Lenny Distilled

Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact

May 26, 2024

Featuring: Bangaly Kaba (Director of Product Management, YouTube)

10 quotes · 10 insights

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Ship predictably, not frantically

What is a better outcome? Is it a better outcome to just ship more faster now, but most of the things aren't unimpactful? 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?
Bangaly KabaDirector of Product Management, YouTube 00:34:54

You are nothing like your users

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.
Bangaly KabaDirector of Product Management, YouTube 00:56:13

Strategy without execution is worthless; execution without strategy is waste

What I call the anti-pattern 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.
Bangaly KabaDirector of Product Management, YouTube 00:26:49

Design for immediate habits, not future promises

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.
Bangaly KabaDirector of Product Management, YouTube 01:08:58

Impact solves all PM career problems

Impact is only achievable by looking at a set of variables related to the environment, a set of variables related to your skills.
Bangaly KabaDirector of Product Management, YouTube 00:00:50

Your manager is your most important variable

Your 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.
Bangaly KabaDirector of Product Management, YouTube 16:56

Different growth stages require different strengths

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.
Bangaly KabaDirector of Product Management, YouTube 00:20:09

Sometimes you must slow growth to preserve trust

We had to do this thing. We called it the connections pivot, right in like 2016... 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 your nose to spite your face, because the regular person wasn't having a great experience.
Bangaly KabaDirector of Product Management, YouTube 01:18:00

Growth compounds through small systematic wins

People think growth is overnight success and it's not. 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.
Bangaly KabaDirector of Product Management, YouTube 35:48

Build systems, not one-offs

People and teams don't really reach their goals. They fall to the level of their systems.
Bangaly KabaDirector of Product Management, YouTube 1:37:43

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