The Exchanges

Q feedback from your team is to take a first pass at it. And here's like a rough quick draft. Uh, I find with design, especially if you design something ugly, uh, and designers are often like, let me make that better. I can't stand this thing. Uh, is there any other, anything else you want to add there? Just like this idea of the tuning fork as a feedback strategy.

A Okay, there's two areas we can go deeper on here. One is in how you get the feedback. So this is definitely a squarism. I think it was probably adopted from Amazon, which is around the silent read of documents. When you are all so busy and someone's like, I wrote a doc, you send it into the Slack, you know, ecosystem and everyone goes, please give feedback. You have so much going on. Like you'll be lucky to maybe get a response. Maybe there's one or two people that chime in. And so even though we hate meetings and we love asynchronous, there is a lot of value to saying, I need. 20 minutes of focused time to interrogate something that I've done. And we're not going to talk. I'm literally going to force us into a room or zoom. You're going to read this doc. I'm going to watch you comment on it in real time. I'm gonna respond to your comments in real time, and at the end of this thing, I'm gonna have enough really good input that I can do a huge rub on this thing and get to the next phase.

AI assessment note: “One is in how you get the feedback. So this is definitely a squarism”

Q Is there anything else hiring wise? I know there's probably infinite things that you've done, but is there anything else you think might be worth sharing of things you've learned to be more successful at hiring awesome people?

A One final note I'll make on Unsell email is it's not as if you just send the email and then they either say yes or no. Like most of the time they will say, thank you. I am cool with six of these. This one freaks me out. Can we talk more? Definitely. And I think this is where hiring managers have an incredible responsibility that sometimes isn't taken as seriously as it should, which is when you are working with someone to get them to join or to offer, like you need to bend to do whatever it takes for them. And so if they're like, Hey, the only time I can talk is tonight at 11 o'clock after my kids go to bed. No problem. Here's my phone number. Let's hop on. I will walk you through whatever you want to talk about. And that sort of has to be the place you get to for like really strong hires. So that's just like one other thing I'll say. The meta point around that is You need to be really invested in the candidates. This probably does change at a certain scale. Like, you know, if your quote unquote organization is hiring a hundred engineers or whatever, like you have process around it, you have pipelines as a machine at that point. But I do think the direct hiring managers have a responsibility to be really involved in every individual. Cause there's no one who's like directly hiring a hundred people. It's always within a number that I think you can take on.

AI assessment note: “The meta point around that is You need to be really invested in the candidates.”

Q Super cool. That magnetic trade is not boring at all. That is extremely cool. And that is a really cool story too. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to and find useful, share with friends and family and work here in life?

A I think we've actually maybe touched on both of these. Um, I'll cheat and I'll pull one from maybe each parent so that in case they see this, they don't feel like I'm favoring one of them. Uh, so my mom's side, I think something that she would always repeat to me growing up is Everything happens for a reason. And I hated that growing up because she only said it when something bad would happen, you know, something bad happens because everything happens for a reason. And I'm like, no, it doesn't. Life just sucks. And to no surprise at this point in the conversation, I've now grown to really, really appreciate that piece of advice because what it's actually trying to communicate is when something happens, good or bad, frankly, Don't dwell on it. That's the past. Focus on what you want to do and then just move towards that. And then in most cases, you'll be able to look back in one, five, 10 years and connect the dots in a way where the story makes sense in your mind. And so just having that shift in perspective, I think has helped me a lot to not overreact to anything that happens in my life. Um, So, that's one side. And then on my dad's side, so the funny origins of this, unsurprising to anyone with Asian parents, I'm a spunky little seven-year-old. I come home with my math test one day. The guy had 97%. I think that's pretty good. I go show it to my dad with beaming eyes and pri…

AI assessment note: “she would always repeat to me growing up is Everything happens for a reason.”

Q good writer and a poet and Help me develop my writing early on, Vanessa, and she said exactly the same thing. Just to become a better writer, read beautiful writing, and it just kind of infuses you or your brain. Uh, in your experience, is there anything you read, anything you found really effective, anything that you think influenced the way you write or think that people can check out?

A I explicitly do not mean read a bunch of other PM artifacts. Like you're not gonna become a better writer by reading PRDs or, you know, whatever it is. Or support articles. It needs to be Writing that compels, like that's the theme I would go back to because that's what you're trying to do at the end of the day. And when I say compels, I mean, it pushes you to action because if you read something and you're like, oh, that's interesting. That's not enough, right? You need to be able to give someone something that then allows them to do something differently. And so the things for me that have been best, obviously there's like all the Paul Graham essays. I think his writing is very succinct, very clear. That's not novel. I, I learned a lot by finding specific voices back in the day on Twitter, and it wasn't always what they were posting on Twitter, but if they wrote an essay or a post, that would be their crispest thinking. And so you can use these like broadcast channels to find where their gold nuggets are, but then spend time with those instead, and don't worry about all the additional noise that comes with it.

AI assessment note: “obviously there's like all the Paul Graham essays. I think his writing is very succinct”

Q going to help a lot of people. The two categories you shared, I think are especially powerful. So the advice here is just separate this company just doesn't need someone with my skills right now from I am not good at these skills. Can you just share those two kind of things that might be true that you may not be recognizing about why they maybe laid you off again?

A Totally. So one is the business just doesn't have a need for you. You know, they got ahead of their skis and that's their fault. And they probably admit that, but that's not up to you. The second one though is. My skills and the way that company operates are not compatible. And this one I think is really, really important because I've seen so many times where there's been a PM, engineer, designer, like whatever role, they cannot make it work at company A. And then you see them five years later, just killing it in company B. And you're like, did they change as a person? Did they get super good at what they were bad at before? Like, Maybe a little bit, but honestly, it was just a change in environment. And when you find the right environment in the right role, like you just flourish. And I think this is actually, sorry, we'll go back to hiring for just a moment, uh, or at least management. This is why performance conversations can always feel so difficult because it seems like you're telling someone you are bad. And as the recipient, you're like, I am bad. And no one wants to hear that. But the reality is you are not bad. It is that maybe the way that your environment is working, like the machine that you exist as a part of is not the kind that you thrive in. And so it's within your control to decide I'm going to change how I work to fit that environment, or I'm going to find a d…

AI assessment note: “Totally. So one is the business just doesn't have a need for you.”

Q some very tactical stuff that you've found to be useful in your product management career. The first thing that I've heard you talk about is that you discourage people from going straight into product management. If they wanna become product managers, you encourage them to start somewhere else first. Why is that? Where do you want, where do you think people should start? Talk about this insight that you've had.

A Yeah. So follow me on the detour to science world temporarily. Uh, if we, if we all remember sort of like high school science classes, there was like this concept of potential and kinetic energy and There's so many different definitions for like product management, but the one that I have come to myself that I really like is when you are building a product, you have this team, right? Engineers, designers, so much potential, and the purpose of product management, not the person, but the practice is to convert that potential into as much realized value for someone as possible, right? Minimum loss. And when you're just getting started with a new product, the people that should be doing that are the people who are building it, right? That's an engineer. That's a designer. That's a salesperson or a support person. They're the front line of the smallest loop possible to get something going. And it's through those practices that I think you're able to get the most exposure to what it takes to build a good product. And then from there, that's your foundation, right? That's the unique perspective that you bring. And allows you then to actually take on a quote unquote role, a product manager in a good, unique, insightful way. So that's sort of like the foundation. There's a lot more to unpack behind that comparison, but that's where it comes from.

AI assessment note: “That's an engineer. That's a designer. That's a salesperson or a support person.”