Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart)

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:00):
You're early growth PM at Facebook. You're head of growth at Instagram, you're VP of product at Instacart. You're now director of product management at YouTube and I've heard that you've had a lot of impact on a lot of different cultures.

Bangaly Kaba (00:00:10):
I found this framework travels with me. It's got these five components to it, vision, skills, incentives, resources, action plan, and you need all of those to have change. And then within those buckets you've got to figure out what are the right levers that you need to pull? What are the things that are missing?

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:26):
You're really big on something you call understand work?

Bangaly Kaba (00:00:29):
What I call the anti-paren of what we want to do. Someone says, "Hey, you know what? This would be great to build." And you go pull data to go justify why that would be great to build. Call that identify, justify, execute. First you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on. So understand, identify, execute.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:45):
You wrote this legendary blog post called How to Choose Where to Work and What to work on.

Bangaly Kaba (00:00:50):
There's impact that you're really trying to drop and the impact is only achievable by looking at set of variables related to the environment, the set of variables related to your skills.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:01:02):
Today's guest is Bengaly Kaba. Bengaly was an early growth PM at Facebook where he was responsible for how people make friends on Facebook. He was Head of Growth at Instagram where he helped scale a platform to over 1 billion users. He was also VP of product at Instacart. He's also worked with tons of amazing startups as a Growth Advisor, including Twitter. He's now Director of Product Management at YouTube where from what I hear, he's already made a huge dent. This conversation went long because there was so much gold to be extracted from Bengaly's head and I could not stop myself from learning everything I could in our time together. This episode is for anyone looking to level up their product and growth chops or also just do better in your career.

(00:01:42):
We dig into his framework for how to choose where to work and what to work on. The importance of spending time on something he calls understand work, his adjacent user theory and how it can help you drive growth. A bunch of advice for coaching product managers and managers of managers, tons of lessons and stories from his time at Instagram, Facebook and YouTube and so much more.

(00:02:03):
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing feature episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Bengaly Kaba.

(00:02:18):
Bengaly, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Bangaly Kaba (00:02:22):
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:02:24):
So many previous guests have recommended that I get you on this podcast, which I already knew. Funny story, when I first launched this podcast, I asked you to be on it. You're like, "Sure." And I included you on my launch poster of all the guests that are going to be on the podcast, and then you decided to take on a very hard work and jobs that kept you from having time, and so I'm really excited that we're finally doing this.

Bangaly Kaba (00:02:47):
I'm glad we're finally making a reality. Sorry about that, Lenny.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:02:50):
No sweat. You actually mentioned to me that somebody came up to you in Zurich and was like, "I'm excited for you on Lenny's podcast."

Bangaly Kaba (00:02:57):
Yeah, it was crazy. I was visiting a team that I managed there about to get back on a plane to go back to SFO and just standing there doing some work, minding my business and I get on the plane, I'm talking to a colleague and someone comes up to me, I don't think I've ever seen them before, and said, "Hey, sorry to interrupt you. I'm so excited for your podcast with Lenny. I can't wait for it." And then just walks away and I was like, "What is going on right now? Lenny is a big deal. I don't even know how this person knows me." And that's how I knew Lenny, that I had to reschedule with you because I was like, if people are coming up to me and telling me that they're excited, I was like, there is a lot of anticipation. And Lenny, the power of your reach now is legit.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:03:37):
That is hilarious. That's a new strategy for me to get people on the podcast just say they're going to be on the podcast and then the pressure will start.

Bangaly Kaba (00:03:46):
Oh yeah, I mean, totally.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:03:46):
Okay, so there's two broad topics that I want to spend our time on today. I want to talk about career advice and growth advice and they're both essentially growth oriented, one's career growth, one is product growth. How does that sound?

Bangaly Kaba (00:03:57):
Sounds perfect.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:03:58):
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Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust. Members FDIC. So let's maybe start with the career. You wrote this legendary blog post called How to Choose Where to Work and What to Work On that a few people have mentioned to me was really impactful in their career. And just to remind people of your career path, which they'll hear in the intro, but just to give people a reason to listen to your advice on career, you are early growth PM at Facebook, you're Head of Growth at Instagram, you're VP of Product at Instacart. You worked with a ton of amazing startups as an advisor, including Twitter, you're now Director of Product Management at YouTube. This is a career that many people would dream of having. So let's just spend a little time on this topic of how to choose where to work and what to work on. And I know you kind of have this framework in this post, so maybe that's a good way to start out just how you broadly think about where to work and what to work on?

Bangaly Kaba (00:07:18):
Yeah, that blog post that you're referring to actually came out of a personal struggle that I had when I was at Facebook and trying to decide what my next move should be. I felt like I was kind of stuck. I felt like I was working harder but not seeing incremental benefit to the work that I was doing. And I knew that I needed a change, but emotionally I understood that, but I couldn't really have an objective way of thinking about it. And so I really pushed myself to figure out what is actually going on with my situation and how do I create a way that I can rely on objectively to understand what's actually going on? And so I looked at that situation and I wrote that post and the framework is really that there's impact that you're really trying to drive and that is the thing that is the most important. And the impact is only achievable by looking at two sets of variables, a set of variables related to the environment, a set of variables related to your skills, and really breaking down each and understanding what's happening in the environment bit by bit and what's happening with your skills and where are you hindered structurally within the environment? Where are your skills kind of lacking and what do you have control over? And using that whole kind of output, that framework to decide what makes the most sense.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:08:40):
Why is impact the key output of this equation? I think for a lot of people that isn't necessarily the intuitive variable that they think is important to focus on. Why is that so important in your experience?

Bangaly Kaba (00:08:51):
Yeah, I mean I didn't really know how to think about what the right thing to optimize for was initially, and I realized that it's not compensation. Compensation is a reflection of the input, the impact that you're having, and you're leveling how [inaudible 00:09:12] you are, how much scope you have is a derivative of how much impact you're driving. The more impact you're driving at your company, the more people feel like you can operate independently, you can drive real results the more that scope they'll give you. So really impact became the thing to optimize for. It is the import and compensation becomes an output based on that.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:09:32):
I think this is a really important point that is easy to miss and this is what I always tell people when they're looking for ways to get promoted and do well in companies, just find ways to have more impact. Can you maybe make it even more concrete? What does impact mean to you when you talk about impact?

Bangaly Kaba (00:09:46):
Yeah, I mean, so impact can be a lot of things, but I think for a product manager for example, it's really one, helping to drive extreme clarity about where the problems with the product, where there's opportunities and what is the right focus and prioritization? That is actually a form of impact. Just creating the clarity that people need to understand and believe in the investment. The reason why I name this and it feels a little counterintuitive is that the more senior you get, the more there are questions of are we even investing in the right place, right? Is this area, is this team, is this org the right investment? And so being able to even create the clarity that there is opportunity, it is the right thing to do, it is strategically and structurally important, is a form of impact. And then actually delivering on that impact, showing that you can make progress quickly, that you can deliver fast lane wins as Casey Winters would say, or medium and slow wins and then actually showing that you can do this again and again is how you actually validate the impact that you can see where the opportunity is and what's going on.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:10:53):
Awesome. Okay. So this equation is impact equals environment type skills. Can you talk a bit about how to work on these two elements?

Bangaly Kaba (00:11:01):
So the environment was the one to me, that I think is most people overlook and I overlooked when I was first thinking about this. Environment in this case, I think I kind of discreetly named a few things. One is your manager, then there's the resources. So what kind of team do you have? Is your team staffed appropriately? Do you have the right P&L, whatever budget to get the things done that you need? Then there's a scope, what is in your remit versus not in your remit? Because if you don't have enough scope, then you can't actually focus on the things that are most important. The team itself, the skills, relative skills of the team, your compensation in some ways is part of the environment because if you're not compensated fairly, you don't believe you are, then it's hard to feel like the work that you're doing is meaningful.

(00:11:47):
And then there is the last part is the company culture. So to what extent is the culture a place where you feel supported, included, you feel like you can do your best work? And so you are really looking at each one of these variables, and I look at this every year and I say, "How is my manager doing?" How do I think about my manager? How do I think about the resources I have, the scope, the team, the conversation, the company culture and to what extent? And I score them, I score them as a 1 means it's kind of neutral. A 2 means that I'm greatly benefiting from this situation and something even closer to zero is I'm not in a good place. So I assign a score in quarter point increments, 0.25, 0.5, 0.751 up to 2 every year. And I really ask myself, what is the state of each one of these and to what extent do I believe that they can and will change?

Lenny Rachitsky (00:12:40):
Wow, I love this. So there's this formula, impact equals environment times skills. Within environment there's these five variables and they add up to 10?

Bangaly Kaba (00:12:49):
Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:12:50):
If they each give you two points. That's so cool. Okay, so the five, just to be clear, your manager, the resources you have, is teams number three?

Bangaly Kaba (00:12:58):
Mm-hmm.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:12:59):
Compensation and then the culture of the team?

Bangaly Kaba (00:13:02):
And then your scope as well.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:13:03):
And then scope. Okay, got it.

Bangaly Kaba (00:13:04):
It's actually six, yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:13:05):
Oh, there's six. Okay, got it. So it's up to 12. So the idea here is you score each of these of how you're feeling, how the environment is contributing to the impact that you're delivering. And if one of these is not a great score, that's an opportunity to improve your impact, which will improve your career?

Bangaly Kaba (00:13:26):
That's right, and you have to really be honest. I think part of what makes this framework so powerful for me at least, is that it helps you to be honest around what are the things that are limiting your ability to have impact and for your skills to really land? And to what extent do you believe that you can help to change or try to influence the change in the environment? Because no one wants to be in a place where there's a bad culture and the culture is a bad fit for you, but if you're not really thinking about it objectively and naming that, or maybe it's the culture of the team that is not the right place for you, so it really forces you to evaluate what's going on around you that's limiting your impact.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:14:05):
Is there an example from your career you could share where one of these was not where it needed to be and either helped change it or realize you had to get out of there?

Bangaly Kaba (00:14:14):
When I was actually at Facebook, I was running the team that does all the people recommendations and it was a great team. I actually had a massive, massive team. I had 30 engineers I was working with, 15 machine learning engineers and 15 front end and back end engineers. And so great team, incredible team, lot of resources, ton of scope. In some ways it was too much scope and to me that was problematic because I really needed to build out, I felt like multiple teams to support the work that we were doing or to break it up; because it was, I mean the pace, the velocity you can imagine at Facebook was incredible. And I felt like between all of the work that we needed to do, the amount of engineering capacity that we had and the amount that was on the table, I felt like I wasn't resourced in a way where I felt like I could actually deliver on all of the things that were necessary without burning myself out. And I felt like I was burning myself out and I couldn't really see the forest through the trees because there was so much to do.

(00:15:20):
And so that was a situation that I didn't really understand how to navigate at that point in my career. And there were two or three manager changes concurrently, and so I didn't have a manager to lean on that I felt like I had a relationship with to help me to navigate that space. And I felt like the scope was actually too much for what needed to be done, and so I needed to find a better kind of fit for me. There was nothing wrong with the team, it was a great learning environment, but it was the confluence of scope and manager and all happening at once just wasn't a good fit for me.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:15:53):
A lot of people are in these situations where they'd say they go through this score, they identify I have way too little scope, way too much scope like you described, and there's always this question of can I actually make a change or is this just not, am I not in a position? Especially, I see product managers, there's just always a lot of, I can't actually change anything. What do you often tell people around this that just feel like there's nothing I can do here and my manager sucks, what am I going to do?

Bangaly Kaba (00:16:17):
Well, I do think one of the things that I recognize is your manager. Not all of these variables is created equal and the manager is the most important variable in the environment, because a great manager who is empathetic, who is aware of what's going on, who is a great communicator, has the ability to move the chess pieces around and to fix some of these for you either immediately or in time. There's no one other than your manager who can really help to increase your scope or to help make sure that the team has the right pieces in place, or dial in some of the issues that you might see in culture.

(00:16:56):
And so that is why people say they don't leave a job, they leave a manager because the manager is the one that has a lot of the power to fix a lot of these variables. And so really the question becomes like to what extent have you been able to clearly articulate what are the... And dispassionately articulate, what are the challenges that you're having, you're seeing across some of these variables with your manager? Help them to tie it back to how it's impacting your work and see if they can help you to create a plan to alleviate some of these things.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:17:28):
That's super interesting. Then your experience with the manager is kind of the core of a lot of these variables. Is there anything you recommend to people if their managers is not someone they like, is it just try to find a new manager or potentially leave?

Bangaly Kaba (00:17:39):
You're never going to always like your manager, right? That's not the... The goal isn't to like your manager. Ideally, you respect them and they respect you, you feel like there's things that you can learn from them. Finding a new manager is always an option, but I guess sometimes the real question is, is actually spending time to try to understand what is your manager optimizing? A lot of times I think there is a big disconnect between an IC focusing on their discrete area and try to optimize for local maxima, versus understanding, okay, my manager's thinking about these things and this is how I fit in, and understanding maybe they have a gap to understanding why your area is important. Or maybe there's stuff that's on your manager's plate that is actually adjacent to your remit that if you understood that they were optimizing for, you can take that on and you would find more synergies with what they're trying to do.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:18:28):
I love that advice. Let's talk about the other side of this equation. We've talked about environment, let's talk about skills. What do you advise there for folks that want to improve their skills?

Bangaly Kaba (00:18:37):
The skills part is really, really big and it's something that requires I think, consistent evolution of your own abilities. And so I broke it out in that blog post kind of communication, your ability to influence your leadership, strategic thinking and then execution, actually getting things done. The communication above these, again, not all of these are created equal. I think communication is the one that tends to be the most impactful. And you see this in a lot of ways. You see this for people who are poor executors but incredible communicators and they seem to continue to rise and rise because they can tell a great story, but when you look under the covers, there's nothing there. There's no substance there.

(00:19:17):
So communication for better or worse is one of the most important things. But building out your skills I think is really just kind of a, it is an interesting time to be in product and to be in tech right now because you have so many more ways to build out your skills than what previously existed. Just so many incredible blog posts like your podcasts and blogs, there's so many incredible people who've come on here who tell you things like how to go to market, how to think about B2B SaaS and metrics. And so listening to you, reading Ben Thompson, understanding his mental models, if you go to look at Elena Verner or whoever, there's so many thought leaders who are out there.

(00:19:56):
So I think being a voracious reader is really, really critical because it helps to build your toolkit and you need arrows in your quiver to really understand how to think about the right framework and the right mentor at the right time.

(00:20:09):
One thing I also tell people is people think about mentorship as like, I have a mentor, Lenny is my mentor, or John is my mentor. I tell them, it's actually better to have a stable of mentors. You want to have three or four. And ideally, what you do is you meet with each one of them once a month on a different Friday of the month. And so you might have three or four people on every Friday you're meeting with someone different. And the reason why this is so important is because if you, Lenny, are a mentor to me and you're busy one Friday and we only meet once a month now I don't have anyone to talk to for two months. And you're going through a lot of things and you're not really able to bounce ideas, or build skills or learn how influence others, but if you have three or four mentors, you have someone different to talk to every week. And if one or two of them cancel, you still have two people to talk to that month and you still can continue to grow and to build your thinking.

(00:21:01):
So that's something I always recommend. And then the last thing I actually talk about is, when it comes to execution, I think people don't, especially product managers, don't do enough of watching and learning from others. There's an art and a science to product management. And in a lot of ways I come from a background of education and in a lot of ways in product management, it's very similar. You want to watch how well the people hone their craft, how they deliver, how they lead teams and kind of steal things from them. Figure out, well, wow, Lenny did this really, really well when he was at Airbnb. It was really incredible. I'm going to take that. I'm going to take how he runs that team, or how he landed that framework, or how he communicated this message and note it and use it in my own toolkit later on. And so if you're really a student of product, you can't just be a student of theory, you've got to be a student of practice too, meaning you're going and you're looking, it's like, "Hey, I'd love to sit in your team meetings. Can I come watch? Or your PM meetings or your leadership meetings." And you are really like doing that for the sake of learning is really, really incredible. And that's some of the ways I talk about building skills.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:22:05):
Is there an example of that latter lesson that you learned from someone that comes to mind of watching someone and like, oh, I'm going to do that.

Bangaly Kaba (00:22:13):
Earlier in my career, when I first got to Instagram, I wasn't the first Growth PM, but I was one of the first and a guy who was there before me, his name was Georgia Lee, he actually stood up the growth team and ended up leaving six months right after I joined. But I watched, George was a really good listener. He had just a really incredible ability to be in a room and hear what was going on, to recast it back and make sure that everyone felt good about where we were and what was being said and the path forward, and really crystallizing the action items and also how people felt about what the next steps were. And walking out of that meeting, it felt like he always had buy-in and clarity and was helpful to build trust. You can see him almost winning trust in every moment of that meeting. And that was something that I really admired, and learned, and kind sought to emulate later on in my career.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:23:15):
That's an awesome example. It comes back to the skill of communication that you talked about, just the power becoming really good at that. And this is such a simple skill you just described, is just recapping, here's what we talked about. Here's what we're going to do. Here's the decisions we made. Here's action items. It's not actually difficult, it's just-

Bangaly Kaba (00:23:30):
It's not, actually. But what was magical about the way he did it. It's like he would name people and their contributions and show how all of this came together into what is the path forward.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:23:41):
That is amazing.

Bangaly Kaba (00:23:41):
And it's the communication, but it's also the other side. It's the other coin, the side of communication, which is eliciting to figure out how you communicate back to others.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:23:49):
So good. Following up on something else you talked about, which is mentors. Anytime someone talks about finding mentors, everyone's always, how do I find a mentor? What advice do you share with folks of how to find a mentor to help? You say once a week or once a month?

Bangaly Kaba (00:24:03):
Where I see people find the most success is they ask. They tell people what they're working on or what challenges they have and they say, "Do you know someone who I might be able to learn from who has done this or has good thinking about this recently?" So instead of just going to someone saying, "Hey, can you be a mentor?" Coming to me and say, "Hey, Bengaly, I'm actually trying to figure out how do I change the way this team operates because we need to go from this model to that model, but here's some of the challenges. So do you know someone who's actually really good at changing the way teams work or really good at communicating a new vision that I can talk to?"

(00:24:40):
And so that I think is really important because what you do is you're creating a seed, and the seed is there's a triad and you have the person who's looking for the mentor. You have the recommender, the recommender, and then you have the potential mentor. And the recommender is basically saying, "Here, there's common purpose between the two of you and I can see it, and I think this is important, so I want you all to come together." And that triad in that moment creates a higher affinity, highly likelihood that the person who needs the help and the person who you're connecting them with are going to see mutual benefit from one another. And I think I find that just doing that and seeding that and being really focused on what the opportunity or the challenge is, tends to lead to better connections as opposed to just reaching out and saying, "Hey, I like your style. Will you be my mentor?"

Lenny Rachitsky (00:25:30):
So essentially share with folks you trust, here's what I'm working on. See if they recommend someone that could help you with that specific skill versus assuming that there's this person that can help you with this skill?

Bangaly Kaba (00:25:40):
That's right.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:25:41):
I love it. Going back to your advice on career, something that you wrote about in your post plus folks have told me you're really big on, is this something you call understand work? Does that ring a bell?

Bangaly Kaba (00:25:53):
Yes, it does.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:25:53):
Okay. Talk about that and why that's important?

Bangaly Kaba (00:25:56):
I certainly cannot take credit for understand work. This is part of an old Facebook framework of understand, identify, execute. What I-

Bangaly Kaba (00:26:00):
Facebook framework of understand, identify, execute. What I probably will say is I guess I've been the shepherd for understand work in other companies. I've taken it from my time at Facebook and Relink Institute or rigorously at Instagram, then at Instacart and when I helped with Twitter, now at YouTube. The way I like to talk about it with my teams is that first I tell a story actually, and the story is we've all had a moment where we have worked on something with a team, super excited, finally it launches and we go out to dinner and we celebrate. And we're celebrating, everyone's juiced. It's great night. You go back to the office the next day and you look at the metrics and the metrics are flat and everyone's a little bummed. Why did this happen? Right. Why are the metrics flat? What happened? We worked so hard.

(00:26:49):
And ultimately when you unpack it, you realize that you built something that you thought was going to be a good idea, but you really didn't understand a lot of key components of what people really needed, what pain points really existed, or what were the alternatives and what the real value of those alternatives were in the market, or exactly how the product needed to work, what the flywheel or what the experience needed to be. And so that is what I call the anti-pattern of what we want to do and I call that identify, justify, execute. Right. Where you identify something, someone says, "Hey, you know what? This would be great to build." And you identify that, then you go pull data to go justify why that would be great to build and then you sink an ungodly amount of time working on it in order to make it work, but it ultimately doesn't succeed.

(00:27:36):
And that is the anti-pattern to what is kind of like the Facebook kind of way of thinking, which is understand, identify, execute, right? So first you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on. So when we talk about understand work, there's a few ways to think about it. One is, it is an intentional affordance in your execution to do the work that helps you to de-risk a project and to learn what's going on. When I say an intentional affordance, meaning you put it down like Lenny is going to work on this thing. Right. Lenny as a product manager is going to write a strategy. Janice as a designer is going to design a prototype, whatever the thing is, and you put it down as actual an item as opposed to assuming it's going to happen in the background. We don't make an affordance for understand work, then the work doesn't get done and everyone's just sprinting on execution.

(00:28:27):
And so it's a planned intentional time to the team's bandwidth to figure out what is it that we need to do to understand what's happening. And so for example at Instagram we did a lot of understand work of what makes for a good connection? Right. How do we want to think about that? How do we want to make sure that we're actually growing a graph, a social graph that makes sense? And so I might work with data science to do understand work, to pull a funnel and look at the different types of connections for different types of users and make it make sense. Right. And engineering might do understand work to instrument logging to make sure that we have the data that we need in order to tell the story. And so you're doing this understand work to basically better understand the gaps in knowledge. What's also really interesting is that understand work helps you to clarify what is a root cause, or what is a job to be done, or what is the right use case?

(00:29:25):
And because the team adopts this mentality, it becomes this forcing function for execution. So when someone says, "You know what we should build? We should build this." You have a team that's enabled and empowered to say, "That's a good idea, but we don't actually understand these three things before we start working on that. So maybe we should do understand work to make sure that that is actually the right idea." Right. And so what you end up getting by embracing this concept is two things. You get parallel paths of work. So every sprint, let's say you do a three-week sprint or a three-month roadmap, you're executing on the things that you have a lot of conviction around and you're also doing understand work in parallel. And so at the end of the sprint you have learnings from what you executed. Wow, that test or that launch worked really well. We should double down. Or Wow, that test or launch didn't work. Here's how we should pivot. And you have insights from the understand work and you use both of those to plan the next sprints or roadmap. Right.

(00:30:29):
And so because you have this parallel path, you end up getting this velocity multiplier over time. Right. So the next sprint, and the third sprint, and the fourth sprint, every subsequent sprint you de-risk new ideas, you've gotten more clarity. And so you do more execution, you do better execution and you move faster and the things you ship, you have a higher win rate on the things you ship, right? And your shipping, I remember when I left Instagram, this is many years ago, but we had 15 teams and we might've been running 12 to 20 experiments a quarter a team, and I would say probably 60 to 70% of them were positive and shippable, which is incredible. I mean, you think about and multiple and the magnitude of that and it was because we were so effective at de-risking and understanding what was going on.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:31:18):
This is really interesting. I imagine many people listening here are like, we put time into understanding, we run experiments, we write strategy docs, we use research. What is it that you think people are, where do you think they're missing? Is it that you dedicate people's actual time, like you're just doing understand work instead of building a new thing. For this next sprint, you're just going to be telling us what the problem here or opportunity is. How do you actually operationalize this versus just what people probably already do, which is user research, data dives?

Bangaly Kaba (00:31:47):
What I found is a couple things. One is when your team does not fully understand a problem space, the balance of work tends to be higher. I think when I started at YouTube we were doing 60% execution, 40% understand work. Right. And over time, as we understand more and more, the mix shifts. Now my teams are probably doing 80% execution, 20 to or 85% and 20 to 15% understand work.

(00:32:18):
And so it's not just about writing a strategy, it's about saying, okay, if we have these themes of stuff that we want to work on, what do we know with confidence because the data tells us and what do we need to understand because we don't have the data, we don't have the research, we don't have the insights? And really being honest with yourselves around what are the things that are low to medium effort but high likelihood of being impactful because you have the data and what are the things that you are interested in perhaps doing, but because you're missing something, you're missing research or feedback from users or data or some insights or strategy. You should actually say, I'm going to go do this before I do something else. Right.

(00:33:03):
An example of this is one of my teams ships paid virtual goods in the live experience on YouTube. And that's a really, really important and hard problem space. And when I joined, we didn't really fully understand the whole live ecosystem, like how we lived in that live ecosystem, how our products worked, where the biggest opportunity was. So the first and most important piece of understand work was instead of shipping iterations to the current product, we needed to actually get the funnel of what was happening. Right. Like what's happening with how many people are watching live every day, how many people are clicking through, how many people are seeing our experience, how many people actually buying it? We didn't really fully have the experience mapped out and to understand where were the gaps and where are the problem space is in, where should we be focusing?

(00:33:52):
And so we had to do that. And that was understand work for multiple people, for multiple teams. We had to do on the engineering side, we needed data science as analysis. We needed the PM to go and dog through the experience to figure out what was broken. All of that was intentional and an affordance on our roadmaps.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:34:08):
What's interesting about this is that this is very counterintuitive to how people would probably approach, hey, we need to speed up execution, we need to speed up growth, we need to ship more, execute, go faster, do more. And what you're saying is you find the impact comes from actually slow down how much we're doing and spend more time understanding to execute more intelligently.

Bangaly Kaba (00:34:32):
That's right. Slow down and speed up.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:34:33):
Fascinating. Because it's interesting, I have a bunch of questions that emerged out of folks that you've worked with and many of them are around how you turn a culture around, speed things up, and drive growth in a really meaningful way. And it sounds like this is one of your key strategies, is get people to spend more time understanding before diving into a bunch of stuff.

Bangaly Kaba (00:34:54):
It does sound counterintuitive, but if you actually think about it, what is a better outcome? Is it a better outcome to just ship more faster now, but most of the things aren't unimpactful? Right. Or is it a better outcome to ship fewer things but really work on making sure that you're shipping them in the best way and de-risking a lot of other things so that a year later your win rate's higher and your velocity is higher?

Lenny Rachitsky (00:35:19):
Yeah, I think counterintuitive is the wrong word. I think it makes sense. I think it's just no one does this. Usually everyone's like, move faster, we need more and ship more experiments.

Bangaly Kaba (00:35:28):
Well, I mean this is the irony of growth, is people think growth is overnight success and it's not. Right. It is a lot of short wins and short-term execution for a longer-term gain and really understanding you have a lot of short terms towards the longer-term outcomes.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:35:48):
So that people can take away this lesson, can you help people understand just when you say understand work, like what does that look like generally? Is it just a dedicated time to dive into data and answer a bunch of questions you've sent them? Is it running experiments to test hypotheses? What does that usually look like when you're, here let's do 40% understand work?

Bangaly Kaba (00:36:10):
The understand work sometimes comes from me, but most often comes from the teams themselves. And every function can do and should be doing understand work at some point. Right. And so it really depends on what the function is. So for an engineer, it could be looking at the code and saying, okay, we want to improve this. I need to do understand work to understand do we need to refactor this code and how scalable is it and what do we need to do to make sure that we can execute fast and make sure that we're not going to have a lot of start and stop? That could be understand work. It could be actually instrumenting the data and making sure that we actually have full visibility into what's going on. Data science, like we work a lot with data science doing activation metrics and understanding proxy metrics. Right. That's understand work because it helps us to figure out what we need to build and where to focus.

(00:37:05):
For product management, sometimes understand work is figuring out the partnership strategy ahead of actually launching the product because you need to go figure out how the pieces are going to come together. Right. And so it really just depends on what the function is. But when I say it should be coming from the bottoms up, what I mean is I encourage the team when we plan a sprint or plan a roadmap, to ask a question to identify the key themes that they need to work on. And when they ask a question on a key theme, also ask what else do we need to understand to make this happen? And in that planning session, to make sure that you are including cross-functional partners. So it's not just product design and data science and Inge, you also include go to market, you also include marketing because if you're not inclusive, then you don't really understand what the issues are.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:37:55):
My PM brain is afraid of creating too much understand work and nothing getting done. How do you find that balance of we're going to be understanding for hours and days and weeks and months and not shipping much? How do you do some,-

Bangaly Kaba (00:38:11):
I tell them, you have to ship. I mean, you always have to ship, right? Sometimes I give them, sometimes it's helpful, especially early on because it takes a while for people to get their head around why this is so critical. I say, we should choose, sometimes I'll give them guidance. We should choose three to four understand projects that are going to really help this roadmap and figure out what they are. Right. So choose your top three or four and then let's talk about it. And I'll give them guidance. Or I would say figure out... There should always be some execution. So initially you're looking for low effort, high impact things to execute against. Right.

(00:38:53):
And so build a portfolio of work to do every sprint or every roadmap, some of which should be low effort, high impact, some of which should be medium effort, high impact. And sometimes understand work actually looks like doing a cheap test, doing a test that's going to help us to learn as fast as possible that we think is a good enough experience that can inform us. Right. And so identifying ways to do that. And so it's really about just managing expectations and helping people to be clear that the goal is to ship the product, but you want to ship the things that you have more confidence and understanding versus not.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:39:29):
So I think a big takeaway here is if you want to have more impact, move faster, try to spend a little more time understanding the problems you're going after in the opportunity space.

Bangaly Kaba (00:39:40):
That's right. Right. I'll give you a very tactical example is when I joined Instagram in January 2016, believe it or not, the onboarding, the sign-up flow at Instagram had literally no logging to it. It had logging of how many people started and how many people ended. Right. And I joined in January and it was like we had to write a roadmap. And so the roadmap looked like this. Okay, we know this amount at the top of the funnel and this amount at the bottom end of the funnel. And there was eight steps in the funnel and we don't know what is going on. Right. So the first bit of understand work was we needed to do the instrumentation of that funnel as fast as possible to get the data to figure out where the drops were happening and what to fix. But because we knew of what was happening at the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel, we can go and play around with the experience and see what was broken.

(00:40:32):
So we ran a bunch of tests of stuff that was obviously broken to see what would improve. Right. And so it was like a mix. And so what we did was we set up time where we did, the beginning of like the first couple of weeks, add the logging, ship it to code, re-evaluate in the middle of the quarter, look at the full funnel and then add more things that we can do later on once we got that. But in order to get that done, that involved understand work with growth marketing to figure out what was the schemas for the instrumentation, right, the engineering to actually do that logging. Right. Data science to like pull together funnels and dashboard it, all of that had to come together all at one time.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:41:08):
I really like just this concept of calling it understand work. I think that alone is a powerful tool because we're going to spend more time on understand work.

Bangaly Kaba (00:41:15):
It feels like it gives meaning to stuff that otherwise people would brush aside.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:41:18):
Right. Where it's just like, no, no, let's just ship stuff. Let's just try stuff. Let's just test the step. We'll see what happens.

Bangaly Kaba (00:41:25):
That's right.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:41:26):
Is there anything else you have seen and often do to help a team you join move faster and grow bigger? And I've heard that you've had a lot of impact on a lot of different cultures, so I'm curious if there's anything else that is really effective.

Bangaly Kaba (00:41:42):
I've found myself in a bunch of interesting situations where I had to come in and help improve cultures or change cultures around teams. I found this framework, I don't even actually remember where I got it from, but it travels from computer to computer with me and team to team, and it's called managing complex change. I actually think I got it from business school or something. And it's really interesting. It's got these five components to it. There's vision, skills, incentives, resources, action plan, and you need all of those to have change. Right. Team needs to have vision, they need to have the skills, they need to have the right incentives. Sometimes some teams are incentivized to do some things versus others. You need to have the right resources in the right places and you need to have a clear action plan. And what I love about this framework is if you can visualize it and maybe you can share it with your podcast.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:42:34):
Yeah. We'll put it up on the screen on YouTube so folks can see what you're talking about.

Bangaly Kaba (00:42:38):
Basically what it does is it shows where if you're missing any one component, you get different outcomes. Right. So if you're missing the vision component, you end up in a state of confusion or if you're missing the incentives, you end up in a state of resistance because people aren't incentivized to do the right work. Or if you're missing an action plan, you end up in a state of false starts. So I use this, and I think about this a lot actually, because when you come in as a leader, as someone who's supposed to influence change, you have to really observe what's happening and figure out what are the challenges anecdotally and what are you observing? And then I figure out where I can plug in and what I can do to make the teams better. And what I tend to find is moving from the right side to the left side of this, like action plans are easier to institute. Right.

(00:43:27):
So if I see a team that's struggling to execute, I wonder do they have the right type of PRD framework or are they communicating well? Do they have the right type of team meeting structures? Those are kind of lower hanging fruit. It's a lot harder to change vision and skills. It will come in time. But what I also have done over the course of my career is I've built this deck that comes with me of different skills that matter. Right. What are different skills, what are different frameworks, how do we think about it, to help level teams fast? Right. Because I find that sometimes you walk in and not everyone is grounded in the same mental models or concepts.

(00:44:07):
One example of this I talk about a lot is Instagram. Instagram had just this fantastic culture of thinking about how do we ship high, high quality product, right, and what does product craft mean? And so that is something that I came to YouTube and my teams particularly, they didn't have a mental model for product craft. So I found myself talking into an echo chamber in some way. So I had to build a deck that showed, okay, here's how I think about product craft. Here's a framework for it. Here's how I think about all of these different things. And so now we have a shared language, shared communication for, and a repository of skills that we're going to build.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:44:47):
So I'm looking at this image that we'll have up. So in this case, their skills weren't necessarily there, which in this framework leads to anxiety. And so what I'm hearing, essentially you come into a team, you're like, what am I feeling? Is it confusion, frustration, the wrong thing? And that kind of tells you which of these buckets to spend time on.

Bangaly Kaba (00:45:06):
That's right. And then within those buckets, you've got to figure out what are the right levers that you need to pull? What are the things that are missing? How do you really focus and where do you kind of spend your time?

Lenny Rachitsky (00:45:16):
So interesting. I love that this image is just like this very grainy,-

Bangaly Kaba (00:45:20):
So old.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:45:21):
Screenshot from some old McKinsey deck or something.

Bangaly Kaba (00:45:24):
Yeah. It's from like 2006 PC or something.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:45:26):
I love it. So you have this thing, you have this deck. You just come in with all these tools in your tool belt. Is there anything else in that list of things that you bring with you to help change culture and help teams,-

Bangaly Kaba (00:45:37):
Yeah. I think one thing I think about a bunch is I come from, my background's a little bit different than a traditional tech executive. There was actually three phases to my career. I was in education for six years, taught in inner city DC and then was a dean of a boarding school in Switzerland, which is a little bit of a plot twist.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:45:38):
Oh, wow.

Bangaly Kaba (00:45:58):
I went to business school and I worked on Wall Street for a bit, and then I left my job on Wall Street, quit and started a startup. Startup was a glorious failure as many startups are, but it was like a very non-traditional path towards tech. And I think a lot of my time in these other industries actually shapes the way I think about products and product management and actually changing teams and building teams. And what I mean by that is I think there's a lot of similarities between education and product management believe it or not.

(00:46:31):
When I was interviewing for my first set of jobs in tech, recruiters would say to me, "How does your background relate? I don't really see it." And I would tell them, "When I was in education, I would walk into a classroom of 24, seven-year olds, and these kids owed me nothing. And the only way I could be successful or impactful is I needed to be able to be a strong communicator. I needed to be able to have a clear vision of what was going on. I needed to be able to influence them in a believable way such that they would get on board with what needed to be done for 270 days of the year." It's like when you walk into a room as a product manager, engineers, designers, researchers go to market. Nobody owes you anything. And the only thing that you're going to do in order to be successful is you need to be a strong communicator. You have a clear vision of what's going on and you need to be able to influence them to do the things together of what matters, right? It's very similar skillset, just different domain expertise.

(00:47:29):
And so because of that, right, I've really adopted a mindset of how do I coach my teams? How do I enable them? Because it's really about the sum of the parts versus me being a top down leader saying, you have to do this and you have to do that. And so I think a lot about that in both approach and the processes that we create. And to give you a couple of classic typical examples of this, there's two things I want to call out. One is there's this, actually this education framework, it's called Bloom's Taxonomy. I think it's changed over time, but when I learned it, it was basically a pyramid and the pyramid was, Bloom Taxonomy describes what's the different levels or order of critical thinking you need in order to be a master of something? And at the bottom of the pyramid was knowledge, and then it's comprehension, and then application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Right.

(00:48:26):
And so going up the pyramid, it means it's higher order thinking. And I think about that a lot and trying to understand where are my teams struggling? Do they have the core knowledge that they need? Do they understand it but they can't apply it or they apply it, but they're not able to analyze it across different business segments? Right. And you can use this framework not only with the ICPMs and the teams themselves, but also for your managers, like what is breaking down? And in using that and attaching that to the skills that we want to build to figure out how do you fill in those gaps? Right. And it really is a grounding for me, a grounding mental model for how do you build teams that are actually affect them? How do you meet people where they are as opposed to just saying, hey, you need to figure this out? Right. I find that too often in tech and also in product, people are ask to figure things out but not given the support to get there, and there's no way to really connect the dots for them.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:49:21):
Amazing. I'm pulling up the Bloom's Taxonomy. So essentially if you see a PM struggling, which you try to do is figure out which of these things do they not have? How are you not supporting them? How can you support them better? So it could be they don't have the skills, they don't have the understanding. What are some of the other things that often you find that maybe hinder a product manager's success?

Bangaly Kaba (00:49:42):
A lot of times they might have the understanding, but they haven't had a chance to apply it to a variety of different scenarios or haven't seen it applied to multiple scenarios. Right. So oftentimes you might understand a concept like machine learning, but you haven't actually worked on it in against multiple scenarios. So you maybe have one way of doing it that doesn't make sense and you need to have two or three, and you don't even know that two or three ways of doing it exists. Right. That is often a common failure point. Right. Or it's maybe you know how to apply it, but you can't synthesize why this thing that you're doing actually matters for the business context. Right. Oftentimes that becomes a challenge with managers. It's like they know what to do, but they don't understand how to tie it back to the business context and the overall strategy needs and so where to prioritize. Right.

(00:50:31):
And so what I find is that when you're trying to manage managers, you're really trying to live at the top of the pyramid. You are responsible, managers responsible for basically owning that pyramid for all of the areas that they operate, but they need to be able to live at the top of the pyramid across all of them. They need to be able to synthesize and evaluate what's happening for each product team that they own in order to kind of make the bigger picture connections.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:50:56):
By the way, I loved your metaphor of product manager, like this group of seven-year-olds where you have to learn how to manage, influence, communicate.

Bangaly Kaba (00:50:56):
Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:50:56):
It's great.

Bangaly Kaba (00:51:05):
Yeah. I mean, they're not like a group of seven-year-olds,-

Lenny Rachitsky (00:51:07):
It's the skills.

Bangaly Kaba (00:51:07):
But I think it's actually, it's,-

Lenny Rachitsky (00:51:08):
Yeah, the same skills.

Bangaly Kaba (00:51:08):
Huh?

Lenny Rachitsky (00:51:09):
The same skills you,-

Bangaly Kaba (00:51:10):
Same skills.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:51:11):
Yeah.

Bangaly Kaba (00:51:12):
I mean, I think it's true. I found it actually significantly harder for me to get 24 seven-year-olds to believe in what I was doing then to walk into a room with Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and explain to them what's the strategy for growing the next 100 million users on Instagram? These are very logical adults who can reason with you, and you got a classroom of kids. It's not quite the same. So those skills are really critical.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:51:36):
I love that. I definitely want to ask about your Instagram days. Is there anything else in this bucket of wisdom of, you kind of talked about things you've learned about how to manage product managers and managers of managers. Is there anything else there that might be helpful to folks that you've learned?

Bangaly Kaba (00:51:50):
One thing that I also think about a lot, and I don't know if this is just a me thing, but I think about PM as a team sport. Right. Leading product teams is really about...

Bangaly Kaba (00:52:01):
Leading product teams is really about being the coach and helping other people to see what their role is on the team and to maximize them. People talk a lot about product as you're the CEO, and I don't actually fully believe that analogy. If you think about it as a team sport, there's a few things that shake out. One is not everyone's going to be a star player. But not everyone needs to be a LeBron James or Kobe Bryant. You need role players. You need really strong role players. You need people who feel valued in their role, and you need to understand how to groom those role players and how to make sure that they have the right seat at the table and the right place. So I think it's, yes, you're the conductor of the orchestra, but you're really more than that. You're really the coach of the team.

(00:52:46):
Another thing I think about a lot is I have a good friend who's a college basketball coach, and he taught me about this idea of your coaching tree. This is a really important concept, especially in college basketball. You, as a head coach, you take a lot of pride in who are your assistants. Who is your first assistant, second assistant, and third assistant? And where do they go on to be head coaches? And what legacy do they have because you were able to instill a bit in them? The coaching tree of a Mike Mike Krzyzewski, the coaching tree of a John Calipari, these esteemed coaches, not only because of what they've done, but because of the tree that they've built.

(00:53:26):
And I like to think about this as well, because I think it's really important for product leaders, think about what is their leadership tree. Who have you helped to build up and help to grow and help to get to their next wall? And so I think about this a lot. I have people who I've worked with who are running growth at Stripe or the CPO at Chief or now running stories at Instagram that were on my team in the earlier days. And their success is my success, and I'm proud for them, and I'm happy for them. And I think it kind of reinforces this mentality that it's your responsibility to coach people up to greatness.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:54:04):
So what I'm hearing is you put a lot of value in your team on them coaching folks, whether they're managers or even ICs is helping them understand that it's important to coach folks on their team and help them develop, that it's part of your job, essentially.

Bangaly Kaba (00:54:21):
That's part of your job. You are trying to build a repository of skills and repository of knowledge and of team velocity. And the only way you can do that is everyone is... So rising tide has to lift all boats.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:54:33):
Amazing. And interestingly, that probably teaches you how to do your job better because you're in teaching, you actually learn things a lot better.

Bangaly Kaba (00:54:40):
That's right. That's right. And it forces you to figure out how can you get things off of your plate so that you can go work on bigger things.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:54:46):
Yeah, and how good does it feel when folks that you used to manage go on to do bigger and better things.

Bangaly Kaba (00:54:51):
That's right. That's great.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:54:52):
I want to talk a little bit about growth within YouTube. I heard that you haven't been there for that long, and apparently you've already... Two extra, three extra more, something important within YouTube. I don't know exactly the details, and people are very impressed with the impact you've already had. And apparently a lot of the success there and other places is how you think about growth through flywheels. You always look for the flywheel that helps drive growth. Can you just talk about either at YouTube, ideally YouTube, whatever you can share, because that's pretty impressive, especially for a company that scale that you're making so much impact, or other places, just how you think about flywheels and growth.

Bangaly Kaba (00:55:29):
Well, it's very generous of you. I wouldn't say, look, we've done some really good work, some good work so far at YouTube, and it's been a journey. I do think a lot about flywheels. I think it's actually a lot of growth is really understanding what is the value profit, all of the different points of the experience, especially if you have a multi-sided marketplace. A multi-sided marketplace for YouTube is like the creator and what the creator is trying to achieve both from an engagement perspective, but also for me for a monetization perspective. And then for the viewer or the purchaser, where is their hat? What are they trying to do, and where are they missing the opportunity?

(00:56:13):
I can't really go into specifics a bunch with YouTube, but what I would say is this is that one thing that I always do when I come in is I try to push my teams to really dog food products in their adjacent user state, if you will. And what I mean by that is often, a product that you and I use that we've been using for years isn't actually the product that we're building for other people. Like a power user who's using a product has... There's so much history and there's so much informed knowledge on how that product... for that product to actually create a great experience for you that if you were to go and create a new Gmail account and look at YouTube today, I guarantee you it's a completely different and significantly worse experience.

(00:57:03):
And there's a lot of obvious opportunities missed, especially with what is the flywheel and why things are working or not working if you don't actually go and use things in a new state. And an example of this when we talk about YouTube is a lot of the YouTube graph for searching stuff is based on what have you watched in the past? So if you go and search and you search history, it's going to be about like, well, what have you watched in the past or what have you searched for, and what can we show you that's going to be what we can better predict?

(00:57:33):
But if you don't have a line of search history, then they're not going to do as good of a job. And so that's not a direct translation for what we were doing. But for me, I work on freedom monetization, and there are really important flywheels around what does it take for a creator to make content that can help them to monetize? How do we get that content to people and where to what extent are we getting that content to people, and how do we make sure that people feel good about what they're receiving, the people who are paying. And all of those flywheels have to work.

(00:58:02):
And so part of what I've been able to do is really think about how do we connect the dots in a story that the teams can uniquely understand, can help them to lean in even more and have clarity and purpose of work. Sometimes, what's super important about the flywheels actually is enabling for your teams to know what to work on and what not to work on. And then it also helps us to understand what do we know and what do we not know about creators and viewers and monetization operations so that we can do the understand work to improve the velocity and to prove the impact.

(00:58:35):
And that's really where we've been focused. And so I did a lot of this in YouTube, but I also did this in Instacart, really thinking about when I joined Instacart, one of the big questions I had was like, how will people in their daily lives... How's their daily life actually reflecting in the purchase experience? Are we making it easy for them? Because when you buy groceries, you're not going to going grocery shopping because you want beautiful ingredients in your fridge. You're going grocery shopping because you actually have a meal to put together. So are we actually reflecting the real job to be done, which is I want to buy tacos, I want to make Taco Tuesday. Can we make it easier for people to find the ingredients for tacos, as opposed to having them sort for tortillas and tomatoes and avocado? And so it's really thinking about what is the job and then what is the flywheel to make that happen, and how do we make this come to life?

Lenny Rachitsky (00:59:25):
There's so many things that I want to follow up on here. First of all, I realize that all of the things you worked on, I am a daily active user of or weekly active user. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Instacart about weekly active user, I think that might be. Yeah. Wow, nice job. You got me. You got me in the flywheels of all your flywheels.

Bangaly Kaba (00:59:45):
I was not intentional, but I'm glad my efforts had improved joy, just a little bit,

Lenny Rachitsky (00:59:48):
Nice work.

Bangaly Kaba (00:59:49):
... ideally.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:59:51):
Okay, so a couple takeaways here. One is you think about the value prop at every interaction of both sides, if it's a multi-sided marketplace or if it's just like, "Why would I be doing this?" So it's like, "Why would I send an invite to my friend? Why would I share this photo? Why would I open up Instacart?" And then you think about the jobs to be done during the day of a potential user and how can we flow into that versus not connect to their actual day-to-day experience?

Bangaly Kaba (01:00:17):
And is the product actually working? As I'm doing this, I'm looking and saying, "Is the product actually set up to deliver these things? Do we actually see it work or not?" I think there's a lot of assumptions that the product works, but a lot of times teams will surprisingly build the pieces of a flow but not actually build the experience, the output. They don't design it in a way where you're getting the real output that you need.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:00:39):
That's such a easy to miss point you're making here, which is you just think about, "Hey, I have Taco Tuesday. I'm actually as a product manager on Instacart. I'm going to open up the app, and use it in this use case and see how it goes."

Bangaly Kaba (01:00:51):
That's right.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:00:52):
And most people don't do that is what you realized.

Bangaly Kaba (01:00:55):
Most people don't do that. Another example of this, this was years ago, but at Instacart, Instacart made it really hard to reorder stuff, super hard to reorder. And it was shocking to me, because when I thought about it, when I go to the grocery store, 90% of the time I'm getting the same stuff. It's like maybe not every trip, but over the course of a month or two, you've got a list of things that are part of your staple, and then occasionally holiday time I went some peppermint bark chocolate or something. There's random snacks you're going to throw in, but there's... And so when we looked at the data, it turns out, after five times when you go to Instacart, 90% of your order was the same. But when you wanted to reorder, at least back then, you couldn't go and reorder easily. You had to dig and find it like seven or eight clicks.

(01:01:46):
And when you did reorder, you had to reorder the whole thing. You couldn't take pieces, you couldn't take, I want to take the milk and the blueberries. And so you think about growth, you think about what does it mean to grow an Instacart? What does it mean to actually drive better retention? Well, it's actually really important to make it easy for people to make the next order. And so the product wasn't really built for that, though people have the best intentions in mind.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:02:10):
The adjacent order.

Bangaly Kaba (01:02:12):
Yeah, exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:02:13):
I imagine that was maybe one of the biggest growth wins in Instacart history is just the reorder the same thing, because I do that all the time.

Bangaly Kaba (01:02:20):
Yeah, you would be surprised.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:02:22):
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(01:03:14):
You mentioned this concept of adjacent user kind of adjacently, but I think it's worth spending a little more time here. It's like this term you popularized and you explained it somewhat, but maybe explain a little bit more. I think it's really powerful for people and how do you think about growth.

Bangaly Kaba (01:03:29):
This was something that came out of actually my time at Instagram. It was a framework that we came up with because Instagram really was, at that time, we grew so fast that the people who were using Instagram in February were completely different than people who were using it the following October and then the next January. I think when I joined, we were at like 440 million monthly actives. January 2016, at the end of that year we were at 636 million, grew like 47% that year. And so when we talk to users, first half of 2016, when we talk to women in the US in their 30, they're like, "Why would I have an Instagram? I have a Facebook account." Literally people said that, it was that long ago. And then a year later it's like, "Of course I use Instagram. Instagram is my everything." The world changed so fast.

(01:04:21):
And so when you're in a hypergrowth product, it's really, really important to understand who your users are today and the persona of the user, what motivates them, why they're using it, but then also to understand who is the next user? Who is the user who could be using this product, but for some reason it doesn't work for them, and understanding who that adjacent user is and when you are actually starting to see that adjacent user adopt the product. And one of the ways you start to see the adjacent users starting to adopt the product, especially with the data, is you start seeing cohort curves decline. You start seeing the people who sign up today, three or six months from now, they're signing up and they're doing a worse job. Nothing's changing the product, but just the understanding of how the product should work is different.

(01:05:12):
They might be less tech savvy. On a scale of an early adopter versus late majority, they might be closer to the late majority. And so we saw this at Instagram. We always knew working on our registration flow, and at one point we were converting at some insanely high percent, and then three months later it would go down by 15%, not because anything was broken, but just because we'd broken into new markets. You bring on people in India or you bring on people in the Philippines, and their understanding of how it works, the phones they use, et cetera are all different. So really, the core of their adjacent news was a few things. One is like you have to understand who's using your product today and why. And when you're growing at some really strong pace, 30, 40, 50% or more per year, you've got to be on top of who you believe the next user is and why.

(01:06:02):
And then you also have to be the adjacent exactly, use the product like them and see how it's working, what's broken with it. And so at an Instacart, the adjacent user, the original user might've been like an office admin who is going to buy this thing every week because of during happy hours and team staff. But then the next adjacent user might've been the mom of three or four or the dad of three or four who's home with the kids and they need to depend on Instacart, versus later on it might be they're a single person in New York who does this out of convenience. But what they're optimizing for, how they use the product all changes, and the functionality and the abilities are fundamentally different. So you have to be them, you have to watch how they use the product, you have to talk to them, and then have to visit them and literally see what they're doing in real time in order to make sure that you're enabling the right jobs for them.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:06:57):
I love just the visualization of the adjacent user. Basically your growth is going to come from non-existing users. It's the users right outside that circle of...

Bangaly Kaba (01:07:05):
That's right.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:07:05):
... pre-users are today, and you need to think about what do they need that existing users maybe don't need. You said that this is most powerful for hypergrowth companies. Is this something you think people like all companies should be thinking about or is it a lot less important if you're not a hypergrowth business?

Bangaly Kaba (01:07:21):
So it's a great question. I think it's essential. It's mandatory for hypergrowth. I think it's very helpful if you have a product or a company that is not growing what you want it to be. And so you are focused on capturing more share of wallet instead of expanding your audience. And so sometimes you can imagine a cosmetics company, for example, that's like digitally enabled. You can imagine that they've hit a ceiling in terms of the growth of their users, and they're really just trying to get people to buy more product, but maybe the people who want to use their product are missing something from your current product. Maybe you're missing different skin tone shades, or maybe you're missing certain types of tools. So really talking to who is just outside of your current user base, who's coming to your product and looking around and not buying and understanding what are their needs and figuring out how do you enable for them, how do you build the right experience for them in order to become adopters of your product?

Lenny Rachitsky (01:08:21):
So what I'm hearing is spend some understand work to figure out who your potential users are,

Bangaly Kaba (01:08:25):
That's right.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:08:26):
... and then use the product as them and see what is missing. I imagine user research goes into this. You're not actually going to understand necessarily all the things they need. So it's probably fine folks in that cohort and see how they use the product. Awesome.

Bangaly Kaba (01:08:41):
Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:08:42):
The question I had on my mind as you're talking, you've come into so many companies and helped them with growth. Where do you find most of the opportunities often lie? Is it like onboarding, activation? Is there a trend like that you're like, "Here's probably there's going to be opportunity here," or is it super mixed bag?

Bangaly Kaba (01:08:58):
Usually it's somewhere in the onboarding to habit-building experience. What does it take for someone to actually understand the value, that first moment, that first aha moment in the product? And a lot of teams, it's shocking how many teams don't really understand what that moment is for them. And then also how do you get them to build habit around the product. Oftentimes, a lot of people equate growth to top of funnel, and that is also critical. I think having the right top of funnel motion is really critical and building on that. So I think there's one part of, it's like once you have the right top of funnel motion to get people to come in, how do you help to make sure of the defining value and the building habit and their routine? Because that's the thing that helps you to compound over time. If you're bringing a lot of people but they're not staying around, then you just have a leaky bucket and it doesn't matter how big your top funnel is. So making sure that that first-month and two-month, three-month experience is great.

(01:10:04):
And then the other part is really figuring out how do you build compounding growth loops where it's not just one way of acquiring people, but you're building two and three and four ways that layer onto each other that help you to really supercharge your engine of acquiring people. So at Instagram, if you kind of look at where Instagram is and how I [inaudible 01:10:28] and grew, there's a lot that goes into it, but if you actually unpack the top of funnel for what worked at Instagram, there's certainly a component of it, which was our core component, which was invitations, where people inviting you and making sure that those invitations work and they work well and that people, their friends are coming on, you get notified.

(01:10:48):
But another part that goes unspoken, still critical to this day was the celebrity partnerships was critical, because basically they had this wonderful partnerships team that basically took Instagram and taught celebrities how to use it, how to make it work for them, how to tell their own story and be their own brand, and that was a critical growth funnel because with that, you had the ability for them to create these celebrities and celebrity creators to set the norm for how the platform gets used, but they also were getting picked up by the news and the media for all the stuff that's happening in the celebrity world, which then added onto this other growth level, which was SEO.

(01:11:36):
And so every time a news article came out, they would link to the creators or the celebrities Instagram account or that particular post. And so you have this whole SEO engine that worked. And the SEO engine was because you have both web, which we launched at Instagram, which created the canonical SEO tables, and then you had all of these inbound links from these celebrity sites and news media, but then what you also had is you had embeds for Instagram and all of these different sites, like a news article, whatever, the posts, Lenny's podcast, Instagram account, and those embeds help with SEO juice.

(01:12:15):
And so you have not just the invites, but now you have the celebrities, now you have the SEO component. And then we would do a bunch of paid media on top of that using a lot of those signals. And then we have our own content. And so you would have all of these different growth engines compounding each other. So every time the invitations got better, every time we've got more celebrities, every time SEO gets better, it's like magnifying the top of funnel, and at the bottom of the funnel or mid-funnel, making sure that people are retaining and getting value and staying around over the long term.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:12:47):
That is so interesting. I had no idea this was such a core part of the early growth strategy. Everyone's always talking about reality and word of mouth, all these things. And you're saying partnerships was a key part of the early growth strategy.

Bangaly Kaba (01:12:59):
Huge. It's huge.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:12:59):
That's so funny. Never something people talk about in growth, this partnership. It's always is like, "Oh, there's a couple of companies that really had success from partnerships in BD." How early was this a big part of the strategy? How early in the history of,

Bangaly Kaba (01:13:13):
I mean the partnerships team was there before I joined. It was a very savvy and astute thing that Kevin and Mikey set up. The partnerships team drove a lot of the word of mouth around Instagram, but it was the partnership's work in combination with the product work that actually helped to allow a lot of that to land. It was our ability to think outside the box and understand that we needed to have a web presence because it was critical for international growth and it also helped with SEO. And so the idea of launching web really drove and actually increased Instagram's growth by 10% the minute we launched it. And it was something that George Wang, who was there before me, had the idea around. It wasn't really something that Kevin and Mikey believed in initially, but we had to prove to them that it was really impactful and one should launch.

(01:14:03):
Then they understood why it was impactful and all of the effect of it. But web was really critical for driving so much SEO, which helped support a lot of the celebrity work and the partnerships work, because now every time creator or celebrity did something on Instagram, every news media article picked it up and it just helped to drive searches in Google searches, which helped to make Instagram part of the cultural zeitgeist.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:14:29):
This is so interesting, because everyone imagines Instagram, virality, word of mouth, like SEO and partnerships sounds like a core part of Instagram's early growth, which I don't think anyone ever talks about.

Bangaly Kaba (01:14:39):
No, that's huge.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:14:39):
Wow.

Bangaly Kaba (01:14:40):
I mean it was part of Facebook's growth too, but I think a little bit differently. It's not as much partnership, but when you Google someone now, you Google someone's name, oftentimes, Instagram is one of the first five things that comes up for the average person,

Lenny Rachitsky (01:14:40):
Yeah, right.

Bangaly Kaba (01:14:40):
... now, by design.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:14:53):
LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter.

Bangaly Kaba (01:14:54):
That's right.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:14:55):
Do you ever see the video of Alex Jiu talking about TikTok's growth strategy of this whole... He had this metaphor, and he was trying to grow off of Instagram, so his metaphor was Instagram is like you're in Europe and you're killing it. If you're in Europe and you're king, you don't ever want to go to America. There's no reason for you to give it up. And America is TikTok in this case. He's like, "How do we convince people to come to America and try moving everything there?" He's like, "We need to go after the people that are not doing well in Europe, who want to be the king, and we're going to help you become that king in America, or the President."

Bangaly Kaba (01:15:28):
So he used the adjacent... Used that theory on us, basically, is what you're saying.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:15:33):
That's right. He did. Drink up your shake.

Bangaly Kaba (01:15:40):
Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:15:40):
Yeah. And I think the reason that strategy worked differently is there was already a place, so they couldn't execute what you did because there's already celebrities already there, and it's not like, "Come here." There's no point. I already have a huge following.

Bangaly Kaba (01:15:51):
So you make your own celebrities.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:15:53):
Make your own celebrities. Exactly. And they went after the B-list, C-list people. So it's interesting that people look at Instagram, like, cool, we're going to do partnerships, SEO. But I think it's important to realize things change when the market is a different dynamic. You can't just do the same thing.

Bangaly Kaba (01:15:53):
That's right.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:16:07):
It won't work as well. Is there anything else from the Instagram early days that maybe people wouldn't know or would be interesting to share? Because you were there quite early, and now it's maybe the most thriving social network in the world.

Bangaly Kaba (01:16:17):
One thing that's actually, I think, interesting, as an interesting story that doesn't get talked about a lot is I think the early Instagram was built where... it was built in a way where every follow was created equal. And what I mean by that is if I followed you, Lenny, or if I followed Kim Kardashian, I followed Selena Gomez, all follows were treated like they were equally important. And this is actually a really important fact. It was a really important factor for a couple of reasons. One, early celebrities who were adopting Instagram obviously benefited from that, because a celebrity is going to get a follow before an average person does. It doesn't mean that their followers weren't meaningful. It's just that when you have a machine learning that's just optimized for a click through a follow, then that matters.

(01:17:15):
But what ended up happening is we ended up looking at the data, and I can't take credit for this. My colleague at the time, Rob Andrews, had identified this. He was the head of growth marketing. He was a peer of mine that basically, this is 2016-ish days, the average person would come on Instagram and retain, but then leave after 7, 8, 9 months. We'd see a flattening in a retention curve, but then we would see it dip again, which was very weird. And we're like, why is this happening? And it turned out that what was happening anecdotally is that people were revving up Instagram, following a bunch of people, following a lot of celebrities, actually, because the celebrities were being shown, and then when they actually went to make their first post, a few months later-

Bangaly Kaba (01:18:00):
... being shown. And then when they actually went to make their first post a few months later, none of their friends were following them. And so there was posting into an echo chamber and anecdotally people would stop using the product because they felt bad. We hypothesized that no one was liking or following or commenting on their posts. And so we had to do this thing. We called it the connections pivot, right in like 2016 ... Actually, 2017, where we had to convince Kevin and Mikey that it was actually not the right thing to do to prioritize celebrities to everybody because we were basically biting bite your nose to spank your face, whatever that is, because the regular person wasn't having a great experience.

(01:18:44):
And so it doesn't mean that we shouldn't recommend celebrities, but Jeff recommended celebrities to people who are already on there. They already have their graph. And the most important thing to do is actually get regular human-to-human connections in the first whatever, when people first sign up so that when you let me actually go make your first post, your friends would see it and you would be validated and you would feel like, okay, this is a police for me. I have a community here.

(01:19:11):
And so that connection pivot was critical. It changed ... Literally, angle-changed the retention on Instagram. And so if you about Instagram's growth, there was a TechCrunch article about Instagram's growth at I think 2017, 2018 when we were going 40, 50% year over year. And obviously, there was a lot that went into that skyrocket. People think that stories was the sole reason why we grew and story brought us a lot of people, but we literally, our attention doubled over the course of a year and a half. If you could imagine, imagine if your bank account, the interest rate doubles every month, you know what I mean? It was incredible. This shift in making sure that people got connected with their friends early on changed the way that people perceive the value. And so a lot of the top-of-funnel work that we did, a lot of the activation work that we did really paid off in spades ultimately.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:20:05):
Wow. I'm curious, what's the most impactful thing you've shipped/led to in terms of impact and experiment launch?

Bangaly Kaba (01:20:14):
At Instagram, we saw this big problem where people were logging out and not being able to get back into their account. It was crazy. Hundreds of thousands of people a day could not get back into their account. It was because ... And when I say could not get back into the account, I mean they literally would try and 28 days later, we would never see them again. And we thought it was a problem because they didn't remember where their email was, which email they signed up with or what their actual handle was or what their password was. We were losing 10, 12 million people a year from what we called account access churn. So we worked on this problem and we had spent a lot of time in South Asia and Southeast Asia trying to understand how to grow the product. And from that time we realized that it's important actually for people to be able to log out.

(01:21:14):
We don't want to restrict people's ability to log out because there are many people in the world who don't want to use background data because they're on prepaid phone plans or they don't have a lot of money and they want to share their phone with a sibling and so they log out. And so it's really important. And so we don't want to take away that behavior, but we did have to do a better job of helping them get back in.

(01:21:40):
So we did two things. One was there used to be a time, and you can probably find it on Google if you did an archive search where if you wanted to log into your Instagram account, there would be a tab for your email and then there would be a tab for your handle. And we didn't really make it easy for you to log in with your phone number either. You had to get to the right tab and the right place to get the right thing. And so we did this omnibox experience where it was just like email, phone handle, put it all in one place and we made it super simple for you. And the second time, if you tried it twice and it didn't work, if we knew that you were on a trusted device, we would just send you a text message and say, Hey, are you trying to log in? That solved half the problem.

(01:22:23):
And then the other half, what we did, and this still exists today on Instagram. When you log out we say, Hey Lenny, it looks like you're going to log out, do you want us to save your credentials on your advice so you don't have to worry about your password? And then we later added an ability to have a password. And that's all basically the other half.

(01:22:40):
And so just being really thoughtful around what is actually the core job that people are trying to do because a bad experience would've been like, Hey, let's make it really hard for people to walk out. And then how do we ... One or two experiments really help people to get back into the experience. And so what was interesting was that we were able to solve this ... And this actually helped drive public 15, 20 million extra month active users a year, but what was also super interesting was that it helped us to realize that getting people back into their account more drove more account content creation on incident in ways that we didn't expect. And so because we were getting people back into the account, people getting into the second account and getting into the third account and they were going into their finsta account and creating content more. And so that actually led to the creation of a multiple accounts team, which is what has made it easy for you to navigate between accounts on Instagram today.

(01:23:42):
And so that was understandable actually coming to life. It was, Hey, we're going to do the understand work to figure out how to solve account access issues and we're going to solve it. And solving it, when we looked at the data, we're like, Hey, why is all this account, why is all this content creation happening? That was not what we were expecting and where is it happening? And it was happening from second and third accounts. And so that made us realize that oh, people were not only getting locked out of their first accounts, but they were actually creating a lot on the second and third accounts. How can we make it easy for them to get and navigate between their first account, whether it's your account and a business account or your account and [inaudible 01:24:19] account or a bakery account, you know what I mean? And so that created a multiple accounts team, which I ended up owning and that ended up even becoming a bigger effort after I left.

(01:24:26):
So that's an example of understand work, solve a real problem, real-solve and solving massive solution, massive impact, creating new data that you didn't expect that drives new understand work, which creates a whole new team to allow you to move around your Instagram account more seamlessly. And you can see this now when you go to post, you can decide, okay, I want to post as Lenny, I want to post as this other thing, or when I want to write a story, you can change anywhere. And that was all an effort that originally came out of this realization.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:24:55):
I love how many of these huge impact stories are just such straightforward, simple things like just let people log in more easily, help them log out more effectively, fine, show them their friends versus celebrities. So many of these stories are often just really simple ideas that lead to such profound change. The log-out example is interesting. At Airbnb, we found the log-out was actually causing a lot of churn also, but they went ... Initially, they went with a simple solution of just extend the session, log-out link instead of a week, make it two weeks or three weeks or four weeks. You pointed out with Instagram, people actually wanted to log out. They're like, let's leave that alone. Start with making it easier to log back in.

Bangaly Kaba (01:25:35):
That's right.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:25:36):
Amazing. Man, you're so full of amazing stories. I'm curious with Facebook, maybe just as I wrap up here, is there anything there? Because you were an early growth PM at Facebook. You worked a lot on friends and helping people discover their friends. Is there anything in there that would be interesting to share?

Bangaly Kaba (01:25:51):
In my time, so I joined Instagram or Facebook in 2014 and I was responsible for people recommendations globally. And at the time, Facebook was at scale and big and dominated North America. And so really the focus area at the time was South Asia and Southeast Asia. And we noticed a lot of really interesting things, especially in India. Facebook seemed to be broken from a people graph perspective. The data was telling us people didn't have as many friends in common. In the US, it might've been on just making up a number. On average, we saw 22 friends in common when you make a friendship connection. But in India, it was like seven, right? And then there was a lot of friending and messaging or friending and unfriending. We're like, what's going on here? So we had some hypotheses from the data, we ran a bunch of tests. Nothing seemed to work and be a breakthrough.

(01:26:44):
So actually, at that time, I had to propose and they agreed to do this. We needed to do understand work. So we were literally on the ground in India every three months took a team of engineers with me. I'm talking like we're in Delhi in people's homes and Mumbai, and we went to go investigate what was going on, watch people make friends, watch them use people you may know and really understand what was happening and see what was going on because we felt like there was context that we were missing.

(01:27:14):
There was a lot of things that we learned. It was mind-blowing. But one of the most interesting things, Lenny, was that we watched people try to make friends and we said, "Hey wait, that's their profile page. Why aren't you looking at it?" And they would say, "Well, that doesn't have any relevant information for me, so I need to go look in the pictures." They're like, "Well, why doesn't the profile page have relevant information for you? That's where the information's supposed to be." And they're like, "Listen, this guy's named Amit Kumar. I have 10 friends named Amit Kumar. What is this page going to tell me?" And they would scroll down, they'd be like, "All of these fields are not relevant to me." And so you look at it, Facebook at the time, it was very Western-centric. It's probably still is, it was like name, it was like school you went to, job title, affiliations, that kind of stuff. That's all Western paradigms. Some of these people are like, my friends sell jeans at a market. None of this is relevant. You don't even know the name of the school. Sometimes it might be a number or something. And so all of the descriptors that we take for granted were not relevant and the names were very common.

(01:28:24):
This was really illuminating. So what they would do is go look at pictures and say, is this my friend's car or is this my friend's ... Can I see my friend's animal and what's available? And it was interesting because the understand work, at least the more realization. So we went back to Menlo Park with the data, turned out ... We said, okay, let's look at the data in a different way. What are the most common names on Facebook? And we looked at, and the top 10 common names are Indian names. And the most common name was Amit Kumar. And there was like 250,000 people a month who used Amit Kumar who were real people. So imagine you're in Bangalore and you're trying to find your buddy named Amit Kumar. It's probably 5,000 that we could possibly recommend. So super interesting was like the cultural context was so different. So we had to get creative, find creative ways to figure out how to solve it.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:29:12):
The power of understand work shines again. We have a recurring segment on this podcast called Fail Corner where ask guests to share a time they failed in their career and what they learned from that experience because a lot of people look at your career and your story and just like, holy shit, what a journey. I will never be able to achieve this. Is there a time when things didn't go well and something that you took away from that experience?

Bangaly Kaba (01:29:36):
Probably for me, I think my time at Instacart was probably not my best time. I think I went to Instacart with a vision of what I felt the product could be or should be. And it was I think a big story that I deeply believed, but I was not, I think aware or in tune with what the DNA of the company was at the time, which was it was like a company that was really great at operations because that was the core of what they did. And they were really building out a lot of their product experience and a lot of what the new function. And so I think what they needed at the time was a much more tactical in the weeds, get your hands dirty, do, do, do because they hadn't really seen that before. And what I wanted to deliver in that experience was more building the right systems, the right people, the right processes so that we can figure out how to institutionalize the work.

(01:30:46):
And I think for me that was probably my biggest oversight is that I think they needed more tactical and I was more ... I don't want to say in the clouds, but more thinking about where do we want to go with the experience that we need to build versus let me get deep in the funnel data. It felt like it became loggerheads where I didn't feel like I was probably either delivering what they wanted or being supported in the way that I wanted to be supported.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:31:13):
Is the lesson there to spend more time and understand work before you take a job to make sure you're aligned with what they're looking for?

Bangaly Kaba (01:31:20):
That is actually the lesson. And I think it's part of that is it's doing that. One of my takeaways is do that not only with the people there but with the people who've left it to, but the people who've left the company will give you a perspective that is raw and different and much more I think aligned with what you want to hear. And it may or may not be the same, but I think the people ... This isn't specific to Instacart. Whenever you talk to people who are at the company, they're always try to tell you the best version of the company. The people who left will tell you what the worst version or their version and it's on you to triangulate that information, but you need both sides.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:31:57):
Love that lesson. Bangaly, is there anything else that you want to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

Bangaly Kaba (01:32:06):
No, I think we've got a lot.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:32:07):
We have. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got six questions for you. Are you ready?

Bangaly Kaba (01:32:14):
I am ready to go.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:32:15):
First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

Bangaly Kaba (01:32:20):
Few I've recommended most of them are Over My Shoulder, actually Range by David Epstein. I think are really critical PM work really being able to be a master of a lot of different things or somewhat deep in a lot of different things. Deep Work, Cal Newport, kind of clearing space to be focused and do the things thinking about the most important work in a deep and undisturbed way. And then Start At The End by Matt Waller, who's a behavioral scientist buddy of mine. Really thoughtful book, helps you really think about what you're building, but in a way that's more holistic.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:32:49):
Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates when you're interviewing them?

Bangaly Kaba (01:32:55):
I've got a relatively new one that I love. This works exceptionally well I believe for more senior hires, whether they're like group product managers, directors, or even kind of senior ICs. I go through and I think about what are the four, usually five skills that are really critical for someone to have in this job. And I think about them myself and I think about the archetypes of what is the ratio I want of these? But then I ask them, I say, Hey, take out a piece of paper or take out your laptop. I'm going to give you five skills and I want you to stack-rank them for me. One to five. So one being the one you're strongest at and five being the one you're relatively weakest at.

(01:33:41):
So it's way better than saying give me your strengths and weaknesses. It also forces them to contextualize it against the skills that you're looking for, but it also helps you have a meaningful conversation around how they think about themselves and their self-awareness and to what extent they're ranking these skills based on the context they're in versus their own ability.

(01:34:02):
Sometimes you rank something a five because something you would just weak at because you haven't had to do because there's a strong function at that company. And so when they stack-rank it and then people are like ... I've asked this probably four or five times on a recent role. I hire people like, Ooh, this is really hard. But really good question. I usually will dig into what is number two and what's number four and number five, and why? And it really helps me to one, calibrate am I looking for the right person? And two, are their skills actually a match for what we need at this time?

Lenny Rachitsky (01:34:33):
I love when I hear a question I've never heard before. That is genius. Next question, do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really like?

Bangaly Kaba (01:34:41):
I think one that I enjoy quite a lot ... Actually, it's really kind of ... It's really simple, but amazing is this app called Flighty. You heard of it? F-L-I-G-H-T-Y.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:34:52):
No.

Bangaly Kaba (01:34:52):
It is a travel app and it manages all of your flight itineraries and your friends' itineraries. But the reason why I love it is it goes two or three clicks deeper than the average travel app or your airline app and it tells you when your inbound plane is running late, it helps you to understand where the gates on. My wife was just in Madrid last week. And she texted me saying, "Hey, I'm at the airport but no gate is announced." I looked at Flighty, I'm like, "Your gate is E67. It's actually been assigned but it hasn't been announced." And this happens a lot in Europe. You'll be there and they won't tell you the gate until an hour beforehand.

(01:35:28):
So it gives you so much information right before. It's actually publicly announced, which is really helpful, especially if you really need to be somewhere because oftentimes I know if my plane's going to be late and if I need to rebook before anyone else does, which helps you, gives you a better chance of getting somewhere. Or I will be able to get to a gate, I get to SFO and it might not be on the board at SFO, but I know exactly where it gave you this. So really a great app. Can't say enough about it.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:35:53):
I'm downloading it right now. It's got a bazillion reviews, five stars. Thank you for the recommendation. Incredibly useful.

Bangaly Kaba (01:36:00):
Of course.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:36:01):
I'm trying out a new question. You've joined a bunch of different companies. What's one thing that you've done in the first 90 days at the job that has made a big impact?

Bangaly Kaba (01:36:11):
I go and I sit in team meetings and see how they operate. I just listen. I talk to not only the PMs but the content designer and everyone, and I try to get to know them by both name and story. And what I mean by that, it's like oftentimes people, execs come in and they're like, what are we doing? What are we prioritizing? Why does it matter? And they don't really take the time to actually learn who the people are, what the story is, what they care about, what they're passionate about, both professionally and personally and really try to understand how the team is working from that person's perspective.

(01:36:52):
And what I find is actually when I do that, people are way more willing to hear ... When it is time for me to share my thoughts, they're way more invested because they believe I'm invested in that.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:37:05):
I love that. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you really like and find useful and often share with friends or family in work or in life?

Bangaly Kaba (01:37:17):
I'm not big on mottos. There's one that I've actually been repeating. I don't remember. I got it done ... It might have been like Adam Grant or someone on Instagram, but it was ... It's one, I said it to a colleague of mine, he's like, "Wow, that really hit differently." I think it goes something like this. People and teams don't really reach ... They don't actually reach their goals. They fall to the level of their systems.

(01:37:43):
And that to me was really powerful because I struggle a lot with just being balanced in life, working out the way I want to and getting the right rest and making sure that I'm spending time in all the right places. And that's really like ... It's a goal of mine. But the problem is that I don't ... My system for that specifically, I tend to ... I'm not rigorous with it is when I need to be.

(01:38:06):
But on the other hand, at work, I'm very rigorous in the systems and processes. So really that saying to me really hits because it is both applicable to your life and how you want to live your life but also how you want to run your teams.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:38:19):
Final question. You mentioned that you were a dean at a school, a boarding school. Is there something that you take away from that experience that's going to sticks with you? I know you mentioned one thing about treat PM's skills are similar to teacher skills. There anything else there?

Bangaly Kaba (01:38:34):
Actually, so I was a dean of a boarding school in Switzerland, which was actually one of the most fun and interesting times of my life. It was an American school in Switzerland just outside of Lugano, Switzerland, the Italian-speaking section. I learned a lot about myself during the time. I learned a lot about just relationships and people. I actually had a call with one of my old students this morning. She's like in her thirties now. This was like 20 years ago. So I still keep in touch with them. And I think that's the comment I made about knowing people by name and story matters a lot. It says a lot that 20 years later I'm still talking to some of these students who are their own adults running their own businesses. But also I think the human challenges and human connection, human problems, very universal.

(01:39:24):
This was a really interesting place when you had kids coming from a variety of different walks of life, some who lived in Azerbaijan or Kosovo and felt like ... The families felt like they couldn't be safe there, so they wanted to send the kids somewhere else. So some kids whose parents worked at the US Embassy and just were kind of there for a little bit of time. And what I found to be true is that just spending time with people and understanding their own story and family life really led to a lot of shared interests and passions. And it helped really me to see that the world can be very similar in so many ways and it is very much reflected to me in my day-to-day life in tech because as you know in the Bay Area, there's so many people who come from so many walks of life who end up in this journey building these products and companies and just help me to value so many different voices.

(01:40:15):
If you want to build world-class products, if you want to build product that can scale around the world, if you want to build product that's be hypergrowth, you have to be inclusive of so many voices. And so you have to build that skill to be able to acknowledge and learn from and to live in tension with different voices.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:40:32):
That is beautiful. I love that we're ending there. Bangaly, I feel like we've done a lot of understand work and I think we've helped a lot of people with a lot of things we talked about so much. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to follow what you're up to, and how can listeners be useful to you?

Bangaly Kaba (01:40:47):
For as much as I've worked at social companies, I actually don't use my social products that much. I'm on Instagram. If you look @iambangaly, I-A-M-B-A-N-G-A-L-Y, Google that. All of my socials handles all have the same kind of link including LinkedIn. So hit me up whenever. And then what can people do useful for me? I don't know. I don't have a short list. I would say I love to hear people's stories. I love to give advice. Obviously, my time is a little bit limited occasionally, but I think if people can share with me things that they're learning or things that they see in the market, or if they have questions, I always love to hear it. And so I think for me, just hearing other people's stories and learning what other people are doing is probably the most rewarding for me.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:41:35):
Bangaly, thank you so much for being here.

Bangaly Kaba (01:41:38):
Thank you. This is amazing. I really appreciate you, Lenny.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:41:40):
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.

(01:41:49):
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.