YouSaid · the spoken record

Deb Liu

lines on the record: 83
first: 2024-08-22
most recent: 2024-08-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, there's a woman who I worked with in product, and now she's the founder, very successful founder. And she said to me, I want to join the board of this Fortune 100 company. She told me the company and I said, okay, that's a lot. So she said, how can I get there? And I said, first, it's probably going to take you 10 years because look at who's on the board. I happen to know a couple people on the board. And I said, why don't you introduce you to one of them? And they can tell you how to get there. But the point is, she knew where she wanted to go. And she said, I'm willing to take the first step today. And I said, first, you've never been on a board. You were very successful, but this is not, you know, you have not, you know, there's so many steps before you get there. It's like before you go to Harvard, you know, you have to graduate from, you know, elementary school to middle school, take the SIT, you have to apply. So I said, let's start from the first step and let's break this problem down. But I love that she knew where she wanted to go. And she's like, even if I don't make it there, I'll be happier having made this journey.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also, I think. Know it's only you presented these offers, it's like one role is so different from another, you know, and they often don't happen at the same time. They might say, well, you have to decide in two weeks, and then you say, well, there's this other company I'm talking to. And you get a lot of pressure to say yes to this versus this. And to really having a measuring stick. Is this getting me closer or further away from where I go can allow you to actually take serial decision making to a place where you're measuring against a long-term goal?”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the problem is this with you and me, Lenny, is that hindsight bias is a problem. We made it because we weren't intentional in a lot of ways. But for how many people is that true, right? For how many people who aren't, you don't have a plan and you get there. I always tell people, you know, if you aren't sure what your destination is, that's definitely where you're going to end up. But if you actually aim in the right direction, you can shape your learnings. You can shape the roles you take. You can shape your skills towards the place that you want to go.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody does. And so I think having a plan allows you to compare every decision. It's not like when you're offered an admission to college, you're looking at three different offers maybe, you know, with financial aid or not, and you can make a decision. Oh, they're offering you this department, but I can't get into this department. And I'm going to, this is how far it is from home. But jobs and roles are nothing like that. It's like someone calls you one day, hey, I'm at Facebook. You want to come? I'm like, I'm actually, you know, on maternity leave. And he's like, just come talk to me. I'm like, why not? And, you know, you end up dropping into different parts of your life. And I think sometimes by saying, here's where I want to go and here's how I want to get there, you can have such a better career. And so I do encourage everybody to do this and to think about what does success look like in five years and how far am I from that? And am I heading in the right direction?”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Stephanie Telinius at eBay for two years. I led the buyer experience. We did some really good work there. And then I went on maternity leave again and I get a call from a friend, my old engineering manager from PayPal. Hey, I'm a Facebook. You want to come? You can't come into product. You need a CS degree for that. But we have a product marketing job open. I was like, so it's good. Drop into Facebook. And so again, no idea what I'm doing back in product marketing. So I spent a few years doing that and eventually was invited into product. And, you know, so on and so forth. And each job that came along was organic but also kind of accidental. And I see that happen in a lot of careers, which is my story when you look back looks great, right? It looks like it all worked out, but I had almost zero intentionality in any of these. And I think that had I had more agency and I thought about what I wanted, I could actually measure, is this the thing that would get me further or not? I ended up extremely lucky.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, charity, social commerce, and digital goods. And I thought, okay, this is an interesting job. So I create the job, have a couple product managers. Wasn't really sure where this was going. And then one day I was like, you know what? I'm not feeling this. I have a child at home. I just, I got into the, you know, what Cheryl Sandberg calls that kind of like between kids situation where I was boarded my job. So I go to the VP I was working one of the VPs I worked with and I resigned. I said, I'm leaving tech. Just I'm going to stay home and maybe start something small. And he convinced me to hold off and he said, I'll find you a job. He calls me a week later and he said, found you a job with Stephanie Telinius leading the buyer experience at eBay product. And I said, oh, that sounds interesting. So I said, sure. As you noticed, I do not have a plan. I'm just drifting as I'm so fortunate that I had amazing mentors who gave me opportunities to, but end up working for, you know, Greg fans.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally unqualified. I ended up in this job, and I do a good job. I end up, you know, doing it for several years. I build up the team and we have a great relationship with eBay. Our team was very close. And we were able to actually build something really lasting and that worked really well. And then I had a baby. And so this happens in a lot of women's careers. I was turning 30. I had my son. And I had to leave for six months. And so I handed my product to my successor, Mike Wu. And he ended up taking over. And he did such a good job while he's gone. I didn't want to displace him when I got back. And so I thought, well, I'll go look for another role. I couldn't really find a product role I liked. I mean, because there weren't that many product director roles. And so I ended up in corporate strategy. So I worked for the amazing Rajiv, who was CEO at the time. He's since passed. And I kind of wrote his feetes, worked on strategies. I worked on digital goods and charity. And he ended up building that into a vertical for the company.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I'll tell you the story of my career and how I was the accidental PM and then eventually I told you how I accidentally fell into PM, but also fell into so many of the things that happened in my PM career. And if I had to go back, I would think much more deeply about what I want to accomplish. So I ended up a PayPal. I was working for a guy named Dave Lee who reported to Amy Clement. And then he left. And so she offered me his role. I had only managed people for like, I don't know, 15 seconds. I was two years out of business school and I was definitely not qualified to do his job. He was a director of product. I wasn't even a director. And I was running the team for eBay. So basically the PayPal part of eBay, which is basically half the company's revenues and profits.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, for your PM audience, I want to say this, which is a lot of the greatest PMs are the worst PMs for their careers. They love products. They love the craft. They love, you know, the customer research, the data. They have plans. They have timelines. And then when it comes to career, they have none of those things. They just drift from job to job. Hey, should I take this role or this role? Like, how do I think about this? And I see that, but if I said you had to write a spec for your career, what's in there? What are your milestones? What are the skills? What are the features that you want to have of your career? You know, how are you going to get there? What does success look like? You actually have metrics for your product, and yet you don't have metrics for your career. And so often I often poach them. I coach a lot of people. And when I coach them, I ask them, well, what do you want to see yourself in five years? Where do you want to go? And half the people have no idea. And I think that's really tragic because, you know, when you pee on your career, it's about intentionality.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is because you are there, you're going to change the directory of the product, or this thing is, you know, this thing has 100, you know, 100,000 users. You're going to get it to 200,000. Like those are the kinds of things that are going to be. The big swings are the things that you can, you know, you write your career stories about. They're not just I move this metric X, but I changed the trajectory in this way. And so the big swings, though, have a lot of failures along the way. And so you have to understand you're making trade-offs in that. And I encourage everybody to take some time, two, three years in their career when they're ready for the big swing, where if it doesn't work, if it works, run the team, you run this amazing product. If it doesn't work, you can always go back and go back to the core products.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends. It depends on your personality. So, the one thing I realized about my role was that I did a lot of, I had like five different careers at the company over 11 years, you know, and so most people don't realize that when you work on new things, you're constantly adding to your portfolios, attracting from it, growing things, pruning them. And so you could just work on so many cool things, except everything has similar kind of, it's like it rhymes, but it's not exactly the same, right? So you learn the lessons of how to get things done, how to get resourced, how to get support when the product's not working, how to, you know, not get pruned in the next culling. And those are really, really important skills. But I think for people who are just starting out of the career, it is a very high risk thing to do. So if you're very early in the career, I encourage people just learn the core skills first. You can learn the core skills when there's a lot of stability. This product is growing X percent, like 5%, and you're going to grow at 10. That's amazing.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The incredible journey within because you learn so much about the mechanics of what that takes, and yet at the same time, I found a lot of energy from doing something that someone hasn't done before. And so I really enjoyed the, hey, this thing could fail. Let's pivot. Let's try to figure out. Let's prune this. Let's try that. And not everything I did there succeeded, but a lot of the things that are lasting the lasting products are ones that gotten really big. And so for me, it was a greater reward and it made a journey so much more interesting. But for others, I think, you know, work on the core product, learn the skills. It is absolutely respectable as well. But if you choose to be the person who works on innovation new products, expect in a year you might literally have nothing to show for it. But the less that you learned. And I think those lessons are really precious and we often underestimate that too.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the most important part of the environment is really patience. Patients with, and you know, again, this is a portfolio strategy. And I tell every PM who, you know, I used to do a new hierarchy class. And I say, look, a lot of you are going to go into the core product and your job is to grow X by three to five percent over every six months, right? Like growing engagement or growing sessions or maybe growing video views or whatever your metric is, you're trying to grow something 5% and then you exceed expectations. And I said, and then a bunch of you are like, I want to do something new. I want to build something from scratch. And I said, by the way, a very, very successful company for a new set of products has a 50% hit rate. So half of you are going to come back in a year and have a different job because that did not work out. Do you have the resilience to do that? And I think somebody, you know, you enter a large company, you're, by the way, you can have an amazing career building core product.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go run your old team again. And I thought, well, I will do both. And so I did both for a while until it really took off. And I think the thing that I think a lot of large companies don't realize is that you can love something to death. And say with every new product, I'd rather kind of do it out of the limelight, do it with minimal resources, and have the freedom to fail. Because success and failure really is, you know, in startups, failing fast is really important or succeeding fast, right? It's the long slog that makes it really hard. And in a company, you end up getting cut if you're the long slog product. And so being able to just say, you know what, we're pruning this. We're doing the next thing, the next thing. And then having the time to iterate and grow is really critical.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, everything in a company is like, let's do the most important thing. These are kind of seeds and we'll just let them. And so if you do that, you have to know that you don't get a lot of resources. You get a lot of attention. And I appreciated that because I think I work best when people aren't, there is not a lot of scrutiny. I think sometimes large companies, they say, well, this innovation team and then they check in on them way too much. They're like week to week progress. Where are you going? What's your strategy? But so much, as you know, of building something new is the iteration process. It's the failing a lot. We actually tested like five or six versions of the ads product before we got it to take off. And it took months. And then we were on the verge of death multiple times. In fact, I actually went back to run the payments team while I was working on that product because the team we had gathered still want to continue working on it, but I needed a second job back on the payments team because they asked me like this, we don't think this thing is going to work.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we just said, hey, look, what ad product do you want? And they said, actually, our biggest challenge, like your biggest challenge is the shift to mobile. Build us a mobile acquisition engine. And we said, that's doable. And at the time, the company was very brand-oriented. Most of the ads in the, actually, almost all the ads on the platform were brand. And we were not even on the ads team. So we actually worked on this team called the platform team. And we said, okay, we'll build an ads product for the Facebook feed, the new mobile Facebook feed, and suddenly became a billion dollar business within about 18 months, which was such an incredible journey. We worked on the mobile advertising platform. So basically the mobile ads network. That was a great experience. And so each time I worked on something, it was just the thing that you have to remember is the failure rate for something like this is very high. You know, you start something and the amount of iteration, people think, oh, yeah, it's very easy. You start something and it's linear because you have all the resources of this company behind you.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first, I didn't build the ads platform. I actually built a first direct response ad product the company overhead. But we'll talk about how that led to why direct responses a vast majority of the ads revenue for the company. But one thing that it was really interesting is that I just, you know, I really saw my opportunity in Facebook to be somebody that zigged when other people zagged. Like there were amazing people who did a lot of the really core products, right? Working on feed, photos, like videos. And I, you know, I came in actually on the payments team. And we worked on payments and eventually built games, which was the first billion dollar business. It was very successful. We worked with the likes of all the game companies that were on kind of the Canvas games platform. And it was just an incredible opportunity to start from scratch and build something really cool. We built Facebook credits, which eventually became kind of the Facebook payment system. And, you know, then from there on, I built the first direct response ads product. And again, leveraging the skills that we had, we had a lot of relationships with game companies because of my time and payments.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never actually shared it publicly, but it's something which, you know, I had always had a role where I did new things for the company. And there was a role where it was running something which, you know, more of an existing business. But I had always been kind of the innovator, the new stuff person, right? I had taken over so many new things. And so, you know, maybe that wasn't the right thing at the right time for me. But it was something that was really incredible and a turning point for me.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's a choice, right? I could have said, you know what? I can't have that job. I could go do something else. But I didn't. I took the job I had with the team I had and I turned it into thing that was going to be something we wanted. And so I think sometimes it's not, you know, I think that that experience was a very humbling experience because, you know, to be told no and then to say that this will never happen was really hard. But at the same time, it was a reminder that you're not right for every job, even if you think you are. And that you can't take the raw materials of what you have and turn it into what you want.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he didn't say it harshly. He didn't say it, but he was giving me feedback about something which he did not see me in that role, in a role that I really wanted. And I had to decide each time, like, what do I do with this information? This is my dream job. I actually, I decided I was going to turn the job I had and the job I wanted.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I remember there was a job that I really wanted at Facebook, and I'd been there for a long time. I had been, you know, leading different teams. I was a VP of product and a GM. And there was a job. There was one job that I never got to do. So I got to do all the jobs I wanted. And Mark gave it to someone else. And I told him at the time when he gave it to the first person, who was amazing at it. I said, you know, if this job were open, I like to be considered for it. The job opened up later, gave it to someone else. And I said to Mark, again, like I really wanted that job. And he said, not only will I not give you that job, you know, you'll never have that job at this company.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over many generations. And I think sometimes we think, oh, yeah, you know, I wish I lived a term life. And that is not what we want. You want to have enough adversity that you learn to overcome so that you can build stronger over time and build resilience in your career. And I've seen that so much, which is the best product leaders I ever work with are the ones that have the toughest stories that had the hardest feedback, but also the ones who are able to bounce back quickly and make it happen.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, here's what I notice about everybody. You know, I have coached a ton of people in my life. I have managed big teams. And, you know, the people who are most successful are not the people who had no failures, who would live charmed lives and head up into the right careers and got promoted every cycle. The people who were most successful were the ones who actually threw adversity learned to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones. They were the ones who got hard feedback and then came back stronger because now they learned what to do differently. They were the ones who products failed, but they said, you know what? I'm going to turn this failure into success. I'm going to take those lessons and make this company stronger. The once who, you know, when you live a charmed product life, you always work on everything that's easy. You don't actually, trees are strong because they bend in the wind, because they're tested, because it's cold, because it's windy, because there's conditions. And that's how a tree grows strong and tall.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coming in with humbleness was really important. But during the interview process, actually, I didn't realize this, but they asked me questions as if I was a product manager, as if I knew I was doing. And I think when you have passion around a product or passion around a company or around a business model, around something, it shows. And so it's not necessarily faking the enthusiasm or faking the idea that you want to work there. But, you know, you don't have to know how to write the spec or a PRD or briefings or anything like that. You don't know how to know how to do customer research or do data analytics or read reports. But instead, show your passion around the product itself, around the use case, around the customer. Show who you are and why you care. I think sometimes people just say, well, I want a product job. But you have to be able to fall in love with the problem. You have to fall in love, not with the product that I said the problem, right? The use case. What problem are you trying to solve? And if you can do that.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go do that. Let's go do it. And I said, Well, how do you do that? And she said, Well, you write down what you want to build, and then you work with the engineers to do it. And I just remember thinking, this is crazy. I have no idea what I'm doing. And it was such an incredible adventure, though. Those first few years, I just learned so much about the craft of building, how to really think through product use cases, how to think through what customers wanted, not just the customer of one, myself, but really what true customers and customer cohorts wanted. And so it was really a time when I felt like I was really blossoming. But I didn't come in with mastery. I came with a curiosity. And I think that's what made me a great product manager was that I didn't have a set way of doing things. There wasn't some playbook I was trying to play. There wasn't some framework, but instead I was willing to learn.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And embarrassingly, I went to the first day of work and I said to Amy Clement, who was the VP of product at the time, and I said, okay, I literally have no idea what this product job is. And she showed me the rogues, and she was so incredible. She actually showed me. She said, you know, all those ideas you had, all that energy you had around building these things.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I said, okay, well, what kind of jobs do you have? And he's like, I have jobs and product, and I have jobs in marketing. Now, I take it a marketing class, obviously, in business school. And I said, I wonder what this other product job is. So I look over at Catherine and I've kind of seen her around Stanford before. So she was a year ahead of me. And I said, well, what do you do? She said, product. I'm like, that sounds good. I'll do that. And that's actually how I fell into product management. Well, I actually, and I'm embarrassed to say, faced my way through those interviews because during the interviews, they're like, well, what would you build? And since I was an avid user of both products, I could really richly say, here's the product feedback I have, here are the new products you should build, here's my feedback on things that we should be doing differently. And they said, congratulations. And they gave me the job.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'll start with my career in tech. So I had worked in consulting before business school. I went to Stanford for Business School, I came out to California, didn't know that much about tech, but I really loved using eBay, so I interned there my first year in business school. And then when it came to finding a job, I really wasn't sure what we wanted to do, but we wanted to move back to the East Coast. And so I wasn't looking and couldn't find a job. Like it was really hard. It was 2002. And so I kind of ran into Tim Wenzel and Catherine Wu. So Catherine Wu is from Airbnb, as you might know her. And Tim Wenzel put together the PayPal Mafia. He was the recruiter for PayPal. Went to this table and I said, absolutely love PayPal. Use it all the time. I'm a big seller on eBay. And he's like, do you want a job? I'm like, no, I'm actually going back east.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you're worrying all the time, you're not necessarily having impact. So, how do you keep going back and forth and back and forth so that you're not going straight up a ladder? You're actually laddering back and forth into different things where you're having an amazing time, where you know everything. And then you're the newbie again and learning new things. And you're incorporating what you used to know into what you're learning and the impact that you have today and so on and so forth.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always be learning. And I tell this to everybody. So I often tell people someone who's always learning is always going to exceed someone who's the expert today. You're going to find people, you know, the one thing about school is that we go to school and there's just such a thing as getting 100 in the test. A perfect score on the SAT, graduating with a 4.0. Well, there's nothing like that in careers, right? We think it's actually a nonlinear experience and there's always something better than you at speaking or presenting or strategy or execution. But if you're always learning, learning from the best, getting feedback, you're always going to get better every single day. And that's what I have always held, which is each job I took, I didn't necessarily qualify for it. I wasn't necessarily the very best at it. And so it became a student of being better at that job. And once I mastered that, I was a student for something else and something else and something else. And so I always balance learning and impact, which was you can have the most impact the job you know the best, but then you stop learning.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most important career decision you make is who you marry. Is this person lifting you up or pushing you back? You will have a much more successful career if your home life is in balance. It's like a yin and a yank.”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Workplace is really favoring people who can speak up. It looks like self promotion. I wouldn't want to do that because of self promotion. But instead, what if I called it educating about all the great work your team has been doing, helping people see why your team should get more resources? You have to actually share what you do”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know some of the best PMs I have ever worked with are terrible PMs for their careers. They just drift from job to job. Hey, should I take this role or this role? Like, how do I think about this? But if I said you had to write a spec for your beer, what does success look like? How are you to get there?”
2024-08-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and why you should PM your career like you PM your product | Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry, ex-Facebook, PayPal, eBay) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source