, you know, I wish I lived a term life. And that is not what we want. You want to have enough adversity that you learn to overcome so that you can build stronger over time and build resilience in your career. And I've seen that so much, which is the best…

AI assessment note: “the best product leaders I've ever worked with are the ones that have the toughest stories”