YouSaid · the spoken record

Mayur Kamat

lines on the record: 100
first: 2025-05-22
most recent: 2025-05-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“If they're going for larger big growth companies as the next step of the career, right? Once you kind of, this is still so all the people, companies I talk to, the amount of companies that are truly world-class at experimentation is so low that if you work in one of these companies and you build this tool set, you can build a whole career on this, right? You can go to any other company and say, this is what I'm going to bring to the table because there's no growth without, as I said, without compounding wins faster. Nothing compounds wins faster than experiments. And there's no company out in the world that says, we don't want to grow. So that is an incredible kind of brand that you can build alongside with it. And then the third piece is just the scale. One of the other interesting aspects of banking is what I call a 100% product. It's actually more than 100%. There are more bank accounts than human.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of it is just a hiring philosophy, right? One of the advantages you get for being like a big fish in a small pond is you get to have your pick of the cream of the crop. So in Europe here where we don't have like the same level of unicorn or decacon density you have in the Bay Area being one of the first ones or the few ones, you do get a little bit of that branding working in your favor. So some portion of that is just the input, right? If you're taking really smart people like very chance at N26 they will become they will stay smart two is again the level of problems that they work on are harder just the fintech angle we mentioned and now with this whole experimentation driven kind of change that we made in the last year or so there's also a new kind of toolkit that they get especially”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have now made it scientific. Now, somebody comes up with an idea, say, that's a bad idea here. This is why it's a bad idea, because we have done this experiment six times and it has failed across this user groups at this exact level of impact created. So it kind of gives the PMs the kind of, hey, I'm not just a general purpose technician, I'm a specialist now. And it's extremely empowering once we can, it takes a long time to mow the team in that direction. But once you get it there, the PMs just, it's a natural kind of dopamine hit every time you run an experiment and see it more metrics.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the second thing which I tell my PMs now, which is truly kind of empowering if you think about it, the challenge with being a product manager is everybody thinks they can do their job. You go to, the CFO might have an idea, the head of kind of accounting has an idea. Anybody who uses the product thinks they have ideas. At some point in time, you're like, what is my discipline? What is my science? Nobody goes to the accounting guy and says, hey, I have a great idea for how to cook our books. Nobody does that because there's a science behind it. There's a science for financial forecasting. Even in technology, like a lot of the times people just don't go and say, hey, just jump this thing and let's use this code that the AI code generator has used. There's a little bit of science there. Whereas in product, you largely find that it's a combination of data and ideas and stuff. And anybody thinks they can, the moment you build experimentation.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the first things kind of do when I take on a role, the company already does and have an experimentation culture. That's largely why they hire me in the first place. So for now, the first thing is to say, how can we bring it in? First, the kind of right culture, the right incentives, and the right tools. And then once it's set up, it gets a lot of fun. Get a lot of fun for the PMs because you have kind of democratized performance for the product managers.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a mixture of users over 10 years, 20 years, even six months, and they all behave differently. If you look at a cohort level, development of certain users, you generally end up making better decisions. But even over there, it's still a lot more, there's a lot of noise between the moment you start tracking it, then moment you start making decisions based on it. The world has changed in that meantime. At Binance, this was kind of a very foreign concept when I brought this in. I'm like, oh, the conversion's down now, even though the product's done really well, because Bitcoin has crashed nobody wants to go sign up for an exchange account. So if you just measure pre and post, you would think that you have done something wrong in the product. If you measure it as an experiment, you would know that between that variant and control, it's still doing great, even though overall conversion is down. Largely, the more you kind of”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm like, oh, this is working. Let's do more of these. So now there are some areas where you can't do it, like in compliance, in legal aspects in Europe, especially pricing. In US, you can run pricing tests in Europe. It's a little bit different. So those areas you would need to have a lot more kind of deeper thinking, understanding of your cohorts coming up with more structured reason for why you should do it. But you can't really test and know within a couple of days or couple of weeks at max, whether this was a good idea or not. Irreversible decisions or they're just extremely time consuming to find out, then do some pre-work. Look at largely finding a lot of companies that really look at data without looking at cohorts. You make completely bad decisions because if you look at your dash,”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use this tool. I'm going to give a shout out to StatSig because they're awesome. Vijay, who used to run the experimentation at Facebook, he's ban off and now has this tool. There are several of those. But if you're running proper experiments, I just look at the StatSig dashboards. And I'm looking at experiments. I'm looking at what metrics they might.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For market expansions, for investments, for licenses, compliance, several areas where it makes sense and it's kind of useful. But for most product managers, your strategy should be how fast can I go from hypothesis to data. The faster you can go there, the easier your strategy gets.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is about looking at porter sport forces, a lot of slides, looking at some data and slicing it and saying we need to go here or there. All of it is largely Some sort of package intuition. And the challenge with that is usually you go with the loudest voice in the room. And if you're a junior in your career, it's a very frustrating exercise because you think you know the strategy better. But it's all it is. It's a sense of package intuition. And then the guy with the loudest, biggest title or the loudest voice is going to go do it. Because very early in my career, Jonathan Rosenberg, he was the head of the CPO at Google. All the PMs reported to him. He was not called the CPO back then. And he had this one thing he would say all the time, that come to me with data. If you come to me with ideas, we'll go with mine. That was the thing. You can come with any ideas. We just going to do what I think. But unless you come with strong sensors, proof to override me. So again, strategy is a little bit overrated for product.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the, and there's a pre conversation you talk about contrarian view by definition seems like a, this is going to be a controversial words. Feel very at odds with each other for me. A product, you have hypothesis, you know, and if you can test it, you don't need a strategy. If I say, hey, if I build this and I know this will add this much users and this time with this conversion late, this customer acquisition cost and this LTV, that's your hypothesis. And you could test it in a market very quickly. And if it works, you have your strategy. Keep doing more of it. Strategies always like keep doing more of it or don't do it, right? That's all there is to strategy. The key part is just figuring out which one goes and which bucket. And if you're really executing fast enough in a kind of a structured experimentation driven manner, your strategy becomes largely solved problem. And there's a challenge. A lot of people think like strategy.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where you don't have. And then when you look at the next job, just try engage. Like, are they hiring me because I did really well at some of the stuff that I didn't love doing? And if that's what they're hiring you for probably you're not going to have a lot of fun or high acceleration if you go there.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever this launch and just tracking data analytics. So this pod is true for most PMs. Some jobs require more of one versus the other. And you just know when you do these things which one you're truly great at and sure have a lot of fun doing. Maybe you just don't like Jira and the ticket tracking and just following people on that. And that's the worst part of your job. Stay away from more structured, complex stakeholder management jobs or you find that, hey, you do really well at that and somebody asks you, like, hey, what are the 15 things we're going to do next week to improve our conversion? That's where you kind of have a hard time to sit down, spend hours thinking about it, then maybe that's not your strength. So over time, you kind of build this self-calibration on areas that you have fun doing and areas.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of kind of so there's a scientific way of doing this, and it's gotten a lot better since I read that book a long time ago. Again, if you're truly, truly curious, it doesn't take that long and now it's a lot more accessible. That's one way to do it. And it kind of separates in terms of execution and some sort of structured thinking, innovation, and design, creativity, stakeholder management, EQ. a little bit of a more scientific picture on what your strengths are. But there's also a simpler way, right? Like you know, there's as a PM, you do pretty much a large portion. Everybody does the same few things, right? You think you're designing the roadmap, you're coming up with what you think is the product strategy. There's a lot of time around just managing engineers, making sure they do stuff. There's stakeholder management, marketing, compliance.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was incredibly spot on its areas where I would do well, areas where I would struggle and need help. So that's one way to do it. It's super extreme. A little bit a year, two years ago, we had the opportunity to see as good friends with Ray Dalio. So we had Ray Dalio come to our executive off site. And he walked us through how he and his company does strengths assessment. So that one is a lot more accessible. I think it costs like $50. You can go to, I think we search for ADALEO strengths. There's a website that you can go in. The way it works slightly differently for executors because you do it. So there's a your component tells you how good you think you are. And then it has your leadership team vote you on certain different aspects. So there's a two-layer assessment how good you think you are and how good everybody else thinks you are. And then the overlap is where your true strengths are. And as a CEO, I can say, oh, Meyer's great at design. Everybody else knows that Myer's great at design. We should give design problems to Mayer. So that's another way.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our high dominance, high warmth in the Q4 cauldron. And that, as you can realize, if you also want smart people to find those who land in that cauldron is literally looking through a needle through a haystack. But when I almost didn't do it, like I was like, this is like I've been doing product for 15 years. This is insulting that I need to go do a six hour. The only reason I did it at that time was my son was like four and a half years old and I was teaching him like because he'd want to go to kindergarten. I was starting like do some math with him. And then in like six months he knew all the math that I knew like he was solving quadratic equations and stuff. And we thought, oh, we have a genius in the house. We got to get him tested. We were testing him and that's the only reason I took this test because I thought, hey, it would be interesting to understand what this process looks like. But then when I got the results, I was like, it was so spot on.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, after you finish your PM rounds, we would send you to this psych assessment. It would be a six-hour psych assessment. And they would tell me what your strengths are. Not just that. It would be an IQ component. So we would know what percentile you are. And not just like an IQ score like Einstein or not, but IQ score across different across pattern recognition or structured thinking, across numerical ability, verbal ability. A lot of people say they hire the smartest people at Agoda, we literally hired the smartest people because we paid a psychologist a lot of money to tell whether they're smart or not. But other than that, they also give you your strengths and weaknesses. It used to be called unwished the company still around. This is called Q4 and it's called Q4 because they had this four quadrants on two axes. One is on dominance and one is on warmth. So you want people.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, there are several ways to do it. I remember I read this book. I don't think it shaped my understanding of it because I was already operating in that mode, but it used to be called Now Discover Your Strengths. Now it's called Strength Finder 2.0. It's still like 20 years old now, but there's a lot more newer ways to do it. The two things I have done, and they're both kind of, I'm not sure how accessible they are, but I'll give you the examples. So at Agoda, we used to pay a psychologist $5,000 for every single PM we interviewed”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's the thing about FinTech, which is probably the most interesting FinTech, you have two customers. You have your usual customers and you have your regulated. And you need to keep both of them happy. And usually what makes one happy, it makes the other one less happy. So you are constantly dealing with trade-offs. Like in most PMs and most companies, you have some trade-offs, but they're not existential. Whereas in FinTech, like every trade-off is existential. Like when you found a company, every trade-off is existential. You may not exist as a business if you make a wrong decision. In fintech, a lot of the PMC that day in, day out. And that probably kind of conditions them to a whole different level of juggling balls than you would be a PM at other company.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hours and hours single day, every single day. You're driven by a whole, these are the voyagers of these are the folks who would go explore new climates in the future, are the folks who sailed out on the seas in 1600s to discover new land. That being access to these people directly. Is extremely empowering. You not just learn from it, but you get inspired by it. If you have an X definition of success, now your definition of success is 10x. You automatically push the boundaries more. So I think those two things, those three things, early start, category defining companies, mutual success and creation of dense networks. And just being inspired by incredibly, incredibly successful and talented people.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe it's a product manager who starts a company, but maybe there is a business development manager who has also started his company and now you can collaborate and have partnerships. So that success, the mutual success, which a lot of early startups see, that creates a kind of a more denser network than you working at a large company where not all of you see the success at the same time. And three comes down to the founders as well. incredibly mission driven founders. I always find it super admiring now when I look back at Valentin and Max here at N26 and I look at CZ, they have reached from a whatever metric you can define of success, whether it's the size of the company, whether it's their personal network, beyond whatever anybody would think success means. And then to wake up every day and to do”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Well, let's end 26. One of the reasons why they have so many founders is the fact that it was a category defining, like we were the first kind of mobile bank. So a lot of the problems we saw in early days, nobody else saw them. So every product manager had to solve it for the very first time in history. And that kind of is a whole different level of kind of trial by fire. Same thing with the evolution. They about started about the same time. Those are the companies that show up in the top rankings because you did this before anybody could do it and you learned by literally mowing mountains. I think two is also the fact that you see, we have this whole PayPal mafia, right? Like when you see this early success, everyone sees it together. So when they go, they have that network, as you said, built in. These are, right?”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You realize that work is not going to be my big part of my identity. My identity is who am I as a parent, who am I as a community member? Who am I as a son to my parents? Who am I as an artist or a contributor? And that's what my is going to be a well-rounded person. And a job is... And the value and meaning, the top part of the Maslow's pyramid comes from everything but work. And then you just need a kind of a balanced life because then work is a certain portion of it and the rest kind of fills the picture.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your bread and your depth in sort of just the ladder. So you are incredibly either getting specialized in a specific domain where there is now enough value for you to separate yourself from the pack. Whether it's like in FinTech now, we have folks who are onboarding experts with KYC. We have people who are fraud experts. We have who have really great understanding of how card schemes work and how master cards work and where can we get the right incentives for the user, the folks who are experts on customer loyalty and retention. You build that domain expertise and then you realize that everyone needs that, right? And that could be like an incredible way to specialize. So you may not lead growth at a certain team, even though you're not a CPU. So that's kind of the second way of doing it. And the third one, again, just not to knock it out, is you.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Google is to be a founder. And the CEO is now the thing they tell me when they hire me is like, I wish I had your job. That's because that's what I used to do. That's what I have loved doing. And now I spent 90% of my time doing stuff that is not the stuff that I truly enjoy. But folks enjoy building stuff. There's a PM. There are a lot of things you don't have control over. And you feel like, hey, that's what's stopping me from growing. That's what's stopping me from truly enjoying. Founding is a great path, right? You have that control now. You own the decision making. There's rarely times you can say, hey, this did not work because of that person. If you're constantly hitting that, then founding is a great path for you because then you have the ball control, for better or worse. The other is just like, I mean, it's less about being a CPO and just like growing your”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The number one, and that's, I think, back to your original question on N26, if you work in incredibly high growth companies, especially fintech, where there's a higher people end up being founders because it's probably a whole different kind of track we can go down on. The founding you own company is probably the most kind of obvious exciting alternate path. The only thing I ask there is like, again, the same question, like what you are good at and what you love doing, the challenges with founding a company is like a large portion of running a company has nothing to do with building a great product, especially as the company gets bigger. I've worked for founders now for 17 of my 20-year career. Even at Google and stuff, like Mikhail was my boss at”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moment you start having those conversations, you are probably not on that track. Like you should not be on that track because the moment the word work-life balance comes, I think Jeff Bezos has this thing that he hits the word because it means like they're opposing things that need to be balanced. It needs to be work-life awesomeness or something like that, where every moment is awesome, whether you're working or you're living. But for some people, that comes naturally because that's how they wired. And those people should absolutely pursue it because it would be incredibly fulfilling. And the things that are challenging would also feel not as onerous. Whereas for everything else, it would feel like a sacrifice. It would feel like something you need to balance. And then you would, again, even if you're great at it, you're not going to have fun doing it. And at some point, you would not be great at it.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no, no, absolutely not. Absolutely not. It's like. To really enjoy your work and what you're doing, it won't feel like a sacrifice. When you're constantly, when you look at a new product, you're walking down the street, you see a new product, you're on the App Store, you see a new product, and you're like, oh, this is cool. Oh, look how they're doing their onboarding. Oh, look how the app store entry looks. But if that truly fills you up, fills your cup. Like every moment you're looking at why things can be better, how you can be better, how a certain thing, you would be the sacrifice will not feel like sacrifices. It will not feel like you're working long hours. You will not feel like, hey, when you're talking to PMs and giving them some guidances, when you're building things, when you're recruiting new people, all that stuff feels your cup, right? It doesn't drain it. And then you would have incredible fun on the journey. So it's less about the, that your sacrifices or work-life balance.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe as a group product manager, but throughout the stuff, you have built a holistic life that doesn't revolve around your work and gives incredible meaning to you. Or you can be saying, you know what, work is a huge part of my identity. Somebody asked me what wakes me up in the morning and what gives me that energy. It's my work. I can't separate my identity from your work, then maybe you should pursue that C-level path because it will truly be fulfilling and you would be able to make those challenges and sacrifices that are going to be asked of you to make that. So if you can calibrate that early and have that true conversation with yourself, like, yes, I want to go down that path and I want to do, you would make different career choices. And in that path, I would definitely say don't look at compensation. There are two jobs, look at the three things. Is it going to give me high compounding of learning? Is it high overlap with my strengths? And is it, am I going to have a lot of fun doing it?”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years of your career, I would say do not look at the compensation. And then the last one, this was kind of strange. Most interesting advice I can give people is determine very early in your career if you truly want to be a C level someday. You want to be an executive someday because it's almost like if you're ambitious and successful, you enter product management, you're like top of your, it's almost like an expectation of you that you would become that. And you'd never really challenge or question yourself. Is this the thing that meets me that I need to do to get there? Is that something I'm going to truly enjoy, not just the destination, but the process to get there? And a lot of people think that and they make suboptimal decisions based on that. There's like incredible careers you can build and incredible lives that you can live by just being great at what you do, doing more of that stuff. And you end your career maybe as a director.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Process management. You would struggle in a kind of a growth team where the expectation is you're doing things really quickly. So I would look at first very introspectively, what are my true strengths? What do I, and then look at jobs where that has a much higher profile of winning? And thirdly, largely, I would say do not optimize for compensation, especially early in your career. If you're truly on a track to become like an executive someday or found your own company and make it successful, you will find that the compensation is so much backloaded that you would make 90% of your compensation in the last five years of your career. So optimizing for 10%, 20% early in your career. So if you have two jobs and I would like rank in your first 15 years.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you just have to manage around it. If you get higher up in your career, then it gets easier because you can build a team that complements your strengths. But again, if you're early in your career, find places that if you're a great kind of creative person, if you can look at a product and think of 100 things you can do better, you're always about what's the next best thing and how quickly can I implement it. You need to be working in themes that have a high experimentation culture, need to be working in growth teams in large companies. If you work in a fintech company on a compliance side project or launching like a new business vertical, you're going to struggle. At the same time, if you have external management structured thinking, you have great stakeholder management, you have high EQ, you should work in themes where there's a large amount of complex people management.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The faster you will grow. The second piece generally is like if you need to optimize for what you're great at. And now after having two kids, I'm fairly in the fact that your strengths kind of get defined very, very early. I'm looking at my nine-year-old and 12-year-old and they have a whole different set of strengths. So if you're like 25 years old early in your career, it's very hard at that point to say, oh, here are all my weaknesses. And I need to improve on those. A lot of the career feedback typically tends to be around like, hey, here are the things you need to be better at. Why don't you do more of that step? Firmly in the camp that you need to know what you're great at, what are your superpowers, and you need to find jobs where success is determined by how much of that superpowers you get to use. And early in your career, you can't get away with the fact that there's some stuff you're not going to be great at.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The number one thing I shared before the best thing you can do is find companies that are growing fast because it kind of compounds your learning at a much faster interval. Just the basic compound interest formula, right? Even if your interest rate is low, if you're compounding daily versus compounding yearly, after two years, you would be at a whole different stage at the endpoint. Companies that are growing fast just lets you get that learning much, much quicker. I remember joining Microsoft first in my career, some of the products I worked on during my internship had not shipped till I left Microsoft three, four years later. That's a very, very low rate of compounding. And Microsoft's a whole different company now, 20 years later, thankfully. And then you contrast that something like Binance, where every day or every hour or every minute you're shipping something and learning from it. So the faster you can compound your learning,”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This just beyond the KPI. So at Bina, there was a very strong belief that, hey, 80% of the world doesn't have access to financial tools. They don't even have access to currency that they can trust. And when we look at live in Europe or in US and we think about crypto, it's largely about speculation or Bitcoin. For most of the world, they just need access to a US dollar stablecoin. And just knowing that my currency is not getting kind of de-inflated because of things beyond my control. So everyone having come from these kind of a lot of our employees across all these countries, they had a very strong mission believe that what we are doing will truly empower billions of people. And there's a power in that. Like a lot of people go through like, hey, I'm going to mow mountains because it's not just about the money. It's just not about my career. It's about”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are several preconditions. One is you're growing really fast, right? So the growth for the employees comes just from seeing problems at scale that are growing every day, that it needs less of a manager's attention to figure out what you need to grow. And the best way to grow in general is that you work at a very fast growing company. If that's true to people are extremely well compensated. So they care about the KPIs more than they care about what's the next stage in my career and how do I get promoted. Because, I mean, our bonus structure went from like 0% to like 500%. So a lot of people didn't really care getting a 10%, 20% pay raise. They just want to do incredible work because they know they would be taken care of. And three, there's like some, it's a mission-driven company still believe at the end of the day that you're doing.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, we need you in this wardroom right now. And it was a bug in iOS 4. This is a long time ago, which caused every single user to pull the entire Gmail inbox, resync the whole inbox. So bug on the Apple side is going to take two, three weeks to fix. And it was causing like a thousand X load to our servers. And I remember Connie Ors, who was the head of infrastructure at Google. And he's like, sure, he slipped the button and there were 1000x servers that showed up for the next two weeks. And I was like, wow, that is KO, right? So this was my second time kind of feeling that, wow, moment, but like, oh, we just put 500 people in and solve the problem. It's less about having the 500 people and being able to maneuver them that quickly. I don't think I've been able to do that at any other company.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has its downsides, but if you're running in this kind of extreme mode and you're less not as worried about just the team stress and personal development aspects of it, we're just purely looking at the execution of the product. There's a surprising amount of power that comes with it. So it's probably the second time in my career where I had that, wow, you can do this because in other companies it would take years to do it. The first one was, this is going back at Google. I remember I joined Google. It was my first day at onboarding. And I was the product manager for Gmail for mobile, for sync. And I was in my onboarding meeting when they pulled me out and said, hey, we have an issue. The service is down. And Wall Street Journal is writing an article that Google, Microsoft, Apple not working together causing the service to go down.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It gets very tricky, but we also had resources. At one point in time, we said we had like a team of 20 people working on KYC. And we said for the next three months, we won 500.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bit of bilingual labor there as extreme customer focus. And it doesn't really matter. It's not that customers are not a number. It's a person at the end of the screen and we care about them. So you would need to know like, hey, you would get questioned acceptance rate in Kenya falling suddenly. So when you have, and that's just one piece of the problem in a large product with like 80 different products. You would of course cannot do it for every single product, but the concept of like what is the most leveraged decision you could be working on right now. And if it is for your growth, it's the onboarding, then you better know exact every single screen of the flow why is there a drop off and what are your teams doing for it? So that level of detail and you just do it on different products. At different parts of your journey.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To literally have this top 50 countries, the top 10 document types. So this spreadsheet of basically 500 cells with the conversion rate at each level. And then we are looking at, okay, a passport in Kazakhstan has very low level of conversion. What can we do about that? Do we need a new vendor? Do we need better imaging technology? Do we need a new SDK from a vendor? And then we go sell by cell based on, let's say, if it was running a typical product team, I would say, okay, let's just look at maybe the top 90% tile of our users. But this was Binance. And then CZ is like no user left behind. Even that one user in Congo is important because this is financial inclusion for them. So then all of those 500 sales matter, no matter how low their impact to the conversion rate is.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, let me get an example. So, one of the areas when I joined one of the biggest kind of product problem we had was like crypto before was fairly unregulated. So you could just sign up with an email address or even just a wallet and start trading. There was almost zero friction. And then it suddenly became regulated where you had to almost have a full KYC flow like a bank. And that just meant that the conversion rate dropped from, let's say, 100% to like 2%. And now we had to solve this problem. This was the daily meeting level problem. And it's okay if you're operating in one country. You can do it easily. If you're operating in 200 countries where there's not even a standard for what a document acceptance criteria might look like, now you have a significantly larger problem. You cannot say let's work with the KYC vendor and do the onboarding. So we would need to, we had”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm trying to see what are the great parts of that that I can bring to different roles. But that concept of daily meeting, if there's something super urgent, how can you own it directly and run it yourselves where you are in the details so your team knows that they need to be in the details and then be able to execute that? So that's probably the most fascinating. There are several war stories. I was there for two years and the amount of interesting stories that happened during that time is a lot, but then maybe we can follow up later if you have specific questions there.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“24 hours, yes. And people did it. It's extremely interesting to see that when you have really smart people, you give them really hard problems. You have no constraints on what can you need to solve them, whether it's money, people, except time. Time is always at a premium. People can move mountains in small amount of time. I think probably was the most fascinating part of working at Vinals that I've now tried to take. There's some good parts of it in terms of attention to detail, being able to pick certain areas and own it irrespective of what your title is and how many people report to you. There are certain downsides in terms of the amount of randomization that it can cause teams, especially if it's not super well thought through.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Executed largely based on this concept that I now take with me. I call it the running products via daily meeting. So we would pick an owner for something really urgent at the nightly leadership call. And then that owner would be expected to have like all hands on deck for however long that problem is every single day and then report the updates on the daily call. And some of these were like really massive topics. Like how do we get 15 financial licenses in 15 countries in the next three months? So it wouldn't be at a scale that was”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the leadership team, for example, met every day. And because the leadership team was spread across the world, we met at like 11 p.m. when I was in Singapore every day. That includes the weekends, holidays, like the leadership team was there 11 p.m. every single day, which meant that none of the decisions were blocked for more than 24 hours. And most of them, we made it on chat even within those 24 hours. But if there was something”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“KPI, my top line KPI was the trading volume. And my monthly KPI was in trillions of dollars. So the scale was mind-boggling. Teams of 10, 20 people running multi billion dollar profit businesses. And that brings it with it, like a first, how did they do that to that scale? And to what kind of culture requires to keep that running? Both are very fascinating. I think we could spend a lot of time talking about it. But the truly interesting thing, the first one is this you can't do this by having a traditional arg structure. So CZ, the founder and CEO at one point had like 55 direct reports and his direct reports had about the similar ones. So for a large portion of the history of the company, there was just one level between the individual employees and the CEO. And that leads to like an extreme level of decision making and execution. You cannot have one-on-ones when you have 55 direct reports. So there's a culture of one too many and doing that as often as possible.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, really, just a background for Binance because I think a lot of people have heard it, some in positive connotations, some not so much. The scale of Binces is pretty mind-boggling. So just to give the history, they started in 2017 as a crypto exchange. When there were other crypto exchange on the market for years, like Coinbase, and within six months, they became number one. So that's unprecedented. That's like launching a search engine today. And then six months later beating Google. And then they went within five years to add a peak valuation of somewhere like 400 billion or so with 2,000 employees. So that's zero to 400 billion in five years. So it's at a scale that's never been done before. Like Google couldn't do it, Facebook. None of the names that you hear it. And so it's remarkable. When I was there as the head of product,”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strategy is a little bit overrated for product. For most product managers, your strategy should be how fast can I go from hypothesis to data.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably most spectacular failure was the first PM on Hangouts. We had thousands of people working for me. We had entire power of Google. We had Larry literally sitting with us saying we can do anything we want Chrome to do. And we still didn't manage to build a great messaging product. The main kind of learnings from that is don't take on projects that are going to be six months a year because you just generally don't have control over the macro. The challenge with being a product manager is everybody thinks they can do their job. Anybody who uses the product thinks they have ideas. So at some point in time you're like, what is my discipline? Like what is my science? The moment you build experimentation, you're now made it scientific.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source