YouSaid · the spoken record

Ami Vora

lines on the record
97
first
2024-06-23
most recent
2024-06-23
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Oh, thank you, Lenny. It's been such a pleasure. I write a blog on SubStack at Amibora.substack.com. It's called The Hard Parts of Growth. It's just about how even when you're working in great places with great people. And so you can find me there. I do the same. I cross post to LinkedIn. So you can find me there. And how can people be helpful to me? I don't know, just by being great, by being kind and nice and making the world slightly better. Yeah, I think that's all we can all do.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I love jokes. There was a year at Facebook where I kind of posted a joke of the week to the company and they're all terrible. Yeah, exactly All right, here's my favorite joke. Wine on Sharksey Cl They taste fun Tell you one more, and you can choose which one. All right.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And it's made me think about what are all the things I think about repeatedly without really having trigger or reason. And there's still a lot. I don't think about the Roman Empire though. That is not one of them.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “It is definitely non motto. I feel like I know people love mottos and I'm so impressed. I'm like, you know, you know what you are. You know what you need. I am not that person. But I have a piece of advice that someone gave me very early in my career. Actually, it was Chamoth. He said, you can either have more energy or less ambition. And I was like, whew, that's a little harsh. But also, like, really true. And I think about that, it's another of my Roman empires. 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 have to feel uncomfortable. And, you know, sometimes I don't want to do those things. I don't want to do all of that work. And then I can't be mad if I'm not having the impact. Like those two just have to go together. I also have to get lucky in all these different ways, but like the two have to go together. And that's been just like a good governor a little bit of how I think about what.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Maybe a physical product that I really like. I like, I drink a lot of coffee and tea through the day, and it's just like, I don't know, like a calming ritual. And so I have like a fellows electric kettle. That was my big work from home upgrade. So I have this life for kettle. I have like a pour over kit. I have these like lovely, like colorful mugs that I like. Like that is actually just made my day-to-day a lot better. It's just a little feeling of luxury.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Watch a lot of witty workplace comedies from the mid 2000s. So I watch a lot of the office or 30 rock reruns. Things are just very comfortable that I already know everything. There's no surprises. I'm not great with new stuff right now”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “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.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, I think often make things adversarial that are not actually adversarial. Like, it is very rare for customer value to be different than company value on a long enough time horizon. Like there might be short-term divergences, but really to solve, to create value for the customer, you got to be around as a business. You know, like otherwise you are creating zero value for the customer. And so I think really just starting with the like, what are the end goals and Where does stuff diverge in the very short term versus the medium term versus in the long term? It shouldn't. And really thinking about where you are in the journey and how to place that, that always helps me because our metrics should absolutely be about long-term customer impact. It's very rare if those aren't and then you're still able to be successful.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Sometimes people ask me who are working in product like 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. And so the one thing that I would just advise everyone to do is just like think about the customer. Like talk to the customer, be an advocate for them. It's such a shortcut to everything else you need to do in order to be successful. But it's so easy for that to get lost when you're thinking about, okay, how do I get alignment on my team? How do I figure out my roadmap? How do I like convince people to join the company? There's all these different things. But fundamentally, we're here to create value for the customer. And the closer you can get to that.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “People at the company and that convinced one of them to introduce me to everyone at the audience. I made a trade. I said, I'll buy you fancy coffee at Cooper Cafe in downtown Palo Alto. And in exchange, like just introduce me to everyone, everyone you know, taking me around the office. And so everyone I met, I said, hey, I'm Ami, I really want to work here. I'll do whatever you need. And the only call I got back was from the head of PR, Brandy Barker, who said, look, we can't hire you. We didn't interview you. We don't have head cal. You're not really qualified. It was just like 10 reasons. I was like, okay, thank you for calling me. And she said, but when you need a temp to review our press releases. So if you want to come and join a temp agency, we'll tell them to send you here. And that's what I did. I moved out to California and I slept on people's couches and eventually they hired me full time. And I didn't.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well, I quit my last job. I knew that what I wanted to do was be involved in all the wild stuff happening in Silicon Valley in the mid-2000s. So I'd quit my last job. I was kind of traveling around the world a little bit. I was living in New York, an extremely blissful lifestyle. I was unemployed. I was doing whatever I wanted. It was some of the best time I've had in my life. And eventually I needed a job, you know, like you do. But it was 2007. And the only place I wanted to work was Facebook. Like you could hear the way people talked about these products. You know, people would say Facebook is more important to me than my car. It's like how I connect with the world, right? Like it was such a magical product and you could hear that. And I knew some.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “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 a senior, when often the founder has a bunch of the vision and knowledge. And what they really need is somebody to build the product. They don't need somebody who's going to scale the team or like build systems. They've got enough of that. And so that to me is part of building that complementary relationship where the founder and CEO know what they need. And on the CPO side, they know that they can mind meld enough with the CEO to actually have an impact.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “What I'd say to everyone else is make sure you just have a mind mel with a CEO before you decide to take the job, like spend a day together, like understand how they think and how they operate and whether you're going to work together in a way that feels really high fidelity and like high trust and you're going to have room. I mean, I'm not a founder, like by any stretch. And so when founders ask me, like, what should I look for and it had a product or CPO, I say something a little bit different, which is”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Like such a great relationship, like a trusting and complimentary relationship with Max and the rest of the exec team. And also they took seriously things that he really didn't have to that, you know, I have so much respect for that. And I think I got really lucky in just like finding a great CEO and exec team.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Correct my starting point of knowledge. And with Max, I also wrote a parallel document of hot takes. So like once a quarter or so for the first year, I write a document that was just like, hey, for sake of provocation, if we wanted to fundamentally change a few things, here's ideas on what we could fundamentally change. And Max, you know, very, very well could have just been like, hey, like, can you please just run product? That's kind of you. Can you please do that? And instead, he and the entire rest of the executive team were like, yeah, like, let's step through these. 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, you know, because I was able to build.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, I mean, this is going to sound so naive, but I literally didn't know how important it was for me to have such a great relationship with the CEO. Like, because I always had great relationships, you know, I was lucky I had great relationships with a lot of people at my previous jobs. I was like, oh, of course. It's going to be fine. Everyone's going to let me do what I want, whatever. And I think I just got really lucky because Max is an amazing CEO who's also super growth mindset and super open to like talking over ideas, even when they involve a lot of change. So when I was onboarding, one of the things I always like to do is write a list of observations. I go out and talk to people. I have one-on-ones with a lot of people and I write like, here's the themes that I'm hearing and here's what's going well. Here's what's not going well. And that's like a way for me to both share what I'm seeing and like build some credibility and trust that way, but also for people to give me feedback and be like, oh, you're wrong about this just so I can kind of.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Maybe I was only good at meta. Like maybe there was something about that network of people and how great they were and how well I knew those products. And maybe I wouldn't be that successful somewhere without that scaffolding. And so leaving and being able to go somewhere else and like. Lead through change and a new place and new customer set, a new business model. That's also been really, really affirming for me, honestly.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “A little bit. It was also really interesting because Fair was entirely new to me. It was like a new business model. It was a whole new set of people. It was a whole new set of customer problems. And so every interaction, I just had to learn so much. I had to learn like who is this person? How do they see the world? What's the problem they're talking to me about? What's the customer impact I think? So it was just like a dramatic learning curve, which I always really love. Maybe the last thing I'd say is like. Again, I was super lucky at Meta. I think that I.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Coming to fair, 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 like have an impact and improve things and help your team. And so I always just try to like remind myself it's going to take time. And what's most important is not for me to like try to come in and change everything immediately, but to learn enough to be able to change things like 60 or 90 or 120 days in the future. And so that breathing helps.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, I mean, I was so lucky. I had such an amazing Veronica Meta. I got to work with amazing leaders, truly great products. And I came to Fair for the same reason that I've been anywhere because I believe in the people and I believe in the mission. A lot of my family in India is in wholesale and local retail. which is what fair does. And so it was also a very personal thing for me to do. I felt like I knew those customers. I'm a huge fan of small businesses. I got to work with a bunch of them in previous jobs as well. I would say it like”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Nothing Yeah, like no org is optimal. It's definitely not you can optimize for the people you have and you can optimize for the products you have. You can optimize for the customers you have and you can optimize for the technology you have. Those are like the options that you have, right? And in every one of those, you trade off everything else. And so you're just like, you just have to know there's not going to be a perfect where all of it works. And that's okay. Like that is part of the fun of it. That's part of getting to do this work is like continuing to improve, but it's hard. It's hard when people, it's hard, especially when you want everyone to think you're so great at everything.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Worthwhile that it's kind of worth being terrible at everything and being visibly terrible at everything because that is the best way that I have to like have that kind of impact.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “And it is a kind of dark view of leadership, you know, where you do like, yeah, you can't fully solve problems. You have to say no a lot. People are unhappy with you. I thought, you know, as we get more senior, everyone listens to you and they like you and you just say a thing and then it happens. And that is not at all accurate. You know, it really is most of the decisions you make are not going to be perfect. And I think I'm all about just normalizing and acknowledging those hard truths because otherwise I feel like I'm failing. And if I just know that something's normal, that it's part of the job, then it's not me. It's just like, okay, this is a fact of the job that I have to get accustomed to if I want to have this kind of impact. And there's something about having the impact, like being able to serve the customer, being able to be part of this team. There's something about it that is so.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Least bad, the best possible for the time, for the problem that's consistent, that makes sense with the framework. And that's been like a tough thing to learn too.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I think that's my take on like leadership in general. Especially as you get more senior. You can only make bad decisions, you know, like at some point, someone can bring no problem, you can recognize a problem, and you can solve it. And there's like, ah, so much happiness in solving that and like tying a bow around it. But as you get senior, the only problems you'll see are ones that are fundamentally unsolvable because otherwise someone would have solved it before they got to you, right? And so all you're doing is like choosing which branch of suboptimal you're going to put your name on and like describing like the principles you're using and the context and the fact that you know it's suboptimal, but it's still the best thing. I think that's a really hard thing is just to recognize and acknowledge that like increasingly people only see you do very make suboptimal decisions from a distance. They're just like, why is that person only making bad decisions? It's because those are your only options. All you can do is choose the least.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “And then you have to agree on the outcome that you're aiming for. Like, if you disagree on what the company outcome is or what the customer outcome is, then you've got some structural stuff you need to work out. And normally you just have to escalate it. But if you agree on, we're all trying to move this metric by changing this customer experience, then all you're doing is having a conversation about the best way to do that using the different information that everyone is bringing. And I think that's super important to just have as a rational, open, explicit discussion, as opposed to like trying to hide it or pocket vetoing or something else because you assume that like when someone disagrees with you that Know there's something emotional or wrong about it.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Think there's value in also acknowledging that teams are going to have different incentives. Even inside a team, like cross-functional teams on the same pod or whatever are going to have different incentives. They're going to come in with different information. They're going to have disagreements. And certainly different teams inside a company or different pillars inside a company, different products, they're all going to have different incentives. And I think sometimes that feels like something is going wrong. when people disagree, but actually that's just a sign of like healthy tension and knowledge. I think the thing that makes tension healthy is one when you can acknowledge it and say, yeah, of course there's tension. You're very different information than I'm bringing when we should be disagreeing. Like that's not, no one's a bad person. No one is like coming in with poor intent. Like everyone's doing the thing they are supposed to do and that is like a useful thing to do.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah, and you have to have faith that it is actually connected to that output metric. Like, 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”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “That it might be trickier. I mean, maybe going back to like the GMV example, maybe instead of motivating everyone on GMV, you motivate them on GMV per surface and you divide up the surfaces or maybe you motivate them on like actually different goals that underlie like when you think about GMV, what are all the various engagements, customer engagements that lead to GMV? Can you go along those input metrics? Can you goal on number of people who visit, number of people who convert, number of people who reorder, number, you know, et cetera, rather than going strictly on the output?”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “One of the things I like to do is just detangle okay as a company, let's think about our customers. Let's think about all the things they're going to need in their journey. Let's think about how we will know, how we will match our own metrics to customer success. Let's play the entire field. Like what would it look like if we could detangle it so that every team we had internally had a different goal that ladders into like a goal framework that's actually the thing that we need to do to solve the full customer impact? And then you don't have the same swim lanes problem. You have like plenty of room for people to like make progress on their lane. They all know how they fit into the bigger picture. And it just opens up a lot more growth for every team. And it makes sure that we're solving like the customer problem end to end.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Yeah, I mean, I think one thing is to try to decouple all the things we're trying to do. Sometimes when you give people direction, you're like, okay, everybody just go get revenue or, you know, everybody just go get GMV. And it seems obvious because that's the thing you have to do, right? As a company. But there's only a few places where you're guaranteed to get that and it's measurable and like you can do it. And that leads to what I call toddler soccer. you know, where everybody just runs to the same surface or the same customer set or the same like exact product where you can do this and it's measurable and you end up like everyone's tripping on each other. Everyone's trying like nobody really gets contact on the ball. There's no like coordination, you know? I have three kids. I've watched a lot of toddlers play soccer. It's a very fresh, very fresh metaphor. And instead like.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Oh, I mean, number one, no next on me. They're going to be there next themselves That is maybe the most important thing is everyone will only tell you their own story, like, that's all anyone can do. But the thing that I tell people is don't dampen who you are in your strengths. Just continue expanding. Whenever you run into a problem, just add more to the things that you can do, the tools that you have, the way you can express yourself. Just keep on adding and growing and don't like shrink yourself ever.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “It feels like yet another burden where you're like, I don't know how to do that. Like, I had the extreme generosity of so many wonderful leaders who helped me on my way, but I didn't feel like I had this mentor. And for a while, it was just like, oh man, if I only had a mentor, I would know how to do all of this stuff. And it felt like another weight that I needed to carry, which I didn't. I had everything I needed people were so kind and generous, but I didn't recognize it that way because we talk about it differently.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “And then I think we just said give women weird advice. Like, here's a hot take. 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. Like I think we tell women, you know, to unlock your future success. You've got to find somebody who has made all the same life decisions you have and who you look up to and relate to, but also had an hour every month to like be an oracle to tell you all the things you do in your life.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “I think that is still true. And there's often a kernel of truth in it. You know, for me, this is forever work. Like, 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. There's a step in between where I can choose, is this feedback I want to take action on in this exact way? Am I going to look for more themes, take action a different way? Or am I going to say this is who I am? And I understand the trade-offs. I'm going to do a better job of giving people context on the decisions I'm making and why I'm choosing these trade-offs. But actually, this is like part of how I want to operate. And I'm going to keep on.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Then we've talked through some of them. I think one, you get a different style of feedback, and a lot of the ways to interpret that feedback, I think to this day, I get feedback that is about walking a very narrow tightrope where not only do you have to change a bunch of things and do a bunch of things that are important, you have to make people feel a certain way about how you do them. And the ways that they want you to make you feel are like diametrically opposite. Some people are going to be like, be more directive. So that way everyone knows what you're thinking. Some people are going to say be less directive. So people can come to their own conclusions. Some people are going to say like move faster because there's always more you can do. Some people are going to say move less fast because otherwise you're going to end up swearing people. And a lot of it is kind of personal, like there's a bunch of research about how.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “More tools. I think that's like a theme that's coming up. It's just like, I'm all about more lenses, more keys, more tools in general. Because why not? Like, why not have access to more different styles of things?”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “And more expansive. But the end outcome is the same is that you can work with more different styles of people, more different styles of problems.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Yeah, it's kind of one of my Roman empires. Like, I think about this every so often, like, way too much, I think, especially because I talk to other senior women who received similar feedback and chose not to act on it or did act on it and like, you know, what happened to their paths were different. I think where I landed is like, 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 the way I do give that feedback is you do need to be able to work with a broader range of people. And the way to do that is to expand your tool sets. Like you're not going to make yourself smaller. You're not going to be any less of who you are, but you are going to build new tools so that, you know, new keys to unlock new different kinds of doors. And that is only going to make you bigger and more powerful.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Shrinking myself a little bit and not being so aggressive, not being so opinionated, kind of being more unobjectionable. And the weird part is that it kind of worked for a long time. Like people were more likely to work with me. They were more likely to say nice things. I mean, I take those to extremes. I wore earth tones for like two years because I was just like, I got to fade back a little bit. And then, you know, at some point I actually had to do a leadership job. And my team was like, well, what do you think? What's your opinion? And I was like, you've been telling me not to have an opinion for so long. And so it took, it took a little bit of work to get back to, oh yeah, like I can have, I have a lot of opinions. I have a lot of thoughts. It is okay for me to express. It is needed. My team needs me to have these opinions and thoughts and be a leader who can like take ownership and be visible.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “It was sometime within Facebook. It was really when I was stepping into the bigger ads jobs, like getting to be ahead of product for Facebook ads. 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 I don't very complicated feedback and I don't, I wouldn't give that feedback to anyone else. But I took a very seriously. It was coming from so many different places. It was coming from people I really trusted. And so I kind of went out of my way to be more likable, which for me ended up being like,”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Of our revenue is going to come from small businesses versus big businesses in three years. And if we all agree on that topic, we just take it as the truth and we should just fill it. If we disagree, then we should talk about it. We should talk about the strategic ramifications if we chose one path or the other path. So for me, it was getting more comfortable having an opinion, honestly, about how the world was going to go and also feeling comfortable that we would be able to change it when we learned that like maybe that wasn't exactly right. Like we would have the machine, the execution machine behind it to try it out and then change and iterate and improve with customer feedback.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “The things that made me feel confident in my own opinion. And there's like a bunch of things that do make me feel confident in my opinion. When I talk to specific customers and I feel like I can build an emulator for them, like a customer on my shoulder where I can say, oh, I talked to this person working in this job. Here's what they would say if I showed them this product or this strategy. So I think talking to customers is a big unlock for me and like feeling like I have unique knowledge of the customer. I think working through different product iterations of if we thought this was the right outcome what would it really look like from a product perspective or a product portfolio in three to five years and which of those like seems right or rational or like it will go the way I think the world goes I think asking for other opinions like sometimes I run like surveys to the leadership team where I'm just like how do you think you know what percentage”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “I think I got that same feedback quite a lot, actually, of needing to kind of think bigger and be more visionary, et cetera. And I still do, frankly, actually. There's moments where I retrench way too far into execution and worry a little less about long-term strategy. So it's definitely my bias still. The biggest thing that held me back from talking about strategy was I didn't feel confident that I knew enough to declare a strategy. It was actually almost like a self-confidence imposter syndrome thing where there were people who could just say, I know how the world is going to develop in the next five years. And let me tell you, here's where we're going to be. Like, this is the dot on the map. And I was always like, how could you know? Like anything could happen. Like, who would I be to say, I know how the world's going to develop? And here's where we're heading. And so for me, a lot of it was actually learning.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “People because we have the story, we have the narrative, we have the sequence. What's going to change for our customers as a result of this strategy exercise?”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Yeah, I mean, I think, again, like some of the joy of strategy is like the philosophy and excitement of thinking about all the long-term stuff that will happen. But I try to like always come back to what's going to change for the customer. If we have all of these conversations and we come out with this shiny five-year plan, but then we change nothing about the products that we're building or how we are building, what was the point of that exercise? Like it made us feel good. And there's something to making us feel good. That is good. It's important for teams to feel good and connected. And this is like a good exercise for that. But it's so much more powerful when it's an exercise that translates into us doing something differently, whether that's prioritizing different products, whether that's changing our portfolio allocation, like moving people to the things we think are most important now versus things that are going to be less important right now. Like what's the change or like coming out with a strategy that'll...”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “You're focusing on the execution of the system a little bit more, but You know, you got to stay connected, I think, to the customer and to what you're bringing to them.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “I 100% know that that's true. 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. I think you should still be spending your time understanding what's slowing people down and unblocking it, understanding like how is the market changing, understanding what the broad customer feedback is, like just constantly improving the system that you are building. I think that's. Mean how much time can you spend thinking about the future as opposed to like actually trying to create it?”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Yeah, I do think about it a little bit in terms of proportion of time you should expect to spend. So, I mean, there's no point exactly. You can't have a bad strategy. So you should spend some time. Maybe it's like 20% of your time. But the bulk of your time should be confirming that strategy actually makes sense for the customers, getting it out there, building the machine to constantly make it better, as opposed to like a perfect strategy. You go away, you build it for a year, you ship it, the market has changed, you know? Customers have changed. Their needs have changed. Competitions, like just the whole landscape has changed. And you probably could have solved those problems more easily had you headed in the right direction but done it with more ongoing customer feedback.”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “I do think it's very glamorous to work on strategy. It's so fun that it's so fun to have the word strategy in your, I don't know, we've like built a mythology around strategy being the most important thing. And execution is not glamorous. It is not like. Whiteboarding by yourself, you know, and pointing to things and like coming out with the grand vision. It is like the nuts and bolts and like sometimes kind of boring, sometimes kind of like grind it out work of like you have to bring the donuts, you had to look at the dashboards, you got to rewrite the spec. You got to just do a bunch of the grinding. But that is what leads to the customer's outcomes. You know, that is what the customer is eventually going to feel. They're never going to see the whiteboard. They're going to see that someone took the time to fix this bug”

    2024-06-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source