Bangaly Kaba

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?

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.

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.

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.

Impact is only achievable by looking at a set of variables related to the environment, a set of variables related to your skills.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People and teams don't really reach their goals. They fall to the level of their systems.