Lenny's PodcastMaking an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG)
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Ami Vora on curiosity, metaphors, and execution-driven product leadership
- Chief Product Officer of Faire, Ami Vora, reflects on her path from temp at Facebook to leading products at Facebook Ads, WhatsApp, and now Faire, emphasizing authenticity, curiosity, and learning by doing.
- She explains how subordinating ego, assuming others know something you don’t, and using genuine curiosity (“Fascinating, tell me more…”) transforms disagreement into collaboration and better outcomes.
- Ami details practical approaches to product reviews, strategy vs. execution, goal-setting, and org design, stressing narrative, metaphors, and principles as tools for scaling decision-making.
- She also discusses the realities of being a woman leader in tech, managing conflicting feedback, growing without shrinking yourself, and the importance of staying close to customers as companies scale.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasSubordinate your ego to the outcome and lead with curiosity.
Ami shifted from needing to be right to prioritizing the best outcome, assuming others know something she doesn’t and asking, with genuine interest, why they think differently—turning conflict into a chance to learn and get to better decisions together.
Use the “dinosaur brain” model: you own the recommendation; your manager owns context.
Executives can only hold a few facts in their heads; your job is not to dump information but to synthesize it into a clear, opinionated recommendation while they contribute broader context, patterns, and cross-company constraints.
Design product reviews to teach principles, not just make decisions.
Instead of treating reviews as approval gates for every choice, bring one focused decision and aim to leave with shared principles, trade-offs, and risk appetite so future decisions can be made autonomously and coherently by the team.
Anchor strategy and product direction in metaphors that capture how users should feel.
By asking when users have felt the desired feeling before (e.g., “face-to-face conversation” for WhatsApp or “Dolores Park with friends” for a social app), you create a narrative that guides design, UX, and decisions without prescribing every detail.
Execution beats perfect strategy—especially when you need to learn.
Perfect strategy with weak execution never reaches customers and yields no learnings; “good-enough” strategy with strong execution lets you discover what’s wrong with the strategy, iterate fast, and eventually converge on both great strategy and outcomes.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesI think the hard part is sublimating your ego a little bit and saying it's more important to get to the outcome than to be right.
— Ami Vora
Working with Ami, she could have the most profound disagreement in the world and she would respond, ‘Fascinating, you have to tell me more why you think that.’
— Boz (as quoted by Lenny Rachitsky)
My manager owns context. I own the recommendation.
— Ami Vora
Execution eats strategy for breakfast… customers don't care about your five-year plan. They care about the product that's in their hands.
— Ami Vora
As you get more senior, the only problems you'll see are ones that are fundamentally unsolvable… all you can do is choose which branch of suboptimal you're going to put your name on.
— Ami Vora
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