YouSaid · the spoken record

Naomi Gleit

lines on the record: 97
first: 2024-10-27
most recent: 2024-10-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So, when we communicate, we're using the same vocabulary. I really believe in visuals. I think sometimes just having a conversation or a big meeting where people are talking, I'm just not very auditory. I'm a very visual person. It's hard for me to follow along just by listening. I will often have a visual in a meeting. I will leverage that visual to literally real-time edit what is being decided. So for example, if we have multiple options, I will edit the slide that's being projected to say we decided on option one. Here are the next steps. One, two, three. A lot of times people are saying, that's not what I heard. I heard this as a next step or I heard that as a next step. I love that because that avoids leaving the meeting and being like, I don't know what we agreed to. I heard this. You heard that. No, actually, we haven't agreed upon set of like decisions and next steps that we all real-time edited and looked at together.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, another Naomiism's canonical everything. So, that includes canonical nomenclature. I often talk about canonical nomenclature. One way to ensure extreme clarity is we have the shared vocabulary. I've been in a lot of situations where people are using the same or different words to describe the same or different things, which results in talking past each other. One of the most egregious examples of this is when I was working, I was in a conversation around how our reviewers and global operations were performing and we were using consistency and accuracy interchangeably. Consistency refers to how often different reviewers agree on the decision. Accuracy refers to how often the decision is correct according to ground truth. Those are very different things. We don't want to optimize for consistency because you could be consistently wrong. Like we want to optimize for accuracy. And so that is what canonical nomenclature is, is literally writing out all the words and their definitions.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clarity so we can just focus our conversations on things when we actually agree, not when we are misunderstanding each other. There are a lot of tactics that I use to drive.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So PM, as conductor is sort of how I describe the product management function. But one of the key naomiisms that I think is really critical to getting stuff done is what I call extreme clarity. I think our jobs are super hard. Extreme clarity means everyone's on the same page. It definitely doesn't mean that they all agree with each other, but they just have the same understanding of the facts. So we can disagree, but we all believe, you know, in the facts, which is that, you know, there's A, B, C, our options are X, Y, Z, and here are the trade-offs, you know, one, two, three. That kind of shared understanding is what extreme clarity is. That came from a place of just being in many meetings, on many emails, in many situations where I felt like we actually agree on something. The nature of this conflict is a result of misunderstanding. And that seems like an incredible waste of time. And so we want to have extreme.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The right tempo. And a lot of times I think people use music analogies or vocabulary to describe the work, and that includes things like people being in harmony, like a good team, a good PM, a good orchestra is in harmony. They're in sync. They're at the right tempo. They have the right cadence. Sort of how I imagine what a PM does at work, important characteristics are the PM is not the star of the show. Indeed, conductors don't even say anything during the performance. And also, you know, but I would at the same time give PMs like little metronomes and conductor wands. This was something that I used to do when we were smaller just to sort of take the analogy way too far.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Adam referred to me as a conductor. That's one of the Naomiisms in my role as head of product. I want to educate the PM community about what is PM. It's the most common question I get from PMs and non-PMs. What do PMs do? What makes a great PM? And what I say is a PM is a conductor. It says though the team that you are a PM on is an orchestra. There are many different functions in your team that includes legal, policy comms, data analytics or sorry, analytics, engineering design, much like there are many different instruments in an orchestra. And as a PM, your job is to make sure everyone's playing their part correctly. Every section in the orchestra is playing their part. But at the same time, they're playing together. They're unified in the music that they're producing and that they're playing at the”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, also, that's very kind of Adam. I adore Adam. Obviously, he's one of the tenured people in small group. And I've actually gotten the opportunity to work even more closely with him than usual. We recently launched something called Teen Accounts and Adam and I worked very closely on that. In terms of how I do the things people say that I can do, I really rely on Naomiisms. Like I said, Actually, I refer your podcast out a lot because there isn't just like a PM university that I can send people to. There isn't like a formal training that people can get to become a product manager.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. And then, you know, maybe where we do sort of see the impact is maybe something like the translations thing that we talked about. The macro barrier, removing the language barrier, and so maybe the approach we took meant that we supported 100 plus languages instead of whatever the professional translators, you know, there's just sort of we have the long tail of languages so that last person who's still speaking, you know, sort of near extinct language can still use Facebook. But yeah, I think that's right. I sometimes think that maybe some of our efforts were really more on the margin of a bigger trend around product market fit.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, what we did was allow people to get notifications even as an unconfirmed account. And then if they clicked on any of those notifications, that would count as an account confirmation as well, because they proved ownership of the email. It's just removing a micro barrier of having to go find the confirmation email, click it before you can do anything on the site. I do think we've been relatively lucky in having a lot of high demand that meant that we could focus on just removing macro barriers. And then on the growth team, a lot of the iterations and optimizations were about removing just sort of friction.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A feature phone or a lower end device. Internet.org, what about removing the barrier of having access to the internet or being able to afford a data plan? And so those are the macro barriers that thematically the growth team has worked on. What I would say is maybe applicable is really the micro barriers. All of the work that we did on growth around optimizing the flows were really about removing micro barriers. One of the things that I thought was just so elegant was after we did that 2009 instrumentation of all the flows, the product flows relevant to growth. What we found is 20% of people aren't actually confirming their email. We tried sending them an SMS so maybe they would confirm the SMS instead. What we found was a lot of people are actually still clicking on notifications that they're getting, but because it wasn't the specific confirmation email, we weren't able to confirm the account.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Level around removing barriers. There are macro barriers, like the first project I work with was high school students on Facebook, which is an interesting story in and of itself because at that time we almost created a separate website called Facebook High just to keep them separate from the college students. But at that time, we were like, no, this is one graph, this is one community. College students have friends and people they're connected to of all different ages. bifurcate the graph And obviously we've maintained that principle ever since. But it was about removing barriers. So you had to be a college student, then you had to be a high school student, then you had to be in a work network, then you had to have any email address. One of the next projects I worked on was not everyone has access to a smartphone. How can we remove the barrier of having access to a smartphone and building more of a rich Facebook experience for someone that was using a”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, definitely the understanding, execute. I would just ask yourselves do you have the data that you need to know what you need to do on growth? And if not, definitely take the time to instrument that data. The thing that, you know, I think we are relatively lucky. I talked about why I was bullish on Facebook in 2005 even was because there was product market fit. And so for us growth, as much as credit as we give to the growth team, I'm actually not sure how much credit we deserve and how much incremental growth we drove above and beyond the fact that this was a product that had product market fit. And we benefited in a huge amount from having high demand for the product. So at every step, and I talked about the growth team, the projects that we were working on were really at a high level.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mobile first product, and then it was about mobile photos, and then it was about mobile videos. So over time, the technology has really changed, but the core use case that we really need to educate people on, which is like how to connect with their friends on”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know. I mean, I remember the day where I was like, Do we need to explain to people how to use this? Is it not obvious? And it's like, my dad's like, I don't understand this whatsoever. My dad would go on to become like Facebook's biggest power user because I always like, you know, beta tested everything with him. But yeah, that was not obvious to us at the time in 2006 that we had to explain to people how to use Facebook. And again, remember that It's fun talking about this because obviously the product has evolved so much, but the principles are relatively the same. It was the facebook.com eventually became facebook.com, but eventually, you know, we built a mobile app and then, you know, it was.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ability for teens to register and then work networks. And then in 2006, open registration, when we started getting all kinds of people with any email address, it was before it was.edu or like a Microsoft.com email address that was required in order to sign up for Facebook than anyone with any email just could register, including people like my dad and my grandma, that we realized, wow, in order to get people to this magic moment, how are we going to do that? What's the most effective way that insight resulted in building like a new user experience? I remember it was just like step one, upload your profile picture. That was really important so people could find you and know who you were. Step two, find your friends. That's where a lot of me sort of contact importing and people you may know and hear other people at your school and hear mutual friends, that step in the news or experience ultimately became one of the most important drivers of that activation metric that we talked about.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“New user onboarding. We didn't need to explain to people that they had to find their friends. They were sort of automatically connected to everyone on the college campus and sort of knew how to use this product. It felt very intuitive. Again, we were college students building a product for other college students. They were sitting next to each other in libraries or at desks and sort of through osmosis understanding how the product worked. It was more when we launched”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The majority of the value is in the latter is just having extreme clarity around the goal and that allowed everybody to work towards optimizing the same goal. You're right. Like we did sort of just pick a point on the curve. I think it could have been any of those. And indeed, as part of preparing for this, I was like, was it seven friends in 10 days? I had to go back and I asked a few people that I worked with back in the day and they were like, well, I thought it was 10 and 14. I mean, I think at the it just, it doesn't matter. It's just that we pick to one of them. And what mattered there was we had the same goal. What mattered was that it was a retention goal or an activation metric. And one of the most important things that actually came out of having that goal was building a new user experience. Believe it or not, you know, when we first launched Facebook or, you know, I wasn't around then, but in the early days of when it was just a college site, we didn't need a”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the company that was very separate from the product and engineering team. Another thing that we did in the early days was there was a juncture where it was like, how are we going to translate this site? And I think we could have taken more of a non-technical traditional approach and had professional translators translate the entire site into the different languages. And instead, sort of what the growth team suggested was why don't we build a version of Facebook that allows you to make translations inline. And so the community of people using Facebook at the time who actually knew the product the best could actually insert translations and there's a whole system that we built around how to like upbrank the best translations and downranked we have over 100 languages supported. So I was trying to find these like product technology solutions to these”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fun fact. Oh, that's so great. I remember Mickey. What is his last name Okay, yes, I definitely remember this. And social impact is just one thing that I think I'm really proud of. And again, remember, social impact used to be a business thing. You would create this corporate social responsibility.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The special sauce of the growth team, we eventually extended that approach. I think that approach started with the growth team, but we extended to other areas. So for example, one of the products or projects that I took on after growth was social impact. And instead of what I think a normal company might do, which is start a corporate social responsibility wing, we decided, hey, no, we're going to take a data-driven, product-driven approach to driving social impact instead of having a foundation that's distributing money. We're going to build a product that actually raises money from our community and many years later, we've raised billions of dollars from the community for charity. So that's sort of the approach that I think is unique about the growth team that expanded to other areas and that I think the company, you know, in many ways has taken to most of the problems that we face.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“20% drop off on registered users at the email confirmation step. How can we address that? These are the opportunities that we identified. And then we would execute by building product. So having this data-driven, product-driven approach to what I think historically was more of a business responsibility at a company was sort of what the growth team”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of my naomiisms is really understand, identify, and execute that framework came from 2009 where the growth team at the time was sort of fledgling and it just started was Focused on only instrumenting data. And Alex often wears a shirt that says, why guess when you can know? We just didn't have the data that we needed to make informed decisions to know really what were the biggest levers to drive growth. And so in 2009 in January, we basically stopped doing anything on our roadmap except data instrumentation. And that's when we instrumented every step of the registration flow, instrumented every step of the news, our onboarding experience. We knew where there was drop-off. And so we understood, which allowed us to identify.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally, and that was Danny Ferrante, who really came up with the growth accounting framework, which I guess is quite obvious, but like the plus new minus stale plus resurrected. The thing that I feel like, you know, may be valuable for PMs and is one of my Naomiisms is I think what the growth team really pioneered was being data driven and product driven, especially in an area that was historically more of a business function. So I think at that time a lot of the growth in new users was expected to come from like marketing or comms, whereas the insight that we had is actually the product is the biggest lever to drive growth. And that means we should have a product and engineering team working on optimizing things like the registration flow, the invite flow, the user onboarding, getting you seven friends in 10 days.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of our focus shifted to being around engagement and retention. How do we drive engagement and retention? We look at the variables that correlate most with that outcome. What we found was friending. And so those two magic moments, having seven friends in 10 days or 14 friends in 14 days, really just mapped to when we feel like your likelihood of being a retained user goes up because you've seen sort of the value in Facebook and it kind of makes sense like Facebook is much more compelling if you have 14 days 14 friends and the other thing around 10 or 14 days is we want it to happen quickly. We wanted to have you experience the magic moment soon after you had registered on the site to prevent you from churning and then us having to resurrect you again.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So, yes, seven friends in 10 days was a thing. Ten friends in fourteen days was also a thing. They're kind of the same thing. They're just different points on a retention curve. I would say the key insight here is when we start the growth team, I think we were pretty focused on acquisition. We had a notion, though, of growth accounting, which looks at how many, what's our net growth every day. And that would look at the number of new users that registered minus the number of users that actually went stale. So after a 30-day period, that's how we define it. They no longer logged in. And then plus the number of users that resurrected, which is after 30 days, they came back. And what we found was the churn and resurrection lines were actually much larger than the new user line, which implied to us that retention in driving those two lines was actually our biggest lever to drive net growth. And so while we were focused on acquisition,”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a huge proponent of it, but I'm not sure it necessarily originated with him. And indeed, I think sometimes the focus on being so data driven might have been something that myself, Alex Schultz, Javier Olivon, these are some of the original people that were on the growth team and that are my closest co-workers now may have really pushed on. Highlighting the value of for Mark. I'm happy to talk about the growth team, which is something I get asked a lot of questions about if you want.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that we did in the early days on the growth team, because I'm not sure that necessarily. We talk about this sort of legacy or the history or the lore around the growth team. And this may not be a direct answer to the question, but it didn't really necessarily come from Mark. Mark wasn't like you guys should create a growth team. Here's how you should operate. And so I think in some ways we established and grew growth team. And Mark sort of got on board or, you know, saw the value in it.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's some of the unique properties of small group from a process perspective. We have one weekly sort of strategic meeting. It's more open-ended. There is time for discussion. It's longer and it's sort of more unstructured. We also have one weekly operational meeting, which is highly structured where we go through all of the priority projects. The person who owns each of the projects will actually speak to the weekly updates for that project and, you know, it's very operational and tactical.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They may push back on things. They may fight for things. And so I think small group is characterized by a lot of disagreeable givers. I think that's really important for an organization. One thing I think Mark has done really well in general is just have a culture, including on his leadership team, of people who give him feedback. I think a lot of times as you get more successful or as you have more fame or if you have more wealth, you lose having an accurate feedback loop.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of what I call disagreeable givers, just to back up, I don't know if you've heard this framework, but I think I learned this from Adam Grant during like a executive learning and development session. And he was saying that there are, if you think of a two by two, there's people who are agreeable and disagreeable. And then there's people who are givers and takers. And the most dangerous kind of person to have in an organization is an agreeable taker. And what that means is an agreeable person, super nice. Everyone likes them, really easy to get along with, but they're a taker. Maybe their motivation is more self-interested rather than what's best for a company, for the company, which is what how I would define a giver. And the most precious person in an organization is the disagreeable giver. Those are the people who are really motivated to do what's best for the company, but they can be a little bit disagreeable in the sense that they may not say what you want to hear.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, so I think the first thing is small group is sort of the leadership team. It's the leaders working on the most important projects at the company, sort of independent of reporting structure and stuff. It's like, who are the leaders on the big most important projects or functions? They will be represented in small groups. Makes this group unique? A lot of them are people like me, sort of people that have been there for a very long time. So I think sort of the tenure of small group is really rare. Why I think that's important is you have a lot of people that are motivated by mission rather than sort of climbing the corporate ladder at this point. And so...”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, that has really helped me over time, but I think that in that you can see some of what I think we all see in Mark, for example, for those things never give up. He has that aspect of him and it makes sense. For me, number three is really the hardest, which is focus on what you can control. Because I think I probably think I can control more things than I actually can.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For years, we met with them. I think we still continue to, even though they've now at this point graduated from college and have real jobs. But one of the lessons that we taught during that class that I remember, Mark, distinctly like writing on the whiteboard or not the whiteboard, the actual was a chalk with chalk on a chalkboard with a four life lessons that was one and I kept these for myself as well. Love yourself. Two, only then could you truly serve others? Three, focus on what you can control. And four, for those things never give up. And that was sort of his life lessons, four steps to how to approach life. And we actually made stickers for these four steps that the students could actually put on their composition notebooks as a reminder. And I think”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing I would say about Mark is I think people know he is married, he has three daughters, he's a really great dad. He's a really great husband. I would say he's also a really good friend. Maybe that's something that I can sort of speak to from experience. He's just an incredibly thoughtful friend. There was a period in my life, I think 2014, 10 years ago when I was going through just sort of like a really hard time. I had come out of a breakup, but Mark saw that I was having a hard time. He asked me if I wanted to volunteer to teach a class in East Palo Alto after their school day. And in retrospect, it's pretty funny, but Mark and I taught a class about how to build a business. So you had the CEO of Meta teaching this class to a bunch of middle school students. And we got really close to them through that process. We made some really important mentorship connections.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Watch. Yeah. I was at that event too. I thought it was great. I think, yeah, that's. That's the no gap between who Mark is and what the world sees.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coming across as a little scripted. I think he was not confident and pretty careful about how he showed up. And he's upskilled here. He's just gotten a lot more comfortable. And so people are able to see who he really is.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I've always said that there is the biggest gap of anybody I know between what people think of Mark and who Mark. Think this is the mark that I've known for the past 20 years, and the world is finally getting to see what I've been lucky enough to see. And that gap that we've talked about is really starting to close. How did we get here? I always say Mark is a learn it all, not a know-it-all. He is the fastest person at upskilling of anyone I've ever met. He used to do these annual challenges one year. I did them with him. It was learning Chinese. And within a year, he was able to basically achieve an eighth grade fluency in Chinese. And that's just one example, obviously. He's gotten incredibly great at guitar, MMA, a lot of his passions, but he's also gotten a lot of a lot better at some of the professional skills. And I think negotiation, public speaking is one of those. I think before in the early days, it just wasn't something that he was very comfortable with. He's talked himself about.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, there are a few thousand PMs at Meta. They do not all report to me. I would say a few hundred of them report to me on the teams that I directly manage, but I feel responsible for the entire PM community at Meta. There are things that we do centrally, things like PM performance, PM culture, PM onboarding and training. And that's the kind of thing that I look out for. You know, obviously I wanted to be a PM head of product is my dream job. you know, deeply supportive of the PM function. And so I really care and I think it's PMs are huge point of leverage in a company for how we can actually get stuff done and help accomplish the company's goals. And so that's, I sort of focus on PM as like a really important exponential lever for doing that.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Floor. I picked up all the stuff on my desk, put it in a box, walked down to the second floor once I got the job to become a PM. And when I got to the second floor, I distinctly remember everyone on the second floor standing and clapping. And so it was a big standing ovation. I'll never forget Baz was there, by the way. I know Baz has been on your podcast, but even Baz was there sort of standing and clapping. And so I guess, you know, to the lesson that you were trying to extract from my story, I do think I sort of tried to create the luck by not giving up and just repeatedly cold calling or cold showing up or cold volunteering until I sort of, you know, was able to make it happen.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By then we had moved to 156 University and all of the PMs and engineers worked on the second floor and I was working in marketing like I mentioned and I worked on the third floor and all the business functions worked on the third floor and my goal was to be a PM. I ended up going sort of the analogy. I went to the second floor most days after work, asked if there were any projects that I could help out with. You know, it was very early days. There was always more to do than people to do it. And so eventually I picked up a few projects helping with program management, you know, giving my product feedback. And by the time that I actually applied formally to be a product manager, I had been doing the job voluntarily, almost informally for a few months. And I remember this because I had a seat on the third floor.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I got to Facebook, I knew I wanted to build as someone who wasn't really technical, I wasn't going to be an engineer or a coder, I wanted to work with the engineers in the coders to build products. I thought product management was the right function for me. And so my dream was always to be a PM. And it wasn't luck as to how I ended up becoming a PM. I sort of took the same approach showing up at the office, asking if there were any roles.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was pure sort of just like refusing to quit. I think I just walked into the office, I talked to the person at the front desk. Is there anything that I can do? They weren't hiring non-technical people. I didn't have a computer science degree. I wasn't technical. I had this Bachelor of Arts degree. And that's why the personal assistant in the marketing role eventually did open and was something that I thought it could be qualified for.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got an offer from Facebook. I also got a competing offer from LinkedIn. And so at that time, I made the choice to go to Facebook because I was interested in sort of. I think it's because I definitely saw that there was product market fit. I saw that students on Stanford were obsessed with it, but it also had a long list of colleges that were really excited and on the waiting list to be accepted onto Facebook. And so there was this like product market fit piece and also a huge demand from other audiences, other colleges, but our younger brothers and sisters were also sort of interested about Facebook and it seemed like it had this much broader appeal. So that's what happened. I got the marketing job. Cheryl also talks about when you are getting on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat. That was my foot in the door. And here we are 19 years later.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Facebook as a process, you know, as part of being an academic researching Facebook, also being a Stanford student using Facebook, I was like, I really want to work here. Facebook had just moved to Palo Alto. Mark had driven across country, I guess, and arrived in Palo Alto, opened up an office at 443 Emerson Avenue, or Emerson Street. It was right above the Jing Jing's Chinese restaurant in downtown Palo Alto. And I just went to the office sort of cold called the equivalent of just walking into the office and seeing if there were any available jobs. There were not. I think I did that maybe five to ten more times. Eventually, there was an opening to interview for Sean Parker's personal assistant. He was at the time, I think, the president. I did interview and I did not get the job. A few months later, I found out about a marketing role that was available. And one interesting thing I haven't really talked about was”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. I would love to say that I reflect on it. The truth is, I think I barely have time to reflect right now. I'm thinking about all the things that I need to do on my to-do list. So I'm pretty in it still, even after 19 years, I am really focused on the work that I need to do. I do honestly have moments where I get to reflect, for example, like on this podcast. Sometimes people do ask me, you know. And I think, especially as I approach the 20 year milestone, my 20-year face viversary, I'm sure that will give ample opportunity for me to look back.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So much for having me. As I told you earlier, I refer your podcast all the time, and so I can't believe I have the opportunity to actually talk on it.”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really believe in frameworks for things that helps drive extreme clarity. I work on a lot of different projects. A lot of times I'm ramping up mid-project. I'm like, where can I learn what I need to learn about this project? I ask five different people, get five different answers. That is unacceptable. Of course, I'm sure there's hundreds of docs associated with the project, but there needs to be one canonical doc. Everyone should know exactly where the canonical doc is. That's the one place I can go to to get all the information I need about a project. And it will link to all the other docs, things on the canonical dock are”
2024-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source