来自 Binance、N26、Google 等公司的非传统产品经验 | Mayur Kamat(N26 CPO)
Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26)
Mayur Kamat: My, probably, most spectacular failure was, I was the first PM on Hangouts. We had thousands of people working for me. We had entire power of Google. We had Larry literally sitting with us saying we can do anything we want Chrome to do and we still didn’t manage to build a great messaging product. The main learnings from that is, don’t take on projects that are going to be six months, a year, because you just generally don’t have control over the macro. The challenge with being a product manager is, everybody thinks they can do the job. Anybody who uses the product thinks they have ideas, so at some point in time, you’re like, “What is my discipline? What is my science?” The moment you build experimentation, you’ve now made it scientific.
Introducing the Guest
Lenny Rachitsky: A lot of new people in their career are like, “Oh, I just want to think about strategy. I’m going to think about the big picture.”
Mayur Kamat: Strategy is a little bit overrated for product. For most product managers, your strategy should be, “How fast can I go from hypothesis to data?”
Pre-Binance Career
Lenny Rachitsky: Today, my guest is Mayur Kamat. Mayur is Chief Product Officer at N26, one of the most successful fintech startups in the world and which, in my research, came in amongst the top five companies in the world who are hiring and producing the best product managers. Prior to N26, Mayur was Global Head of Product at Binance, VP of product at Agoda, which is over a $100 billion dollar company based in Thailand, and a PM at Google and Microsoft. In our wide-ranging conversation, Mayur shares what he’s learned about hiring and developing great product managers, what he learned from his time working at Binance, which, as you’ll soon hear, was one of the wildest and most unique ways of working, what he learned from the failure of Google’s early attempts at Hangouts, where he was the first PM. Also, the pros and cons of working in Asia versus Europe versus the US, and why you should be starting your career on the West Coast of the US. Also, why comp early in your career does not matter and so much more.
This episode is so full of golden nuggets and advice for product people throughout every stage of their career. If you enjoy this podcast, don’t forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of amazing products, including Superhuman, Notion, Linear Perplexity, Granola and more. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com and click Bundle. With that, I bring you Mayur Kamat.
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Many of you are building AI products, which is why I am very excited to chat with Brandon Foo, Founder and CEO of Paragon. Hey, Brandon.
Brandon Foo: Hey, Lenny. Thanks for having me.
Time at Binance
Lenny Rachitsky: Integrations have become a big deal for AI products. Why is that?
Brandon Foo: Integrations are mission-critical for AI for two reasons. First, AI products need contacts from their customer’s business data such as Google Drive files, Slack messages or CRM records. Second, for AI products to automate work on behalf of users, AI agents need to be able to take action across these different third-party tools.
Extreme Flat Hierarchy
Lenny Rachitsky: Where does Paragon fit into all this?
Brandon Foo: These integrations are a pain to build. That’s why Paragon provides an embedded platform that enables engineers to ship these product integrations in just days instead of months across every use case from rag data ingestion to agentic actions.
Lenny Rachitsky: I know from firsthand experience that maintenance is even harder than just building it for the first time.
Brandon Foo: Exactly. We believe product teams should focus engineering efforts on competitive advantages, not integrations. That’s why companies like You.com, AI21 and hundreds of others use Paragon to accelerate their integration strategy.
Lenny Rachitsky:
Mayur, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.
Deep Dive: KYC Optimization
Mayur Kamat: Thank you. This is super exciting. Thank you for having me.
Lenny Rachitsky: I want to start with your time at Binance. You’ve worked at Google, you worked at Microsoft, you worked at a company called Agoda. Now, you’re at N26. I imagine Binance was the most unique place that you’ve worked at, and I’ve also never heard much about what it’s like to work at a company like Binance. I was just looking them up on Wikipedia. I saw they started in China, they moved to Japan, they moved to Malta. Now, they have no official headquarters. What was it just like working at Binance? How was it most unique from other places you’ve worked?
Power of Extreme Models
Mayur Kamat: Yeah. Maybe just a background for Binance, because I think a lot of people have heard it, some in positive connotations, some not so much. The scale of Binance is pretty mind-boggling. Just to give the history, they started in 2017 as a crypto exchange, when there were other crypto exchange on the market for years, like Coinbase. Within six months, they became number one. That’s unprecedented. That’s like launching a search engine today, and then, six months later, beating Google. Then they went within five years to at a peak valuation of somewhere like 400 billion in five years. It’s at a scale that’s never been done before. Google couldn’t do it, Facebook, none of the names that you hear. It’s remarkable. When I was there as the head of product, my top line KPI was the trading volume, and my monthly KPI was in trillions of dollars.
Just the scale was mind-boggling. We had teams of 10, 20 people running multi-billion dollar profit businesses. That brings in with it, first, how did they do that to that scale, and two, what kind of culture requires to keep that running? Both are very fascinating. I think we could spend a lot of time talking about it, but the truly interesting thing, the first one is, you can’t do this by having a traditional log structure. CZ, the founder and CEO at one point had 55 direct reports, and his direct reports had about the similar ones. For a large portion of the history of the company, there was just one level between the individual employees and the CEO. That leads to an extreme level of decision-making and execution. You cannot have one-on-ones when you have 55 direct reports, so there’s a culture of one-to-many and doing that as often as possible.
The leadership team, for example, met every day, and because the leadership team was spread across the world, we met at 11:00 PM when I was in Singapore every day. That includes the weekends, holidays. The leadership team was there, 11:00 PM every single day, which meant that none of the decisions were blocked for more than 24 hours. Most of them, we made it on chat even within those 24 hours, but if there was something big, it was escalated, decided. We executed largely based on this concept that I now take with me. I call it running products via daily meeting. We would pick a owner for something really urgent at the nightly leadership call. Then that owner would be expected to have all hands on deck for however long that problem is every single day and then report the updates on the daily call. Some of these were really massive topics, like how do we get 15 financial licenses in 15 countries in the next three months? It wouldn’t be at a scale that was-
Prerequisites for Extreme Work
Lenny Rachitsky: You’ve got 24 hours.
Mayur Kamat: Yes, and people did it. It’s extremely interesting to see that when you have really smart people, you give them really hard problems, you have no constraints on what can you need to solve them, whether it’s money, people, except time. Time is always at a premium. People can move mountains in a small amount of time. That extreme ownership culture, I think, probably was the most fascinating part of working at Binance that I’ve now tried to take. There’s some good parts of it in terms of attention to detail, being able to pick certain areas and own it, irrespective of what your title is and how many people report to you. There are certain downsides in terms of the amount of randomization that it can cost teams, especially if it’s not super well-thought through. I’m trying to see what are the great parts of that that I can bring to different roles, but that concept of daily meeting, if there’s something super urgent, how can you own it directly and run it yourself, where you are in the details so your team knows that they need to be in the details, and then be able to execute that. That’s probably the most fascinating. There’s several war stories. I was there for two years and the amount of interesting stories that happened during that time is a lot, but then, maybe I can follow up later if you have specific questions there.
Accelerating Career Growth
Lenny Rachitsky: I would love to hear a war story. This is definitely as interesting as I was expecting it to be. Just what I’m hearing so far is just things that worked well for them to operate at this insane pace and scale is the entire leadership team meeting every single day, 11:00 PM your time. Hopefully, at better times for other folks around the world.
Mayur Kamat: There’s some people in Sydney, Australia, so it was 1:00 AM for them.
Should You Become a CPO?
Lenny Rachitsky: Good grief. This idea of a flat structure, yeah, it’s interesting, because I imagine that’s not necessarily great for other reasons and then this idea of being in the details. Let me ask about that, actually. What does that actually look like? I think a lot of people, a lot of leaders are like, “Oh, yeah. I’m in the details, we should be in the details.” What does that actually look like in real life at Binance?
Mayur Kamat: Let me give an example. One of the areas, when I joined, one of the biggest product problem we had was, crypto before was fairly unregulated, so you could just sign up with an email address or even just a wallet and start trading. There was almost zero friction. Then it suddenly became regulated, where you would almost have a full KYC flow like a bank. That just meant that the conversion rate dropped from, let’s say, 100% to 2%. Now we had to solve this problem. This was the daily meeting level problem. It’s okay if you’re operating in one country. You can do it easily. If you’re operating in 200 countries where there’s not even a standard for what a document acceptance criteria might look like, now you have a significantly larger problem. You cannot say, “Let’s work with the KYC vendor and do the onboarding.”
We had to, literally have this, the top 50 countries, the top 10 document types, this spreadsheet of basically 500 cells, the conversion rate at each level. Then we are looking at, okay, a passport in Kazakhstan has very low level of conversion. What can we do about that? Do we need a new vendor? Do we need better imaging technology? Do we need a new SDK from a vendor? Then we go cell by cell based on, let’s say if I was running a typical product team, I would say, okay, let’s just look at maybe the top 90 percentile of our users, but this was Binance and then CZ is like, “No user left behind. Even that one user in Congo is important because this is financial inclusion for them.” Then all of those 500 sales matter, no matter how low their impact to the conversion rate is.
That’s a little bit of Binance flavor there. It’s extreme customer focus and it doesn’t really matter. Customers are not a number. It’s a person at the end of the screen and we care about them, so you would need to know, you would get questions like, why is the driver’s license acceptance rate in Kenya falling suddenly? When you have, and that’s just one piece of the problem in a large product with 80 different products. You, of course, cannot do it for every single product, but the concept of, what is the most leveraged decision you could be working on right now? If it is for your growth, it’s the onboarding, then you’d better know exact every single screen of the flow, why is there a drop-off and what are your teams doing for it? That level of detail, and you just do it on different products at different parts of your journey.
Alternative PM Career Paths
Lenny Rachitsky: I imagine there’s people listening where they’re like, there’s the team responsible for the onboarding flow and the KYC flow of their product and it’s so hard. They’re like, oh, there’s all these problems with our flow. Imagine that for 100 different versions of the flow across 100 different countries. Good God.
Deepening Domain Expertise
Mayur Kamat: And documents. It gets very tricky. It gets very tricky, but we also had resources. At one point in time we said, we had a team of 20 people working on KYC and we said, “For the next three months, we want 500.”
Identity Beyond Work
Lenny Rachitsky: Which has its own downsides, too.
Mayur Kamat: Has its downside, but if you’re running in this extreme mode and you’re less, not as worried about just the team’s stress and personal development aspects of it, you’re just purely looking at the execution of the product, there’s a surprising amount of power that comes with it. This was probably the second time in my career where I had that, wow, you can do this because in other companies it would take years to do it. The first one was, this is going back at Google. I remember I joined Google. It was my first day at onboarding and I was the product manager for Gmail for mobile, for sync. I was in my onboarding meeting when they pulled me out and said, “Hey, we have an issue. The service is down and Wall Street Journal is writing an article that Google, Microsoft, Apple not working together causing the service to go down, so we need you in this war room right now.”
It was a bug in iOS 4. This is a long time ago, which caused every single user to pull their entire Gmail inbox, re-sync the whole inbox. A bug on the Apple side is going to take two, three weeks to fix, and it was causing 1000x load to our servers. I remember Connie Wurz, who was the Head of Infrastructure at Google, and he’s like, “Sure.” He flipped a button and there were 1000x servers that showed up for the next two weeks. I was like, “Wow, that is scale,” right? This was my second time feeling that wow moment where like, oh, we just put 500 people in and solve the problem. It’s less about having the 500 people and being able to maneuver them that quickly. I don’t think I’ve been able to do that at any other company.
High-Growth Companies & Dense Networks
Lenny Rachitsky: To close the loop on some of these radical ways of working, this idea of 50 reports per person and this idea of caring about a person in Congo not being able to sign up, do you think that’s a good idea? Do you take those in the way you work now or is it just, in this particular situation it’s important? Other places, maybe not.
Mayur Kamat: There are several preconditions. One is you’re growing really fast. The growth for the employees comes just from seeing problems at scale that are growing every day that it needs less of a manager’s attention to figure out what you need to grow. The best way to grow in general is that you work at a very fast-growing company. If that’s true, two, your people are extremely well compensated, so they care about the KPIs more than they care about what’s the next stage in my career and how do I get promoted? Our bonus structure went from 0% to 500%, so a lot of people didn’t really care getting a 10%, 20% pay. They just want to do incredible work because they know they would be taken care of. Three, it’s a mission driven company, still believe at the end of the day that you’re doing this just beyond the KPI.
At Binance, there was a very strong belief that 80% of the world doesn’t have access to financial tools. They don’t even have an access to currency that they can trust. When we look at, live in Europe or in US and we think about crypto, it’s largely about speculation or bitcoin. For most of the world, they just need access to a US dollar, stable coin and just knowing that my currency is not getting deinflated because of things beyond my control. Everyone having come from these, a lot of our employees were across all these countries, they had a very strong mission belief that what we are doing will truly empower billions of people. There’s a power in that. A lot of people go through, “Hey, I’m going to move mountains because it’s not just about the money, it’s just not about my career. It’s about doing something that will change the world.”
Why FinTech Builds Great PMs
Lenny Rachitsky: Let’s follow this thread on accelerating your career, and talk about where you’re at today, N26. As you know, I’ve been doing a bunch of research on which companies hire and produce the best product managers. I’ve done a couple passes at this, and N26 has come up in the top five of both ways of approaching this, essentially which companies alumnis go on to do the best in their career. N26 is way up there. I want to come at this from a couple directions. One is what N26 as a company does to hire and incubate the best people, but also just you personally, what your advice is to people and how you help them become great PMs. Let’s actually start in that second bucket. What is the most common and most impactful career advice that you share with product managers that you manage, that you find most helps them move ahead in their career and get unstuck in their career?
Mayur Kamat: I think the number one thing I shared before, the best thing you can do is find companies that are growing fast because it compounds your learning at a much faster interval. Just the basic compound interest formula, even if your interest rate is low, if you’re compounding daily versus compounding yearly, after two years, you will be at a whole different stage at the end point. Companies that are growing fast just lets you get that learning much, much quicker. I remember joining Microsoft first in my career. Some of the products I worked on during my internship had not shipped till I left Microsoft three, four years later. That’s a very, very low rate of compounding. Microsoft’s a whole different company now 20 years later, thankfully. Then you contrast that something like Binance where every day or every hour, every minute you’re shipping something and then learning from it.
The faster you can compound your learning, the faster you will grow. The second piece generally is, you need to optimize for what you’re great at. Now having two kids, I’m fairly in the fact that your strengths get defined very, very early, right? I’m looking at my nine-year-old and twelve-year-old, and they have a whole different set of strengths. If you’re 25 years old early in your career, it’s very hard at that point to say, “Oh, here are all my weaknesses and I need to improve on those.” A lot of the career feedback typically tends to be around, “Hey, here are the things you need to be better at. Why don’t you do more of that stuff, right?” Formally in the camp that you need to know what you’re great at, what are your superpowers, and you need to find jobs where success is determined by how much of that superpowers you get to use.
Early in your career, you can’t get away with the fact that there’s some stuff you’re not going to be great at and you just have to manage around it. If you get higher up in your career, then it gets easier because you can build a team that complements your strengths, but again, if you’re early in your career, find places that, if you’re a great creative person, if you can look at a product and think of 100 things you can do better, you are always about what’s the next best thing and how quickly can I implement it, you need to be working in teams that have a high experimentation culture. You need to be working in growth teams in large companies. If you work in a FinTech company on a compliance side project or launching a new business vertical, you’re going to struggle, right?
On the same time, if you have extreme management structured thinking, you have great stakeholder management, you have high EQ, you should work in teams where there is a large amount of complex people management and process management. You would struggle in a growth team where the expectation is you’re doing things really quickly. I would look at first very introspectively, what are my true strengths? What do I, and then look at jobs where that has a much higher profile of winning. Thirdly, largely I would say do not optimize for compensation, especially early in your career. If you’re truly on a track to become an executive someday or found your own company and make it successful, you will find that the compensation is so much backloaded that you would make 90% of your compensation in the last five years of your career, so optimizing for 10%, 20% early in your career.
If you have two jobs, I would rank in your first 15 years of your career, I would say do not look at the compensation. Then the last one, this was strange. I never thought about this longer, but now I think this is probably the most interesting advice I can give people is determine very early in your career if you truly want to be a C-level someday, you want to be an executive someday, because it’s almost like if you’re ambitious and successful, you enter product management. You are in top of your, it’s almost an expectation of you that you would become that and you’d never really challenge or question yourself, is this the thing that needs me, that I need to do to get there? Is there something I’m going to truly enjoy? Not just the destination but the process to get there.
A lot of people think that and they make suboptimal decisions based on that. There’s incredible careers you can build and incredible lives that you can live by just being great at what you do, doing more of that stuff. You end your career maybe as a director, maybe as a group product manager, but throughout the stuff, you have built a holistic life that doesn’t revolve around your work and gives incredible meaning to you, or you can be saying, you know what? Work is a huge part of my identity. Somebody asks me what wakes me up in the morning and what gives me that energy? It’s my work. I can’t separate my identity from your work. Then maybe you should pursue that C-level path because it’ll truly be fulfilling and you would be able to make those challenges and sacrifices that are going to be asked of you to make that.
If you can calibrate that early and have that true conversation with yourself like, “Yes, I want to go down that path and I want to do,” you would make different career choices. In that path, I would definitely say don’t look at compensation. There are two jobs. Look at the three things. Is it going to give me high compounding of learning? Is it high overlap with my strengths, and am I going to have a lot of fun doing it? If you have fun doing it, then it becomes a virtuous cycle and you do more of it and you’re great at it.
Discovering Your Strengths
Lenny Rachitsky: On the question of decide if you want to be a CPO, essentially-
Do you want… Decide if you want to be a CPO essentially, is the, the implication there is, if you do, that’s a big sacrifice, you’re going to be stressed. Work-life balance is worse. Is that kind of the core question?
Mayur Kamat: No, no, no, absolutely not.
Uncovering PM Strengths in Practice
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay.
Is Product Strategy Overrated?
Mayur Kamat: Absolutely not.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay.
Irreversible Decisions & Cohort Analysis
Mayur Kamat: It’s like, if you truly enjoy your work and what you’re doing, it won’t feel like a sacrifice. When you’re constantly, when you look at a new product, you’re walking down the street, you see a new product, you’re on the app store, you see a new product, and you’re like, “Oh, this is cool. Oh, look how they’re doing the onboarding. Oh, look how the app store entry looks.” If that truly fills you up, it fills your cup, every moment you’re looking at why things can be better, how you can be better, how a certain thing… You would, the sacrifice will not feel like sacrifices. It’ll not feel like you’re working long hours. You’ll not feel, hey, when you’re talking to PMs and giving them some guidances, when you’re building things, when you’re recruiting new people, all that stuff, it fills your cup, it doesn’t drain it. Then you would have incredible fun on the journey. So, it’s less about that your sacrifices or work-life balance.
The moment you start having those conversations, you are probably not on that track. You should not be on that track because the moment the word work-life balance comes, I think Jeff Bezos has this thing that he hates the word because it means there are opposite things that need to be balanced, right? It needs to be work-life awesomeness or something like that, where every moment is awesome whether you’re working or you’re living. But for some people, that comes naturally because that’s how they’re wired. And those people should absolutely pursue it because it would be incredibly fulfilling, and the things that are challenging would also feel not as onerous. Whereas for everything else, it would feel like a sacrifice, could feel like something you need to balance. And then you would, again, even if you’re great at it, you’re not going to have fun doing it, and at some point you will not be great at it.
Building an Experimentation Culture
Lenny Rachitsky: For folks that are PMs today, there’s almost an implication their career is heading towards CPO eventually. That’s kind of the ladder they’re on. What are the, say, top three most common other options you’ve seen, other paths you’ve seen of folks that you manage, so that people can think about, “Okay, I don’t need to maybe just keep climbing this ladder. There’s these other directions I can go.”
Mayur Kamat: I mean the number one, and that’s I think back to your original question on N26, if you work in incredibly high growth companies, especially FinTech where there’s a higher, people end up being founders because it’s probably a whole different kind of track we can go down on, the founding your own company is probably the most kind of obvious/exciting alternate path. The only thing I ask there is, again, the same question, what you’re good at and what you love doing. The challenges with founding a company is a large portion of running a company has nothing to do with building a great product, especially as the company gets bigger. I’ve worked for founders now for 17 of my 20-year career, right. So, even at Google and stuff, Nikhil was my boss at Google, used to be a founder, and the CEOs now, the thing they tell me when they hire me is, “I wish I had your job,” because that’s what I used to do. That’s what I have loved doing, and now I spend 90% of my time doing stuff that is not the stuff that I truly enjoy.
But folks enjoy building stuff as a PM, there’s a lot of things you don’t have control over, and you feel like, “Hey, that’s stopping me from growing. That’s what’s topping me from truly enjoying.” Founding is a great path. You have that control now, you own the decision-making. There’s rarely times you can say, “Hey, this did not work because of that person.” Right? If you’re constantly hitting that, then founding is a great path for you because then you have the ball control for better or worse.
The other is just, I mean, it’s less about being a CPO and just growing your breadth and your depth instead of just the ladder, right? So you are incredibly, either getting specialized in a specific domain where there is now enough value for you to separate yourself from the pack, whether it’s, like in FinTech, now we have folks who are onboarding experts with KYC. We have people who are fraud experts, [inaudible 00:29:37] who have really great understanding of how card schemes work and how MasterCards work and where can we get the right incentives for the user. The folks who are experts on customer loyalty and retention. You build that domain expertise and then you realize that everyone needs that, right? And that could be an incredible way to specialize. So, you may lead growth at certain team even though you’re not a CPO, right? So, that’s kind of the second way of doing it.
And the third one, again, just not to knock it out, is you realize that work is not going to be my big part of my identity. My identity is, who am I as a parent? Who am I as a community member? Who am I as a son to my parents? Who am I as an artist or a contributor? And that’s what my death is going to be, a well-rounded person. And a job is great, I’m great at it, but I’m going to do it as much as it’s needed. And the value and meaning, the top part of the Maslow’s pyramid comes from everything but work. And then< you just lead kind of a balanced life because then work is a certain portion of it and the rest kind of fills the picture.
Traits of Top PM Companies
Lenny Rachitsky: So, just to summarize these four really good pieces of advice for how to essentially keep your career going and get unstuck and accelerated, is work at companies that are really high growth because your learnings will compound, and also the network you build, you didn’t even mention that, that becomes really valuable because especially if the company does well, sometimes companies grow really well and there’s extra benefits there, but even if they aren’t, you still earn a lot.
Career Trade-offs Across Regions
Mayur Kamat: Absolutely. Well, let’s say N26, one of the reasons why they have so many founders is the fact that it was a category defining, like we were the first kind of mobile bank, right? So, a lot of the problems we saw in early days, nobody else saw them, right? So, every product manager had to solve it for the very first time in history. And that kind of is a whole different level of kind of trial by fire. Same thing with [inaudible 00:31:44]. They both started about the same time. Those are the companies that show up in the top rankings because you did this before anybody could do it, and you learn by literally moving mountains. I think two is also the fact that you see, we have this whole PayPal mafia. When you see this early success, everyone sees it together. So, when they go, they have that network, as you said, built-in.
These are, maybe it’s a product manager who starts a company, but maybe there is a business development manager who has also started this company and now you can collaborate and have partnerships. So, that success, a mutual success, which a lot of early startup see, that creates kind of a more denser network than you working at a large company where not all of you see the success at the same time. And 3Ls comes down to the founders as well. They’re incredibly mission-driven founders. I always find it super admiring now when I look back at Valentine and Max here at N26, or I look at CZ. They have reached from a whatever metric you can define of success, whether it’s the size of the company, whether it’s the personal network, beyond whatever anybody would think success means, right? And then, to wake up every day and to do this hours and hours single day, every single day, you are driven by a whole.
These are the voyagers of, these are the folks who would go explore new planets in the future or the folks who sailed out on the seas in 1600s to discover new land. That being access to these people directly is extremely, extremely empowering. You not just learn from it, but you get inspired by it. If you have an X definition of success, now your definition of success is 10x, you automatically push the boundaries more. So, I think those two things are, or those three things, early start, category defining companies, mutual success and creation of dense networks, and just being inspired by incredibly, incredibly successful and talented people.
Lenny Rachitsky: You pointed out this really interesting insight that I forgot to mention with the list of companies that seem to hire and create the strongest PMs. There’s a lot of FinTech representation there, and I think you touched on why that might be the case because all these problems are extremely complicated and never been solved and they’re solving at scale.
Seattle to Bangkok: Moving for Family
Mayur Kamat: Here’s the thing about FinTech, which is probably the most interesting is, FinTech, you have two customers. You have your usual customers and you have your regulator, and you need to keep both of them happy. And usually, what makes one happy, it makes the other one less happy, right? So, you are constantly dealing with trade-offs. In most PMs, in most companies you have some trade-offs, but they’re not existential. Whereas in FinTech, every trade-off is existential. When you found a company, every trade-off is existential. You may not exist as a business if you make a wrong decision. In FinTech, a lot of the PMs see that day in day out, and that probably kind of conditions them to a whole different level of juggling balls than you would be a PM at other company.
Agoda: Experiment-Driven Product Bootcamp
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, that’s such a good point. Just really good stakeholder management influence dealing with all these trade-offs. I think that’s a really good point. I’m going to come back to the strength stuff because that’s really important and I’ve been meaning to come back to it. So, just to reflect back, the four things you pointed out are really what you want to look for to accelerate your career. Companies that are growing really fast, working on things that you’re good at, and finding a role that leverages your strengths versus things that you’re not good at. Not optimizing for comp really is such a good point there. Your point essentially is you’ll make most of your comp later, probably the 50%. The second half of your career, you probably make, I don’t know, 10 times more than you make the first part of your career.
And so, optimize for the future cop, not today’s comp. And then this idea of making sure, ask yourself, do you want to be CPO? Do you want to go down the C-suite route or do you want to maybe probably plan to start a company, something else? And that informs the role you’re in. Coming back to the strength stuff, how do people figure out their strengths? Do you have any advice for someone sitting around, they’re like, “What am I actually good at? I don’t know.”
Advantages of Working Abroad
Mayur Kamat: So, there’s several ways to do it. I remember I read this book, this was, I don’t think it shaped my understanding of it because I was already operating in that mode, but it used to be called Now Discover Your Strengths. I think now it’s called Strength Finder 2.0. It’s still 20 years old now, but there’s a lot more newer ways to do it. There are two things I have done and they’re both kind of, I’m not sure how accessible they are, but I’ll give you the examples. So, at a Agoda, we used to pay a psychologist $5,000 for every single PM we interview, right? So, after you finish your PM rounds, we would send you to this psych assessment. It would be a six-hour psych assessment and they would tell me what your strengths are, not just that it would be an IQ component.
So, we would know what percentile you are, and not just like an IQ score like Einstein or not, but IQ score across different, across pattern recognition or structured thinking, across numerical ability, verbal ability, right? So, a lot of people say they hire the smartest people. At Agoda, we literally hired the smartest people because we paid the psychologist a lot of money to tell whether they’re smart or not. But other than that, they also give you your strengths and weaknesses. It used to be called, I know the company still around, it’s called Q4, and it’s called Q4 because they had this four quadrants on two axes, one is on dominance and one is on warmth, right? So, you want people who are high dominance, high warmth in the 4 quadrant, and that as you can realize, if you also want smart people, to find those who land in that quadrant is literally looking through a needle through a haystack.
But when I, I almost didn’t do it. I was like, this is like I’ve been doing products for 15 years, this is insulting that I need to go do a six hour… The only reason I did it at that time was my son was four and a half years old and I was teaching him, because you’re going to go to kindergarten, I was starting do some math with him, and then in six months he knew all the math that I knew. He was solving quadratic equations and stuff. And we thought, oh, we have a genius in the house. We got to get him tested. So, we were testing him, and that’s the only reason I took this test because I thought it would be interesting to understand what this process looks like. But then when I got the results, I was like, it was so spot on.
It was incredibly spot on in saying areas where I would do well, areas where I would struggle and need help. So, that’s one way to do it. It’s super extreme. A little bit a year, two years ago, we had the [inaudible 00:38:40]. CZ is good friends with Ray Dalio. So, we had Ray Dalio come to our executive offsite, and he walked us through how he and his company does strengths assessment. So he has a, that one is lot more accessible. I think it costs like $50. You can go to, I think you search for Ray Dalio’s strengths, there’s a website that you can go and… The way it works, slightly differently for executives because you do it, so those are your components, tells you how good you think you are, and then it has your leadership team vote you on certain different aspects. So, there’s a two layer assessment, how good you think you are and how good everybody else think you are.
And then, the overlap is where your true strengths are. And as a CEO, I can say, “Oh, Mayur is great at design. Everybody else knows that Mayur is great at design. We should give design problems to Mayur.” Right? So, that’s another way of kind of… So, there’s a scientific way of doing this and it’s gotten a lot better since I read that book long time ago. Again, if you’re truly, truly curious, it doesn’t take that long and now it’s a lot more accessible. That’s one way to do it. And it kind of separates in terms of execution, in terms of structured thinking, innovation and design, creativity, stakeholder management, EQ. You get a little bit of a more scientific picture on what your strengths are. But this is also a simpler way.
As a PM, you do pretty much a large portion. Everybody does the same few things, right? You think you’re designing the roadmap, you are coming up with what you think is the product strategy. There’s a lot of time around just managing engineers, making sure they do stuff. There’s stakeholder management, marketing, compliance, whatever. There’s launch and just tracking data analytics. So, this part is true for most PMs. Some jobs require more of one versus the other. And you just know when you do these things, which ones one you’re truly great at and you have a lot of fun doing, right? Maybe you just don’t like Jira and the ticket tracking and just following people on that, and that’s the worst part of your job. Stay away from more structured complex stakeholder management jobs. Or you find that, hey, you do really well at that and somebody ask you, “Hey, what are the 15 things we’re going to do next week to improve a conversion?”
That’s where you kind of have a hard time, you just sit down, spend hours thinking about it, then maybe that’s not your strength. And so over time, you kind of build this self calibration on areas that you have fun doing and areas where you don’t have. And then, when you look at the next job, just try and gauge, are they hiring me because I did really well at some of the stuff that I didn’t love doing? And if that’s what they’re hiring you for, probably you’re not going to have a lot of fun or high acceleration if you go there.
Working Abroad: Salary Caps & Geography
Lenny Rachitsky: There’s so much there. There’s I think an important point that I’ll add, and I’m curious if you agree. A lot of new people or new people in their career, like, “Oh, I just want to think about strategy. I’m going to think about the big picture. I don’t want to just sit there and optimize the roadmap and be in Jira.” But it’s actually, that’s your job when you’re just starting out. You need to earn the right to contribute to the vision, to the strategy.
Mayur Kamat: There’s one of the, and as a pre-conversation we talk about contrary and view, product strategy by definition seems like a… This is going to be controversial.
Shreyas Doshi on Leverage
Lenny Rachitsky: Great.
CZ’s Similar Approach at Binance
Mayur Kamat: Not really… Those two words feel very at odds with each other for me. A product, you have hypotheses and if you can test it, you don’t need a strategy. Right? If I say, “Hey, if I build this and I know this will add this much users and this time with this conversion rate, this customer acquisition cost and this LTV,” that’s your hypothesis and you could test it in the market very quickly. And if it works, you have your strategy. Keep doing more of it. Strategy is always keep doing more of it or don’t do it, right? That’s all that is to strategy. The key part is just figuring out which one goes in which bucket. And if you’re really executing fast enough in a kind of structured, experimentation-driven manner, your strategy becomes a largely solved problem. So, for most, and that’s a challenge.
A lot of people think strategy is about looking at Porter’s [inaudible 00:43:18] forces, a lot of slides, we’re looking at some data and slicing it and saying, “We need to go here or there.” All of it is largely in some sort of package intuition. And the challenge with that is, usually you go with the loudest voice in the room. And if you’re a junior in your career, it’s a very frustrating exercise because you think you know the strategy better. But it’s all it is. It’s a sense of package intuition, and then the guy with the loudest, biggest title or the loudest voice is going to go do it. It was very early in my career, Jonathan Rosenberg, he was the head of, he was the CPO at Google.
All the PMs reported to him. He was not called the CPO back then. And he had this one thing he would say all the time that, “Come to me with data. If you come to me with ideas, we’ll go with mine.” Right? That was the saying. You can come with any ideas, we’re just going to do what I think, but unless you come with strong sense of proof to override me. So again, strategy is a little bit overrated for product. For market expansions, for investments, for licenses, compliance, there’s several areas where it makes sense and it’s kind of useful. But for most product managers, your strategy should be, how fast can I go from hypothesis to data, right? The faster you can go there, the easier your strategy gets.
Protecting Calendar White Space
Lenny Rachitsky: That is certainly a hot take. So the idea here, I’m curious how you operationalize this with folks at N26. Is it just like, “I don’t need to see a whole strategy for the year. Just give me, here’s the plan, here’s what we’re going to test, here’s our hypothesis?” Are you actually, what do you tell your PM team?
The AI Corner
Mayur Kamat: We use this tool. I’m going to give a shout-out to Statsig because they’re awesome. Vijay used to run the experimentation at Facebook and has this tool. There’s several of those. But if you’re running proper experiments, I just look at the Statsig dashboards, right? And I’m looking at experiments, I’m looking at what metrics they’re moving, I’m looking at the P-value, I’m looking at how quickly can they get to statistical significance. And I’m like, “Oh, this is working. Let’s do more of these.” Right? So, now there’s some areas where you can’t do it, like in compliance, in legal aspects, in Europe, especially pricing. In US, you can run pricing tests. In Europe, it’s a little bit different. So, those areas, you would need to have a lot more kind of deeper thinking, understanding of your cohorts. You’re coming up with more structured reason for why you should do it, but you can’t really test and know within a couple of days or a couple of weeks at max whether this was a good idea or not.
Those, if there are either irreversible decisions or they’re just extremely time-consuming to find out, then do some pre-work. We look at largely, find a lot of companies that really look at data without looking at cohorts that make completely bad decisions, right, because if you look at your dashboard as a mixture of users over 10 years, 20 years, even six months, and they all behave differently. If you look at a cohort level development of certain users, you generally end up making better decisions. But even over there, it’s still lot more, there’s a lot of noise between the moment you start tracking it than moment you start making decisions based on it. The world has changed in that meantime. By now, this was kind of a very foreign concept when I brought this in. I’m like, oh, the conversions down now, even though the product’s done really well because Bitcoin has crashed, right?
Nobody wants to go sign up for an Exchange account. So, if you just measure pre and post, you would think that you have done something wrong in the product. If you measure it as an experiment, you would know that, yeah, between the variant and control, it’s still doing great, even though overall conversion is down. So largely, the more you kind of, one of the first thing kind of doing when I take on a role, the company already doesn’t have an experimentation culture. That’s largely why they hire me in the first place, right?
So, for now, the first thing is to say, how can we bring it in? First, the kind of right culture, the right incentives and the right tools. And then, once it’s set up, it gets a lot of fun. Get a lot of fun for the PMs because you have democratized performance for the product managers. And the second thing, which I tell my PMs now, which is truly kind of empowering if you think about it, the challenge with being a product manager is everybody thinks they can do their job, right? You go to… The CFO might have an idea, the head of kind of accounting has an idea. Anybody who uses the product thinks they have ideas, right?
So, at some point in time, you’re like, what is my discipline? What is my science? Nobody goes to the accounting guy and says, “Hey, I have a great idea for how to cook our books.” Nobody does that because there’s a science behind it. There’s a science for financial forecasting. Even in technology, a lot of the times people just don’t go and say, “Hey, just dump this thing and let’s use this code that the AI code generator has used.” Right? There’s a little bit of science there.
Whereas in product, you largely find that it’s a combination of data and ideas and stuff, and anybody thinks they can… The moment you build experimentation, you’ll now make it scientific, right? Now, somebody comes up with an idea, say, that’s a bad idea. Here, this is why it’s a bad idea, because we have done this experiment six times and it has failed across this user groups at this exact level of impact created. So, it kind of gives the PMs the kind of, hey, I’m not just a general purpose technician, I’m a specialist now. And it’s extremely empowering once we can, it takes a long time to move the team in that direction. But once you get it there, the PMs just, it’s a natural kind of dopamine hit every time you run an experiment and see more metrics.
Lenny Rachitsky:
Christina Cacioppo: Great to be here. Big fan of the podcast and the newsletter.
Lenny Rachitsky: Vanta is a longtime sponsor of the show, but for some of our newer listeners, what does Vanta do and who is-
… show, but for some of our newer listeners, what does Vanta do and who is it for?
Speaker 1 (00:50:05): Sure. So we started Vanta in 2018, focused on founders, helping them start to build out their security programs and get credit for all of that hard security work with compliance certifications like SOC 2 or ISO 27001. Today, we currently help over 9,000 companies, including some startup household names like Atlassian, Ramp, and LangChain start and scale their security programs and ultimately build trust by automating compliance, centralizing GRC, and accelerating security reviews.
That is awesome. I know from experience that these things take a lot of time and a lot of resources and nobody wants to spend time doing this.
Speaker 1 (00:50:43): That is very much our experience, but before the company. And to some extent during it, but the idea is with automation with AI, with software, we are helping customers build trust with prospects and customers in an efficient way. And our joke, we started this compliance company, so you don’t have to.
We appreciate you for doing that and you have a special discount for listeners, they can get a thousand dollars off Vanta at vanta.com/lenny. That’s V-A-N-T-A .com/lenny for $1,000 off Vanta. Thanks for that, Christina.
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I want to come back to the question of what N26 has done well to create and hire great PMs. So you’ve spent a bunch of time on here’s career advice that I often give and what has helps people most in their career. Just to kind of close this thread, is there anything N26 did or is doing that either from the hiring perspective or from training? I know you haven’t been there from the beginning, just like as a business, as a company that they’ve done really well that other companies may want to copy.
Enterprise AI in Practice
Mayur Kamat: Some of it is just the hiring philosophy. One of the advantages you get for being a big fish in a small pond is you get to have your pick of the cream of the crop. So in Europe here where we don’t have the same level of unicorn or decacorn density you have in the Bay Area being one of the first ones or the few ones, you do get a little bit of that branding working in your favor. So some portion of that is just the input. If you’re taking really smart people, very chance at N26 they will stay smart. Two is again, the level of problems that they work on are harder. Just the print tech angle we mentioned and now with this whole experimentation driven kind of change that we made in the last year or so, there’s also a new kind of tool kit that they get, especially if they’re going for larger big growth company as the next step of the career.
All the people companies I talk to, the amount of companies that are truly world-class at experimentation is so low that if you work in one of these companies and you build this tool set, you can build a whole career on this. You can go to any other company and say, “This is what I’m going to bring to the table.” Because there’s no growth without, as I said, without compounding wins faster. Nothing compounds wins faster than experiments and there’s no company out in the world that says we don’t want to grow. So that is an incredible kind of brand that you can build alongside with it. Then the third piece is just the scale. One of the other interesting aspects of banking is what I call a hundred percent product. It’s actually more than a hundred percent, they’re more bank accounts than human beings because a lot of people have more than one bank account.
So you never run out of target addressable market. It’s as big as it can get, which means that there’s no upper bound on how much… Because at some point if you’re, I don’t know, building in kind of an AI code generator, your market is capped that maybe developers or people want to be developers. Or you’re building, I don’t know, AWS, it’s a massive market, but it’s still like all the company that need online hosting. They look at banking everybody needs and the fact that it’s oldest or the second oldest, depending on how risky you are or not… Or profession known to man. It is a self-hedged product. When things get tough on one side of our business, the interest rates, let’s say, go high, spending goes down, but we make money on deposits. When interest rates go down, spending increases, so we make more your money on interchange, [inaudible 00:54:36] investments. So it’s a very self-hedged business that lets you go through the troughs and the peaks better than most companies.
And that understanding that how do you build naturally hedged products is probably another kind of reason why… It just influences how you make decisions and how do you kind of scale your core product portfolio. Just one example, for about a year and a half ago, we were largely year bank with a card and we were the first mobile bank and that was a big enough market. But in the last year or so, we have just fleshed out that product portfolio. We have a big lending portfolio now. We launched savings last year. We invested heavily in savings because the interest rates were high, was a super amazing tool to attract new users by offering high interest rates.
But as the interest rates are going down now, which is investing heavily in lending because now you can get loans for lower prices, which was super hard to get last year. So being able to build products that complement the macro also gives you that kind of additional balancing act that you don’t get in typical single focus companies. So I think it’s a combination of few of those things, being able to get great talent, being able to train them now more so especially around experimentation and just see how we can build a product portfolio that complements each other but also naturally hedges against each other, just gives you a better, well-balanced way to operate.
Fail Corner: Career Failures
Lenny Rachitsky: I think this explains something really interesting. As you were talking, I realized that a lot of these companies that produce the best PMs are to your point, non-US based, but incredibly successful in their location. And so it draws in the most talented people in that region. So I know Intercom I think technically is… So Intercom was number one on this list of companies that produce the best PMs. Intercom, Palantir, Revolut, and then N26, Chime, Stripe, Dropbox were kind of at the top. And four of those essentially, or three of those are non… Intercom I think was Ireland for a lot of their team is based in Ireland. Then Revolut is the UK and then you guys. So it’s interesting, that explains some really interesting insights of just be the best, be the big fish in a small pond, draw in the best talent and then work on really hard problems and be really successful. There you go. There’s a formula.
From Hangouts to Enterprise Products
Mayur Kamat: Yes, yes. It’s very simple when you put it that way.
Career Advice: Find Overlapping Superpowers
Lenny Rachitsky: Oh, man. Okay. You interestingly have worked in a lot of different places. I want to spend a little time here. So you’ve worked in Europe, you’ve worked in Asia, you worked in the US obviously. For someone that is maybe thinking about moving out of the US or maybe moving to the US, what have you found are the big trade-offs?
Mayur Kamat: Yeah, so I would say early career you want to be in intensely talents dense areas for all the reasons that we mentioned before. Finding the high growth companies, finding the networks that will make you successful. For general tech, there’s no better place than West coast of the US. Everybody doesn’t have the option, especially now with the immigration policies and so forth. I mean things were always hard. They seem extremely harder now. So you may not have that option, but if you do have that option, I would encourage everyone, there’s no better place than West Coast to start your career. There’s some exceptions, like for crypto, I would say Dubai is very strong, very great, has a really high density there. But again, it’s a very industry specific. Bangalore, if you’re Indian, has managed to recreate some of the magic of Silicon Valley, not at the same scale, but getting better. If you’re in finance, maybe there is London, Singapore, and Asia has now at least not as much new innovation, but each of the big companies has a presence there.
So at least secondary talent densities there, those would be our options if US is not available early in your career. And in some ways it helps define you, right? If you work at Microsoft or Google or OpenAI or some of these companies that become brands later, it’s something you can take with you when going… The second part of your question is if you decide to move, having that experience and that brand and that kind of achievements there can help you find great opportunities elsewhere. I mean, I’ve been a little bit privileged that some of these opportunities I found me like N26 here in Europe or Binance before in Asia where I wasn’t really in that super talent dense area in the first place. But luck’s not a great strategy. So if you’re planning for it, I would say build your early career in the US. Honestly, when we moved to Thailand 2018, at that point, I didn’t think I was making a great professional decision.
We were just struggling in the US with both me and my wife working. Both our kids in Seattle were tiny. My daughter had asthma at that time and she was just constantly sick. And it was a struggle for us to kind of manage both work and life. And when I talked to Agoda, I had never heard of the company and the only reason I ended up taking the job was like, hey, Bangkok’s a hot place. My daughter might not have asthma there and we might have some help in the house. So we could probably balance some of the things that are really not adding value to our life right now. And that was the hypothesis there that I can do a lot more on work because I was literally not able to focus as much on it, everything else that was happening. And as I said, everything on an experimentation that we just hit a home run on all the hypothesis. My daughter, the heat cured her asthma.
Just having a support structure allowed us just as a family to spend a lot more time with each other and allowed me a lot more time to work and be on my career when I’m not doing dishes and not doing laundry and not throwing out the trash and not mowing the lawn. There’s just so much hours that show up in the day that you could be doing things that you’re great at and add to your career. And then Agoda just turned out to be almost like a bootcamp for understanding how an experimentation based product culture might work. Because before that I worked at Google, I worked at startups. My [inaudible 01:01:31] claim to fame was building big stuff and Agoda just taught me a lot of the growth comes with incredibly small things done faster. So it’s part of Booking Holdings. So if you heard of Booking.com, it’s a 10 billion company which sold flights, hotels, and cars. 10 years later it still sells flights, hotels, and cars, it’s a $ 170 billion company.
Quick Fire: Book Recommendations
Lenny Rachitsky: Oh, wow.
Mayur Kamat: It’s an incredible growth story. And that tells you you really don’t need from a strategy perspective to do something completely different if you can truly compound your growth by optimizing every single thing really, really well. So there are the pros that come with, as I said, when you move, most of the time you’re building products that are global, especially if you’re based in the US. Very few times you’re building product that just work in the US. Now, that’s not true for a lot of the countries. Like in India, a lot of products are only designed for Indian market, a lot of products in China only designed for Chinese market, but from the US you’re designing product for the world and a lot of the times you don’t experience the same constraints or you don’t empathize with the user at the same level because you just haven’t lived that user’s life.
So in terms of just being able to calibrate yourself on what a global product might look like, being able to live in different places and understanding some of these constraints first hand, definitely a pro. As I said, especially if you have built that early reputation, you get to work at some of the best companies when you go abroad. And so there’s a hit to compensation, at least initially for sure. Nobody pays anywhere close, especially here in Europe. But as I said before, don’t optimize for compensation early in your career or even middle part of your career. So if you follow that advice, it’ll not matter because you will have kind of something unique to offer. Even if you come back to the US later having worked in different… Having understanding, especially if you’re in FinTech where the actual laws are different in different countries and that one you truly do not appreciate working in the US. Even at Google and stuff, when we would launch products, I would be like, oh, the lawyers, they’re just making life difficult.
But the many of now have a true appreciation of how different the world truly is. It just makes you a better stakeholder when you talk to the legal team, when you talk to compliance team, when you talk to marketing. So I think those are all the pros. The compensation could be the con. The other big con is that today, if you’re in Silicon Valley, I spent 15 years in Seattle, I worked at four companies, I could change jobs and stay in Seattle because there’s enough companies there. You’re not going to run a ceiling at some point, in Bay Area, there’s no ceiling, right? You can keep growing. The challenge now is that if I’m in Bangkok and I’m working at Agoda, at some point I need to find a new job or because let’s say I’m at the CPO level, I want to be CEO now. Agoda already has a CEO, so I need to find, be a CEO somewhere else. Guess what? That company is not going to be in Bangkok. Now I have to move and move my whole family to Singapore, which I did. Then you hit somewhere over there or then you hit another ceiling, now you need to move back or go somewhere else with Thailand, which I did. And then you’re like, oh, maybe there’s a great opportunity in Europe which would give you a whole different scale. Then you need to move to Spain, which I did. So at some point your family’s like, what’s happening? It turned out to be what turned out to be one step to go from A to B is now just a every year journey.
So that’s something to calibrate, especially later in your career that it’s extremely hard if you like the job and don’t like the location or vice versa, ‘cause they usually come as a package deal now. We see this in Bangkok now where there’s not that many great tech companies, and if you’re at Agoda and you’re doing really well, but it’s just one company, you just don’t have options. And especially if you love Bangkok, which is a great city, probably my vote for the best place to live in the world, that’s a struggle. You love the city, but if you need to move your career ahead, you need to go somewhere else.
Quick Fire: Movie Recommendations
Lenny Rachitsky: So interesting. I feel like Thailand is very popular right now with White Lotus.I think White Lotus had the most views of any show or some crazy… It was very popular. I feel like there’s a lot of tourism coming to Thailand more than they’ve had.
Recent Favorite Products
Mayur Kamat: Yes, yes.
Personal Life Motto
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. I want to come back to one piece of advice that we were chatting about before we started recording that I think might be helpful to people, which is, and this is kind in a different direction, but I want to make sure we touch on it, is Shreyas Doshi’s point about leverage. I know this is something that you think a lot about. He has this really good advice and we’ll point to the episode if people want to dig deeper around finding the highest leverage opportunities for you to work on as a PM. Can you just share that advice for folks that haven’t heard this before?
Mayur Kamat: This is true for no matter what level of career you are in, but you have a finite amount of time and largely you have more problems than you have time to solve them. The question is which ones you work on. And this becomes even harder, let’s say you’re a CPO now because all of them are important, otherwise they will not come to you in the first place. The question is, which one do you work on? And the principle is simple. You work on problems that have a 10X positive or a negative impact. I mean the number can be 10, 5, 300, depending on finance it would be a hundred, some companies might be three. And in most FinTech companies one of two problems, it’s a growth problem or a compliance problem because both of them can have a negative or positive 10X impact and that’s what you focus on. That’s what you spend bulk of your time. What was interesting for me, my first executive roles, that was Google, I was a product manager.
I joined what was White Pages back then as a VP of product. I was my first kind of… And White Pages, Alex Allgood, Seattle, founding legend, three companies, all unicorns now. Incredible, very good personal friend and mentor. What was truly interesting when I joined it, they’re like, “Okay, this is your desk, this is the product area. So we had two offices, this is when everybody worked in office five days a week.” And I’m like, “Okay, where does Alex sit?” And he’s like, “Oh, he’s sitting with accounting.” And I’m like, I didn’t think about it because I thought his office is near accounting. Then I find out he doesn’t have office, he has a floating desk. So all the other desks were fixed, but he had a movable desk and he would move his desk to one of the departments, which I think had the highest leverage opportunity. And he would sit there at that desk when that department till that either problem was solved or the opportunity was realized, and then he would literally move his desk and then go to product or tech or finance.
And that was his way of… You could literally visualize him working on the highest leverage problem by his desk moving. And then that combines that with what we talked before about details and a little bit, I think I didn’t mention it about the humility that you need to have to be working in the detail. A lot of the times, especially later in your career, you’re like, hey, this is beyond me. This is below me. Why do I need to do that? I have so many PMs or data analysts or somebody should do it. Why would I do it? And that was kind of again, just a quick story there. I remember we were trying to figure out our growth channels and we found out that, hey, we are kind of really tapping out on paid, on social, on referrals, but SEO was something we just hadn’t worked on for a while. We’re building a caller ID app and what we wanted to do was when somebody types a phone number in Google, we want to be the first link to say, hey, is this a spam call or not?
Or whose number it is. And if we could then we could get them to download our app. That was the hypothesis. So I present at the executive team meeting to Alex, like, “Hey, I have a team. I want to hire a product manager focused purely on SEO and because I think that’s one of our highest leverage areas right now.” And Alex is like, “Hey, the whole White Pages, I built based on SEO. People who type people’s name and the first thing used to be a White Pages link. I’m one of the best people in the world to work on SEO.” I’m like, “Yeah. So?” He’s like, “Let me run this product.” I’m like, “Okay, what do you mean?” He’s like, “No, no, I will be the product manager for this for however long you need it.” I’m like, “How’s [inaudible 01:10:54]?”
“They don’t worry about it. Just tell me about the engineers.” So again, he moved his desk to where that product team sat, and for the next three months he was the product manager on that scrum. So he would come to my product team meetings, give us update on what’s happening with the SEO scrum, and then an hour later I would be in the leadership meeting giving my update to him, and truly he was operating it saying, this is high leverage area for the company, high leverage for my yards. It should be high leverage for me. I’m the best person to do it. I’m going to be in the details and do it. CZ, same at Binance, there were a lot of products that he would just sit on himself. There were very few people at Binance who would say no to CZ, but one of my lead PMs who worked on the products that CZ worked on, he would tell them no all the time.
They would just baffle all the other executives, how is he saying no to CZ and none of us are doing it? Hey, that was his product area that CZ was working on, and there was that mutual respect there that, hey, we know this thing and he is going to say no to me because probably not a good idea. So that humility and attention to detail is required to work on the high leverage problems. A lot of the high leverage problems are not, as I said, not strategy decisions. They’re not language markets to go after and stuff. A lot of them are like, why is this thing not working as well as it needs to be? And a lot of time the devil is in the details and you need to be over there. I think combining that, knowing what is high leverage or not, and two, both having the humility and the patience to be able to go dig deeper and solve that.
Some of them are quick ones. Like if I’m looking today at, let’s say how many of our signed up users convert into a long-term monthly daily active user, that could be something I focus on for a month. Because we’re running a lot of experiments on early onboarding screens, early rewards, early incentives, early loyalty program, and at some point it might be like, oh, the team’s got it. I’ve given all my… What I could do there. It’s functioning. We have great PMs. I trust their execution on this. Let me just go focus on some of the compliance challenges that we have or fraud issues that we have in France.
Those kind of being able to kind of… The only way that works for me is I keep a very three calendar because you cannot do this without that. If you have hundreds of meetings, hundreds of one-on-ones daily standards, a lot of recurring meetings, you just can’t find time to go work on high leverage problems. So that would be my kind of other stuff is you should have plenty of open spaces on your calendar. A full calendar is a badge of shame, not a badge of honor.
Where is the Best Food?
Lenny Rachitsky: These are awesome stories. Just the metaphor of the moving desk is so good. That’s the epitome of a… Like what you’re describing is what people now call founder mode, where the founder just goes in the details working on the problem. Brian Chesky actually did this at Airbnb while I was there. He took on a new product and was like mini CEO, essentially. I don’t know if he’d called himself the product manager ‘cause I don’t think he loved product managers. He kind of famously got rid of product managers, which he didn’t actually… But yeah, he did that very much and he sat with the team, kind of created a whole space for the team that he was in. These are awesome stories and really good example of a founder using their power to unblock and finding the highest leverage opportunities.
To kind of start to close off our conversation, I’m going to take you to a couple recurring themes on this podcast, recurring segments on this podcast. First, we’re going to visit AI Corner and in AI Corner I ask, what’s a way that you have found to use AI in AI tool, a bunch of AI tools in your work to work more efficiently to work to create better quality work?
Mayur Kamat: I still haven’t found a game changer for me personally. Something that I use right now and I’m a little bit not-
He was like, now I am a little bit not sure that am I not doing something right, what the other people are, or I’m a little bit too jaded for it.
So we have Gemini across the work. So for meeting notes and stuff, works great, especially for folks who don’t make it. We use a tool called Writer for our copywriting and UX teams, especially because we are operating in Europe across several languages. So being able to generate that very quickly, especially for illustrations and in-app messages and stuff that’s been a, several tools now. But Writer just has, the copywriting market is really well done over there.
If you ask me across N26. But even when we did this at Binance or at Agoda, there are three areas where AI is complete game changer. One is on coding. Again, you can use whatever latest tool for prototyping or not most value, especially for the companies I have worked at, which are fairly large companies, very large code bases.
Having some sort of co-pilot that’s integrated with your repositories. Rough data, maybe somewhere between 18 to 25% productivity boost for a developer, which is fairly massive, right? So that’s one category, game changer. Customer support, game changer. Whether we should do it at scale or not, that’s a different kind of more ethical/human question to ask there. But for solving the bottom 70 percentile problems, “Why is my card declined? Why is there a hold on my account? What happened to the replacement card I shipped? Why is it not arrived?” Basic questions, AI automating now almost 60, 70% of that. Customers getting that real feedback. Game changer.
And the last one is just on fraud and being able to just understand patterns better on real customers versus not. At Binance, we had this product where users could exchange crypto with each other. I could pay you Bitcoin and get Thai bath in return, huge amount of fraud.
And they’re using AI just to understand language patterns of fraudsters versus not fraudsters. Massive. So again, as a company level, there is an incredible set of advancements across these three areas: developer productivity, customer support, and fraud. But for me personally, I’m like, what would I use that suddenly makes me a better CPO? I’m still struggling a little bit over there, but I don’t think we need something at that level because largely what still remains the domain of humans is decision making and taking the brunt of the impact of what decisions you make because I would love to blame AI for some of my bad decisions. That’s not why [inaudible 01:18:10].
Lenny Rachitsky: You can still do that. You can still do that even if it’s not.
Mayur Kamat: Yes, yes. But again, hopeful to, generally not a big fan of … The thing I call a little bit jaded. You have tools now that you write few things and they make a long essay for it. And then you have tools that compress long essays into few words. You could have just said few words in the first place and save the whole round trip. It’s like a reverse zip. I remember when we had zip and it was a game changer, but there was a big file you needed to send over a slow network, so you compressed it and sent it and then expanded it. We’re doing the reverse now. We have a small thing, we make it big and then send it over and somebody’s making it small. But on these three areas, if you’re at all skilled companies, if you don’t have a great tool for developing productivity, you’re not looking at essential basic LLM bots for deflecting customer service and you’re not looking at patterns on user transactions or user communications or detect fraud, that’s the first area I would focus on.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, I’m going to take us to another recurring segment on the podcast. It’s called Fail Corner. And the idea here is folks like you come on this podcast, there’s all these wins, killing it, CPO, this and that, and just moving into Thailand, it worked out incredibly, what a win all the time. In reality, that’s not how things go. So the question to you here is just what’s the story of a failure in your career when things didn’t go well and it was a big deal for you, and then what you learned from that experience, how that actually impacted you?
Mayur Kamat: Yeah, so from the product side, my probably most spectacular failure was I was the first PM on Hangouts. And if you ask Nikhil, he’ll probably say he was my boss then. It was an effort the size I’ve never seen before or after in my career. We had thousands of people working for me. We had entire power of Google. We had Larry literally sitting with us saying we can do anything we want Chrome to do. And we still didn’t manage to build a great messaging product.
So when I look at pure product-sense, product decision-making was, there’s several reasons now I’d had luxury of 15 years to analyze that on solving for the wrong audience, solving for the wrong DNA of the company. I have this premise that certain companies can never succeed at certain type of products like Microsoft with mobile or Google with social or Facebook with enterprise, it is just the DNA of the founder actively acts against you succeeding there.
I would’ve said Google with enterprise as well. But then Sundar came and Larry was no longer the CEO and that’s when the enterprise took off. They literally had to change the CEO to win in certain segments, but more, and then again, I worked in Nagoda during COVID, so travel company during COVID, Binance during its probably most tumultuous area of compliance and government scrutiny. There’s a lot of missteps there around externalities. I think one of the main kind of learnings from that is just don’t take on projects that are going to be six months, a year, because you just generally don’t have control over the macro. Things just move way more faster. And that’s probably cemented my kind of now product philosophy of just doing small things very quickly, spending most of the times doing that. You still launch big products, but even over there we try and get early signals as soon as possible. But because in Nagoda, like one of the big projects we launched was we wanted to control the payments infrastructure for all the hotels and we thought if we had that device in the hotel’s desk, so not only for bookings made online, but for everything that happens at the hotel, if we control that infrastructure, not only would we make money, but we had a touch point with the users that went beyond booking the travel.
Travel as you know, is not a high frequency activity. You book once, then you book six months later and most of the time people would not come to Nagoda, they would just go to Google and go to some other website. So we wanted that touch point that stayed with them and thought payments would be a great avenue to do that because that’s something you do every day. And again, we did it in the Nagoda style.
So we did an experiment. We started very small and literally went to the mall and bought these $50 Android devices where we ran our software that people could just scan the credit card by a camera and charge it. It was incredible. We had thousands of hotels use it. And then COVID hits and then there’s literally nobody going to hotels anymore. But it took us like six, nine months because of the licenses, and so to launch it. And in hindsight probably, I mean you couldn’t have thought about COVID with that sense, but still the amount of time it took to launch the product was something we could have done better. So learnings for most of it is don’t take too long to launch, don’t take too long to validate your hypothesis.
Lenny Rachitsky: The Hangout story is amazing. It’s like a classic product. People now make fun of just Google, why can’t you get this right? And it’s been changed. Names have changed a hundred times. Interestingly, Meet ended up being really good, Google Meet.
Mayur Kamat: That’s the last thing I did when I left Google.
Lenny Rachitsky: Oh, Okay.
Mayur Kamat: After we built the Hangouts, they’re like, “Okay, this is not going anywhere. We are going to start this new product called Allo.” Which also didn’t work.
Lenny Rachitsky: One of the many names,.
Mayur Kamat: But then I said, you know what? We should still, because I used to work for Android Enterprise team before, I’m like, what if we just made it an enterprise product? Let me at least write the spec for it on, hey, what would we do differently for, I still called it Hangouts by Enterprise. They rebranded it later. But that was my salvaging moment for, but from the sense, I mean the Hangouts team invented WebRTC. Now every single communication in the world happens on WebRTC. So if you think from the cultural and technological impact that the Hangouts team had is insane. Like this tool we are using every single meeting product, every single WhatsApp, voice calling, video calling, every Zoom, everything runs on WebRTC. From a technology side, I think that was a pretty massive win that the team came up with that.
Lenny Rachitsky: That’s the power of having Chrome having a browser, also, just introducing technologies.
Mayur Kamat: Yeah. Yes, absolutely.
Lenny Rachitsky: Final question before we get to a very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you want to leave listeners with or maybe a point you want to double down on just to kind of leave a little last little nugget before we get to the lightning round?
Mayur Kamat: I mean, just summarize, it depends on the audience. A lot of the folks who probably listen to it or coming it from a perspective of like, “Hey, how does this help me be better at my job tomorrow than I was today?” And for them I would say, again, if you’re truly working in areas where you think you’re optimizing your strengths and having fun, just keep doing it and just keep that as your kind of north star, as you look at new pieces. When you talk to new companies, try and evaluate the overlap of superpowers. What is your superpower? What is the company’s superpower? Will they feed each other?
If you get a very strong resonance there, I think that would be a great career step irrespective of whether it’s in Bangkok or Spain or however the compensation is going to be, because truly you’ll find that you grow much faster because it’s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy at that point. But just keep looking for overlapping superpowers all the time and not just in professional life, even the concepts beyond maybe even for relationships and stuff like folks who are extremely complementing strengths and whose superpowers feed each other make for great life partners. So there’s maybe that analogy can be extended beyond your career.
Lenny Rachitsky: Wow, that’s a powerful point right there. Well, what a cool way to end that. Well, with that Mayur, we’ve reached our very exciting lightning round. I’ve got five questions for you. Are you ready?
Mayur Kamat: Yeah, let’s do it.
Lenny Rachitsky: What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
Mayur Kamat: The one that I read most recently, so I generally don’t read a lot of books because I read a lot of content like, small content.
Lenny Rachitsky: Tweets.
Mayur Kamat: And tweets and then Substacks and Discords and WhatsApp messages, and so book takes a mind share shift for me to go read a book. The one I read most recently, which I thought was pretty amazing and a lot of overlap with what I said today, The Five Kinds Of Wealth. That one was very well articulated, especially the last point I made very early. One of the potential paths is you just do well on your job and then you find meaning elsewhere. This book is probably an incredible structured way of thinking around it. What is your wealth in terms of your health, your physical health, your mental health, your relationship health, your community and your wealth that you’re generating financial wealth is and how do you think holistically? Because at the end of the day, you are what you optimize for. If you optimize for financial wealth, you’ll become wealthy, but you might not be wealthy in a full spectrum manner.
The Strengths Finder 2.0, I said very early on. It’s still an interesting book to just think about how you would think about your strengths, but again, if you don’t want to read the book, I would just do one of these kind of online quizzes for it. But The Five Kinds of Wealth then Strength Finder 2.0 would be maybe what I would suggest.
Lenny Rachitsky: The first book by Sahil Bloom friend of the podcast willing to tell this stuff. I forgot to mention the story briefly about the Strength Finder stuff. So I actually, when I was leaving Airbnb and looking for my next thing and even thinking about leaving, I took a strengths test and I was working with executive coach and I saw the results and she’s like, “What do you see in these results? What are these results telling you?” I’m like, I don’t know. She’s like, this tells me you should start your own company and work on your own. All the strengths that are popping up here are things that you as a founder need and that really helped me.
Mayur Kamat: What’s your one person data point on that? Was it a good one?
Lenny Rachitsky: Was it is a good decision, you mean?
Mayur Kamat: Yes, relying on that strength test to make a career.
Lenny Rachitsky: The best. So great. I am such a huge fan of Strengths Finder and any kind of strengths test and interestingly, people may be afraid of taking them because they’d be like, here’s what I suck at. It always makes you feel good. It’s like, here’s the stuff you’re good at and it’s not like, here’s what you’re bad at. It’s just, here’s the stuff you’re best at and it’s always positive. It’s never like you suck at this stuff. It’s just not your strength. So it was a huge win for me. I highly recommend it.
Mayur Kamat: Awesome.
Lenny Rachitsky: Especially if you’re trying to make a career move. So yeah, fully aligned. Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you’ve really enjoyed?
Mayur Kamat: The one I saw that kind of TV shows usually I watch to kind of give it down time, so usually I watch just periodic shows, the House or Big Bang Theory and stuff. The one that I saw recently that kind of shook me a little bit was Adolescence. Again, it’s a tough topic around teenage mental health and violence in schools and just the way it was shot. I would see the first episode, even if it’s not your genre because it’s shot in a single camera motion and the whole episode for an hour, there’s no cut. Camera just keeps moving and it just makes bizarre, you feel a little different than watching it. Irrespective of this topic, which is also pretty intense. Just visually you feel different, and if you’re motion sick like me, you really feel different.
Lenny Rachitsky: That’s wonderful. It sounds like what a …
Mayur Kamat: I would watch that. I need to watch The White Lotus because everybody keeps bringing it every time I tell them I’m from Thailand and I haven’t seen it yet, so I’m behind on my mean culture a little bit.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, you are. It’s like you, no one else has not seen it. I think you’re the only person left.
Mayur Kamat: Yes, I’m the only one.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. Do you have a favorite product you’ve recently discovered that you really love?
Mayur Kamat: So products, so I spend most of my time using banking and trading products, and I would give a plug here. If you’re in Europe, try N26 or even revenue, incredible product. If you’re in the US, Robin Hood, just the motion design they have done and the onboarding is just a joy to use, whether you use it for banking or trading or just for their card. I just find the product design and motion, especially as you touch and swipe and try to be done. Anything that Nikita Beard launches. So I just downloaded Bible study or Bible chat yesterday.
Lenny Rachitsky: I saw a tweet about that. It’s like in the top 10 of all social apps and it’s like bible study.
Mayur Kamat: Yeah, it’s top ten. And I can tell why I have got three messages right now to treat my anxiety by reading Bible today, and one of the time I was feeling slightly anxious, so maybe there’s some magic there.
But the one app that I would just for personal, I used to write in Hindi. I used to write poems growing up as a kid, and that was just now this app Suno.com. I can make songs from them and they’re incredible songs, at least I think so. Nobody else thinks it so far, but just the fact that you can write something and now you have a song is just magical. The first time that AI, I saw a use case, I said, it’s nothing so far that makes me a better CPO right now, but as an artist or at least the bathroom artist, it’s just incredible that you can think of something, put it down there and you can actually see what would a professional singer and a band and a musician if they were to compose it, what it would look like. So that’s probably the most wild I have been by technology, the recent times, the Suno.com. They’re onboarding flow sucks and their growth product is, if I were the PM on Suno, I would do things a lot differently, but their core tech is magical.
Lenny Rachitsky: I’m a huge fan. One of my favorite things to do at Suno, I think it’s Suno.ai also, is just ask it to make a song in the style of a sea shanty. It’s so fun. And they give you a few options, so you could be like, here’s this version, that version.
Mayur Kamat: Yes, yes.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful in work or in life?
Mayur Kamat: One, I kind of relates to the things we talked about is there’s no right or wrong decision. There’s just low and fast decisions. Now, there are some extreme caveats to that around you’re doing something that might kill your user like healthcare or military or even compliance, which can kill your company. Don’t use it. But everywhere else in generally goes back to the strategy thing we talked about as well. A lot of the times if it’s you make a wrong decision, if you make it fast enough, you would know it was wrong and you would correct it and you would still do it faster than thinking months for the right decision. So for anything that’s reversible, anything that’s not going to get you in jail or kill your company, no right or wrong decisions, just slow or fast decisions.
Lenny Rachitsky: Final question. You’ve lived in a bunch of places. You’ve lived in Spain, Thailand, Mumbai, Seattle, I think Texas, even for some period for school?
Mayur Kamat: Yeah. College, yes.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. There’s probably other places. Which has the best food?
Mayur Kamat: Bangkok, no question. Barcelona comes closer for some, but Bangkok, you can have a three Michelin star, one of the top five restaurants in the world, spend 1 street food, stir-fried pork and rice with basil. Incredible. Just the spectrum of entire, from the cheapest food you can think of, the most expensive food you can think of in that same one kilometer walkable area, having thousands of these, literally there’s the density of food. No one comes closer. Barcelona has incredible restaurant. The best restaurant in the world is like a block away from here. It’s called Disputar. Takes like two years to get on the wait list there, but that’s on one end of the spectrum, Barcelona, that probably comes close second. But that cheap, get down 2:00 A.M. walk down and have an incredible meal for a dollar. nothing comes closer to it than Bangkok.
Lenny Rachitsky: This episode’s a great ad for Thailand. Let’s go. You definitely got to watch White Lotus. Mayur, this was awesome. We covered so much ground. I feel like I got to know you so well. We covered so many-
Mayur Kamat: Thank you so much.
Lenny Rachitsky: … perspectives in all this. Yeah, we’re not done yet. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, maybe check out if there’s roles at N26 and then how can listeners be useful to you?
Mayur Kamat: Find me, this is one of the things being old is I was one of the first users of LinkedIn, so linkedin.com/mayur. [inaudible 01:36:10] Facebook, so facebook.com/kamat or N26.com. mk@N26.com. If you’re especially curious about how we do stuff here, we are hiring, we are growing really fast. As I said, banking’s a great business to be in. We’re not going to go out of flavor for the next few thousand years. So if you’re thinking of a career, you’re thinking about Spain or was thinking about Berlin, just a whole different interesting lifestyle and different kind of product thinking, please reach out on any of those channels.
If you’re in Europe, download or try N26. Like we go by the motto, love your bank. Our founders say that people would rather go to a dentist than to a bank branch, and that’s why we build this. We truly feel like for an everyday banking, it’s just use the app and you feel like, I want to use my banking app every day. There’s some bit of magic, which I didn’t have that much contribution yet. I made it a little bit simple and seamless, but magic was there before and so if you’re in Europe, you’re looking for a new bank account, N26.com.
Lenny Rachitsky: There we go. Mayur, thank you so much for being here.
Mayur Kamat: Thank you. Thank you, Lenny, and thank you everyone.
Lenny Rachitsky: Bye, 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 LennysPodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Glossary
| English | 中文 |
|---|---|
| Agoda | Agoda(在线旅游预订平台) |
| Airbnb | Airbnb(全球短租住宿平台) |
| Alex Allgood | Alex Allgood(White Pages 创始人) |
| Allo | Allo(Google 即时通讯产品) |
| Bangalore | 班加罗尔(印度科技中心) |
| Booking Holdings | Booking Holdings(在线旅游集团,旗下含 Booking.com、Agoda 等) |
| Booking.com | Booking.com(在线旅游预订平台) |
| Brian Chesky | Brian Chesky(Airbnb 联合创始人兼 CEO) |
| C-level | C-level(企业高管层级,如 CEO、CPO 等) |
| Chime | Chime(美国数字银行) |
| co-pilot | co-pilot(AI 编程辅助工具) |
| cohort | 同期群 |
| Connie Wurz | Connie Wurz(Google 前基础设施负责人) |
| control | 对照组 |
| CPO | 首席产品官(Chief Product Officer) |
| crypto | 加密货币 |
| CZ | CZ(Binance 创始人兼 CEO) |
| director | 总监 |
| Disputar | Disputar(巴塞罗那知名餐厅,实际名称为 Disfrutar) |
| Dropbox | Dropbox(云存储服务) |
| Dubai | 迪拜 |
| executive | executive(企业高管) |
| executive coach | executive coach(高管教练) |
| FinTech | FinTech(金融科技) |
| founder mode | 创始人模式(founder mode) |
| Gemini | Gemini(Google 的 AI 助手) |
| group product manager | 集团产品经理 |
| Hangouts | Hangouts(Google 即时通讯产品) |
| Intercom | Intercom(爱尔兰客户通讯 SaaS 公司) |
| Jeff Bezos | Jeff Bezos(亚马逊创始人) |
| Jonathan Rosenberg | Jonathan Rosenberg(Google 前产品负责人) |
| KYC | KYC(Know Your Customer,了解你的客户) |
| Larry | Larry(指 Google 联合创始人 Larry Page) |
| Lenny Rachitsky | Lenny Rachitsky(播客主持人) |
| LLM | LLM(Large Language Model,大语言模型) |
| LTV | LTV(Lifetime Value,客户终身价值) |
| Maximilian | Maximilian(N26 联合创始人 Maximilian Tayenthal) |
| Microsoft | 微软 |
| N26 | N26(德国数字银行) |
| Nikhil | Nikhil(Mayur 在 Google 时的上司) |
| Nikita Bier | Nikita Bier(知名独立应用开发者,代表作包括 tbh 等社交应用) |
| north star | 北极星(指引方向的核心原则) |
| onboarding | 新手引导 |
| P-value | P 值 |
| Palantir | Palantir(美国大数据分析公司) |
| PayPal mafia | PayPal mafia(PayPal 早期员工后来成为硅谷一批重要创业者和投资人的群体) |
| PM | PM(Product Manager,产品经理) |
| Porter’s Five Forces | 波特的五力模型 |
| Q4 | Q4(人格评估工具,基于支配性与亲和性两个轴的四象限模型) |
| Ray Dalio | 瑞·达利欧(Ray Dalio,桥水基金创始人) |
| Revolut | Revolut(英国数字银行) |
| Robinhood | Robinhood(美国股票交易平台) |
| Sahil Bloom | Sahil Bloom(作家、创业者) |
| scrum | scrum(敏捷开发中的迭代团队) |
| SDK | SDK(Software Development Kit,软件开发工具包) |
| sea shanty | 海员号子(水手传统劳动歌曲) |
| SEO | SEO(Search Engine Optimization,搜索引擎优化) |
| Shreyas Doshi | Shreyas Doshi(硅谷知名 PM,前 Stripe、Google、Twitter 产品负责人) |
| stakeholder management | 干系人管理 |
| statistical significance | 统计显著性 |
| Statsig | Statsig(实验与功能管理平台) |
| Strength Finder 2.0 | 《Strength Finder 2.0》(优势识别器,盖洛普出版的优势评估工具书) |
| Stripe | Stripe(在线支付平台) |
| Substack | Substack(newsletter 发布平台) |
| Sundar | Sundar(指 Google CEO Sundar Pichai) |
| Suno | Suno(AI 音乐生成平台) |
| Thai baht | 泰铢 |
| Valentin | Valentin(N26 联合创始人 Valentin Stalf) |
| variant | 实验组 |
| Vijay | Vijay(前 Facebook 实验化负责人,Statsig 创始人) |
| VP of product | 产品副总裁 |
| WebRTC | WebRTC(Web Real-Time Communication,网页实时通信协议) |
| White Lotus | 《白莲花度假村》(White Lotus,HBO 热门剧集) |
| White Pages | White Pages(美国电话号码查询与来电识别公司) |
| Writer | Writer(AI 写作与文案生成工具) |
| 《Adolescence》 | 《Adolescence》(混沌少年时,英国 Netflix 短剧) |
| 《Big Bang Theory》 | 《Big Bang Theory》(生活大爆炸,美国情景喜剧) |
| 《House》 | 《House》(豪斯医生,美国医疗剧) |
| 《The Five Kinds of Wealth》 | 《The Five Kinds of Wealth》(五种财富) |
Reformatted by reformat_english.py
来自 Binance、N26、Google 等公司的非传统产品经验 | Mayur Kamat(N26 CPO)
Mayur Kamat: 我最惨烈的一次失败,大概是我作为第一个 PM 负责 Hangouts 的那次。我们有上千人为我们工作,拥有 Google 全部的资源,Larry 就坐在我们旁边,说 Chrome 想做什么都可以——但我们仍然没能做出一款出色的消息产品。最大的教训是:不要接手那种需要半年、一年才能出结果的项目,因为你根本无法控制宏观环境。做产品经理的挑战在于,所有人都觉得自己能胜任这份工作。任何使用产品的人都会觉得自己有想法,所以到某个时刻你会问自己:“我的专业在哪里?我的科学在哪里?“而当你建立起实验体系的那一刻,你就把它变成了一门科学。
Lenny Rachitsky: 很多职场新人会说:“我只想思考战略,我要思考大局。”
Mayur Kamat: 对产品来说,战略有点被高估了。对大多数产品经理而言,你的战略应该是:“我能多快地从假设走到数据?“
嘉宾介绍
Lenny Rachitsky: 今天的嘉宾是 Mayur Kamat。Mayur 是 N26 的首席产品官(Chief Product Officer),N26 是全球最成功的金融科技创业公司之一,在我的研究中,它跻身全球招聘和培养最优秀产品经理的前五家公司。在加入 N26 之前,Mayur 曾任 Binance 全球产品负责人、Agoda 产品副总裁——Agoda 是一家总部位于泰国、市值超过千亿美元的公司——他还曾在 Google 和 Microsoft 担任 PM。在这次广泛的对话中,Mayur 分享了他在招聘和培养优秀产品经理方面的经验,在 Binance 工作期间的收获——正如你很快会听到的,那里的工作方式是最疯狂、最独特的之一——他从 Google 早期尝试做 Hangouts 的失败中学到了什么(他是那里的第一个 PM)。此外还有在亚洲、欧洲和美国工作的利弊,为什么你应该在美国西海岸开始你的职业生涯,为什么职业生涯早期的薪酬并不重要,以及更多内容。
加入 Binance 之前的经历
Lenny Rachitsky: Mayur,非常感谢你能来,欢迎来到播客。
Mayur Kamat: 谢谢,这真的令人非常兴奋。感谢你的邀请。
Binance 的工作经历
Lenny Rachitsky: 我想从你在 Binance 的经历聊起。你在 Google 工作过,在 Microsoft 工作过,在一家叫 Agoda 的公司工作过,现在你在 N26。我猜 Binance 是你工作过的最独特的地方,我也从未听说过在像 Binance 这样的公司工作是什么体验。我刚在 Wikipedia 上查了一下,看到他们起步于中国,然后搬到日本,又搬到马耳他,现在没有正式的总部。在 Binance 工作到底是什么感觉?跟其他你待过的地方相比,最独特的是什么?
Mayur Kamat: 好的。先简单介绍一下 Binance 的背景,因为我觉得很多人听说过它,有些印象是正面的,有些则不然。Binance 的规模相当令人震撼。简单回顾一下历史:他们在 2017 年作为加密货币交易所起步,当时市场上已经有其他加密货币交易所运营多年了,比如 Coinbase。但他们在六个月内就成为了第一名。这是史无前例的——就像今天推出一个搜索引擎,然后六个月后击败 Google。然后在五年内,他们的峰值估值达到了大约 4000 亿美元,而员工只有 2000 人。从零到 4000 亿美元,只用了五年。这种规模前所未有。Google 没做到,Facebook 也没做到,你所听说的那些公司都没做到。这确实令人惊叹。我在那里担任产品负责人时,我的核心 KPI 是交易量,而我每月的 KPI 是以万亿美元为单位计算的。
这种规模令人难以置信。我们十几二十人的团队运营着数十亿美元利润的业务。这自然带来两个问题:第一,他们是如何做到这种规模的;第二,维持这种运转需要什么样的文化?这两点都非常引人入胜。我觉得我们可以花很多时间来讨论,但真正有趣的是——首先,你不可能通过传统的层级结构做到这一点。CZ,也就是创始人兼 CEO,一度有 55 个直接下属,而他的直接下属也差不多是这样的管理幅度。在公司历史的大部分时间里,普通员工和 CEO 之间只有一层。这带来了极端高效的决策和执行速度。当你有 55 个直接下属时,你不可能做一对一会议,所以形成了一种一对多的沟通文化,并且尽可能频繁地进行。
Mayur Kamat: 比如领导团队每天都要开会。因为领导团队分布在世界各地,我在新加坡时,每天晚上 11 点开会。包括周末和假期,都是如此。领导团队每天晚上 11 点都在,这意味着没有任何决策会被阻塞超过 24 小时。大部分决策我们在那 24 小时内通过聊天工具就做了,但如果有大事,就会升级上报、做出决定。我们的执行在很大程度上基于一个我现在一直带在身边的方法论——我称之为”通过每日会议来运作产品”。我们会在每晚的领导会议上为一个紧急事项指定一个负责人。然后这个负责人需要全力投入,在问题解决之前每天都盯着这件事,然后在每日会议上汇报进展。有些议题规模非常大,比如”我们如何在接下来三个月内在 15 个国家拿到 15 个金融牌照?“这种规模的——
Lenny Rachitsky: 你们只有 24 小时。
Mayur Kamat: 是的,而且人们真的做到了。非常有趣的一点是:当你把真正聪明的人放到真正困难的问题上,不限制他们解决问题所需的资源——不管是钱还是人——唯一受限的就是时间。时间永远是稀缺的。人在极短的时间内也能移山填海。那种极致的主人翁意识文化,我想大概是在 Binance 工作最令人着迷的部分,我现在也试图把它带到其他工作中去。它有一些好的方面,比如对细节的关注,能够不管你的头衔是什么、手下有多少人,都能选定某个领域并全权负责。当然也有一些负面影响,比如可能给团队带来大量的上下文切换和随机扰动,尤其是当事情没有经过深思熟虑的时候。我在思考的是,其中哪些优秀的部分可以带到不同的角色中去。但那种每日会议的机制——如果有什么事情超级紧急,你如何直接负责、亲自推动,你自己深入细节,团队就知道他们也需要深入细节,然后高效执行——这可能最令人着迷。还有很多惊心动魄的故事。我在那里待了两年,那段时间发生的有趣故事太多了,不过如果你有具体问题的话,我可以稍后再展开聊。
极致扁平的结构
Lenny Rachitsky: 我很想听一个这样的故事。这确实跟我预期的一样有趣。目前我听到的,让他们能以这种疯狂的速度和规模运转的做法是:整个领导团队每天开会,你那边是晚上 11 点。希望对世界其他地方的同事来说时间好一些。
Mayur Kamat: 有些人住在澳大利亚悉尼,对他们来说是凌晨 1 点。
Lenny Rachitsky: 天哪。这种扁平结构的想法,嗯,挺有意思的,因为我猜它在其他方面未必都是好事。还有”深入细节”这个理念,我想就此问一下。这在现实中到底是什么样的?我觉得很多人、很多领导者都会说,“哦对,我在细节里,我们应该关注细节。“但在 Binance 的实际工作中,这到底是什么样子?
深入细节:KYC 流程优化的实战
Mayur Kamat: 我举个例子。我刚加入的时候,我们面临的最大产品问题之一是这样的:加密货币之前基本不受监管,你只需要一个邮箱地址,甚至一个钱包就能开始交易,几乎没有摩擦。然后突然之间变成受监管的了,你几乎要走一套跟银行一样的完整 KYC(Know Your Customer,了解你的客户)流程。这意味着转化率从,比如说 100% 直接掉到 2%。现在我们必须解决这个问题。这就是每日会议级别的问题。如果你只在一个国家运营,那还好办。但如果你在 200 个国家运营,连证件验收标准都没有统一规范,那问题就大得多了。你不能说”找个 KYC 供应商把入驻流程做了”就完事了。
我们必须做到这个程度——排名前 50 的国家、排名前 10 的证件类型,做一张大约 500 个格子的表格,记录每个环节的转化率。然后我们去分析:哈萨克斯坦的护照通过率非常低,我们能做什么?需要换供应商吗?需要更好的图像识别技术吗?需要供应商提供新的 SDK(Software Development Kit,软件开发工具包)吗?然后我们一个格子一个格子地去解决。换作一般的做法,如果我在运营一个典型的产品团队,我会说好吧,我们只看覆盖前 90% 用户的部分就行了。但这是 Binance,CZ 的理念是”不让任何一个用户掉队。即使刚果的那一个用户也很重要,因为这是他们的金融包容。“所以那 500 个格子全都重要,不管它们对转化率的影响有多小。
这就是 Binance 的一点味道。极度以客户为中心,客户不是一个数字,屏幕另一端是一个活生生的人,我们关心他们。所以你可能会被问到这样的问题:为什么肯尼亚的驾照通过率突然下降了?而这只是一个拥有 80 多个不同产品的大型产品中的一个小问题。你当然不可能对每个产品都做到这个程度,但核心理念是:你现在正在做的最有杠杆效应的决策是什么?如果是增长,那关键就是入驻流程,那你就最好搞清楚流程中每一个屏幕的细节,用户在哪里流失,你的团队正在为此做什么。这种程度的细节关注,然后在你旅程的不同阶段对不同的产品重复这个过程。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我能想象有些听众会说,他们自己的团队就负责产品的入驻流程和 KYC 流程,已经够难了,觉得”我们的流程有各种问题”。想象一下,这件事要乘以 100 个不同国家、100 个不同版本的流程。天哪。
Mayur Kamat: 还有各种证件。非常棘手,非常棘手,但我们也有资源。有一次我们说,当时 KYC 团队有 20 个人,我们说”接下来的三个月,我们要扩到 500 人。”
Lenny Rachitsky: 这本身也有它的负面影响。
极端模式的力量
Mayur Kamat: 有它的负面影响,但如果你以这种极端模式运转,不太在意团队的压力和个人成长方面,纯粹从产品执行的角度来看,它会带来惊人的力量。这大概是我职业生涯中第二次感受到那种”哇,原来可以这样”的时刻,因为在其他公司,做同样的事可能需要好几年。第一次是在 Google。我记得刚加入 Google,入职第一天,我是 Gmail 移动端同步功能的产品经理。我正在参加入职培训会议,他们把我拉出来说,“嘿,出问题了。服务挂了,《华尔街日报》正在写一篇文章,说 Google、微软、Apple 没有协调好导致服务中断,所以你现在就得进作战室。”
是 iOS 4 的一个 bug,这是很久以前的事了,它导致每个用户都要拉取整个 Gmail 收件箱,重新同步全部邮件。Apple 那边的 bug 需要两三周才能修复,但它给我们的服务器带来了 1000 倍的负载。我记得当时 Google 基础设施负责人 Connie Wurz,他就说了一个”好”,然后按了个按钮,接下来两周就多出了 1000 倍的服务器。我当时就想,“哇,这就是规模,“对吧?这是我第二次感受到那种”哇”的时刻——哦,我们直接投入了 500 人就把问题解决了。关键不在于拥有 500 人,而在于能如此迅速地调度他们。我不认为我在其他任何公司能做到这一点。
极端工作方式的前提条件
Lenny Rachitsky: 回过头来聊聊这些激进的工作方式,每个人 50 个直接下属这个做法,以及关心刚果一个人无法注册这个理念,你觉得这是个好主意吗?你现在的工作方式还会采用这些吗,还是说只是在那种特定情况下才重要?其他地方也许不适用?
Mayur Kamat: 有几个前提条件。第一,你增长得非常快。员工的成长来自于每天面对不断增长的规模化问题,不需要管理者花太多精力去想你需要怎样成长。总体而言,最好的成长方式是在一家高速增长的公司工作。如果这个条件成立,第二,你的员工薪酬非常优厚,所以他们更关心 KPI,而不是”我职业发展的下一个阶段是什么,我怎么升职”。我们的奖金结构从 0% 到 500%,所以很多人并不太在意 10%、20% 的加薪。他们只想做出出色的工作,因为他们知道自己会被好好对待。第三,它是一家使命驱动的公司,到头来仍然相信你所做的事情超越了 KPI 本身。
在 Binance,有一个非常强烈的信念:世界上 80% 的人无法获得金融工具。他们甚至无法获得一种可以信任的货币。当我们生活在欧洲或美国,想到加密货币时,很大程度上是关于投机或比特币。但对世界上大多数人来说,他们只需要能获取美元稳定币,只需要知道我的货币不会因为超出我控制范围的因素而贬值。我们的很多员工来自这些国家,他们有非常强烈的使命信念,认为我们正在做的事情将真正赋能数十亿人。这里面有一种力量。很多人会想,“嘿,我要翻山越岭,因为这不仅仅是为了钱,不仅仅是为了我的职业生涯。而是为了做一件能改变世界的事情。“
加速职业成长
Lenny Rachitsky: 我们接着聊加速职业成长这个话题,谈谈你现在所在的地方——N26。你也知道,我一直在研究哪些公司能招聘和培养出最优秀的产品经理。我做了几轮分析,N26 在两种评估方式中都排进了前五,基本上就是看哪些公司的校友在后续职业生涯中表现最出色。N26 排名非常靠前。我想从几个角度来谈。一个是 N26 作为一家公司,在招聘和孵化最优秀人才方面做了什么;另一个是你个人层面,你对别人的建议是什么,你如何帮助他们成为出色的产品经理。让我们先从第二个方面开始。你分享给手下产品经理的、最常见的、影响最大的职业建议是什么?你觉得哪些建议最能帮助他们推进职业发展、走出职业瓶颈?
Mayur Kamat: 我认为第一点我之前已经分享过了,你能做的最好的事情就是找到快速增长的公司,因为它能以更快的频率复利你的学习。就用最基本的复利公式,即使你的利率很低,如果是按天复利而不是按年复利,两年之后,你会到达一个完全不同的终点。快速增长的公司就是能让你以快得多的速度获得那种学习。我记得我职业生涯第一站是加入微软。实习期间我参与的一些产品,到我三四年后离开微软时都还没上线。这是一个非常非常低的复利率。当然,20 年后的微软已经是完全不同的公司了,值得庆幸。然后你对比一下 Binance 这样的地方,每天、每小时、每分钟你都在发布东西,然后从中学习。
你的学习复利越快,你成长得就越快。第二点一般来说是,你需要围绕你擅长的事情来优化。现在有了两个孩子,我相当确信一点:你的优势很早就定型了。我看着我的九岁和十二岁的孩子,他们有完全不同的一套优势。如果你 25 岁,刚进入职业生涯,那时很难说”哦,这些是我的弱点,我需要改进这些。“大量的职业反馈通常是围绕”嘿,这些是你需要提升的地方。你为什么不在这方面多努力一下?“我坚定地站在这个阵营:你需要知道自己擅长什么,你的超能力是什么,然后找到那些成功与否取决于你能多大程度发挥这些超能力的工作。
职业生涯早期,你无法回避一个事实:有些事情你就是不擅长,你只能想办法应对。如果你的职级更高,就容易一些,因为你可以组建一个与你优势互补的团队。但话说回来,如果你处于职业早期,要找到适合自己的地方——如果你是一个很有创意的人,如果你看到一个产品就能想出 100 件可以改进的事,你总是想着下一个最好的东西是什么、能多快实现它,那你需要在有高度实验文化的团队工作。你需要在大公司的增长团队工作。如果你在一家 FinTech 公司做合规相关的项目或者上线一个新的业务线,你会很挣扎,对吧?
Mayur Kamat: 同样,如果你有极强的管理型结构思维,擅长干系人管理,情商很高,那你应该去那些有大量复杂的人员管理和流程管理的团队工作。你在增长团队里会很挣扎,因为那里的期望是你做事要非常快。我会首先非常内省地审视自己:我真正的优势是什么?然后去找那些这些优势对成功至关重要的工作。
第三,我想说的是,不要为了薪酬去优化,尤其是职业生涯早期。如果你真的在朝着某天成为高管或者创办自己的公司并取得成功的方向前进,你会发现薪酬严重后置——你 90% 的收入会集中在职业生涯最后五年赚回来,所以不要在职业生涯早期去为那 10%、20% 去优化。
如果你面前有两份工作,在职业生涯的前 15 年里,我会说不要看薪酬。最后一点,这个比较特别。我之前没有深入想过这个问题,但现在我觉得这可能是最能给人启发的建议:在职业生涯很早的时候就确定你是否真的想某天成为 C-level 高管,想某天成为一个 executive,因为如果你有雄心又很成功,你进入产品管理,你是同侪中的佼佼者,周围人几乎默认你会走到那一步,而你从未真正质疑或问过自己:这是我需要的吗?是我想要去追求的吗?这其中有没有我真正会享受的?不只是那个终点,还包括通往那个终点的过程本身。
很多人基于这种假设做出了次优的选择。你可以打造出色的事业,过精彩的生活,只需要把你擅长的事情做到极致,多做这些事。也许你职业生涯的终点是总监,也许是集团产品经理,但在这个过程中,你构建了一个不围绕工作运转、却赋予你极大意义的完整生活。或者你也可以说,你知道吗?工作是我身份认同的很大一部分。有人问我什么让我每天醒来,什么给了我那股能量?是我的工作。我无法把我的身份认同和工作分开。那么也许你应该去走那条 C-level 的路,因为那样你才会真正感到充实,你才能够应对那条路上要求你面对的挑战和牺牲。
如果你能早点校准这一点,跟自己进行一次真正的对话:“是的,我要走那条路,我要去做这件事”,你会做出不同的职业选择。在那条路上,我一定会说不要看薪酬。两份工作摆在你面前,就看三件事:它能给我高倍速的学习复利吗?它与我的优势高度重叠吗?我做这件事会开心吗?如果你做这件事开心,它就会形成一个良性循环——你做得越多,越擅长,越擅长,做得越多。
到底要不要成为 CPO?
Lenny Rachitsky: 关于决定你是否想成为 CPO 这个问题——你的意思是不是说,如果你选择了那条路,那就是很大的牺牲,会有压力,工作生活平衡会更差?这是不是核心问题?
Mayur Kamat: 不不不,绝对不是。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好。
Mayur Kamat: 绝对不是。如果你真心享受你的工作和正在做的事情,它不会感觉像牺牲。当你走在街上看到一个新产品,在 App Store 里看到一个新应用,你会想:“哦,这个好酷。看看他们怎么做新手引导的。看看他们 App Store 页面怎么设计的。“如果这些真的让你充实、让你满足——你无时无刻不在想为什么东西可以更好、怎么可以更好——那么那些所谓的牺牲不会感觉像牺牲。你不会觉得你在加班。不会觉得,当你跟 PM 交流给他们指导时、当你在构建产品时、当你在招人时,这些事情是在填满你,而不是在消耗你。那你在这段旅程中会获得极大的乐趣。所以核心不在于牺牲或工作生活平衡。
当你开始有那些对话的时候,你可能就不在那条路上了。你也不应该在那条路上,因为”工作生活平衡”这个词一出现——我记得 Jeff Bezos 说过他讨厌这个词,因为它暗示存在两个对立的东西需要平衡,对吧?应该叫”工作生活极致体验”之类的,你工作的每一刻和生活的每一刻都是极致的。但对一些人来说,这很自然,因为他们天生如此。这些人绝对应该去追求,因为它会带来极大的充实感,那些挑战也不会觉得那么沉重。而如果不是这样,一切都会感觉像牺牲,感觉像需要平衡的东西。那样的话,即使你很擅长,你也不会享受其中,而到了某个节点,你也不会再擅长了。
PM 的其他职业路径
Lenny Rachitsky: 对于现在做 PM 的人来说,几乎有一种暗示:他们的职业路径最终指向 CPO。这就是他们所在的阶梯。你见过的、你管理过的人当中,最常见的另外三条路径是什么?这样大家可以去想:“好吧,我不一定非要一直往上爬这个阶梯,还有这些其他方向可以走。”
Mayur Kamat: 第一条,这也是回到你之前关于 N26 的问题——如果你在高速增长的公司工作,尤其是 FinTech 领域,很多人最终走上了创业的路。创业可能是最显而易见也最令人兴奋的替代路径。我唯一想问的仍然是同一个问题:你擅长什么,你喜欢做什么。创办公司的一个挑战是,运营公司的大部分工作跟打造一个伟大的产品毫无关系,尤其是随着公司规模变大。我 20 年的职业生涯中有 17 年是在为创始人工作。即使在 Google,Nikhil 是我的老板,他之前也是创始人。现在这些 CEO 跟我说的就是:“我想要你的工作。“因为那是我过去做的,是我热爱做的,而现在我 90% 的时间在做的事情不是我真正享受的事。
但那些作为 PM 享受构建东西的人,很多东西你无法控制,你会觉得:“嘿,这阻碍了我的成长。这阻止了我真正享受工作。“那创业是一条很好的路。你有了控制权,你拥有决策权。你很少再能说:“嘿,这件事没成是因为那个人。“对吧?如果你经常遇到那种情况,那创业对你来说是一条很好的路,因为这样球在你手上,无论好坏。
在专业领域深耕
Mayur Kamat: 另一条路呢,其实跟是否当 CPO 关系不大,更多是横向拓宽你的广度、纵向加深你的深度,而不是一味地往上爬阶梯。你要么在某个特定领域做到极其专业,让自己有足够的价值从人群中脱颖而出。比如说在 FinTech 领域,现在我们有专注于新手引导和 KYC 的专家,有欺诈领域的专家,有对银行卡体系、万事达卡运作机制以及如何为用户争取最优激励方案有深入理解的人,还有客户忠诚度和留存方面的专家。你建立起这种领域专长,然后你会发现所有人都需要它,对吧?这可以成为一条极其有效的专业化路径。所以,即使你不是 CPO,你也有可能在某个团队主导增长。这算是第二条路。
找到工作之外的身份认同
第三条路,同样不想贬低它——你会意识到工作不会是我身份认同的主要部分。我的身份是:作为一个父母我是谁?作为社区的一员我是谁?作为儿子对父母来说我是谁?作为艺术家或贡献者我是谁?我最终想成为一个全面的人。工作很好,我也很擅长,但我会只做到需要的程度。价值和意义——马斯洛金字塔顶端的那部分——来自工作以外的一切。然后你就过上一种平衡的生活,因为工作只是其中的一部分,其余的填补了完整的画面。
高速增长公司与密集人脉网络
Lenny Rachitsky: 所以,总结一下这四条非常好的建议,关于如何保持职业动力、突破瓶颈、加速发展——去高速增长的公司工作,因为你的学习会复利累积,还有你建立的人脉网络,你甚至没提这一点,但它非常有价值,尤其是当公司发展得好的时候。有时公司增长非常好,还会有额外的好处,但即使公司表现一般,你仍然收获很多。
Mayur Kamat: 完全同意。拿 N26 来说,他们之所以出了这么多创始人,原因之一就是它是一个品类定义型的公司——我们是第一批真正意义上的移动银行,对吧?所以我们在早期遇到的很多问题,没有其他人见过。每个 PM 都必须在历史上第一次解决它。那是一种完全不同层次的淬炼。同样情况的还有其他公司,它们差不多同时起步。那些公司之所以出现在排行榜前列,是因为你在任何人能做到之前就做到了,你靠的是真正的移山填海。第二点,你还看到我们有整个 PayPal mafia 的现象。当你见证了这种早期成功,所有人是一起见证的。所以当他们各自出发时,他们自带那个人脉网络,正如你所说。
这些 PM 也许创办了公司,但也许还有一个商务拓展经理也创办了公司,现在你们可以合作、建立伙伴关系。这种共同的成功——很多早期创业公司都经历过的——创造了一种比在大公司工作时更紧密的人脉网络,因为在大公司里,你们并不都是同时看到成功的。还有第三点,就是创始人本身。他们是非常有使命感驱动的创始人。我现在回过头来看 N26 的 Valentin 和 Maximilian,或者看 CZ,总是由衷地钦佩。无论你用什么指标来定义成功——公司规模、个人人脉——他们都已经达到了超出任何人想象的成功程度。然后还能每天醒来,日复一日、一天数小时地投入其中,驱动你的是一种完全不同层次的东西。
这些人是真正的探索者,是未来会去探索新星球的人,或者是 17 世纪驾船出海发现新大陆的人。能够直接接触这些人,是极其、极其赋能的。你不仅从中学到东西,还会被激励。如果你之前对成功的定义是 X,现在你的定义变成了 10X,你会自然而然地推动自己走得更远。所以我认为,这三点——早期加入品类定义型公司、共同成功与密集人脉网络的形成、以及被极其成功和有才华的人所激励——是关键。
FinTech 为何培养优秀 PM
Lenny Rachitsky: 你指出了一个非常有意思的洞察,我之前忘了提——在那份培养最优秀 PM 的公司名单中,有很多 FinTech 公司。我觉得你触及了原因,因为这些问题极其复杂、从未被解决过,而且是在大规模层面解决的。
Mayur Kamat: FinTech 最有趣的地方在于——你有两类客户。一类是你的普通用户,另一类是监管机构,你需要让两者都满意。而通常情况下,让一方满意的举措会让另一方不太满意。所以你一直在处理各种权衡。在大多数公司,PM 确实会面临一些权衡,但它们不是生死攸关的。而在 FinTech,每一个权衡都是生死攸关的。创办公司时,每个权衡都是生死攸关的——你做了一个错误的决定,你可能就不存在了。在 FinTech,很多 PM 每天都在经历这种局面,这可能让他们锻炼出了一种完全不同层次的协调能力,比在其他公司做 PM 所需要的要高得多。
如何发现自己的优势
Lenny Rachitsky: 是的,这说得太好了。真的非常好的干系人管理和影响力运用,处理所有这些权衡。我觉得这一点非常好。我想回到优势这个话题,因为这真的很重要,我一直想聊这个。回顾一下,你提到的四点是真正能帮你加速职业发展要寻找的东西:增长非常快的公司;做自己擅长的事,找到能发挥你优势而非暴露你短板的角色;不要优化当期薪酬,这一点说得太好了。你的核心观点是,你大部分的收入会来得更晚,大概 50% 的比例——你职业生涯后半段的收入可能是前半段的 10 倍不止。所以要为未来的收入优化,而不是今天的。
然后就是这个问题——问自己,你想当 CPO 吗?你想走 C-suite 路线,还是计划创办一家公司或其他?这决定了你应该选择什么样的角色。回到优势这个话题,人们怎么发现自己的优势呢?你有什么建议给那些坐在那里想”我到底擅长什么?我不知道”的人?
Mayur Kamat: 有几种方法。我记得读过一本书,当时是叫《Now Discover Your Strengths》,现在应该叫《Strength Finder 2.0》了。它现在已经有 20 年了,但还有很多更新的方法。我自己做过两种,这两种我不太确定对一般人是否容易获取,但我可以分享一下。在 Agoda,我们曾经为每一个参加面试的 PM 花 5000 美元请一位心理学家。在你完成 PM 面试轮次之后,我们会把你送去进行心理评估。那是一个长达六小时的心理测评,然后他们会告诉我你的优势是什么,不仅如此,其中还包括一个 IQ 测试的组成部分。
Mayur Kamat: 这样我们就能知道你处于哪个百分位,不仅仅是一个笼统的 IQ 分数——像爱因斯坦级别还是不是——而是涵盖不同维度的得分,比如模式识别、结构化思维、数值能力、语言能力等。所以很多人说自己招最聪明的人,而在 Agoda,我们确确实实招了最聪明的人,因为我们花了大价钱请心理学家来告诉我们他们到底聪不聪明。除此之外,他们还会给你一份优势和劣势分析。这个工具以前叫——我知道这家公司现在还在——叫 Q4,之所以叫 Q4,是因为它有两个轴、四个象限,一个是支配性,一个是亲和性。你希望找到的人在第四象限,即高支配性、高亲和性。而你会意识到,如果你同时还要聪明的人,要找到落在那个象限的人,简直是大海捞针。
说实话,我当时差点没做这个测评。我心想,我做了 15 年产品了,让我去做一个六小时的测评,简直是一种冒犯。我当时唯一愿意做的原因是我儿子当时四岁半,我在教他数学,因为他要上幼儿园了。然后六个月内他就学会了我所知道的所有数学知识,他甚至开始解二次方程了。我们想,哦,家里出了个天才,得带他去测一下。所以我们去给他做测试,这也是我唯一愿意自己做这个测试的原因,因为我觉得了解一下这个流程会很有意思。但当我拿到结果的时候,我觉得它太准了。
准得惊人——哪些领域我会做得好,哪些领域我会遇到困难需要帮助,都说得非常到位。这是一种方法,不过代价很高。大概一两年前,CZ 和瑞·达利欧是好朋友,所以我们请瑞·达利欧来参加我们的 executive 团建活动,他向我们展示了他和他的公司是如何做优势评估的。他有一套——那套方法容易获取得多,大概只要 50 美元。你可以去——搜一下瑞·达利欧的优势评估,有一个网站你可以去用。运作方式对 executive 稍有不同,你自己做一遍,它会给出你的各项指标,告诉你你认为自己有多好,然后你的领导团队也会就不同维度对你投票。所以这是一个双层评估——你认为自己有多好,以及其他人认为你有多好。
两者的重叠部分就是你真正的优势所在。作为 CEO,我可以说:“哦,Mayur 在设计方面很出色。其他人也都知道 Mayur 在设计方面很出色。那就把设计相关的问题交给 Mayur。” 所以这是另一种方式。现在有科学的方法来做这件事了,而且比我很久以前读那本书的时候进步了很多。再说一次,如果你真的很好奇,花不了太多时间,而且现在门槛低了很多。这是一种方法。它会在执行力、结构化思维、创新和设计、创造力、干系人管理、情商等方面给你一个更科学的画像。但也有一种更简单的方法。
PM 如何在实践中发现优势
作为 PM,你做的大部分工作其实都差不多。每个人都在做同样几件事:设计路线图,提出你认为的产品策略,大量时间花在管理工程师、确保他们做事上,还有干系人管理、营销、合规等等,以及产品发布和数据追踪分析。对大多数 PM 来说,这些是共同的。只是不同的岗位对某一方面的要求更多一些。你在做这些事情的时候,就会知道哪些是你真正擅长的、做起来很享受的。也许你不喜欢 Jira,不喜欢追踪工单、跟进别人做事,这是你工作中最痛苦的部分——那就远离那些需要大量结构化复杂干系人管理的工作。或者你发现自己在那方面做得很好,但有人问你”下周我们要做哪 15 件事来提升转化率?“的时候你就很头疼,坐下来想好几个小时也想不出来——那这可能就不是你的优势。随着时间的推移,你会建立起一种自我校准,知道哪些事情你做得开心、哪些不开心。然后当你看下一份工作时,试着判断一下:他们是不是因为你那些你并不喜欢做但做得还不错的事情在招你?如果是这样,你去了大概也不会很开心,也不会有很高的成长速度。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这里信息量很大。我想补充一个我觉得很重要的观点,也好奇你是否同意。很多职场新人会说:“我只想做策略,我要思考大局,我不想就坐在那里优化路线图、处理 Jira。” 但实际上,当你刚开始的时候,这就是你的工作。你需要先挣得贡献愿景和策略的权利。
Mayur Kamat: 我们在节目前聊过反向观点这个话题,而产品策略从定义上来说似乎是一种——这话可能会引起争议。
Lenny Rachitsky: 很好。
产品策略是否被高估了
Mayur Kamat: 其实也不算……”产品”和”策略”这两个词放在一起对我来说总是有些矛盾的。做产品,你有的是假设,如果假设可以验证,你就不需要策略。如果我说”嘿,如果我做这个功能,我知道它能带来这么多用户,在这个时间范围内,以这个转化率、这个获客成本和这个 LTV”——这就是你的假设,你可以很快在市场上验证它。如果验证通过了,你的策略就有了:继续做更多同样的事。策略永远就是继续做更多,或者不要做,对吧?策略就这么简单。关键在于搞清楚哪些该放进哪个桶里。而如果你执行速度够快,以结构化、实验驱动的方式推进,策略在很大程度上就变成了一个已解决的问题。
对大多数人来说,这是一个挑战。很多人以为策略就是研究波特的五力模型,做很多幻灯片,看一些数据然后切片分析,说”我们应该去这个市场或那个市场”。但这一切很大程度上只是某种包装过的直觉。问题在于,通常最后是会议室里声音最大的人说了算。如果你是职场新人,这个过程会非常令人沮丧,因为你觉得自己比谁都懂策略,但其实不过是一堆包装过的直觉,然后头衔最大、声音最响的那个人就拍板了。我职业生涯很早期的时候,Jonathan Rosenberg,他是 Google 的产品负责人,那时候他还没有被叫作 CPO,所有 PM 都汇报给他。他有一句经常挂在嘴边的话:“拿数据来找我。如果你拿想法来找我,我们就按我的来。” 意思就是,你可以说任何想法,但我们只会按我想的做,除非你有强有力的证据来说服我。所以再说一次,对产品来说策略是有点被高估的。对于市场扩张、投资决策、许可证、合规等领域,策略确实有意义、有用处。但对于大多数产品经理来说,你的策略应该是:我能多快地从假设走到数据?你能走得越快,你的策略就越简单。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这确实是个很有争议的观点。我很好奇,你在 N26 是怎么把这套理念落实到团队中的?是不是就是——“我不需要看一整年的策略规划,只需要给我计划、给我们要测试什么、给我们假设就行”?你实际上是怎么跟你的 PM 团队沟通的?
Mayur Kamat: 我们用了一个工具。我要特别提一下 Statsig,因为他们的产品非常棒。Vijay 以前负责 Facebook 的实验化体系,做了这个工具。市面上类似的工具有好几家。但如果你在正规地跑实验,我就直接看 Statsig 的仪表盘,对吧?我看实验结果,看各项指标的变化,看 P 值,看多快能达到统计显著性。然后我就说,“哦,这个有效,继续做更多类似的。” 当然,有些领域你没法这样做,比如合规、法律方面,尤其是在欧洲,还有定价。在美国,你可以跑定价实验;在欧洲,情况就不太一样了。所以这些领域,你需要做更多深入的思考,理解你的同期群,构建更有条理的理由来说明为什么应该做这件事,但你没办法在几天内、最多几周内就通过测试知道这是不是个好主意。
不可逆决策与同期群分析
那些要么是不可逆决策、要么需要很长时间才能验证结果的事情,那就先做一些前期功课。我们很大程度地关注一个问题——我发现很多公司只看数据、不看同期群,结果做了完全错误的决策。因为如果你把仪表盘上的用户混在一起看——10 年的用户、20 年的用户,甚至只是 6 个月的用户——他们的行为是完全不同的。如果你从同期群的层面去观察特定用户群体的发展变化,通常能做出更好的决策。但即便如此,在你开始追踪数据和基于数据做决策之间,仍然存在大量噪音。在这段时间里,世界已经变了。我刚提出这个概念的时候,大家觉得很陌生。我会说,你看,转化率下降了,虽然产品做得很好,但比特币暴跌了,对吧?没有人想去注册一个交易所账户。所以如果你只是简单地做前后对比,你会以为产品上出了什么问题。但如果你用实验的方式来衡量,就会知道,实验组和对照组之间,效果其实还是很好的,虽然整体转化率确实下降了。
建立实验文化
总的来说,当我接手一个角色时,如果公司还没有实验文化——而这很大程度上正是他们请我来的原因——最先要做的第一件事就是:怎么把实验文化引进来?首先是合适的文化、合适的激励机制和合适的工具。一旦搭建好,就变得非常有趣了。对 PM 来说也非常有趣,因为你把绩效评估的权力民主化了,交给了产品经理。第二件事,也是我现在跟我的 PM 们说的——如果你仔细想想,这其实是真正赋能他们的一点——做产品经理的挑战在于,每个人都觉得自己能做这份工作,对吧?你去……CFO 可能有个想法,财务主管可能有个想法。任何使用产品的人都觉得自己有想法,对吧?所以到某个时候你会想,我的专业壁垒到底在哪?我的科学方法在哪?没有人会跑去找会计说,“嘿,我对怎么记账有个好主意。“没有人会这么做,因为那背后有专业方法。财务预测也有科学方法。甚至在技术领域,很多时候人们也不会直接说,“嘿,把这个东西扔掉,用 AI 代码生成器生成的那段代码吧。“那里面还是有一点专业门槛的。而在产品领域,你很大程度上会发现,它是数据、想法和各种东西的混合体,任何人都觉得自己能做……但一旦你建立了实验体系,你就把它变成了一门科学。现在有人提出一个想法,你可以说,这是个坏想法,理由在这里——我们已经做了六次实验,在这样那样的用户群体中,以这样精确的影响水平,每次都失败了。这给了 PM 一种感觉:嘿,我不再只是一个通用的技术人员,我现在是一个专业人士了。这非常赋能。要把团队带向这个方向需要很长时间。但一旦到达那个阶段,PM 们每次跑实验看到更多指标提升的时候,都会获得一种天然的多巴胺刺激。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我是实验化的超级粉丝。我觉得这个播客的大多数嘉宾都站在你这一边。我觉得我们可以专门做一整期节目,就聊如何创建实验文化、如何改变文化。
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Lenny Rachitsky: 我想回到之前的话题——N26 在培养和招聘优秀 PM 方面做对了什么?你刚才花了不少时间分享了职业建议以及什么对人们的职业发展帮助最大。作为收尾,N26 有没有什么做法——不管是从招聘角度还是培训角度?我知道你不是从一开始就在那里的——作为一个企业、一家公司,他们有没有做什么做得特别好、其他公司可能值得借鉴的事情?
Mayur Kamat: 一部分原因在于招聘理念。作为小池塘里的大鱼,一个优势就是你可以优先挑选最顶尖的人才。在欧洲这边,我们没有湾区那种独角兽或超级独角兽的密度,所以作为最早的几家公司之一,品牌效应确实会对你有利。所以这里面一部分原因就是输入端的质量——如果你招进来的是真正聪明的人,在 N26 他们很大概率会继续保持聪明。第二点同样重要,他们所处理的问题难度更高。就像我们提到的 FinTech 维度,再加上过去一年左右我们推动的以实验驱动为主的变革,这又给了他们一套新的工具箱——尤其是如果他们的下一步职业规划是去更大的增长型公司的话。
所有我在交流的公司中,真正在实验方面做到世界级的公司少之又少。如果你在这样的公司工作过并建立起了这套工具集,你可以以此为基础构建整个职业生涯。你可以去任何其他公司说,“这就是我能带来的。“因为正如我所说,没有复利式的快速赢,就没有增长。而没有什么比实验能更快地产生复利赢的,世界上也没有哪家公司会说我们不想增长。所以这是一块你可以在职业发展中同时建立起来的极具价值的品牌。第三点就是规模。银行业另一个有趣的方面是我所说的百分之百产品——实际上超过百分之百,因为银行账户比人口还多,很多人有不止一个银行账户。
所以你永远不会耗尽目标可触达市场。它已经大到不能再大了,这意味着没有上限……因为到了某个阶段,比如说你在做一个 AI 代码生成器,你的市场是有天花板的——可能就是开发者或者想成为开发者的人。或者你在做 AWS,虽然是个巨大的市场,但它仍然局限于需要在线托管的公司。而银行业是所有人都需要的。而且考虑到它是最古老的行业之一——取决于你愿意冒多大风险——或者是人类已知第二古老的职业,它是一个天然对冲的产品。当经济形势不好时,比如利率升高,消费下降,但我们在存款上赚钱;当利率下降时,消费增加,我们在刷卡手续费和投资上赚更多钱。所以这是一个天然对冲的生意,让你比大多数公司更能平稳地穿越周期和高峰。
理解如何构建天然对冲的产品,可能是另一个原因——它会影响你如何做决策、如何扩展核心产品组合。举个例子,大约一年半以前,我们基本上就是一个带卡的银行账户,我们是第一家移动银行,光这个市场就足够大了。但在过去一年左右,我们大幅扩展了产品组合。现在我们有了一个很大的贷款业务线。去年我们推出了储蓄产品。我们在储蓄上投入很大,因为当时利率高——通过提供高利率来吸引新用户,是一个极其有效的工具。
但现在利率在下降,我们正在大力投入贷款业务,因为现在贷款成本更低了,而去年这还很难做到。能够构建与宏观经济形成互补的产品,给了你一种额外的平衡能力,这是典型的单一焦点公司所不具备的。所以我认为这是几个因素的结合——能够获得优秀人才,现在又能在实验方面更好地培养他们,再加上看到我们如何构建既互补又天然对冲的产品组合——这一切给了你一种更均衡的运营方式。
顶尖 PM 产出公司的共同特征
Lenny Rachitsky: 我觉得这解释了一个非常有趣的现象。听你讲的时候我意识到,很多培养出最优秀 PM 的公司,正如你所说,都是非美国本土但在其所在地区极其成功的公司。所以它们能吸引那个地区最有才华的人。比如我知道 Intercom 从技术上讲……在这份培养出最优秀 PM 的公司榜单上,Intercom 排第一,然后是 Palantir、Revolut,再然后是 N26、Chime、Stripe、Dropbox,基本都在前列。其中有三四家是非美国的……Intercom 很大一部分团队在爱尔兰,Revolut 在英国,然后就是你们。所以这确实很有意思,揭示了一个非常有趣的洞察——就是成为最好的,成为小池塘里的大鱼,吸引最顶尖的人才,然后攻克真正有难度的问题并取得巨大成功。就是这样,这就是一套公式。
Mayur Kamat: 对,对。你这么说的话确实很简单。
Lenny Rachitsky: 天哪。好,你很有意思地在很多不同的地方工作过。我想花点时间聊聊这个。你在欧洲工作过,在亚洲工作过,显然也在美国工作过。对于可能正在考虑离开美国、或者考虑去美国的人来说,你发现的主要取舍是什么?
不同地区职业发展的取舍
Mayur Kamat: 我会说,在职业生涯早期,你要去人才密度极高的地区,原因就是我们之前讨论的那些——找到高增长的公司,找到能帮助你成功的网络。对于通用科技领域来说,没有比美国西海岸更好的地方了。不是所有人都有这个选项,尤其是考虑到现在的移民政策等等。我的意思是,一直以来都不容易,现在看起来更加困难了。所以你可能没有这个选项,但如果你确实有这个选项,我会鼓励所有人——没有比西海岸更好的职业起点了。当然也有例外,比如在加密货币领域,我认为迪拜非常强,非常好,那里有很高的人才密度。但同样,这是非常行业特定的。班加罗尔,如果你是印度人的话,已经成功复制了硅谷的一些魔力,虽然规模还不及,但在不断进步。如果你在金融行业,也许伦敦是个选择,新加坡也是。亚洲现在虽然没有那么多的新创新,但每家大公司都在那里有布局。
所以至少有次级的人才密度。如果美国在职业生涯早期不是你的可选项,这些就是备选。而且在某种程度上,这段经历会定义你——如果你在微软、Google、OpenAI 或者其他后来成为品牌的公司工作过,这是你在去别的地方发展时可以带走的东西。你问题中的第二部分是,如果你决定搬家,拥有那段经历、那个品牌以及在那里取得的成就,可以帮助你在其他地方找到很好的机会。我自己算是有点幸运,有些机会是主动找到我的——比如 N26 在欧洲找到我,Binance 之前在亚洲找到我——而我当时并不在那个人才密度最高的区域。但运气不是一个好的策略。所以如果你在规划的话,我会建议把职业生涯的早期放在美国。说实话,2018 年我们搬到泰国的时候,我当时并不认为自己在做一个好的职业决定。
从西雅图到曼谷:为家庭而搬家
Mayur Kamat: 当时我和妻子都在美国工作,日子过得很艰难。我们在西雅图的两个孩子都还很小,女儿当时有哮喘,三天两头生病。工作和生活实在是难以兼顾。后来和 Agoda 聊的时候,我压根没听过这家公司,最后之所以接了这个 offer,唯一的理由就是——曼谷是个温暖的地方,我女儿在那儿可能不会犯哮喘,而且我们也许能请到家务帮手,这样就能把那些对生活没有实质价值的事情平衡掉。当时的假设就是,我可以在工作上投入更多精力,因为之前实在是分身乏术。结果正如我所说,这次”实验”的所有假设全部大获成功——我女儿的哮喘,真的被热带气候治好了。
有了支持体系之后,我们一家人能够花更多时间在一起,而我也确实腾出了大量时间投入工作和事业——不用再洗碗、不用再洗衣服、不用再倒垃圾、不用再割草坪。一天之中突然多出了很多小时,你可以用它们去做自己擅长的事、为自己的职业加分。
Agoda:实验驱动产品文化的训练营
然后 Agoda 恰好成了一个训练营,让我真正理解了以实验为基础的产品文化是怎么运作的。因为在那之前我在 Google 工作过,也在创业公司干过,我之前的看家本领是做大项目,而 Agoda 教会了我——大量增长来自于以更快的速度做极小的事情。Agoda 是 Booking Holdings 的一部分,如果你听说过 Booking.com,那是一家市值 1700 亿美元的公司。有意思的是,十年前它还是一家 100 亿美元的公司,卖的是机票、酒店和租车。十年后它依然卖机票、酒店和租车,但市值已经到了 1700 亿美元。
Lenny Rachitsky: 哇。
Mayur Kamat: 这是一个了不起的增长故事。它告诉我们,从战略角度来看,你真的不需要去做完全不同的事情——如果你能通过把每一件小事都优化到极致来真正实现增长的复利效应。所以当你搬出去的时候,伴随而来的好处是——大多数情况下你在做面向全球的产品,尤其是在美国的时候。很少有产品只在美国市场运作。当然,这在很多国家并不成立——比如在印度,很多产品只针对印度市场设计;在中国,很多产品只针对中国市场设计。但从美国出发,你设计的是面向世界的产品,而很多时候你并没有感受到同样的约束,也无法对用户产生同样程度的共情,因为你没有经历过那些用户的生活。
海外工作的优势
所以,就校准自己对全球产品应该是什么样子的认知而言,能在不同地方生活、亲身体验这些约束,绝对是一个优势。正如我所说,尤其如果你已经建立了早期的声誉,你到海外就有机会进入一些最好的公司。当然薪酬方面会有折损,至少初期肯定是这样的。没有什么地方的薪酬能和美国接近,尤其是在欧洲。但正如我之前所说,在职业生涯早期甚至中期,不要把薪酬作为优化的目标。如果你遵循这个建议,薪酬折损就不重要了,因为你会拥有一些独特的东西可以贡献。即使你后来回到美国,带着在不同地方工作的经历——尤其是 FinTech 领域,不同国家的法律法规确实不同,这一点在美国工作时是无法真正体会的。甚至在 Google 的时候,我们发布产品时我会觉得,律师们就是在给我们找麻烦。
而现在我真正体会到了这个世界有多么不同。这让你在与法务团队、合规团队、市场团队沟通时,成为一个更好的干系人。所以我觉得这些都是海外工作的好处。
海外工作的代价:薪酬天花板与地理限制
薪酬可能是缺点。另一个大的缺点是——如今如果你在硅谷,我在西雅图待了 15 年,换了四家公司,我可以换工作但仍然留在西雅图,因为那里有足够多的公司。你不会在某个时候撞到天花板。在湾区,根本没有天花板,你可以一直成长。但问题是,如果我在曼谷、在 Agoda 工作,到了某个时候我需要找一份新工作,或者比如说我已经做到 CPO 了,现在想做 CEO——Agoda 已经有 CEO 了,所以我需要去别的地方当 CEO。你猜怎么着?那个公司不会在曼谷。现在我得把整个家搬到新加坡,我真的搬了。然后你在那边又撞到天花板,又得搬回泰国或者去别的地方,我也确实这么做了。然后你觉得,也许欧洲有个绝佳的机会能给你完全不同的规模。于是你又得搬到西班牙,我也搬了。到了某个时候,你的家人就会说,到底怎么回事?本来以为是 A 到 B 的一步,结果变成了年年都在搬家。
这是需要权衡的,尤其在职业生涯后期——如果你喜欢这份工作但不喜欢这个地方,或者反过来,这会非常困难,因为它们通常是绑在一起的。我们现在在曼谷就看到了这个问题——那里没有那么多了不起的科技公司,如果你在 Agoda 干得很好,但它毕竟只是一家公司,你就是没有太多选择。尤其如果你热爱曼谷——那是一座很棒的城市,我会投票选它为世界上最适合居住的地方——这就是一种挣扎:你热爱这座城市,但如果想在职业上继续前进,你就得去别的地方。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太有意思了。我觉得泰国现在因为《白莲花度假村》(White Lotus)特别火。好像《白莲花度假村》的收视率创了纪录什么的,非常受欢迎。我觉得去泰国旅游的人比以前多了很多。
Mayur Kamat: 是的是的。
Shreyas Doshi 关于”杠杆”的建议
Lenny Rachitsky: 我想回到我们在录音前聊天时你提到的一个建议,我觉得可能对很多人有帮助。这个方向有点不同,但我想确保我们聊到它——就是 Shreyas Doshi 关于”杠杆”的观点。我知道你在这方面思考很多。他有一个非常好的建议——如果你是 PM,要找到对你而言杠杆最高的机会来投入工作。我们之后会指向那一期节目,感兴趣的人可以深入了解。你能给还没听过这个建议的人分享一下吗?
Mayur Kamat: 这个原则适用于任何职业阶段——你的时间是有限的,而问题永远比你能解决的多。问题在于你选择做哪些。这在你做到 CPO 的时候就变得更难了,因为所有问题都很重要,否则它们根本不会到你面前。你要做哪个?原则很简单:去做那些能产生 10 倍正面影响或负面影响的问题。这个倍数可以是 10、5、300——取决于具体业务,金融领域可能是一百,有些公司可能是三。在大多数 FinTech 公司里,问题通常归为两类——要么是增长问题,要么是合规问题——因为这两类都可能产生正面或负面的 10 倍影响,这就是你该聚焦的地方,这就是你该花大部分时间的地方。有意思的是,我的第一个 executive 角色是在 Google,我当时是一个产品经理。
Mayur Kamat: 后来我加入了 White Pages,担任产品副总裁,这是我第一次做 executive。White Pages 的 Alex Allgood,西雅图的创业传奇,创办了三家公司,现在都是独角兽。非常了不起,也是我非常好的朋友和导师。真正有意思的是,我加入的时候,他们说:“好的,这是你的工位,这是你的产品领域。“当时我们有两个办公室,那时候大家还是每周五天都在办公室上班。我就问:“Alex 坐在哪里?“他们说:“哦,他坐在财务那边。“我当时没多想,以为他的办公室在财务附近。后来我发现他根本没有办公室,他用的是一张浮动工位。所有其他人的工位都是固定的,但他的工位可以移动,他会把工位搬到当时杠杆机会最高的部门。他就坐在那个工位上,直到那个问题被解决或者机会被实现,然后他真的会把工位搬走,再搬到产品团队、技术团队或者财务部门。
你几乎可以直观地看到他在处理杠杆最高的问题——就看他的工位移到了哪里。这和我们之前谈到的关注细节结合起来,还有一点我之前没提到的——深入细节工作所需要的谦逊。很多时候,尤其是职业生涯后期,你会觉得,这种事不该我做,这对我来说太低了,我为什么需要做这个?我有那么多 PM、数据分析师,应该有人去做。我为什么要亲自做?我再讲一个小故事。当时我们在想办法拓展增长渠道,发现付费渠道、社交渠道、推荐渠道都已经基本到顶了,但 SEO 已经有一阵子没下功夫了。我们在做一个来电识别应用,我们的目标是,当有人在 Google 里输入一个电话号码时,我们想成为第一个搜索结果,告诉他们这是不是一个骚扰电话,或者这个号码是谁的。如果我们能做到这一点,就能引导他们下载我们的应用。这就是我们的假设。
所以我在 executive 团队会议上向 Alex 汇报:“我有一个团队,我想招一个专门负责 SEO 的 PM,因为我认为这是我们目前杠杆最高的领域之一。“Alex 说:“整个 White Pages 就是我基于 SEO 建起来的。人们搜索人名,出来的第一个结果就是 White Pages 的链接。我是世界上最擅长做 SEO 的人之一。“我说:“对啊,所以呢?“他说:“让我来负责这个产品。“我说:“什么意思?“他说:“不不不,我来当这个产品的 PM,你需要多久我就做多久。“我说:“那怎么行?“他说:“别担心这个,你把工程师告诉我就行。“于是,他又一次把工位搬到了那个产品团队所在的位置,接下来的三个月里他就是那个 scrum 团队的 PM。他会来参加我的产品团队会议,汇报 SEO scrum 的进展,一个小时后我就要在领导层会议上向他做汇报。他确实是这样运作的——这是公司杠杆最高的领域,是他这个角色的杠杆最高点,也应该是他本人的杠杆最高点。他是最合适的人,他会深入细节去做。
CZ 在 Binance 的类似做法
CZ 在 Binance 也是一样,有很多产品他会亲自上手。Binance 里很少有人会对 CZ 说”不”,但我有一个负责 CZ 直接参与产品的主导 PM,他会经常对 CZ 说”不”。其他 executive 都觉得很不可思议——他怎么能对 CZ 说”不”,而我们都不这样做?但那是他的产品领域,CZ 在上面做事,他们之间有一种互相尊重——我们懂这个东西,他会说”不”是因为这个想法可能不太好。所以,谦逊和对细节的关注是处理高杠杆问题所必需的。很多高杠杆问题并不是像我说的那样是战略决策——不是决定要进入哪些语言市场之类的。很多问题其实是:为什么这个东西没有达到应有的效果?很多时候魔鬼藏在细节里,你需要在那里。
保持日历留白
我认为要把这两点结合起来——知道什么是高杠杆什么不是,同时具备谦逊和耐心去深入挖掘并解决问题。有些问题解决得很快。比如,如果我今天看我们的注册用户中有多少转化为长期月活跃或日活跃用户,这可能是我会专注一个月的事情。因为我们在早期新手引导界面、早期奖励、早期激励、早期忠诚计划上运行大量实验,到某个时点可能就会觉得,团队已经搞定了,我已经给出了所有我能给的建议,它在正常运转了,我们有很棒的 PM,我相信他们的执行力。那我就去关注我们面临的合规挑战,或者法国那边的欺诈问题。这种灵活切换的能力……唯一让它成为可能的方法是,我保持一个非常空的日历——因为没有这个,你做不到这些。如果你有上百个会议、上百个一对一沟通、各种日常站会、大量固定会议,你就根本找不到时间去处理高杠杆问题。所以我的另一个建议是,你的日历上应该有大量空白。一个排满的日历是耻辱的标志,而不是荣誉的勋章。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这些故事太精彩了。移动工位这个比喻太好了。你描述的就是现在人们所说的”创始人模式”(founder mode)的缩影——创始人亲自深入细节处理问题。Brian Chesky 在 Airbnb 的时候也做过类似的事,我当时在那里。他接手了一个新产品,本质上就像一个迷你 CEO。我不确定他是否称自己为 PM,因为我觉得他不太喜欢 PM——他著名地裁掉了 PM,虽然实际上并没有完全这样做……但确实,他做了非常类似的事情,他和团队坐在一起,为他所在的团队创造了一整个工作空间。这些故事都很棒,是非常好的例子,展示了创始人如何运用自己的权力来扫除障碍,并找到杠杆最高的机会。
AI Corner
在结束我们的对话之前,我想带你进入这个播客的几个固定环节。首先是 AI Corner,在 AI Corner 中我会问:你在工作中发现了什么方式来使用 AI、AI 工具、各种 AI 工具,让你工作效率更高、产出质量更好?
Mayur Kamat: 我个人还没有找到一个改变游戏规则的工具。我现在在用一些东西,但我有点不太确定——是我做得不对,别人做得更好,还是我有点过于保守了。我们在工作中使用了 Gemini,用于会议纪要之类的,效果很好,特别是对于没能参加会议的人来说。我们用一个叫 Writer 的工具来服务文案和 UX 团队,特别是因为我们在欧洲多个语言环境下运营,能够快速生成这些内容——尤其是插图和应用内消息——非常有用。好几个工具都可以做,但 Writer 在文案市场做得确实好。
如果你问我贯穿 N26 的整体情况,甚至之前在 Binance 或 Agoda 的时候,AI 在三个领域是完全改变游戏规则的。一个是编程方面。同样,你可以用各种最新工具来做原型,但对于我工作过的那些公司来说——都是相当大的公司,代码库非常庞大……
AI 在企业中的实际应用
Mayur Kamat: ……拥有某种与代码仓库集成的 co-pilot。粗略数据大概是开发者生产力提升了 18% 到 25%,这个幅度相当大,对吧?所以这是第一个类别,改变游戏规则的。客户支持,同样是改变游戏规则的。至于我们是否应该大规模推行,那是另一个更偏向伦理/人文层面的问题。但对于解决底部 70% 的问题——“为什么我的卡被拒了?""为什么我的账户被冻结了?""我寄出的补办卡怎么样了?为什么还没到?“——这些基本问题,AI 现在几乎能自动化处理 60% 到 70%。客户能得到即时反馈。改变游戏规则的。
最后一个领域是欺诈检测,能够更好地识别真实用户与非真实用户的行为模式。在 Binance 的时候,我们有一个产品,用户之间可以互相兑换加密货币。我可以付你比特币,换回泰铢,欺诈量非常大。
他们用 AI 来分析欺诈者与非欺诈者的语言模式。效果巨大。所以,从公司层面来看,在这三个领域——开发者生产力、客户支持和反欺诈——确实有令人难以置信的进步。但就我个人而言,我在想,什么东西能让我突然变成一个更好的首席产品官(CPO)?我在这一点上仍然有些挣扎。不过我认为我们不需要那种层面的工具,因为很大程度上,仍然属于人类领域的核心是决策,以及承受你所做决策带来的冲击——我倒是很想把一些糟糕决策归咎于 AI。但那不是……
Lenny Rachitsky: 你还是可以归咎于它的。即使它没做,你还是可以。
Mayur Kamat: 是的,是的。但话说回来,我总体来说不太热衷于……有个现象让我觉得有点腻了。你现在有工具,写几句话就能生成长篇大论。然后又有工具把长篇大论压缩成几句话。你一开始直接说那几句话不就好了,省掉整个来回。这就像一个反向的 zip。我记得当年 zip 出现的时候是改变游戏规则的——你有一个大文件需要通过慢速网络发送,所以你压缩它,发过去,然后再解压。我们现在做的是反过来的。我们有一个小东西,把它变大,发过去,然后有人再把它变小。但在以上这三个领域,如果你身处任何一家科技公司,如果你没有好的开发者生产力工具,没有配置基本的 LLM 机器人来分流客服请求,也没有分析用户交易或用户通讯的模式来检测欺诈——那就是你应该优先关注的领域。
Fail Corner:职业生涯中的失败
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,我要带大家进入这个播客的另一个固定环节了,叫 Fail Corner。这个环节的想法是,像你这样的人来到播客上,全是各种成功故事——CPO、这个那个的,搬到泰国也大获成功,到处都是赢。但现实并非如此。所以我想问你的问题是:在你职业生涯中,有什么事情搞砸了的失败故事,对你影响很大,然后你从中学到了什么,那个经历如何影响了你?
Mayur Kamat: 好。从产品角度来看,我大概最壮观的失败是——我是 Hangouts 的第一个 PM。如果你问 Nikhil,他可能会说他当时是我的老板。那是我在职业生涯中从未见过——之后再也没见过——那种规模的项目。我们有上千人在为我们工作,整个 Google 的资源都在我们手里,Larry 真的就坐在我们旁边,说 Chrome 方面我们想做什么都可以。但我们仍然没能做出一个优秀的即时通讯产品。
所以当我纯粹从产品感、产品决策的角度来看——现在我有 15 年时间可以反思这件事——原因是我们在为错误的用户群体解决问题,不契合公司的 DNA。我有一个前提假设:某些公司永远无法在某些类型的产品上取得成功,就像微软做移动、Google 做社交、Facebook 做企业一样——创始人的 DNA 实际上在阻碍你在那些领域取得成功。
我本来想说 Google 做企业也是一样。但后来 Sundar 上任,Larry 不再担任 CEO,企业业务才起飞了。他们确实不得不更换 CEO 才能在某些细分市场获胜。再后来我又在疫情期间在 Agoda 工作——一家旅游公司在疫情期间——以及 Binance 在其可能最动荡的合规与政府审查时期。那些过程中有很多围绕外部因素的失误。我认为其中一个主要的教训就是:不要承担长达六个月、一年的项目,因为你对宏观环境根本没有控制力。事情变化的速度远比你快。这也巩固了我现在的产品哲学——快速做小事情,把大部分时间花在这上面。你仍然会发布大产品,但即便如此,我们也尽量尽早获取早期信号。因为在 Agoda,我们推出的一个大项目是——我们想控制所有酒店的支付基础设施。我们想的是,如果在酒店前台有我们的设备,那么不仅仅是在线预订,酒店里发生的所有交易都由我们掌控。如果我们控制了那个基础设施,不仅能赚钱,而且我们还能获得一个超越旅行预订的用户触点。
如你所知,旅行不是一个高频活动。你订一次,然后六个月后再订一次,而且大多数时候人们不会直接去 Agoda,他们会去 Google,然后跳到某个其他网站。所以我们想要一个能一直陪伴用户的触点,认为支付是一个很好的切入点,因为那是你每天都在做的事情。我们也是用 Agoda 的方式来做这件事的。
我们做了一个实验。起步很小,真的就是去商场买了那些 50 美元的 Android 设备,上面运行我们的软件,人们可以通过摄像头扫描信用卡来扣款。效果非常好,有数千家酒店在使用。然后 COVID 来了,根本没有人再去酒店了。但整个项目花了我们六到九个月的时间——因为要拿各种许可证之类的东西——才上线。事后来看,你不可能预见到 COVID,但发布产品所花的时间,我们本可以做得更好。所以最大的教训就是——不要花太长时间才发布,不要花太长时间才验证你的假设。
Lenny Rachitsky: Hangouts 的故事太精彩了。这简直是一个经典的产品案例。人们现在总拿 Google 开玩笑——你怎么就搞不定这个呢?名字都换了一百遍了。不过有意思的是,Meet 最终做得很不错,Google Meet。
Mayur Kamat: 那是我离开 Google 前做的最后一件事。
Lenny Rachitsky: 哦,这样啊。
Mayur Kamat: 在我们做完 Hangouts 之后,他们说:“好吧,这东西不行了。我们要启动一个叫 Allo 的新产品。“那个也没成功。
Lenny Rachitsky: 又是众多名字中的一个。
从 Hangouts 到企业产品
Mayur Kamat: 但后来我说,你知道吗?我们还是应该继续,因为我之前在 Android Enterprise 团队工作过,我在想,如果我们把它做成一个企业产品会怎样?让我至少写一份规格说明书,看看我们需要做哪些不同的东西——我当时还叫它 Hangouts Enterprise,后来他们重新命名了。但那就是我的挽救时刻。不过从另一个角度来看,Hangouts 团队发明了 WebRTC。现在世界上所有的通信都运行在 WebRTC 上。所以如果你想想 Hangouts 团队在文化和科技上产生的影响,那是相当惊人的。比如我们现在用的这个工具,每一个会议产品、每一个 WhatsApp 的语音通话、视频通话、每一个 Zoom,所有的一切都运行在 WebRTC 上。从技术角度来看,我认为那是团队取得的极其重大的成就。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这也是拥有 Chrome、拥有一个浏览器来推动新技术落地的力量所在。
Mayur Kamat: 是的,完全同意。
职业建议:寻找重叠的超能力
Lenny Rachitsky: 在进入非常令人期待的快问快答环节之前,最后一个问题——你还有什么想留给听众的,或者有没有哪个观点你想再强调一下,作为快问快答之前的一个小小收官?
Mayur Kamat: 总结一下的话,这取决于听众群体。很多听众可能是带着这样的心态来听的:“这些东西怎么帮我明天比今天做得更好?” 对他们我想说,如果你确实在自己擅长的领域工作,并且乐在其中,那就继续做下去,把它当作你的北极星,在接触新事物时始终以此为参照。当你和新的公司交谈时,试着评估超能力的重叠度——你的超能力是什么?公司的超能力是什么?它们会不会互相成就?如果你在那方面感受到非常强烈的共振,我认为那将是一个非常好的职业选择,不管它是在曼谷还是西班牙,也不管薪酬如何,因为你会发现自己成长得快得多——在那样的时刻,它几乎变成了一种自我实现的预言。所以要持续寻找重叠的超能力,不仅仅在职业生活中,这个概念甚至可以延伸到人际关系——那些优势互补、超能力互相成就的人,往往会成为很好的生活伴侣。所以也许这个类比可以超越你的职业领域。
Lenny Rachitsky: 哇,这个观点很有力量。用这种方式来收尾真是太棒了。好,到这里,Mayur,我们进入了非常令人期待的快问快答环节。我有五个问题。准备好了吗?
Mayur Kamat: 来吧。
快问快答:书籍推荐
Lenny Rachitsky: 有两三本书是你发现自己最常推荐给别人的?
Mayur Kamat: 我最近读的一本——其实我平时不太读很多书,因为我大量阅读碎片化内容。
Lenny Rachitsky: 推文之类的。
Mayur Kamat: 推文,然后 Substack、Discord、WhatsApp 消息等等,所以读一本书对我来说需要一个心态上的切换。我最近读的那本,觉得非常棒,而且和我今天说的很多东西高度重合,是《The Five Kinds of Wealth》(五种财富)。那本书阐述得非常好,尤其是我最早提到的那个观点——其中一条可能的路径就是你在工作上做好,然后在其他地方寻找意义。这本书大概提供了一种极其出色的结构化思维方式:你的财富在健康方面是什么状况——身体健康、心理健康、人际关系健康、社区关系,以及你正在创造的财务财富——如何全面地看待这些问题?因为归根结底,你就是你所优化的东西。如果你优化的是财务财富,你会变得富有,但你可能并不是在全光谱意义上富有。
还有《Strength Finder 2.0》,我之前很早就提到了。这本书仍然很有意思,能帮助你思考如何看待自己的优势。不过如果你不想读整本书,去做一个类似的在线测试就好。但我推荐的会是《The Five Kinds of Wealth》和《Strength Finder 2.0》。
Lenny Rachitsky: 第一本书是 Sahil Bloom 写的,他是这个播客的朋友,很乐意分享这些内容。我忘了简单讲一下关于优势测试的故事了。实际上,当我离开 Airbnb 寻找下一步方向,甚至在考虑离开的时候,我做了一次优势测试,当时我在和一位 executive coach 合作。我看到结果后,她问我:“你从这些结果中看到了什么?这些结果在告诉你什么?” 我说我不知道。她说,这些结果告诉我你应该自己创办一家公司、自己干。这里浮现出来的所有优势都是作为一个创始人所需要的。那真的帮到了我。
Mayur Kamat: 你在这个方面的个人数据点是什么?是一个好的决定吗?
Lenny Rachitsky: 你是说这是一个好的决定吗?
Mayur Kamat: 对,依靠那个优势测试来做职业决策。
Lenny Rachitsky: 最棒的决定。非常好。我真的是优势测试的超级粉丝,不管是《Strength Finder》还是任何形式的优势测试。有趣的是,人们可能害怕做这些测试,因为他们觉得结果会说”这是你不擅长的地方”。但它总是让你感觉良好——它告诉你的是”这是你擅长的东西”,而不是”这是你很差的地方”。它只是说”这是你最擅长的事情”,永远是正面的,从来不会说你在这方面很差,只是说那不是你的优势。这对我来说是一个巨大的收获。我强烈推荐。
Mayur Kamat: 太好了。
快问快答:影视推荐
Lenny Rachitsky: 尤其是当你考虑职业转型的时候。所以,完全赞同。好,下一个问题。你最近有没有一部特别喜欢的电影或电视剧?
Mayur Kamat: 我最近看的——我看电视剧通常是为了放松,所以一般看情景喜剧之类的,像《House》(豪斯医生)或者《Big Bang Theory》(生活大爆炸)这些。但最近有一部让我颇受震撼的,是《Adolescence》(混沌少年时)。它的题材确实很沉重,涉及青少年心理健康和校园暴力,还有它的拍摄方式。我建议哪怕这不是你喜欢的类型,也去看看第一集,因为它是用一镜到底的方式拍摄的——整集一个小时,没有一个剪辑点,镜头一直在运动。这让你产生一种和看普通剧完全不同的感受。撇开主题不谈——那个主题本身也相当强烈——仅仅从视觉上你就会感到不同,而且如果你像我一样容易晕动症的话,那种感受会更加深刻。
Lenny Rachitsky: 听起来很棒。感觉像是……
Mayur Kamat: 我会去看的。我还需要看《白莲花度假村》,因为每次我告诉别人我来自泰国,他们都会提起这部剧,而我居然还没看过,所以我在追热门文化方面有点落后了。
Lenny Rachitsky: 确实落后了。好像你是唯一一个没看过的了。
Mayur Kamat: 没错,我就是那唯一的一个人。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好吧。你最近有没有发现一个自己特别喜欢的产
最近喜欢的产品
Mayur Kamat: 品,我大部分时间在使用银行和交易类产品,这里我想推荐几个。如果你在欧洲,试试 N26 或者 Revolut,产品做得非常好。如果你在美国,Robinhood——他们做的动效设计和新手引导体验非常愉悦,无论你用它做银行、交易还是仅仅用它的卡。我就是觉得它的产品设计和动效,尤其是你触摸、滑动、试图完成操作的时候。还有 Nikita Bier 发布的任何产品。我昨天刚下载了 Bible study 还是 Bible chat。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我看到一条推文说到这个。它在所有社交应用里排前十,而且是 Bible study 之类的应用。
Mayur Kamat: 对,前十。我能理解为什么——我现在已经收到了三条消息,让我通过阅读圣经来缓解焦虑,而其中有一次我确实有点焦虑,所以也许确实有点魔力。
但如果要说一个我个人最喜欢的应用——我以前用印地语写作,小时候写过诗,现在有了 Suno.com 这个应用,我可以把它们做成歌曲,而且效果惊人,至少我自己这么觉得。目前还没有其他人这么认为,但仅仅是你写点东西就能得到一首歌,这就已经很神奇了。这是 AI 第一次让我看到一个用例——我说,到目前为止没有什么能让我立刻成为更好的首席产品官(CPO),但作为一个艺术家——至少是浴室艺术家——你能想到什么、写下来,然后真正看到如果专业歌手、乐队和音乐家来演绎它会是什么样子,这真是太不可思议了。所以这大概是我最近被科技震撼最深的一次,就是 Suno.com。他们的新手引导流程很差,增长产品也一般,如果我是 Suno 的 PM,我会做得很不一样,但他们的核心技术确实是有魔力的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我是超级粉丝。我在 Suno 上最喜欢做的事情之一——好像也是 Suno.ai——就是让它用海员号子的风格来创作歌曲。太好玩了。它会给你几个选项,你可以说,这是这个版本,那是那个版本。
Mayur Kamat: 是的,是的。
人生座右铭
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,还有两个问题。你有没有一个最喜欢的座右铭,在工作和生活中经常回想起来的?
Mayur Kamat: 一个是——跟我们之前聊到的内容有点关系——没有所谓正确的或错误的决策,只有慢的和快的决策。当然,这有一些极端的例外,比如你做的事情可能会伤害用户——医疗、军事,甚至可能搞垮公司的合规问题——那就别用这个原则。但在其他所有领域,基本上可以回到我们之前讨论的战略问题。很多时候,如果你做了一个错误的决策,但做得足够快,你会意识到它是错的,然后纠正它,整个过程仍然比花几个月去思考”正确”决策要快。所以对于任何可逆的、不会让你坐牢或搞垮公司的事情——没有对错之分,只有快慢之分。
哪里的美食最好
Lenny Rachitsky: 最后一个问题。你在很多地方生活过——西班牙、泰国、孟买、西雅图,好像还有德克萨斯,上学的时候?
Mayur Kamat: 对,上大学的时候。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。可能还有其他地方。哪里的食物最好?
Mayur Kamat: 曼谷,毫无疑问。巴塞罗那在某些方面可以接近,但曼谷——你可以去一家三星米其林、全球前五的餐厅,一顿饭花 500 美元;也可以花 1 美元吃一份街头炒猪肉罗勒饭。味道都非常好。从你能想到的最便宜的食物到最贵的食物,在同一条一公里步行的范围内,密集地分布着上千家餐厅,这种美食密度,没有其他地方能比。巴塞罗那有非常好的餐厅,全球最好的餐厅之一就在离这里一个街区的地方,叫 Disputar,预约要等两年,但那只是一端的体验。巴塞罗那可能排第二。但要说那种凌晨两点走下楼花一美元就能吃一顿美味——没有任何地方能跟曼谷比。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这一集简直是泰国的绝佳广告。走吧。你一定要看《白莲花度假村》。Mayur,这太棒了。我们聊了非常多话题,我觉得我真的了解了你。我们聊了很多——
Mayur Kamat: 非常感谢。
Lenny Rachitsky: ——各种视角。好的,还没有结束。最后两个问题。大家如果想联系你,或者看看 N26 有没有职位,在网上哪里可以找到你?听众怎样才能帮到你?
Mayur Kamat: 找我的话——这是变老的好处之一——我是 LinkedIn 最早的用户之一,所以我的链接是 linkedin.com/mayur。Facebook 也是早期用户,facebook.com/kamat。或者 N26.com,mk@N26.com。如果你特别好奇我们在这里做事的方式,我们正在招聘,增长非常快。正如我所说,银行业是一个非常好的行业,未来几千年都不会过时。所以如果你在考虑职业发展,考虑来西班牙或者柏林——完全是不同的有趣生活方式和不同的产品思维——请通过以上任何渠道联系我。
如果你在欧洲,下载试试 N26。我们的理念是”爱你的银行”。我们的创始人说,人们宁愿去看牙医也不愿去银行网点,所以我们打造了这个产品。我们真心觉得,日常银行业务就应该这样——打开 app 就好,你会觉得我想每天都用我的银行 app。这其中有一些魔力,虽然我的贡献还没那么多——我让它变得更简单、更顺畅了一些,但魔力在我来之前就已经存在了。所以如果你在欧洲,想开一个新的银行账户,N26.com。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好了。Mayur,非常感谢你来参加节目。
Mayur Kamat: 谢谢。谢谢你,Lenny,也谢谢大家。
Lenny Rachitsky: 再见,大家。非常感谢收听。如果你觉得这期节目有价值,可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你最喜欢的播客应用上订阅。也请考虑给我们评分或留下评论,这真的能帮助其他听众发现这个播客。你可以在 LennysPodcast.com 找到所有往期节目或了解更多关于这个节目的信息。下期见。
术语表
| 原文 | 中文 |
|---|---|
| Agoda | Agoda(在线旅游预订平台) |
| Airbnb | Airbnb(全球短租住宿平台) |
| Alex Allgood | Alex Allgood(White Pages 创始人) |
| Allo | Allo(Google 即时通讯产品) |
| Bangalore | 班加罗尔(印度科技中心) |
| Booking Holdings | Booking Holdings(在线旅游集团,旗下含 Booking.com、Agoda 等) |
| Booking.com | Booking.com(在线旅游预订平台) |
| Brian Chesky | Brian Chesky(Airbnb 联合创始人兼 CEO) |
| C-level | C-level(企业高管层级,如 CEO、CPO 等) |
| Chime | Chime(美国数字银行) |
| co-pilot | co-pilot(AI 编程辅助工具) |
| cohort | 同期群 |
| Connie Wurz | Connie Wurz(Google 前基础设施负责人) |
| control | 对照组 |
| CPO | 首席产品官(Chief Product Officer) |
| crypto | 加密货币 |
| CZ | CZ(Binance 创始人兼 CEO) |
| director | 总监 |
| Disputar | Disputar(巴塞罗那知名餐厅,实际名称为 Disfrutar) |
| Dropbox | Dropbox(云存储服务) |
| Dubai | 迪拜 |
| executive | executive(企业高管) |
| executive coach | executive coach(高管教练) |
| FinTech | FinTech(金融科技) |
| founder mode | 创始人模式(founder mode) |
| Gemini | Gemini(Google 的 AI 助手) |
| group product manager | 集团产品经理 |
| Hangouts | Hangouts(Google 即时通讯产品) |
| Intercom | Intercom(爱尔兰客户通讯 SaaS 公司) |
| Jeff Bezos | Jeff Bezos(亚马逊创始人) |
| Jonathan Rosenberg | Jonathan Rosenberg(Google 前产品负责人) |
| KYC | KYC(Know Your Customer,了解你的客户) |
| Larry | Larry(指 Google 联合创始人 Larry Page) |
| Lenny Rachitsky | Lenny Rachitsky(播客主持人) |
| LLM | LLM(Large Language Model,大语言模型) |
| LTV | LTV(Lifetime Value,客户终身价值) |
| Maximilian | Maximilian(N26 联合创始人 Maximilian Tayenthal) |
| Microsoft | 微软 |
| N26 | N26(德国数字银行) |
| Nikhil | Nikhil(Mayur 在 Google 时的上司) |
| Nikita Bier | Nikita Bier(知名独立应用开发者,代表作包括 tbh 等社交应用) |
| north star | 北极星(指引方向的核心原则) |
| onboarding | 新手引导 |
| P-value | P 值 |
| Palantir | Palantir(美国大数据分析公司) |
| PayPal mafia | PayPal mafia(PayPal 早期员工后来成为硅谷一批重要创业者和投资人的群体) |
| PM | PM(Product Manager,产品经理) |
| Porter’s Five Forces | 波特的五力模型 |
| Q4 | Q4(人格评估工具,基于支配性与亲和性两个轴的四象限模型) |
| Ray Dalio | 瑞·达利欧(Ray Dalio,桥水基金创始人) |
| Revolut | Revolut(英国数字银行) |
| Robinhood | Robinhood(美国股票交易平台) |
| Sahil Bloom | Sahil Bloom(作家、创业者) |
| scrum | scrum(敏捷开发中的迭代团队) |
| SDK | SDK(Software Development Kit,软件开发工具包) |
| sea shanty | 海员号子(水手传统劳动歌曲) |
| SEO | SEO(Search Engine Optimization,搜索引擎优化) |
| Shreyas Doshi | Shreyas Doshi(硅谷知名 PM,前 Stripe、Google、Twitter 产品负责人) |
| stakeholder management | 干系人管理 |
| statistical significance | 统计显著性 |
| Statsig | Statsig(实验与功能管理平台) |
| Strength Finder 2.0 | 《Strength Finder 2.0》(优势识别器,盖洛普出版的优势评估工具书) |
| Stripe | Stripe(在线支付平台) |
| Substack | Substack(newsletter 发布平台) |
| Sundar | Sundar(指 Google CEO Sundar Pichai) |
| Suno | Suno(AI 音乐生成平台) |
| Thai baht | 泰铢 |
| Valentin | Valentin(N26 联合创始人 Valentin Stalf) |
| variant | 实验组 |
| Vijay | Vijay(前 Facebook 实验化负责人,Statsig 创始人) |
| VP of product | 产品副总裁 |
| WebRTC | WebRTC(Web Real-Time Communication,网页实时通信协议) |
| White Lotus | 《白莲花度假村》(White Lotus,HBO 热门剧集) |
| White Pages | White Pages(美国电话号码查询与来电识别公司) |
| Writer | Writer(AI 写作与文案生成工具) |
| 《Adolescence》 | 《Adolescence》(混沌少年时,英国 Netflix 短剧) |
| 《Big Bang Theory》 | 《Big Bang Theory》(生活大爆炸,美国情景喜剧) |
| 《House》 | 《House》(豪斯医生,美国医疗剧) |
| 《The Five Kinds of Wealth》 | 《The Five Kinds of Wealth》(五种财富) |
此文档由 AI 分片翻译(translate_long_document)