Jason Shah, Head of Product at Alchemy and former PM at Airbnb, Amazon, and Yammer, reflects on working at Microsoft after its 2012 acquisition of Yammer.
“Lo and behold, I was at the world's largest productivity company at Microsoft. And most people there, in my opinion, were wildly unproductive and I wasn't shipping a lot.”
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More from Jason Shah
Opinion
Shah: Web3 is in the strongest position it has ever been in
“I genuinely believe web three is in the strongest position that it's ever been in.”
Jason ShahSep 18, 2022▶ 9:07Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy)
Insight
Shah: Visible progress is the only way to maintain team morale
“So in my opinion, I think that the only way to maintain morale is to make progress. I think that no speech, no sort of extrinsic You know motivators, like we're gonna give everybody some free crypto to keep them motivated about it or something like that really…”
Jason ShahSep 18, 2022▶ 11:19Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy)
Insight
Shah: Amazon PMs cannot divorce product from business and revenue growth
“Amazon was a place where you couldn't divorce business and product. You couldn't be a product manager without thinking about revenue growth, without thinking about go to market.”
Jason ShahSep 18, 2022▶ 19:05Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy)
Insight
Shah: Amazon works backwards from launch; Airbnb works backwards from quality
“I would almost frame it as working backwards from sort of like a moment in time or a launch, like you said with Amazon versus working backwards from a quality standard in some sense of an 11 star experience.”
Jason ShahSep 18, 2022▶ 28:37Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy)
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Shah: David Sacks personally ran Yammer product reviews as CEO
“David Sachs would do this too. He actually ran the product reviews. It was the CEO of the company doing product reviews, not some Kind of middle tier of director of product who was just running them. They were force involved and there were things to delegate a…”
Jason ShahSep 18, 2022▶ 31:12Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy)
Insight
Shah: PMs should reframe executive pushback into shared goal alignment
“Purely based on the word that has come to label a behavior that alternatively could be about, how do I shift the direction on something? Or how do I help the business actually succeed when I disagree with somebody about something? And that's a very different m…”
Jason ShahSep 18, 2022▶ 39:20Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy)
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