Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more

A full calendar is a badge of shame, not a badge of honor.

You work on problems that have a 10X positive or negative impact. In most FinTech companies one of two problems, it's a growth problem or a compliance problem because both of them can have a negative or positive 10X impact.

The challenge with being a product manager is, everybody thinks they can do the job. The moment you build experimentation, you've now made it scientific.

Determine very early in your career if you truly want to be a C-level someday because it's almost like if you're ambitious and successful, you enter product management, it's almost an expectation that you would become that and you'd never really challenge or question yourself.

In FinTech, you have two customers. You have your usual customers and you have your regulator, and you need to keep both of them happy. And usually, what makes one happy, it makes the other one less happy.

If you truly enjoy your work and what you're doing, it won't feel like a sacrifice. The moment you start having those conversations about work-life balance, you are probably not on that track.

My probably most spectacular failure was, I was the first PM on Hangouts. We had thousands of people working for me. We had entire power of Google. We had Larry literally sitting with us saying we can do anything we want Chrome to do and we still didn't manage to build a great messaging product.

At Binance, there was a very strong belief that 80% of the world doesn't have access to financial tools. When we look at crypto, it's largely about speculation or bitcoin. For most of the world, they just need access to a US dollar, stable coin and just knowing that my currency is not getting deinflated because of things beyond my control.

The best thing you can do is find companies that are growing fast because it compounds your learning at a much faster interval.

Do not optimize for compensation, especially early in your career. You will find that the compensation is so much backloaded that you would make 90% of your compensation in the last five years of your career.

You need to optimize for what you're great at. If you're 25 years old early in your career, it's very hard at that point to say, 'Oh, here are all my weaknesses and I need to improve on those.'

There's no right or wrong decision. There's just slow and fast decisions. A lot of the times if you make a wrong decision, if you make it fast enough, you would know it was wrong and you would correct it and you would still do it faster than thinking months for the right decision.

Strategy is a little bit overrated for product. For most product managers, your strategy should be, 'How fast can I go from hypothesis to data?'

Don't take on projects that are going to be six months, a year, because you just generally don't have control over the macro.