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) | Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

You're a VP of Product at Facebook.

You're a director at eBay and PayPal.

You're on the board of Intuit.

You've been the CEO of Ancestry now for the past three and a half years.

This is a career path that a lot of people dream of.

You 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 career, what does success look like?

How are you going to get there?

You wrote this awesome post about introverts and how hard it is to be successful as an introvert.

The 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.

Is there something that you believe that you think most other people don't believe?

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 yang.

Today, my guest is Deb Liu.

Deb was VP of Product at Facebook, where she spent over 11 years.

And while they're created and led Facebook Marketplace, which is now used by over 1 billion people monthly, she also led the development of Facebook's first mobile ad product for apps and its mobile ad network, also built the company's games business and payments platform, including Facebook Pay.

Prior to Facebook, she was director at both PayPal and eBay.

She's on the board of Intuit.

And for the past three and a half years, she's been the CEO of Ancestry.

I actually generally have a rule of no CEOs on this podcast, but to me, Deb is a great exception because she is a product person at heart.

In our conversation, Deb shares a ton of tactical career advice, including why resilience is so key to career success, how to PM your career like you PM your product, how to be successful in business as an introvert, what she's learned about building multiple billion dollars, zero to one businesses within a large

company like Facebook, and so much more.

Deb is so full of wisdom, and I'm really excited to share her insights with more people.

If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.

It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously.

With that, I bring you Deb Liu.

Deb, thank you so much for being here.

Welcome to the podcast.

It's wonderful to be here, Lenny.

It's wonderful to have you here.

You have had such an incredible career.

You're a VP of product at Facebook, you're a director at eBay and PayPal.

You're on the board of Intuit.

You've been the CEO of Ancestry now for the past three and a half years.

This is a career path that a lot of people dream of.

And honestly, just like one of those roles is a dream for a lot of people.

And so I wanted to start with just this question, and I want to see where the conversation takes us.

If you could give one specific piece of advice to someone that's looking to do well in their career or to do better in their career based on what has worked well for you, what would that be?

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 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 someone 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 I 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 of the job you know the best, but then you stop learning.

And if you're learning all the time, you're not necessarily having impacts.

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 then 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.

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That's WorkOS .com. You talked about like you got into a new job maybe you weren't ready for and you like had to learn the job.

So either maybe share a story one of those experiences or just like, how do you actually do this?

So if someone's listening, they're like, how do I learn?

What am I learning?

Well, let's start with my career in tech.

So I had worked in consulting before business school.

I went to Stanford for business school, came out to California.

I 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 I couldn't find a job.

I think it was really hard.

It was 2002. And so I kind of ran into Tim Wentzel and Catherine Wu.

So Catherine Wu is from Airbnb, as you might know her.

And Tim Wentzel put together the PayPal Mafia.

He was the recruiter for PayPal.

I 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.

And he's like, just come in and talk to us.

And so I said, okay, well, what kind of jobs do you have?

And he's like, I have jobs in product and jobs in marketing.

Now I take into 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'd 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, faked 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.

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 ropes.

And she was so incredible.

She actually showed me, she said, you know, all those ideas you've had, all that energy you had around building these things.

We go do that. Let's go do it.

And I said, well, how do you do that?

And she said, we write down what you want to build.

And 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.

So one takeaway might be from this, the phrase fake it till you make it.

Any thoughts and just how to like, I imagine many people right now are like, I'm trying to get a job as a PM.

How do I do this? That sounds great.

I'm going to pass this interview, figure out the job after I joined.

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 what I was doing.

And I think when you have passion around a product or passion around a company or around a business model or 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 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, but I said the problem, the use case.

What problem are you trying to solve?

And if you can do that, you can be a great product manager, even without a lot of experience.

That's an awesome piece of advice.

So just like lean into the passion.

One, first of all, part of it is you have to be excited about the thing you're trying to work on or thinking about the company or thinking about joining.

Sounds like that's a prerequisite here.

We have a podcast episode with early Levine, who has a whole book called Fall in Love with the Problem, which is all about that same idea, actually, for startup founders.

I'll have to read it.

Yeah. He always wears a shirt.

Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

Yes. Yes. That is absolutely the most important skill for a product leader.

Something else I've heard you talk about in terms of something that contributed to your success is being okay with failure and just bouncing back quickly versus avoiding failure.

Is that something that you've come back to a lot?

Well, here's what I notice about everybody.

I have coached a ton of people in my life.

I have managed big teams and 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 through 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 whose 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.

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.

That's how a tree grows strong and tall over many generations.

And I think sometimes we think, oh yeah, I wish I lived a charmed life.

And that is not what we want.

You want to have enough adversity that you learned 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've ever worked 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.

The rear of a segment on this podcast called Failure Corner, where people share a failure they went through along the same lines and something we learned from that experience.

Is there an example of that from your career where a failure made you stronger?

Yeah, I remember there was a job I really wanted at Facebook.

And I'd been there for a long time.

I had been leading different teams.

I was a VP of products 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, if this job were open, I'd like to be considered for it.

The job opened up later, gave it to someone else.

And I said to Mark, again, I really wanted that job.

And he said, not only will I not give you that job, you'll never have that job at this company.

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, what do I do with this information?

This is my dream job.

I decided I was going to turn the job I had and the job I wanted.

And that's a choice.

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 this thing that was going to be something we wanted.

And so I think sometimes it's not, 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.

Are you able to share what those jobs were that you wanted to get that you never got?

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 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, that it was something that was really incredible and a turning point for me.

Great segue to an area I wanted to spend some time on, which is building zero to one stuff within a larger company.

So from what I can tell you, build $2 billion businesses within a large company, Facebook Marketplace, and then the Facebook, and maybe more, I don't know, the payment stuff, the games, I don't know, maybe there's billions of dollars there.

And this is very rare and very hard.

And it's something we talked a little bit on this podcast, just the skills to build something new.

And I know with marketplace, it was not something people believed in for a long time.

It took a lot of work to convince people to actually give it a shot.

So I guess the question here is just, what have you found are key tactics to start something new and allow it to continue to exist and get to a place where people start to believe it?

What has worked for you?

So first, I didn't build the ads platform, I actually built the first direct response ad product company ever had.

But we'll talk about how that led to why direct response is 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 on 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 basic 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.

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 a 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 and 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, a 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.

But actually, everything in the company is like, let's do the most important thing.

These are kind of seeds.

And we'll just let them and see, 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 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 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, you should 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 failing fast is really important or succeeding fast, right?

It's the long slog that makes it really hard 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.

So as a leader trying to do this, and I'll create space for this, is there something you've learned about how to allow for don't over scrutinize us, don't look at us too carefully.

We don't want to be in the limelight.

Don't put too many resources on this yet.

Is it just like, hey, Mark, here's what I think.

Imagine it's not as easy as that.

There's like a lot of, you know, influence and that kind of work.

Is there anything any tactics there you could share to create this sort of environment?

I think the most important part of the environment is really patience.

Patience with and, you know, again, this is a portfolio strategy.

And I tell every PM who, you know, I used to do a new higher PM class.

And I said, like, a lot of you are going to go into the core product.

And your job is to grow x by three to 5 % every six months, right?

Like growing, you know, engagement or growing sessions, or maybe growing video views, or whatever your metric is, you're trying to grow something 5%.

And then, you know, you, you exceed expectations.

And I said, and then a bunch of you are like, I want to do something new.

I'm going 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 ease by the way, you can have an amazing career building core products, like that is a 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 you know, not everything I did there succeeded.

But you know, a lot of the things that are lasting, the lasting products are ones that got really big.

And so for me, it was a greater reward.

And it made your journey so much more interesting.

But for others, I think, you know, you 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, expected in a year, you might literally have nothing to show for it, but the lesson that you learn.

And I think those lessons are really precious.

And we often underestimate that too.

Along those lines, do you think it's a good career move to do a zero to one thing within a bigger company?

Or is it often a bad idea?

Do you have any advice there for folks?

It depends, it depends on your personality in the company.

So the one thing I realized about, 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 say, most people don't realize that when you work on new things, you're constantly adding to your portfolios, subtracting from it, growing things, pruning

them. And so you could just work on so many cool things, except, you know, you're, 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 resource, how to get support when the product's not working, how to, you know, not get prunes 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 you.

So if you're very early in the career, I encourage people to learn the core skills first, you can learn the core skills when there's a lot of stability.

This product is growing, you know, X percent, like 5%, you're going to grow at 10.

That's amazing. Like that is because you were there, you're going to change the trajectory of the product.

Or this thing is, you know, this thing has a hundred, you know, 100 ,000 users, you're going to get it to 200 ,000.

Like those are the kinds of things that are, you know, going to be successful for you and you can put on your resume.

But I think it reaches a point in your career where you have to decide when am I to take the big swing?

Because the big swings are the things that you can, you know, you write your career stories about.

They're not just, I moved 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, you know, if it works, you 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.

It's interesting how your strategy here is very similar to a product portfolio strategy, where as a team, you should have a few big bets and then a lot of incremental stuff.

And it reminds me about this awesome post call, you're in control of your career.

And the argument in your post is you should PM your career the way you PM your product.

So there's a lot of synergy here.

So maybe just diving into this post and advice around this, how should someone be PMing their career the way they PM a product?

What's your take there?

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, and I see that, but if I said you had to write a spec for your career, what is, what's in there?

Right? What are, 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 coach them, I coach a lot of people, and when I coach them, I ask them, well, where do you want to see yourself in five years?

Where do you want to go?

And half of the people have no idea.

And I think that's really tragic because, you know, when you PM your career, it's about intentionality.

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 at PayPal.

It's working for a guy named Dave Lee, who reported to Amy Clement.

And then, you know, 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 the director of product.

I wasn't even a director.

And I was running the team for eBay.

So basically the PayPalvert part of eBay, which is basically half the company's revenues and profits.

Totally unqualified.

I ended up in this job and, you know, I do a good job.

I ended up, you know, doing it for several years.

I built up the team and we have a great relationship with eBay.

You know, that 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, you know, I had to leave for, you know, 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 I was 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 Rajeev, who was CEO at the time.

He's since passed and I wrote his speeches, worked on strategies.

I worked on digital goods and charity.

I ended up building that into a vertical for the company.

So charity, social commerce and digital goods.

And I thought, okay, this is an interesting job.

So I create the job, have a couple of 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 Sheryl situation where I was bored of my job.

So I go to, I go to the VP, I was working, 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 at Stephanie Telenius leading the buyer experience at eBay product.

And I said, Oh, that sounds interesting.

So I said, sure. And she 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, you know, end up working for, you know, Greg fans and Stephanie Telenius at eBay for two years.

I led the buyer experience.

We did some really good work there.

And then, you know, when I'm attorney 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 you know, we have a product marketing job open.

I was like, sounds good.

Dropped into Facebook.

And so again, no idea what I'm doing back in product marketing.

So I spent a few years doing that eventually was invited into product and, you know, so, 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, 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, but not everybody does.

And so I think having a plan allows you to compare every decision.

It's not like when you grab, you know, when you're offered an admission to college, we'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 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.

And 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?

What's interesting is I also had a similar path to you where it was at zero plan or intention or goal, and also just follow things and things worked out.

I wonder how often that happens.

And I wonder if this idea of having intention and planning a roadmap is something you do if things aren't working out.

Because maybe you think you maybe maybe there's some good to not overthinking it and just following pull.

I don't know. 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, you don't have a plan and you get there?

I would tell people, you know, if you if you want to share what your destination is, that's definitely where you'd 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, you know, your skills towards the place that you want to go.

When you talk about getting this offer from Facebook, usually those are like you have three days to decide.

Yes. I feel like that's when those the thing you've done ahead of time of here's what I want would be most helpful.

And also, also, I think the thing about job opportunities in particular, is they tend to come serially, you know, it's only you presented these offers, it's like, one role 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 there you get a lot of pressure to say yes to this versus this.

And to really having a a measuring stick, is this getting me closer, 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.

I did a meditation retreat once.

And when you're meditating, there's this kind of guidance of don't try too hard, don't, don't like push yourself to go into a direction don't like, oh, this I'm not doing a good job, I need to get to this enlightened state.

And instead, their advice is just like push your cart in a direction.

And think about that's the direction you want to head but don't you don't need to like grasp on to here's what I need to land here's waiting to go.

And I wonder if just having a thought of, here's where I want my career to go, I want to be on boards in the future, I want to start a company in the future, I want to become a designer in the future is like at least start there, maybe just like a direction that you're heading.

Yeah, there's the there's a woman who I worked with in product.

And now she's, 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.

And so she said, how can I get there?

And I said, first, it's probably gonna 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 do she wanted them?

And they can tell you how to get there.

But the point is she knew where she went 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, 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, the middle school, you take the SAT, you have to apply say, 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.

And I love that for her.

And I think she's still early in her career, she has so much time ahead of her.

But it's really incredible to see her kind of on this path, and to know that that's her dream, and that I can help her a little bit along the way.

It also relates very much to your idea of thinking of your career, like, like a PM thinks about their product, where one of the tactics is to imagine the ideal scenario, and work backwards from that versus like, incrementally, what's the next thing?

What's the next thing?

So in this case, she was thinking, here's where I want to leave her head.

Okay, what's the next thing to get to that direction?

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Okay, going a slightly different direction.

Okay, I'd say the post that you've written that has most resonated with me was about introverts and how hard it is to be successful as an introvert.

And that basically you have to learn to be an extrovert as an introvert because in business, extroverts are most valued.

Can you just talk about kind of your insight, what you've seen around this and how in your advice to introverts like me about how to be successful in business, like what you need to change?

Well, first, I love the book Quiet by Susan Cain.

She talks about the power of introverts.

Unfortunately, the world doesn't see the way she does.

And I think there is, and I wrote this post, it was the secret bias no one talks about, which is the workplace is really favoring people who can speak up.

And I tell the story of somebody on my team who's just an amazing product manager.

And yet every time she came up for promotion or calibration, people were like, oh, what does she do?

And it was because she was not good at broadcasting or explaining what she does.

And I would take her to executive meetings and she was really bad at answering questions or talking.

And so we would prep and prep and prep.

And I just knew her skills.

I could see her every day moving the product forward.

But for some reason, people, you know, because your peers also have influence over people's ratings and their promotions.

And I was constantly just trying to figure out how to get them to see her brilliance.

And I asked her once, I said, you know, like, I notice that you never answer questions when we do these presentations.

She's I feel like, you know, the conversation has been done.

And so, you know, I really feel like the world's it's not built for somebody like her who's a brilliant product leader, but people couldn't see it.

And I realized that so much of what products and just general leadership is, is not just doing the work.

But actually, it's not just having the product, it's having great product marketing to go with it.

Let's call it that.

Okay, so I've been in products that have been product marketing, right?

You make a light bulb, but you're selling light.

And I really think about how that she was like making amazing number of light bulbs.

She was lighting up all the houses, but she was not marketing the light.

And I think that was the thing that was really missing.

Is that fair? Absolutely not.

There are a lot of people who are born introverted.

Is it fair that a product manager who isn't extra introverted was an extroverted is struggling with that?

No, but that's the world we live in.

And so, you know, it's one of those things where you get to choose what you do.

First, I think for the individual is realizing that you are your own best marketer.

You have to actually share what you do.

You know, if a great product is out in the world, but no one's told about it, did it exist?

And so, one of the things that's very important is really to get that product marketing.

The second part is we should change our workplaces so everyone can be successful.

And I think that that's a really important skill.

As more introverts get into leadership, they need to actually change the world to make more space for people like them as well.

So, one of the things that I found was, you know, in my leadership teams over the last several years, we have this thing where we all vote, but we vote offline in a document and we put a number in and then we put our comments in.

And that way, everyone has an equal voice in this document.

And then when we talk about it, usually, of course, the extroverts speak first, but, you know, everyone has a vote and we can actually see what people's point of views are.

And I love that. I love that when, you know, there's something we used to do at Facebook is we used to go around in a circle and everybody would give their opinion in a meeting.

And I do that still today.

I ask every single person, as a business leader at this company, would you do this?

And even by a joke with our chief legal officer, Greg, I say, you know, you are a business leader and the lawyer.

You can't just say, well, legal advises X.

I'm like, but what would you do?

And so, nobody can, nobody can take a backseat to decision making.

Everybody has a voice.

So there's so many of these kind of bias interrupters, things that we can do to actually make the world easier for those who weren't speaking up and taking 80 % of the air in the room.

And I do think that we have to craft a workplace where everyone can be their best.

In the post, you also talk about like, as much as we want to change the way people run their companies and think, I love your advice of like, you also still have to learn how to speak up and act more extroverted, even though it's not natural to you.

Is that right? I think we do a disservice when we say we're not good at speaking up because it's a skill like any other.

And if I told you the difference between your product being successful and not being successful as you giving this presentation, they're going to kill your product.

If you don't sell this to the executives, you would figure out a way to stand in front of those executives and defend the freaking heck out of your product.

But why aren't you doing that every day?

And I think sometimes we forget that not everything's as essential as they're going to cut your product if you can't convince them to keep it, but every day you're actually building credibility for your team, getting more resources, getting more people to talk about your product inside your company,

getting more press for the product outside.

All of those things combine into momentum for your product.

And don't you want the best thing for your product and your customers?

And so if you think about it that way, it's not, well, I'm uncomfortable.

I hear this a lot where people say, well, you know, you wouldn't understand I'm an introvert.

And I'm like, so, so was I.

And, but instead I just said, okay, this is a necessary skill and it's a learnable skill.

You don't have to be comfortable with it.

You don't have to love it, but you just have to do it.

What about from the, another perspective of why people don't do this, which is it feels like self -promotion and it feels like icky, like I'm just sitting around promoting myself.

I don't want to be doing that.

Anything there that helps people get over that piece.

Well, I just remember I was, I was talking to this ERG group and I was asking about the, there was an upcoming calibration and, you know, self -reviews were due in a couple of days.

And I said, well, what are you doing for your self -review?

And somebody, somebody raised their hand and said, well, I'm really bad at self -promotion.

How, what advice would you have for me?

And I said, if you think your self -review is self -promotion, you've already, you're not going to do a great job at it.

What if I called it educating your manager about all the great work your team has been doing?

What if I called it, you know, helping people see why your team should get more resources?

Suddenly you're cracking open.

You're changing the question, right?

From, oh, I was self -promoting to actually I'm helping my team get more resources and support.

And suddenly she was like, oh yeah, I never thought about it that way.

But I think often if you frame it one way, it looks like self -promotion.

I wouldn't want to do that because of self -promotion.

But at the same time, if it's education, what if I said, you know, I was talking to a PM who's really incredible.

I've mentored him and sponsored him for a long time.

And I said, I don't understand why you don't have more of a voice.

Like you've learned so much about the craft.

You've done this at multiple companies.

And he said, he said exactly what you said, which is I'm not really self -promoting.

And I said, if you see it as self -promoting, you will never do it.

And so let's talk about why you don't actually do this.

And he said, I've seen a lot of people who are really great on LinkedIn, write these articles, but they have nothing to back it up.

And I don't want to be like them.

And I said, okay, will you read my blog?

You know, you follow me on LinkedIn.

Do you think I have nothing to back it up?

And he's like, no, of course not.

And I said, well, then why do you put yourself in his category instead of mine?

And I think it was just a moment where we just came to an understanding where he in his mind was like, I don't want either person.

It's an empty vessel that has like nothing, no substance behind it.

And I said, do you think the things I write have no substance?

And, but it was an interesting conversation because he had taken this mantle that it was self -promotion and that behind, what if people think I have nothing behind it?

I'm like, I know you have something behind this.

I have been your manager.

I have worked with you for many years.

But you see how just reframing it has really changed his way of thinking about it.

Still working on him, but actually think he has so much to give.

And I think he has learned so much about the craft.

And I wish that more product managers feel comfortable that they have something to give to the world.

I think what you're saying right now will resonate with a lot of people when they see people posting it.

Like I feel the still of just like, I don't want to be this guy that's just posting nonsense on LinkedIn just to get likes, even though it's kind of what I do now full -time, hopefully it's not nonsense.

But it is all substance.

So Lenny, we know the substance behind it.

But I, I think there's like a posting on LinkedIn and posting on Twitter.

It's just like, there's like an innate, I'm just doing this because I want to get attention when often, and the way I started this is just like, I have things I've learned that I think are useful.

I'm just going to put them out there.

So just to double click a little bit, because I think this is a really powerful point.

What actually have you found helps people get over that?

Is it like someone like you in his corner being like, you have really great stuff to share, you should actually do it.

Don't be as worried as you think you might be.

Is there anything else that works there?

Actually, what worked for me was I was working with Boz.

And I talked about our relationship with my book.

But I, we made a contract when I started reporting to him.

And Boz, for those of you who don't know, is currently the CTO of Meta.

At the time he was the head of ads and then our team moved into his team.

And so I was re -orged into his organization.

And as I said, we did not have the best relationship before that.

And so we made a contract to work together.

And I had written like, here's how I want you to take care of my team.

Here's how I want you to support our products.

And I wrote him like this long, my part of the commitment.

And then he wrote back, here's what I'm asking of you.

I want you to write and publish something every month.

And I was like, what are you talking about?

Like, why would you say that?

And he said, you have so much to teach people.

Just do it. And I said, I don't really have that much to say.

And he's like, just trust me on this.

You'll figure it out.

And so his advice was write what you repeat.

If you say something more than once, just write it down.

And then just, you know, then the next time someone asks you, you can just hand them.

And he has a great blog with you.

I just don't really think that is a weird thing for your new manager to say after you had a lot of conflict together before that.

But he took my contract, which was by the way, he's like, Oh, do you want to like codify this in some way?

I'm like, no, I just so, but every month from then on, I would literally just write something.

And it was my promise to him.

And I did it faithfully.

And I published it internally.

So I didn't publish it externally for a long time.

And then sometimes they would ask me if I want to publish it externally from the company.

And I would say yes.

And so I did it for years, I reported to him for years.

And then, you know, we switch managers, he moved over to reality labs, and then I had a new manager.

And I continued. And I continued this, you know, then I started doing it publicly.

And then obviously, I wrote a book.

And, you know, because of him and his encouragement, it got me to a totally different place.

And part of it was just the commitment.

I now had accountability, because I knew he was watching.

I'm not actually sure if he was actually watching every month, but I felt the accountability to do this.

And I've done it every single month since.

So it's interesting that that's another example of your manager giving you the space slash forcing you to share publicly being a really good lever to get someone over the sphere.

I think sometimes just doing it gets you over the hump.

Like, for example, my friend Ami Vora, she writes an incredible blog.

If you have not read her self stack, you should.

But she's an incredible writer.

She'd write all these things internally.

And I think you should publish this external.

She has now she does that.

And it's really great.

And I think part of it was just seeing her just put it out there because she is one of the wisest career coaches that I have in managers that I have ever worked with.

And so I'm like, you have so much to say and to share.

So to see it out there, I feel like for years, we all got the benefit of it because we knew her.

But, you know, the world was not getting the benefit.

So in some ways, just having accountability.

So we created a little accountability group to like help each other write.

And it was just a reminder.

Hey, did you do it?

You know, and so I think it's sometimes what's necessary to get over that hump is either having someone forcing you like your manager who made a commitment to or just having a friend to say, hey, by the way, where's this month's votes?

Those things matter because now you got over the hump of I have to do it.

And now it's just about how good you can make it and how much time you've been into it.

Awesome advice. And by the way, folks don't know we've had both Boz and Ami on the podcast in the past.

And aren't they both amazing?

Amazing. And I mean, episode is one of the most popular episodes, more popular than Boz, CTO of Meta.

What do you know? Who would have thought?

She has a lot of coaching wisdom, I think that everyone should hear.

Yeah, she's amazing.

She has a great sub stack.

We'll link to it again in the show notes.

We'll link to your sub step as well.

Please do. Go sub stack.

I want to move in a slightly different direction.

Talk about growth for a little bit.

You have a really nice perspective on how to think about growth.

I think a lot of people think of growth as like, here's a magic bullet.

We're going to do this thing.

It's going to go, wow, we're going to win.

And your approach is it's you talk about it's a game of inches.

Growth is a game of inches.

Can you talk about your perspective there?

Yeah. And you know, sometimes we think it's like, what is the huge stuff function?

But actually, most companies are like, we call points of growth, right?

It's like, if you can move things 1%, a little bit faster every single week, think about the amount of growth you get at the end.

And so it's not just, you know, okay, what's going to get you the 3x?

You can get to 3x 1 % at a time, 5 % at a time, single digit growth.

And sometimes it is the small things that matter the most.

And so when we think about product led growth, it's really about finding the aha moments, the opportunities, and sometimes opportunities are things that seem really silly.

I heard the story at Facebook that one of the big things was just adding the next to ads, they put the word create an ad, you know, was like one of the biggest growth drivers.

And that was it, just putting a link, because people just didn't know how to get to the ads flow.

And you know, it was things like that, where you can actually bend the curve of things choices that you make.

Same thing, you know, each of the growth teams I've ever worked on, it's like really the small things adding up, it is a list we used to work on payments growth.

And we had a list of 100 things we're working on hypotheses, and then we would pick and we would grow them by picking the first 10 and we start working on them the next 10, the next 10, and we would go through these sprint cycles.

And the same thing when we were growing the ads product as well.

Marketplace, each of them were just like, what are the small things that add up to big things.

And I think sometimes we overthink it.

Instead, you probably have 100 ideas.

And by the way, it is absolutely okay, if like, the 80 % of them don't work.

I tell people like sometimes we we overthink his product manager, right, if we just had the perfect plan, the perfect battle plan, but instead, imagine you're a team and you can ship, I don't know, like, let's say four things.

But what if you're a team that can ship 20 things with the same with a 20 % success, you get just as much output.

And yet, you now have, you know, what doesn't work also.

What if you can move it from 20 % to 30 % suddenly six things work, not just four things.

And so in the same amount of time, you have all the lessons of what didn't work.

Plus, you're getting 50 % more output.

And so you're thinking about growth as this engine of it's a learning machine of what doesn't work, what you reiterate on what you change.

And you're constantly getting better and better and better.

I think what you're saying will resonate with a lot of product people where there's always this like, we're just doing a bunch of optimization incremental work, so sucks, boring, why would we let's take some big bets.

And in my experience, and sounds like in our experience, a lot of the wins actually, and Facebook is famous for this, just like constantly relentlessly looking for ways to grow grow, like optimize, optimize, optimize, because that's where a lot of growth comes from.

At the same time, obviously need to take some big bets and take some swings and look for step function changes.

But I guess for someone that's just like, I don't know, is there any advice on just creating that culture of like, it's okay to optimize for a long time, there's a lot of opportunity?

Optimizing? Is there anything you've learned there?

Or is it just like bringing in a depth and like, so it has to be a top down?

I treat growth like let's say a product marketing team, right?

It is an augmentation for a product that works.

So if you have a core product that works, you have a team that's working on, so for us at Ancestry, it's like search and hints or the core, what is the mechanics?

You want people to add people to their family tree, you want them to add stories.

Okay, there's teams that make sure that the uptime is good, that the hints are working, the search delivers results, and you need those teams.

You need those core teams kind of functioning.

But growth is actually optimization on top.

It is making it so that you get to the search flow faster, that hints are surfacing better, that people are accepting them, that if we put the button here versus here, that people are going to discover things faster.

And so it's really taking the core engine and actually wrapping it around the user interface, around the experience, around the flows, so that people can get to it faster, they can have more satisfaction, they can have more impact.

And that's what I see growth as, it's not the core product, it is the cheering on top, making that product more accessible, and more usable, and better every single day.

Yeah, kind of along these lines, I think it's surprised people to learn there's like, at least 100 people that are being be just working on like pricing, optimizing pricing recommendations.

There's like endless opportunity to just make all these core components of an experience better and better and better over time.

Okay, last thing I want to talk about, and this is like completely unrelated to everything we've been talking about mostly, which is your 30 60 90 day plan.

So you wrote this post a while ago, just like here's a great 30 60 90 day plan when you join a company.

And I've heard that many people use this, it's really effective for helping someone on board and be successful.

And I think it's mostly for execs, or is this for just anyone joining a company?

It's for anyone. Okay, anyone, I created it's actually when I joined ancestry, because I hadn't started a real new job in 11 years.

And I thought, I'm going to be a student of how to land well.

So I read a bunch of things I read, you know, it's like, and I decided I was going to adapt all of those things into a summary.

And then I was going to try it real time in my blog.

So in my blog, I write, here's what I'm going to do.

And then I tell you what I did and how it worked.

And some things that and then I actually do a look back as to all the mistakes I made.

And so I kind of did this live, it was not kind of it was all planned, as well as I would thought, but I put it together.

And I wrote the 30 60 90 day plan.

And I have a template.

And it's really I always tell people, like, it's focused on listening and learning first, and then doing.

And so that's the crux of it, which is in those 90 days, it's like, you know, you kind of get used to the environment, you want to have some impact at the start, you want to have a couple quick wins, but you understand the lay of the land.

And you want to listen, because you're, you know, you have something to contribute.

But if you don't understand the language, you don't understand the culture, you might actually make huge mistakes.

And so for the first 30 days, I did a listening tour, listen to, you know, I talked to over 60 people in 30 days.

And then I summarized, you know, a state of the union, here's what I'm hearing, here are the challenges people feel like we're facing here.

Here's what people's wishlets are.

And by the way, one person sent me a wishlist of five things.

And about year, I think it's me till year two to finish his five things.

And then I sent him a note, I said, By the way, the first time we met these five things he wanted to see, we just finished the last one.

And he's like, I can't believe you remember my typical sense of notes, and I summarized it.

And I think it's important because people want to hear that you hear them.

And you don't have to be, you know, a manager or CEO to do that.

I think people on teams often feel like there's no outlet for the things that they want to they want to say.

And I encourage especially product leaders, especially if you're joining an existing team, to listen really behind what people are saying, you know, and then offer to help them do one thing.

So especially when you're meeting with a new engineering team for the first time, actually ask them, like, what is one thing I can do to help you this week?

I would say one thing is limited this week.

So getting 15 new headcount, probably not gonna happen.

And it's like, how can I give back?

And suddenly, you're building a reciprocal relationship.

And so a lot of this 30, 60, 90 day plan is really to help you find your footing, and then to start having impact immediately.

Say you join a company, you're like, I'm gonna do 30 days listening.

And then your boss is like, no, we need to ship stuff, get on it, ship this stuff.

Is there any advice for trying to push back on that great space for listening when there's like deadline things aren't fired?

Like, I encourage everybody to get on the same page on this 30, 60, 90 day plan with their manager.

So actually, don't just keep it to yourself, share it with as many people as you can.

So I think it's very important that everyone sees what you're trying to accomplish and what your output is going to be.

Because if you don't know the output is success there.

The second part is, with your manager say, okay, I would like to carve 20 % of my time listening, and I'm happy to do this work 80 % of the time.

Therefore, every morning from nine to 10, I want to talk to somebody in the organization.

Just make sure he's like, I will do a better job and have more impact if I have this time to make sure that I'm not accidentally making mistake or I didn't get a chance.

I'm asking something of somebody, but I've never met them.

And to really carve out space because it's really important.

Once you're in it, people give you kind of the new person card for maybe a month or two, and then suddenly it's all the problems are your problems.

But what if you don't know what the problems are?

And so I would say, you know, diagnose before you treat.

So make sure you understand so that you can help and deliver what your manager is actually expecting.

I'm looking at your template.

So just to share the bucket.

So first 30 days learning focus second 30 days is aligning on vision for the future.

And the last 30 days of the 90 days is executing setting up act like actually getting starting to get stuff done.

Awesome. Anything else along these lines of this?

The one thing about having a plan also is that you don't feel rushed to, you know, do something that you're not ready for.

Because I do think sometimes you feel like you need to have impact.

I always say, I always tell people like do something small, like give back in some ways that people see you making, you know, but when you actually reflect, one of the biggest things I could do was actually reflect back to the organization.

Here's what I heard from all of you.

I'm listening. I hear this.

And here's what I want to do about it.

And then in aligning, it's like, do we agree this is a set of problems we want to tackle?

And then an execution is like, do we agree that this is how we want to move forward?

And I think that is such an important part of building into a team.

You know, when you enter an organization, you're also entering a team and you're part of a dance that's going around.

What role do you play?

And people are dancing around you.

And if you actually make a mistake, you could trip other people up as well.

So really kind of finding your place in the dance is really important.

And as a PM, the way I always think about it is people won't assume they should trust you.

Like you're just this person that's coming in to kind of tell them what to do.

And so much of your first month, two, three is building that trust with people so that they can actually feel comfortable listening to your guidance and not just like, oh, I guess this person's getting in my way.

And earning that trust, you know, sometimes people really, you'd be really surprised.

A lot of people feel like they're not heard.

And even just coming in and listening is a trust building exercise.

Such a good point. As we wrap up our conversation, just a couple more questions here.

So first is, I want to take us to contrarian corner, which is a segment on this podcast.

And my question is just, is there something that you believe that you think most other people don't believe something that you think is a contrarian perspective?

So I don't know if this is a contrarian perspective, but I go to speak in a lot of universities.

So I speak at Stanford and I'm going to speak at Duke.

And I always tell the people, especially young people, the most important career decision you make is who you marry.

And it's not something we think that much about, especially I started dating.

I met my husband, I was 18 my first weekend in college, started dating when I was 19.

We had no idea what our life was going to be like.

And yet every single day, like this week, we had our board meeting.

I was in Utah the whole week.

I come home and he's taking care of and it's that you will have a much more successful career if your home life isn't balanced.

It's like a yin and a yang.

If something is out of balance, it engulfs the other side, both your job and your home life.

And especially we have three kids, really balancing that is very hard over both of us having demanding careers.

And I think it's not something that's contrarian, but it's something which we don't think about at all when we make that decision.

We think, is this person fun to deal with?

Is this person somebody we see ourselves with?

But my question is, what is the impact of this relationship on your career?

Is this person lifting you up or pushing you back?

Is this person someone who's going to be your greatest cheerleader or are they going to be the greatest weight on you?

And how do you think that that's going to manifest itself 20 years, 30 years from now?

And I think it's just something I wish we thought about more.

And I encourage, especially young people to think about that.

Such a great point is what I want now is a guide for vetting these things when you're dating.

Deb's guide to dating.

I need to write that.

Although I've only really dated him the mother person.

So maybe I'm like the worst person to tell you.

But it worked. So you're maybe the best person.

And now you look back and here's the questions I asked that worked.

That's so funny. Okay, so before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you think might be helpful to share something you might want to leave listeners with?

Any other nuggets of wisdom or advice?

Well, there's one quote, which I share, which I thought about when you were speaking earlier, which is about people who are resilient, which is life.

This is a quote from Chuck Swindoll.

He's a Christian writer that used to read a lot and it was life is 10 % what happens to you and 90 % how you react to it.

And I just looked him up recently and he actually published a book with quote.

He actually had that quote in a previous book 20 years ago.

And I just think that's so important.

You know, you don't get to choose everything that happens in your life.

So much is just, it just happens.

And but it's the people who choose a way forward to turn stumbling blocks from the stepping stones.

As I said, somebody who actually says, you know what, I didn't get the job that I wanted.

And I'm just going to figure out another path.

Those are the people who have the most successful and satisfying careers.

They're zigging when other people are zagging, you know, vice versa.

And I think that they're, you know, are the ones who are the most resilient and happy in the long term.

It's such a good circle back to one of your first pieces of advice of just most successful people are people that are resilient and don't avoid failure, but embrace it and find a way to turn it around.

I think it's such an important point.

It's so hard to do, I guess just I don't know, just to follow this thread a little bit.

Is there anything that has helped you build that?

Or has that always been the way your mind works?

I imagine like coaching helps this helps people with this.

Is there anything just like?

Coaching is incredible for that.

We joke it's work therapy, but really I think it's, you know, for a long time I just, I saw failure as this like catastrophic thing.

Like I was one of those kids who's like, you never got a B until I, you know, then I got to college and I was like, wow, this is harder than I thought.

And so I got two B's in college and I'm like, I'm never doing that again.

You know, but I was that kid who always got the aid, who got the great scores.

I just thought that my life would end if I got a B, you know, which by the way is super.

And looking back, I realized that like work is not like that at all.

And every time I got bad feedback, I'm like, this is catastrophic.

But if you look at feedback as an opportunity, then it's very different.

It's like, this is a gift, right?

But you can't, I would just, I would be crushed every time I get a review, no matter what rating I got, I would read the things that people would say.

And I was like, oh my gosh, I'm a terrible person.

And I had to really rethink that.

And I think coaching, leadership coaching has really helped me through that to say, no, how do you process this and how do you get to the other side?

And that has been so transformative for me is to have that outlet to actually talk through.

No, no, no. What they're saying is not that you're a bad product person.

It's that you need to do a better job communicating or connecting.

And I really struggled with that.

I was very transactional.

I was not a connector.

I was not warm. I really struggled with relationships.

And a lot of the feedback I received for many years was this relationship issue.

And it took me a long time to realize that people aren't saying this because I'm a bad person or that they hate me, but because they want to connect.

And I was actually making it hard.

And I think sometimes we take things so personally, that it becomes kind of this thing.

It's like your, it's, it is your white whale.

It's like the thing you're chasing.

But then what if you say, you know what, I don't need to do that.

I don't need to chase that.

Instead, I need to figure out what's behind the feedback.

And what are they trying to say?

And then actually change yourself over a long period of time towards that.

I had similar challenges where I had this pretty real imposter syndrome for a while when I got, when I started doing well.

And a coach is the key was the key for me to help me get over that and see that if I made a mistake, things wouldn't crumble.

And that it's very normal to make mistakes.

And by the way, I think perfectionism is a curse we place on ourselves.

And it's a very dangerous thing, particularly for product, product leaders, because product managers, you know, things are going to go wrong.

There's literally part of your job.

And yet when we have perfectionism, it is a lack of trust in our ability to bounce back and our ability to actually adapt.

But the more adaptable you are, the less you have to be perfect every single time.

Just to leave people with a tactical piece of advice, say they are like, Oh, man, I need a coach.

Do you have any advice for how to find a coach, how to explore that route?

Yeah, so I actually wrote an article because one of the things I struggle with coaching is very expensive, often, and not every company provides it.

My husband actually works at a coaching company called Sounding Board to make it more accessible.

But one of the things I encourage people to do is there are other ways to get coaches.

So one is going, you know, I'm in a lean in group.

And we're just like, we support each other.

I'm in a coaching circle and YPO.

So that's like a group of CEOs.

And I'm in a number of these coaching kind of circles, which give you an opportunity to learn from each other and to get pure coaching.

And I think that's a good great place to start, especially early in your career, when you're seeing kind of the same people making the same mistakes.

I think as you get more senior, you know, having an individual coach helps because the situations are so much more unique.

But I do think that having that outlet, having a place to say, Hey, is it me?

Or is the situation not right?

And how should I think through this?

That's so incredibly important.

I'm listening to this book or reading a book called Listen right now that a previous guest recommended it's a parenting book.

And it's about just the power of listening and how much that solves many problems with your challenges or with your child when your child is having a problem just listening to them.

There's a lot of power.

This came from a coach that was on the podcast recently.

So it's great. I'll definitely read it or listen to it.

I know. It's weird.

I'm like reading. It's called listening.

Yeah. He's like, this is the parenting book.

The only parenting book you need really solves all the problems that we deal with.

So anyway, uh, that was an awesome final nugget that wouldn't, uh, I'm glad we got there with that though.

We've reached our very exciting lightning round.

Are you ready? Let's do it.

Let's do it. First question.

What are two or three books that you've most recommended to other people?

So, um, I love the book from, uh, professor Jeffrey Pfeffer.

I speak in his class now that I read it way before that it's called power who has it in line.

I'd love the book. He actually has the more practical one, seven rules of power, which came out more recently.

And so just, it's a book that reminds us that, you know, power is not accidental, that people often get it for different reasons and how you should think about the play field.

Um, another book is the conversation.

Uh, Dr. Livingston wrote that about race in America.

And I just love that it's a very honest assessment of race in America.

It is a really tough, you know, it's hard to have that conversation.

And I love that he uses a lot of facts and, you know, and encourages people to open up and have conversations around it.

And then the last one I would say is, well, Susan Cain's client, I adore the book because, you know, I do have introverted kids.

I myself am introverted.

And just to read, you know, the power of introverts as a reminder that we do have amazing people who don't communicate the same way.

And I love that it's a tribute to those, those, uh, the success of those, even if our workplace is not adapted to it, I do think we need to adapt to it so that we can bring the best in everybody.

But her book is a reminder that there's so much power even in, in silence.

Uh, the first book you mentioned, Jeffrey Pfeffer, he's been on the podcast.

I think he may have mentioned you in our conversation.

I love Professor Pfeffer.

That was such a, that was a fun conversation because I came into it very nervous for what his advice would be.

And then came up with it being like, this is great.

He is very wise. He's very wise and just very, uh, I don't care what you think.

I'm just going to tell you the reality of the world.

Oh man. Okay. Next question.

Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed?

Okay. So I know this is like, so this is a fandom thing that I love Fallout.

So I played the game Fallout 4 last year and then the show came out and it was amazing.

And I know that sounds so nerdy, but it was incredible.

And I know that video game movie annotations tend to be terrible, but it was so great.

And having played the game, it was even better.

I, you know, so that is, is that super nerdy?

No, I, I, I've, I watched Fallout.

I have, I don't know anything about the game, but the show itself was really fun.

Just had no idea what it was getting even getting into.

So no, acceptable, nerdy level.

Uh, there's, I don't know if you can get too nerdy on this show.

Next question. Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you just really like?

Well, so actually what's really interesting is I never got into Twitter.

I just couldn't figure it out.

And recently I really got into threads and I didn't think I would.

I was like, well, I'll just post some stuff on it.

But really, I just love the real, I just, I could never figure out Twitter.

Like you follow the wrong person and the whole thing just, it's terrible.

And you know, it's somebody's posting about posting too much or too little, but there's something about the threads algorithm that's really worked the first few months wasn't quite there, but I just feel like it's spot on.

And now I see the magic of it.

That's so interesting.

I've, I've seen some stats that it's like bigger than X now slash Twitter.

And I wonder if that's true.

I gotta look that up, but I've seen more activity on threads.

So maybe I need to go back there.

I spent some time cheering from the sidelines that it's successful because I use it a lot now.

And I guess I had never had a place for kind of real time news.

And it's not exactly meant to be newsy, but maybe it's just who I follow.

But I love kind of just seeing like, here's like five headlines.

You probably missed.

And I was like, Oh, I know they're trying to downplay politics, but I just love that it just feels like, you know, it feels like you kind of get a glimpse of what's going on in the world in five minutes.

Okay. Two more questions.

Do you have a favorite life motto that you often think about?

Come back to share with friends or family, find useful and worker in life?

Ooh, that's a good question.

I would, well, actually, I would say that it's very similar to the Chuck Sandol one, right about life.

So you can use that.

Great. That's what I imagined.

Because yeah, you showed that one early on.

And I imagine that was going to be your answer.

Final question. You started Facebook Marketplace, you built it now has a billion users more than that.

What's the most interesting thing that you have bought or sold on Facebook Marketplace?

The best thing I ever sold on there was I sold my minivan on it.

And it's in four days, I made my husband do it because I wanted him to test the product.

And we were selling our minivan.

And I'm like, just try Facebook Marketplace.

He's like, I don't know about this.

And he's like, there's too many people contacting me.

I need to I needed to stop.

So it worked really well for us.

I think I have bought so many things on there.

It's actually sort of embarrassing.

I recently my daughter wanted the same desk as I had for her new room.

And I couldn't they no longer sell it at Costco.

And I found it for half the price from a woman who was moving and she's like here and I I love it.

So I bought probably way too many things on Facebook Marketplace, actually.

But it's a great thing.

I actually use it as a great rental for kids stuff because you buy a kid's bike and then when they outgrow it, you sell it back.

And the rental fee is almost free.

And I don't have the store all of it.

So I love every part of it.

And I still am an admin user.

And I send a lot of feedback back to that team.

That's amazing. Deb, this was amazing.

I'm so happy we made time for this.

Thank you so much for coming on.

Two final questions.

Where can folks find you if they want to reach out?

Maybe read about stuff you're doing.

Where's your sub stack and anything else people can check out?

Yes, a devlue .substack.

If you want to if you want to look, you can, you know, I post probably about once a week.

I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on threads.

So please do find me.

And then the actual final question.

How can listeners be useful to you?

Well, I would just love to hear kind of what you heard from today that resonated with you and what you're going to do with it.

And how would they share that like LinkedIn?

I'm happy to read your comments or send it if you want to send it to me.

If you actually subscribe to my sub stack, you can just reply to the first email and then I get it.

Awesome. But the easy way, as you said, of replying YouTube comments.

There we go. Get people to YouTube.

Click that subscribe button.

Deb, thank you so much for being here.

And thank you. Thank you so much, Lenny.

That's great. Hi, everyone.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com.

See you in the next episode.

[Mastering Your Career: Insights from Deb Liu on Product Leadership, Resilience, and Intentionality]-[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)]

📋 Summary

Navigating Professional Growth: A Guide to Product-Led Career Management

The "Always Learning" Mindset

PM Your Career Like Your Product

Resilience and the Value of Failure

Strategies for Introverts in the Workplace

Building Zero-to-One Products

The 30-60-90 Day Plan

The Contrarian View: Career and Life Balance

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript