Ami Vora describes her reaction to early career feedback at Facebook warning that intelligence did not matter if colleagues did not like her.
Insight
Vora: Product managers without clear impact goals drive feature complexity
“What's the most dangerous thing in a tech company? A PM without a way to create impact. Oh no, he's toeing the line here. Maybe you know this person. Maybe you've been this person. I certainly have. Where you know you want to do something big, but you're not q…”
Insight
Vora: Prescribing mentorship creates an unnecessary burden for women in tech
“I think we tell women things like, you need to find a mentor, and you need to find a sponsor, and that's just another set of hoops that we have that we tell women to jump through that I don't think we tell other parts of population to jump through.”
Insight
Vora: Senior executive decisions are inherently choices between bad options
“Especially as you get more senior, you can only make bad decisions. You know, like, at some point, someone can bring you a problem, you can recognize a problem, and you can, like, solve it. And there's, like, ah, so much happiness in solving that, and, like, t…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Vora: Faire doubled its growth rate despite a global marketplace slowdown
“Well, at a time when consumer spending is down and most global marketplaces have declining growth rates, VAR's growth rate has doubled because our customers are getting more value and we're getting more efficient about providing it.”
Insight
Vora: Perfect strategy fails without execution because you learn nothing
“If you have great strategy, perfect strategy, but poor execution, you don't win. Because your strategy never makes it to the market. And what's even worse is that you have learned nothing. You don't know whether it was your strategy that was wrong or whether i…”
Insight
Vora: Founders frequently overhire executive CPOs when they just need builders
“Make sure that you really need the level of seniority that you are hiring. I think that a lot of founders think, I need a CPO, I need a VP product, I need someone who's really senior, when often, like, the founder has a bunch of the vision and knowledge, and w…”