Yesterday Women in Product hosted a conference at Facebook with amazing speakers, and I left with many takeaways that I want to implement in my life. I want to share my notes for people that couldn’t be there.
Learning to Lean in Panel
- On getting feedback about ‘aggressive’ or ‘abrasive’ — Passive or aggressive is not good or bad on its own. Dalai Lama is a passive leader There are many aggressive leaders. They can all be great. When people tell you you’re aggressive, ask for specifics — does your behavior make someone feel disrespected?
- Mentors vs. Sponsors — Women have mentors and men have sponsors. What’s the difference? Mentors answer questions and help you reflect yourself, while sponsors open the next door for for you. Don’t just ask people to be your sponsors. Find commonality, build relationship, and show them some value.
- On leadership — What is leadership? Build consensus, have good judgement, and transform what you do.
- On ambition — Be specific about what you want and what you’re willing to do for what you want.
- On career choice — Optimize for learning. What do you want to learn in the next 1–2 years? Find a balance between success and failures. You usually learn the most from your failures, but you don’t want your career to be only a list of failures.
- On building relationship — It pays to build peacetime relationship before things get stressful. When you have issues with your peer, go outside of work and spend an hour together without talking about work. Connect on a personal level. You can be efficient and sensitive at the same time by setting up the intent up front. It’s like the Olympic coach spirit, “I want you to be the best. Do you want to be the best? I want to be the best for you so you can be the best.”
Lightning Talks Panel
Sharon Zheng from Facebook
Often times we think about a team as a PM + Eng + Design + Analyst. But just as importantly, a team needs different ‘personality traits’. We need ‘voice of reason’, ‘product passion’, ‘team glue’, and ‘helpless optimism’. As a PM, you can either wear many hats, or find the person that likes wearing that hat.
Diana Kimball from Quip
Write about what you’ve learned lately — as a way to pay it forward, as a way to market your own product, as a way to celebrate your learnings.
Diana’s advice about writing publicly: play the long game, ask for what you want, invest in serendipity, and let yourself be known.
Sheryl Sandberg’s keynote
- Raise your hand if you ever tell one human being (your dog doesn’t count) that you want to be the CEO of your company. Why didn’t you? Is it because you don’t think you can do it? Is it because you don’t think you can both be a CEO and a mother?
- What’s the difference between management and leadership? Management is the science of getting people to do what you want. Leadership is the 1+1=3. Leadership is to communicate conviction, mission, and passion. You don’t need to be a great public speaker to be a great leader. You just need to find your way to communicate effectively.
- Find the balance between authenticity vs. confidence. If you think you’re too far in one end, over-correct.
- Women systematically underestimate their ability. If we don’t even think we can do it, it will never happen.
- Even mothers think their boys crawl a bit more than they actually do, and think girls crawl a bit less. It’s not just ‘other people’ that need to change. We all have the systematic bias that men can’t cry and women can’t lead.
- Ambition is a discipline — Have someone to talk to. Think about it regularly.
Sarah Tavel from Greylock on Hierarchy of Engagement
1. Grow engaged users — grow number of users completing the core action, not just users.
Core action: friending, tweeting, snapping, repinning
What is your core action? It’s a fundamental question. Repin vs original pin would create two very different products
2. Retain users — the product gets better when users use more, user has more to lose, then the product gets sticky. Accruing benefits vs mounting loss.
3. Self perpetuating. As users engage, they create virtuous loops in product
The strongest virtuous loop is a network effect.
Pinterest’s example for virtuous loops:
Growth: User discovers pin -> send pin to friend -> acquire user
Re-engagement: user repins -> notifies existing user -> re-engaged users
Special Thanks: Thank you Diana Kimball for giving me the encouragement to write!
