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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. “Deliver on all of the things that were necessary without burning myself out. And I felt like I was burning myself out and I couldn't really see the forest from the trees because I was just so much to do. And so that was a situation that I didn't really understand how to navigate at that point in my career. And there were like two or three manager changes concurrently. And so I didn't have a manager to lean on that I felt like I had a relationship with to help me to navigate that space. And I felt like the scope was actually too much for what needed to be done. And so I needed to find a better kind of fit for me. There was nothing wrong with the team. It was like a great learning environment, but it was like the confluence of scope and manager and all happening at once just wasn't a good fit for me.”

    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. “When I was actually at Facebook, I was running the team that does all the people recommendations. And it was a great team. I actually had a massive, massive team at 30 engineers I was working with, 15 machine learning engineers and 15 fun back-end engineers. And so great team, incredible team, a lot of resources, ton of scope. In some ways, it was too much scope. And to me, that was problematic because I really needed to build out, I felt like multiple teams to support the work that we were doing or to break it up because it was, I mean, the pace, the velocity you can imagine at Facebook was incredible. And I felt like between all of the work that we needed to do, the amount of engineering capacity that we had and the amount that was on the table, I felt like I wasn't resourced in a way where I felt like I could actually”

    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. “Right, and you have to really be honest. I think part of what makes this framework so powerful for me at least is that it helps you to be honest around what are the things that are limiting your ability to have impact and for your skills to really land and to what extent do you believe that you can help to change or try to influence the change in the environment? Because, you know, no one wants to be in a place where there's a bad culture and the culture is a bad fit for you. But if you're not really thinking about it objectively and naming that, or maybe it's a culture of the team, that is not the right place for you. It really forces you to evaluate what's going on around you that's limiting your impact.”

    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. “And so you're really looking at each one of these variables, and I look at this every year, and I say, how is my manager doing? How do I think about my manager? How do I think about the resources I have, the scoop, the team, the conversation, the company culture? And to what extent, and I score them, right? I score them as a one means it's kind of neutral. A two means that I'm greatly benefiting from this situation and something even closer to a zero is I'm not in a good place. So I assign the score in quarter-point increments, 0.25, 0.5, 0.751, up to two. Every year, and I really ask myself, you know, what is the state of each one of these? And to what extent do I believe that they can and will change?”

    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. “So, the environment was the one to me that I think is most people overlook and I overlooked when I was first thinking about this. Environment in this case, I think I kind of discreetly named a few things. One is your manager, then there's the resources. So, you know, what kind of team do you have? Is your team staffed appropriately? Do you have the right P&L or whatever budget to get the things done that you need? Then there's a scope. Like what is in your remit versus not in your remit because if you don't have enough scope, then you can't actually focus on the things that are most important. The team itself, the skills of others, the skills of the team, your compensation in some ways is part of the environment because if you're not compensated failure, you don't believe you are, then it's hard to feel like the work that you're doing is meaningful. And then there's the last part is the company culture. So to what extent is the culture a place where you feel supported, included, you feel like you can do your best 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

  6. “Would say, or medium and slowly wins. And in actually showing that you can do this again and again is how you actually validate the impact that you can see where the opportunity is and what's 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

  7. “I mean, so impact can be a lot of things, but I think for a product manager, for example, it's really one helping to get drive extreme clarity about where there are problems with the product, where there's opportunities, and what is the right focus and prioritization of impact, just creating the clarity that people need to understand and believe in the investment. The reason why I named this, and it feels a little counterintuitive, is that the more senior you get, the more there are questions of are we even investing in the right place. Is this area, is this team, is this org, the right investment, right? And so being able to even create the clarity that there is opportunity, it is the right thing to do, it is strategically and structurally important, is a form of impact. And then actually delivering on that impact, showing that you can make progress quickly, that you can deliver fast lane wins, as case.”

    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. “Yeah, I mean, I didn't really know how to think about what the right thing to optimize for was initially. And I realized that it's not compensation. Compensation is a reflection of the impact that you're having. And so, and your leveling, like how love senior you are, how much scope you is a derivative of how much impact you're driving. The more impact you're driving at your company, the more people feel like you can operate independently, you can drive real results, the more the scope they'll give you. So really impact became the thing to optimize for. It is the import and compensation becomes an output based on 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

  9. “And the impact is only achievable by looking at two sets of variables, a set of variables related to the environment, a set of variables related to your skills, and really breaking down each and understanding what's happening in the environment bit by bit and what's happening with your skills and where you hindered structurally within the environment, where your skills kind of lacking, and what do you have control over and using that whole kind of output, that framework to decide what makes the most sense.”

    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. “That blog post that you're referring to actually came out of a personal struggle that I had when I was at Facebook and trying to decide what my next move should be. I felt like I was kind of stuck. I felt like I was working harder, but not getting incremental kind of benefit to the work that I was doing. And I knew that I needed a change, but emotionally I understood that, but I couldn't really have an objective way of thinking about it. And so I really pushed myself to figure out what is actually going on with my situation and how do I create a way that I can rely on objectively to understand what's actually going on. And so I looked at that situation and I wrote,”

    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. “Yeah, it was crazy. I was like visiting a team that I managed there, about to get back on plane and go back to SFO and just standing there, you know, doing some work, writing my business. And I get on the plane, I'm talking to a colleague and someone comes up to me. I don't think I've ever seen them before and said, hey, sorry to interrupt you. I am so excited for your podcast with Lenny. Like, I can't wait for it. And then just walks away. And I was like, what is going on right now? Lenny is a big deal. I don't even know how this person knows me. It's like, and that's how I knew Lenny that I had to reschedule with you because I was like, if people are coming up to me and telling me that they're excited, I was like, there is a lot of anticipation. And Lenny, like the power of your reach now is like legit.”

    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. “Impact that you're really trying to drive. And the impact is only achievable by looking at set of variables related to the environment, a set of variables related to your skill set.”

    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. “What I call the anti pattern of what we want to do. Someone says, hey, you know what? This would be great to build. Then you go pull data to go justify why that would be great to build. Call that identify justify and execute. First, you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on. So understand, identify explicit.”

    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 found this framework travels with me. It's got these five components to it, vision, skills, incentives, resources, action plan. And you need all of those to have change. 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 here.”

    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