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Bangaly Kaba

Episode #29

Director of Product Management

YouTube

⚡Execution

📝Full Transcript

20,412 words
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 ...

📚Methodologies (4)

⚡ Execution

A product execution framework that prioritizes deep understanding of problems before identifying solutions, countering the common 'Identify -> Justify -> Execute' anti-pattern which often leads to flat metrics.

Core Principles

  • 1.Replace 'Identify, Justify, Execute' with 'Understand, Identify, Execute'.
  • 2.Create intentional roadmap affordance for 'Understand Work' (e.g., data instrumentation, research).
  • 3.Parallel path execution of knowns with understanding of unknowns.
  • +1 more...

"First you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on. So understand, identify, execute."

#'understand#work'#operating
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⚡ Execution

A decision-making framework to objectively evaluate career opportunities and current roles by calculating potential impact as a product of environmental factors and personal skills.

Core Principles

  • 1.Impact is the primary input to optimize for; compensation is the output.
  • 2.Impact = Environment × Skills.
  • 3.Environment variables: Manager, Resources, Scope, Team, Compensation, Culture.
  • +1 more...

"The impact is only achievable by looking at a set of variables related to the environment, and a set of variables related to your skills."

#impact#career#equation
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⚡ Execution

A growth strategy focused on identifying and solving for the user segment immediately outside the current core user base—people who are aware of the product but struggle to adopt it due to specific barriers.

Core Principles

  • 1.Hypergrowth changes the user persona rapidly.
  • 2.The core user is happy; the adjacent user is struggling.
  • 3.To grow, you must identify the specific barriers (skills, device, cultural) of the adjacent layer.
  • +1 more...

"You've got to be on top of who you believe the next user is... and literally see what they're doing in real time in order to make sure that you're enabling the right jobs for them."

#adjacent#theory#execution
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⚡ Execution

A diagnostic tool for managing complex organizational change. It posits that successful change requires five specific components, and the absence of any one component leads to a specific negative emotional symptom.

Core Principles

  • 1.Change = Vision + Skills + Incentives + Resources + Action Plan.
  • 2.Missing Vision → Confusion.
  • 3.Missing Skills → Anxiety.
  • +3 more...

"If you're missing the vision component, you end up in a state of confusion... if you're missing an action plan, you end up in a state of false starts."

#5-box#change#diagnostic
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