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Bangaly Kaba

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2024-05-26
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2024-05-26
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  1. “And there's a lot of obvious opportunities missed, especially with what is the flyaw and why things are working and not working, if you don't actually go and use things in a new state, right? And an example of this when I talk about YouTube is a lot of the YouTube graph for searching stuff is based on what have you watched in the past. So if you go and search and you search history, it's going to be about like, well, what have you watched in the past? What have you searched for? And what can we show you that's going to be what we can better predict? But if you don't have a line of search history, then they're not going to do as good of a job. And so that's not a direct translation for what we were doing. But for me, I work on freedom ofization and there are really important flywheels around what does it take for a creator to make content that can help them to monetize? How do we get that content to people and where and to what extent are we getting that content to people? And how do we make sure that people feel good about it?”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “you and I use that we've been using for years isn't actually the product that we're building for other people like a power user who's using a product has so much history and so much informed knowledge on how that product for that product to actually create a great experience for you that if you were to go and create a new gmail account and look at YouTube today I guarantee you it's a completely different and significantly worse experience”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Well, very generous of you. I wouldn't say, look, we've done some really good work, some good work so far at YouTube. And it's been a journey. I do think a lot about fly rules. I think it's actually a lot of growth is really understanding what is the value profit all of the different points of the experience, especially if you have a multi-sided marketplace, right? Like a multi-sided marketplace for YouTube is like, you know, the creator and what the creator is trying to achieve both from a engagement perspective, but also for me for a monetization perspective. And then for the viewer or the purchaser, like where is their head? Like what are they trying to do and where are they missing the opportunity? I can't really go into specifics a bunch with YouTube, but what I'm saying is this is that like, you know, one thing that I always do when I come in is I try to push my teams to really dog food products in their adjacent user state, if you will. And what I mean by that is often a product that”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “That's right. And it forces you to figure out how you can get things off of your plate so that you can go work on bigger things”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Part of your job. I mean, you're trying to build a repository of skills and a repository of knowledge. And the only way you can do that is everyone is a rising tide has to lift all boats.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Mean, this is a really important concept, especially. About this as well, because I think it's really important for product readers to think about what is there like a leadership tree? Like who have you helped to build up and help to grow and help to get to their next role, right? And so I think about this a lot. I have people who I've worked with who are running with Stripe or the CPO chief or now running stories at Instagram that were on my team in the earlier days. And their success is my success and I'm proud for them, right? And I'm happy for them. And I think it kind of like reinforces this mentality. It's your responsibility to coach people up to greatness.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “One thing that I also think about a lot, and I don't know if this is just a me thing, but like I think about PM as a team sport, right? It's leading product teams is really about Being a coach and helping other people to like kind of see what their role is on the team and to maximize them. People talk a lot about product as a, you know, you're the CEO and I don't actually fully believe that analogy. If you think about it as a team sport, there's a few things that kind of shake out. One is not everyone's going to be a star player, but not everyone needs to be a LeBron James or Kobe Bryan, right? You need role players. You need really strong role players. You need people who feel valued in their role. And you need to understand how to groom those role players and how to make sure that they have the right seat at the table in the right place. And so I think it's, yes, you're the conductor of the orchestra, but you're really more than that. You're really like kind of the coach of the team. Another thing I think about a lot is I have a good friend who's a college basketball coach and he taught me about kind of this idea of your coaching tree.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I mean, I think it's true. Like, I found it actually significantly harder for me to get 24, 7 year olds to believe in what I was doing than to walk into a room with Kevin Sister and my Krieger and explain to them what's the strategy for growing the next hundred million users on Instagram. These are very logical adults who can reason with you and you got a classroom of kids that's not quite the same. So those skills are really critical.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Top of the pyramid. You are responsible. Manager is responsible for basically owning that pyramid for all of the areas that they operate, but they need to be able to live at the top of the pyramid across all of them. They need to be able to synthesize and evaluate what's happening for each product team that they own in order to kind of make the bigger picture connections.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Lot of times they might have the understanding, but they haven't had a chance to apply it to a variety of different scenarios or haven't seen it applied to multiple scenarios. So oftentimes you might understand a concept like machine learning, but you haven't actually worked on it in multiple against multiple scenarios. So you maybe have one way of doing it that doesn't make sense and you need to like have two or three. And you don't even know that two or three ways of doing it exists. like often a common failure point right or it's maybe you know how to apply it but you can't synthesize why this thing that you're doing actually matters for the business context right like oftentimes that becomes like a challenge with managers it's like they know what to do but they don't understand how to tie it back to the business context and the overall strategy needs and so where to prioritize right and so what you what i find is that like you know when you're trying to manage managers you're really trying to lift the”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Client, but they're not able to analyze it across different business segments, right? And you can use this framework not only with the ICPMs and the teams themselves, but also for your managers. Like what is breaking down? And in using that and attaching that to the skills that we want to build to figure out how do you fill in those gaps? And it really is a grounding for me, a grounding mental model for how do you build teams that actually affect them, how do you meet people where they are as opposed to just saying, hey, you need to figure this out. I find that too often in tech and also in product, people ask, you know, to figure things out, but not given the support to get there. And there's no way to really connect the dots for them.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “A lot about that in both approach and the processes that we create. To give you a couple classic typical examples of this, there's two things I want to call out. One is there's actually this education framework. It's called Boolean's Taxonomy. I think it's changed over time, but when I learned it, it was basically a pyramid. And the pyramid was Boom taxonomy describes what's the different levels of order of critical thinking you need in order to be a master of something. And at the bottom of the pyramid was knowledge and then it's comprehension and then application analysis synthesis and evaluation. So going up the pyramid means this higher order thinking. And I think about that a lot in trying to understand where are my teams struggling. Do they have the core knowledge that they need? Do they understand it, but they can't apply it?”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And I needed the only way I could be successful or impactful is I needed to be able to be a strong communicator. I needed to be able to have a clear vision of what was going on. I needed to be able to influence them in a believable way such that they would get on board with what needed to be done for 270 days of the year. It's like, you know, when you walk into a room as a product manager, engineers, designers, researchers go to market, nobody owes you anything. And the only thing that you're going to do in order to be successful is you need to be a strong communicator, have a clear vision of what's going on, and you need to be able to influence them to do the things together of what matters, right? It's a very similar skill set, just different domain expertise. And so because of that, right, like I've really adopted a mindset of like, how do I coach my teams? How do I enable them? Because it's really about the sum of the parts versus me being a top-down leader saying you have to do this and you have to do that. And so I think.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I went to business school and I worked on Wall Street for a bit. And then I left my job on Wall Street, quit, and started to start up. It was a glorious failure as many startups are. But, you know, it was like a very non-traditional path towards tech. And I think a lot of my time in these other industries actually shapes the way I think about product and product management and actually changing teams and building teams. And what I mean by that is like, you know, I think there's a lot of similarities between education and product management believe it or not when I was interviewing for my first set of jobs in tech, recruiters would say to me, how does your background relate? Like, I don't really see it. And I would tell them, you know, when I was in education, I would walk into a classroom of 24-7-year-olds. And these kids owed me nothing.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I think one thing I think about a bunch is I come from my background's a little bit different than a traditional tech executive. There were actually three phases to my career. I was in education for six years taught in inner city DC and then was a dean of a boarding school in Switzerland, which is like a little bit of a plot twist.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Right. And then within those buckets, you've got to figure out what are the right levers that you need to pull, what are the things that are missing, how do you really focus and like where do you kind of like spend your time?”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Product craft. So I found myself talking into an echo chamber in some way. So I had to build a deck that showed, okay, here's how I think about product craft. Here's a framework for it. Here's how I think about all of these different things. And so now we have a shared language, shared communication for a repository of skills that we're going to build.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Do they have the right type of PRD framework? Are they communicating well? Do they have the right type of team meeting structures? Those are kind of lower hanging fruit. It's a lot harder to change vision and skills. It will come in time. But what I also have done over the course of my career is I've built this deck that comes with me of different, like different skills that matter, what are different skills, what are different frameworks, how do we think about it to help up level teams fast because I find that sometimes you walk in and not everyone is grounded in the same mental models or concepts. One example of this I talk about a lot is Instagram, Instagram had just this fantastic culture of thinking about how do we ship high high quality product and what is product craft mean and so that is something that I came to YouTube and my teams particularly they didn't have a mental model for”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “You're talking about basically, what it does is it shows where if you're missing any one component, you get different outcomes, right? So if you're missing the vision component, you end up in a state of confusion. Or if you're missing the incentives, you end up in a state of resistance because people honest supervisor do the right work. Or if you're missing an action plan, you end up in a state of false starts. So I use this and I think about this a lot actually because when you come in as a leader, as someone who's supposed to influence change, you have to really observe what's happening and figure out what are the challenges anecdotally and what are you observing. And then I figure out where I can plug in and what I can do to make the teams better. And what I tend to find is moving from the right side to the left side of this, like action plans are easier to institute. So if I see a team that's struggling to execute, I want”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Found myself in a bunch of interesting situations where I had to come in and help improve cultures or change cultures around teams. I found this framework. I don't even actually remember where I got it from, but it travels from computer to computer with me and team the team. And it's called managing complex change. I actually think I got it from a business school or something. And it's really interesting. It's got like these five components to it, you know, this vision skills, incentives, resources, action plan. And you need all of those to have change, right? Like you need, team needs that vision. They need to have the skills. They need to have the right incentives. Sometimes some teams are incentivized to do some things versus others. You need to have the right resources in the right places. And you need to have a clear action plan. And what I love about this framework is if you can visualize it, maybe you can share it with your podcast.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “What would improve? And so it was like a mix. And so what we did was we set up time where we did the beginning of like first couple weeks, add to logging, ship it to code, reevaluate in the middle of the quarter, look at the full funnel, and then add more things that we can do later on once we got that. But in order to get that done, that involved understand work with growth marketing to figure out what was the schemas for the instrumentation. The engineering to actually do that lock-in, right? Data science to pull together funnels and dashboard. All of that had to come together all at one time.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I'll give you a very tactful example. When I joined Instagram in January 2016, believe it or not, the onboarding, the signup flow at Instagram had literally no logging to it. It had logging of how many people started and how many people ended. And I joined in January and was like, we had to write a roadmap. And so the roadmap looked like this. Okay, we know this amount at the top of the funnel and this amount at the bottom of the funnel. And there are eight steps in the funnel and we don't know what is going on. So the first bit of understand work was we needed to do like the instrumentation of like that funnel as fast as possible to get the data to figure out where the drops were happening and what to fix. But because we knew of what was happening at the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel, we can go and play around with the experience and see what was broken. So we ran a bunch of tests of stuff that was obviously broken to see.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “There should always be some execution. So initially, you know, you're looking for low effort, high impact things to execute against, right? And so build a portfolio of work to do every sprint or every roadmap, some of which should be low effort, high impact, some of which should be medium effort, high impact. And sometimes understand work actually looks like doing a cheap test. Doing a test that's going to help us to learn as fast as possible that we think is a good enough experience that can inform us, right? So identifying ways to do that. And so it's really about just managing expectations and helping people to be clear that the goal is to ship the product, but you want to ship the things that you have more confidence in understanding versus not.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I tell them you have to ship. I mean, you always have to ship, right? Like sometimes I give them, sometimes it's helpful, especially early on, because it is a, it takes a while for people to get their head around why this is so critical. I say, you know. We should choose sometimes I'll give them guidance. We should choose three to four understand projects that are going to really help us this roadmap and figure out what they are, right? So choose your top three or four and then let's talk about it and I'll give them guidance. Or I would say figure out”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Understand work is figuring out the partnership strategy ahead of like actually launching the product because you need to go figure out how the pieces are going to come together. And so it really just depends on what the function is. But when I say it should be coming from the bottoms up, what I mean is I encourage the team when we plan a sprint or plan a roadmap to ask a question, so like identify the key themes that they need to work on. And when they ask a question on a key theme, also ask what else do we need to understand to make this happen? And to in that planning session, to make sure that you're including cross-functional partners. So it's not just product, it's not just product design and data science and ING. You also include go-to-market. You also include marketing. Because if you're not inclusive, then you don't really understand what the issues are.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Understand work sometimes comes from me, but most often comes from the teams themselves. And under every function can do and should be doing understand work at some point. And so it really depends on what the function is. So for an engineer, it could be looking at the code and saying, okay, we want to improve this. I need to do understand work to understand. Do we need to refactor this code and how scalable is it? And what do we need to do to make sure that we can execute fast and make sure that we're not going to have a lot of start and stops? That could be understand work. It could be actually instrumenting the data and making sure that we actually have full visibility into what's going on. Data science, like we work a lot with data science doing activation metrics and understanding proxy metrics, right? Like that's understand work because it helps us to figure out what we need to build and where to focus for product management.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Well, I mean, this is the irony of growth as people think growth is overnight success, and it's not, right? It is a lot of short wins and short-term execution for a longer-term gain and really understanding. You have a lot of short terms, chores towards the longer-term outcomes.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “It does sound counterintuitive, but if you actually think about it, what is a better outcome? Is a better outcome to just ship more faster now, but most of the things are unimpactful, right? Or is it a better outcome to ship? Fewer things, but really work on making sure that you're shipping them in the best way and de-risking a lot of other things so that a year later your win rates higher and your velocity's higher.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Teams. We had to do on the engineering side. We needed data science as analysis. We needed the PM to go and dog food the experience and figure out what was broken. All of that was intentional and in accordance on our roadmaps.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “An example of this is one of my teams does ships paid virtual goods in the live experience on YouTube. And that's a really, really important and hard problem space. And when I joined, we didn't really fully understand the whole lot of ecosystem, like how we lived in that live ecosystem, how our products worked, where the biggest opportunity was. So the first and most important piece of understand work was instead of shipping iterations to the current product, We needed to actually get the funnel of what was happening what's happening with how many people are watching live every day, how many people are clicking through, how many people are seeing our experience, how many people actually buying it. We didn't really fully have the experience mapped out. And to understand where were the gaps and where the problem places and like where should we be focusing? And so we had to do that. And that was understand work for multiple people, for multiple people.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “And over time, as we understand more and more, the mix shifts. Now my teams are probably doing 80% execution, 20 or 85%, 20 to 15% under same work. And so it's not just about writing a strategy. It's about saying, okay, if we have these themes of stuff that we want to work on, what do we know with confidence because the data tells us? And what do we need to understand because we don't have the data, we don't have the research, we don't have the insights. And really being honest with yourselves around like what are the things that are low to medium effort but high likelihood of being impactful because you have the data. And what are the things that you are interested in perhaps doing, but because you're missing something, you're missing research or feedback from users or data or some insights or strategy, you should actually say, I'm going to go do this before I do something.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “What I found is a couple things. One is When your team does not fully understand a problem space, Balance of work tends to be higher, like I think when I started at YouTube, we were doing 60% execution, 40% understand work”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “You use both of those to plan the next sprint or roadmap, right? And so because you have So the next sprint and the third sprint and the fourth sprint, every subsequent sprint, you deed rifts new ideas. You've got more clarity. And so you do more execution. You do better execution. And you move faster. And the things you ship, you have a higher win rate on the things you ship. And you're shipping. I remember when I left Instagram, this is many years ago, but we had 15 teens and we might have been running 12 to 20 experiments a quarter a team. And I would say probably 60 to 70 percent of them were like positive and shippable, which is incredible. I mean, you think about you multiply at a magnitude of that. And it was because we were so effective at de-risking and understanding what was going on.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “This mentality, it becomes this forcing function for execution. So when someone says, you know what we should build, we should build this, you have a team that's enabled and empowered to say, that's a good idea, but we don't actually understand these three things before we start working on that. So maybe we should do understand work to make sure that that is actually the right idea. And so what you end up getting by embracing this concept is two things. You get parallel paths of work. So every sprint, let's say you do a three-week sprint or a three-month roadmap, you're executing on the things that you have a lot of conviction around, and you're also doing understand work in parallel. And so at the end of the sprint, you have learnings from what you executed while that test or that launch worked really well. We should double down. Or while that test of launch didn't work, here's how we should pair it. And you have insights from the understand work.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “What is it that we need to do to understand what's happening? And so, you know, for example, with Instagram, we did a lot of understand work of what makes for a good connection, right? Like, how do we want to think about that? How do we want to make sure that we're actually growing a graph, a social graph that makes sense? And so I might work with data science to understand work to like pull a funnel and look at the different types of connections for different types of users and make it make sense, right? Engineering might do understand work to instrument logging to make sure that we have the data that we need in order to tell the story. And so you're doing this understand work to basically better understand the gaps and knowledge. What's also really interesting is to understand work helps you to clarify what is a root cause or what is a job to be done or what is the right use case. And because the team adopts”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “What is kind of like the Facebook kind of way of thinking, which is understand, identify, execute, right? So first, you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on. So when we talk about understand work, there's a few ways to think about it. One is it is an intentional affordance in your execution to do the work that helps you to de-risk a project and to learn what's going on. When I say intentional affordance, meaning you put it down like linear is going to work on this thing, right? Linnea as a product manager is going to write a strategy. Janice as a designer is going to design a prototype. Like whatever the thing is and you put it down as actual an item as opposed to assuming it's going to happen in the background. We don't make an affordance for understand work then the work doesn't get done and everyone's just sprinting on execution. And so it's a planned intentional time to the team's bandwidth to figure out”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “And everyone's a little bummed. Like, why did this happen? Why are the metrics flat? What happened we work so hard. And ultimately, when you unpack it, you realize that you built something that you thought was going to be a good idea, but you really didn't understand a lot of key components of what people really needed, what pain points really existed, or what were the alternatives and what the real value of those alternatives were in the market, or exactly how the product needed to work, what the flywheel or what the experience needed to be. And so that is what I call the anti-pattern of what we want to do. And I call that identify, justify, execute, right? Where you identify something, someone says, hey, you know what? This would be great to build. And you identify that. And then you go pull data to go justify why that would be great to build. And then you sync an ungodly amount of time working on it in order to make it work, but it ultimately doesn't succeed. And that is the anti pattern.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “I certainly cannot take credit for understand work. This is part of an old Facebook framework of understand, identify, execute. What I probably will say is I guess I've been the shepherd for understand work in other companies. Like I've taken it from my time at Facebook and Really Institute or regularly at Instagram, then at Instacard. And when I worked, helped with Twitter now at YouTube. The way I like to talk about it with my teams is that, you know, first I tell a story actually. And the story is We've all had a moment where we have worked on something with a team super excited. It finally launches and we go out to dinner and we celebrate. We're celebrating everyone's juice. It's a great night. You go back to the office the next day and you look at the metrics and the metrics are flat.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “The person who needs the help and the person who you're connecting them with are going to see mutual benefit from one another. And I think I find that just doing that and seeding that and being really focused on what the opportunity or the challenge is tends to lead to better connections as opposed to just reaching out and saying, hey, I like your style. Will you be able to talk to?”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “I see people find the most success, they tell people what they're working on or what challenges they have, and they say, you know someone who Might be able to learn from who has done this or has good thinking about this recently. So instead of just going to someone saying, hey, can you be a mentor? Coming to me and say, hey, Bengali, I'm actually trying to figure out how do I change the way this TMOC rates because we need to go from this model to that model. But here are some of the challenges. So do you know someone who's actually really good at changing the way Teams work or really good at communicating a new vision that I can talk to? And so that, I think, is really important because what you do is you're creating a seed. And the seed is, you know, there's like a triad and you have the person who's looking for the mentor and you have the recommender, the recommender, and then you have the potential mentor. And the recommender is basically saying, here, there's common purpose between the two of you. And I can see it. And I think this is important. So I want you all to come together. And that triading in that moment creates a higher affinity, a high likelihood that”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Not actually, yeah, but like what was magical about the way he did it was like he would name people and their contributions and show how all of this came together into what is the path forward, you know? And it's like, you know, it's the communication, but it's also the other side. It's the other coin, the side of communication, which is eliciting to figure out how you communicate back to others.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Earlier in my career when I first got to Instagram, I wasn't the first growth beyond, but I was one of the first. And a guy who was there before me, his name was Georgia Lee. He actually stood up the growth team and ended up leaving six months right after I joined. But I watched George was like a really good listener. He had just a really incredible ability to be in a room and hear what was going on, to recast it back and make sure everyone felt good about where we were and what was being said in the path forward and really crystallizing the action items and also like how people felt about what the next steps were. And walking out of that meeting, it felt like he always had buy-in and clarity and was like helpful to build trust. You can see him almost like winning trust in every like in every moment of that meeting.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “An art and a science to product management, and in a lot of ways I come from a background of education. In a lot of ways in product management, it's very similar. Like you want to watch how other people hone their craft, how they deliver, how they lead teams, and kind of steal things from them, like figure out, well, wow, they need this really, really well when he was at Airbnb. It was really incredible. I'm going to take that. I'm going to take how he runs that team or how he landed that framework or how he communicated this message and note it and use it in my own toolkit later on. And so if you're really a student of product, you can't just be a student of theory. You've got to be a student of practice too. Meaning you're going and you're looking, you're like, hey, I'd love to sit in your team meetings. Can I come watch? Or your PM meetings or your leadership meetings? And you really like doing that for the sake of learning is really, really incredible. And that's some of the ways I talk about building skills.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Different Friday of the month, right? And so you might have three or four people on every Friday you're meeting with someone different. And the reason why this is so important is because if you, Lenny, are a mentor to me, you're busy one Friday and we only meet once a month, now I don't have anyone to talk to for two months and you're going through a lot of things and you're not really able to bounce ideas or gets build skills or learn how to influence others. But if you have three or four mentors you have someone different to talk to every week and if one or two of them cancel, you still have two people to talk to that. And you still can continue to grow and to build your thinking. So that's something I always recommend. And then the last thing I actually talk about is when it comes to execution, I think people don't, especially product managers, don't do enough of watching and learning from others.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “So many incredible blog posts, right? Like your podcast and blogs, so many incredible people who've come on here who tell you things like, you know, how to go to market, how to think about B2B SaaS and metrics. And so listening to you, reading Ben Thompson, understanding his mental models, if you go to look at Elena Werner or whomever, right? There's so many thought leaders who are out there. So I think being a voracious reader is really, really critical because it helps build your toolkit, right? And you need arrows in your quiver to really understand how to think about the right framework and the right mental model at the right time. One thing I also tell people is people think about mentorship is like, I have a mentor. Lenny is my mentor or John is my mentor. I tell them it's actually better to have a stable of mentors. You want to have three or four. And ideally, what you do is you meet with each one of them once a month, morning.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Skills part is really, really big, and it's something that requires, I think, consistent, you know, evolution of your own abilities. And so I broke it out in that blog post, a kind of communication, your ability to influence your leadership, strategic thinking, and then execution, right? Like actually getting things done. The communication of these, again, not all of these are created equal. I think communication is the one that tends to be the most impactful. And you see this in a lot of ways, right? You see this for people who are poor executors, but incredible communicators. And they seem to continue to rise and rise because they can tell a great story. But when you look under the covers, there's nothing there. There's no substance there, right? So communication for better or for worse is the one of the most important things. But building out your skills, I think, is really just kind of a, it's an interesting time to be in product and to be in tech right now because you have so many more ways to build out your skills than what previously existed.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Focusing on their discrete area and try to optimize for a local maxima versus understanding, okay, my manager is thinking about these things, and this is how I fit in and understanding maybe they have a gap to understanding why your area is important. Or maybe there's stuff that's on your manager's plate that is actually adjacent to your remit that if you understood what they were optimizing for, you can take that on and you would find more synergies with what they're trying to do.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “You're never going to always like your manager, right? That's not the goal isn't to like your manager. Ideally, you respect them and they respect you. You feel like there's things that you can learn from them. Finding a new manager is always an option. But I guess sometimes the real question is actually spending time to try to understand what is your manager optimizing. A lot of times I think there is a big disconnect between an IC”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Articulate what are the challenges that you're having, you're seeing across some of these variables within manager, help them to tie it back to how it's impacting your work and see if they can help you to create a plan to alleviate some of these things.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Well, I do think one of the things that I recognize is your manager. Not all of these variables is created equal. And the manager is the most important variable in the environment because a great manager who is empathetic, who is aware of what's going on, who is a great communicator, has the ability to move the chess pieces around and to like fix some of these for you, either immediately or in time. There's no one other than your manager who can really help to increase your scope or to help make sure that the team has the right pieces in place or dial in some of the issues that you might see in culture. And so that is why people say that we have a job they leave a manager because the manager is the one that has a lot of the power to fix a lot of these variables. And so really the question becomes like to what extent have you been able to clearly articulate what are the and dispassionate”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source