Naomi Gleit: Why Meta product work hinges on extreme clarity

1. 0:00 – 1:53

   Introduction to Naomi Gleit

   1. NGNaomi Gleit0:00

      I really believe in frameworks for things that helps drive extreme clarity. I work on a lot of different projects. A lot of times I'm ramping up mid-project, I'm like, "Where can I learn what I need to learn about this project?" I ask five different people, get five different answers. That is unacceptable. Of course, I'm sure there's hundreds of docs associated with the project, but there needs to be one canonical doc. Everyone should know exactly where the canonical doc is. That's the one place I can go to, to get all the information I need about a project and it will link to all the other docs. Things on the canonical doc are... (instrumental music)

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky0:33

      Today my guest is Naomi Gleit. Naomi is head of product at Meta. Other than Mark Zuckerberg, she's the longest serving executive at Meta. She joined what was then called Facebook as employee number 29, and has been at Meta for almost 20 years. She's seen the company scale from 30 employees to the one and a half trillion dollar business that it is today. Naomi does very few podcasts and interviews and so I was really excited to chat with her and have her on this podcast. In our conversation, we dig into the many lessons that she learned from Facebook's early and legendary growth team, her superpower of taking really complex and gnarly problems and projects, simplifying them and delivering results. We also get into leadership lessons she's learned from Zuck, including his recent transformation into possibly the coolest CEO in tech. Also, why PMs are the conductor of product teams, some very tactical tips for running meetings, writing docs, working out, getting better sleep, and even how to get more protein in your diet. This was such a fun conversation and such a wide-ranging conversation. And whether you are in product or growth or any other tech function, you will get something useful out of this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Naomi Gleit.

2. 1:53 – 6:18

   Naomi’s journey at Meta

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:53

      (instrumental music) Naomi, thank you so much for being here welcome to the podcast.

   2. NGNaomi Gleit2:00

      Thanks so much for having me. As I told you earlier, I refer to your podcast all the time and so I can't believe I have the opportunity to actually talk on it.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky2:08

      Wow, and I'm so flattered and uh, I never get tired of hearing that. Appreciate you sharing that. I want to share a couple tidbits about you because it's pretty crazy when you, uh, see this list. Okay, so you are Meta's longest serving executive other than Mark Zuckerberg. You're employee number 29 at Facebook. You've been there for over 19 years... Sorry, at Meta, formerly Facebook. Um-

   4. NGNaomi Gleit2:35

      I do that all the time.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky2:37

      (laughs)

   6. NGNaomi Gleit2:37

      That's what happens when you've been at Meta for 19 years, is you can't get the name right. (laughs)

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky2:41

      Okay, good. I won't feel bad about that then, and then the last thing is just you've been, uh, at the center of some of the most foundational products that Meta and Facebook have worked on, including working on the early growth team and thinking about the early growth strategy. Basically, you've been there from employee number 30 to today, uh, one and a half trillion dollar company, one of the largest companies in the world today. Very few people have ever seen this sort of growth and scale from the inside. First of all, I guess let me just ask this. Do you ever reflect on this and just realize like, "Holy shit, what a journey I've been on? How, how wild?"

   8. NGNaomi Gleit3:18

      Um, it's a great question. I would love to say that I, I reflect on it. The truth is I think I barely have time to reflect right now, I'm thinking about all the things that I need to do on my to-do list. So I'm pretty in it still, even after 19 years, I am really focused on the work that I need to do. I do honestly have moments where I get to reflect, for example, like on this podcast. Um, sometimes people do ask me, you know, and I think especially as I approach the 20-year milestone, my 20-year Face-versary, I'm sure that will give ample opportunity for me to look back.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky3:55

      Such a classic product manager answer like, "I'm just have too much to do-"

   10. NGNaomi Gleit3:58

       Too busy.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky3:58

       "... I don't have time to think about this." Yeah. "I got to hit some goals here." (laughs)

   12. NGNaomi Gleit4:02

       (laughs) Yeah.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky4:04

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   14. NANarrator5:25

       (instrumental music) . Pendo.

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky5:28

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3. 6:18 – 10:40

   Landing a job at Facebook

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky6:19

      Let me start, I want to start about just how you actually landed at Meta as employee number 29, which is a life-changing decision and a life-changing role. And, um, I want to learn if there's something folks can see about what you did that might be helpful to them when they're trying to find a place to work. And your story, I was reading about this story and it's super interesting. You basically wrote your senior thesis at Stanford about why Facebook was gonna win and why it was gonna beat its competitors. And the competitor site, I've never even heard of, so it's interesting that that was the competitor at the time. Could you share the story of how you landed as employee number 29 at Facebook, now Meta?

   2. NGNaomi Gleit6:54

      Facebook, um, as a pros- you know, as part of being an academic researching Facebook, also being a Stanford student using Facebook, I was like, "I really want to work here." Uh, Facebook had just moved to Palo Alto. Mark had driven across country, I guess, and arrived in Palo Alto, opened up an office at 443 Emerson Aven- Emerson Avenue, or Emerson Street. It was right above the Jing Jing's Chinese restaurant in downtown Palo Alto. And I just went to the office, sort of cold called, the equivalent of just walking into the office and seeing if there were any available jobs. There were not. I think I did that maybe five to ten more times. Eventually, there was an opening to interview for Sean Parker's personal assistant. He was, at the time, I think the president. I did interview and I did not get the job. A few months later, I found out about a marketing role, uh, that was available. And one interesting thing I haven't really talked about was I got an offer from Facebook, I also got a competing offer from LinkedIn. And so, at that time, I- I- I made the choice to go to Facebook because I was interested in sort of the social networking aspect of it. Why was I so bullish on this- this website? Um, at the time, it was www.thefacebook.com. Like, why was I so excited (laughs) about this thing? I think it's because I definitely saw that there was product market fit. I saw that students on Stanford- at Stanford were obsessed with it. But it also had a long list of colleges that were really excited and on the waiting list to, um, be accepted onto Facebook. And so there was this, like, product market fit piece and also a huge demand from other- other audiences, other colleges. But, you know, our younger brothers and sisters were also sort of interested about Facebook, and it seemed like it had this much broader appeal. Um, so that's what happened. I got the marketing job. Sheryl also talks about when you are getting on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat. That was my foot in the door, and here we are 19 years later.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky9:02

      I was just gonna say that, that that's such a good example of what she recommends of if you can get a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask which seat. And, uh, I love the Sean Parker piece. I did not know that.

   4. NGNaomi Gleit9:12

      (laughs)

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky9:12

      That's hilarious.

   6. NGNaomi Gleit9:13

      Yes.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky9:13

      What a different life would have been if you got that job and-

   8. NGNaomi Gleit9:16

      (laughs)

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky9:17

      ... went down that track. So, a couple takeaways here for people that are trying to pick where to work. What I love about your story is one is just, like, you had so much... You just had confidence that this business would work, and you just knew that you wanted to get on this rocket ship. You saw traction, so that told you, give you, I guess, that added to this confidence that this is gonna work out. And then the- you said that you, uh, walked into the office kind of cold. Uh, not even cold emailing or calling, but cold arriving, five to ten times you said?

   10. NGNaomi Gleit9:45

       Yeah. It was- it was pure, um, pure sort of just, like, refusing to quit. I think I just walked into the office, I talked to the person at the front desk, "Is there anything that I can do?" They weren't hiring non-technical people. I didn't have a computer science degree, I wasn't technical. I had this Bachelor of Arts degree and, um, and that's why the personal assistant and the marketing role eventually did open, um, and was something that I thought I could be qualified for.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky10:12

       Cool. I think that's such an empowering lesson of, uh, if you look at someone like you and they're like, "Oh, she was so early at Facebook, how lucky..." Clearly, it wasn't luck. You knew you wanted to work at this company. You put a lot of effort into making it happen, no matter the job. I think that's a really good takeaway and lesson. So, if there's a company today that you're excited about, that you're just like, "This is gonna be a massive success," what I'm hearing is, just do everything you can to try to land a job there, and eventually, you'll be in a role you actually want. It doesn't have to

4. 10:40 – 13:40

   Becoming a product manager

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky10:40

      start there.

   2. NGNaomi Gleit10:40

      When I got to Facebook, I knew I wanted to build. As someone who wasn't really technical, I wasn't going to be an engineer or a coder. I wanted to work with the engineers and the coders to build products. I thought product management was the right function for me, and so my dream was always to be a PM. And it wasn't luck as to how I ended up becoming a PM. I sort of took the same approach, showing up at the office, asking if there were any roles. By then, we had moved to 156 University, um, and all of the PMs and engineers worked on the second floor, and I was working in marketing, like I mentioned, and I worked on the third floor, and all the business functions worked on the third floor. And my goal was to be a PM. I ended up going, sort of the- the analogy, I went to the second floor most days after work, asked if there were any projects that I could help out with. You know, it was very early days. There was always more to do, um, than people to do it. And so, eventually, I picked up a few projects, helping with program management, you know, giving my product feedback. Um, and by the time that I actually applied formally to be a product manager, I had been doing the job voluntarily, almost informally for a few months. And- and I remember this because I had a seat on the third floor, I picked up all the stuff on my desk, put it in a box, walked down to the second floor, once I got the job, to- to become a PM. And when I got to the second floor...I distinctly remember everyone on the second floor standing and clapping. And so it was a big standing ovation. I'll never forget, Boz was there, by the way. I know Boz has been on your (laughs) podcast. But even Boz was there, sort of standing and clapping. And so I guess, you know, to, to the, the lesson that you are trying to extract from my story, I do think I sort of tried to create the luck, um, by, by not giving up, um, and just repeatedly cold calling, (laughs) or cold showing up, or cold volunteering until I sort of, you know, was able to make it happen.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky12:51

      Amazing. Again, very empowering. It's not just like, "Oh, there's these people that just get lucky and they land this PM job." It's like, you landed at the company, "I want to be a product manager." Which is interesting, most people don't like grow up and like, "I want to be a product manager." That's like a rare, uh, a rare thing people even want, uh, especially that early on. So it's interesting that you already knew that. But, uh, you basically did the job, you did the job of PM before you had the job. And by the time you actually asked for it, you've been doing it for a long time and you could show, "Hey, look, I'm actually good at this. I can do this job."

   4. NGNaomi Gleit13:21

      Yeah.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky13:21

      Awesome. Um, by the way, I love the Boz connection. I'm finding that Boz is connected to like the most guests of this podcast in so many different ways.

   6. NGNaomi Gleit13:29

      Really?

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky13:29

      I'm just curious. Yeah. Like Ami, and-

   8. NGNaomi Gleit13:32

      Oh, yeah.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky13:33

      ... you, and a few other people. It's just interesting. There's like a Boz spider web of connections throughout this podcast so far. Um, okay.

5. 13:40 – 14:55

   Working as Head of Product at Meta

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky13:40

      So I'm gonna fast-forward to today. So your role today is head of product-

   2. NGNaomi Gleit13:44

      Yes.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky13:45

      ... at Meta.

   4. NGNaomi Gleit13:46

      Yes.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky13:46

      What does that mean? What does, what do you do at Meta today? How would you describe your role?

   6. NGNaomi Gleit13:51

      Uh, so, you know, there are a few thousand PMs at Meta. Um, they do not all report to me. Um, I would say a few hundred of them report to me on the teams that I directly manage. But I feel responsible for the entire PM community at Meta. There are things that we do centrally, things like PM performance, PM culture, PM onboarding and training. And that's the kind of thing that I look out for. You know, obviously I wanted to be a PM. Head of product is my dream job. I am, you know, deeply (laughs) um, supportive of the PM function. And so I really care, and I think it's, PMs are a huge point of lever, uh, leverage in a company for how we can actually, you know, get stuff done and, and help accomplish the company's goals. And so that's, I, I sort of focus on PM as like a, a really important exponential lever for doing that.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky14:45

      I love that. Okay. I'm gonna come back to what you've learned about what makes super successful PMs-

   8. NGNaomi Gleit14:50

      Yes.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky14:50

      ... and what makes you really successful. I want to take a tangent to Zuck.

   10. NGNaomi Gleit14:53

       Please.

6. 14:55 – 20:04

   Insights on working with Mark Zuckerberg

   1. NGNaomi Gleit14:55

      Yes. (laughs)

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky14:55

      (laughs) Okay. So you've, you've known Zuck for over 20 years at this point. And I just have to ask a few Zuck questions 'cause people are always curious to learn from what has worked so well for him. The first question is just, there's been a pretty profound transformation in, in, in Mark over the past few years, both in terms of how he leads, and also just in his like coolness and vibe factor. Uh, what are your thoughts on just this transformation and how he's able to, been, been, been able to pull it off?

   3. NGNaomi Gleit15:22

      So I've always said that there is the biggest gap of anybody I know between what people think of Mark and who Mark really is. And so, I think this is the Mark that I've known for the past 20 years, and the world is finally getting to see what I've been lucky enough to see. And that gap that we've talked about is really, is really starting to close. How ha- how did we get here? I always say Mark is a learn it all, not a know it all. He is the fastest person at upskilling of anyone I've ever met. He used to do these annual challenges. One year, I did them with him. It was learning Chinese. And within a year, he was able to basically achieve an eighth grade fluency in Chinese. And that's just one example. Obviously, he's gotten incredibly great at guitar, MMA, a lot of his passions. But he's also gotten a lot of, a lot better at some of the professional skills, and I think negotiation, public speaking is one of those. I think before, in the early days, it just wasn't something that he was very comfortable with. He's talked to himself about coming across as a little scripted. I think he was not confident and, and pretty careful about how he showed up. And he's upskilled here. He's just gotten a lot more comfortable, and so people are able to see who he, who he really is.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky16:43

      He was also like, I don't know, 20-something, uh, (laughs) when he started Facebook, and now he's running a 80,000-person org, you know? I could see, I could see-

   5. NGNaomi Gleit16:51

      Yes.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky16:51

      ... the evolution of it.

   7. NGNaomi Gleit16:52

      Yes. I think he was, I think he, uh, might have been like 19 or 20 when I met him.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky16:55

      Oh God, that's insane. So yeah, I could see how, why, why someone would change.

   9. NGNaomi Gleit17:00

      (laughs)

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky17:00

       Uh, I was at the, uh, the Acquired podcast Chase event-

   11. NGNaomi Gleit17:03

       Mm-hmm.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky17:03

       ... with him being interviewed, and he's just like such a cool dude now. He just has these like big shirts with his own like letters on it, his own like phrases.

   13. NGNaomi Gleit17:12

       (laughs)

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky17:12

       His chain. What a, what a cool dude.

   15. NGNaomi Gleit17:15

       (laughs) His, his long hair.

   16. LRLenny Rachitsky17:17

       His long hair.

   17. NGNaomi Gleit17:17

       His watch, yeah.

   18. LRLenny Rachitsky17:19

       Yeah.

   19. NGNaomi Gleit17:19

       I was at that event too. I thought it was great. I think, yeah, that's, that's the, n- no gap between who Mark is and, and what the world sees.

   20. LRLenny Rachitsky17:29

       I love that. Is there something about Zuck that you know that most people don't know? Something that would surprise us?

   21. NGNaomi Gleit17:37

       The one thing I would say about Mark is, I think people, people know he's married. He has three daughters. He's a really great dad. He's a really great husband. I would say he's also a really good friend. Maybe that's something that I can sort of speak to from experience. Um, he's just an incredibly thoughtful friend. There was a period in my life, I think it was 2014, 10 years ago, when I was going through just sort of like a really hard time. I had come out of a breakup. But Mark saw that I was having a hard time. He asked me if...I wanted to volunteer, um, to teach a class in, um, East Palo Alto after, after their school day. And in retrospect it's pretty funny, but Mark and I taught a class about how to build a business. So you had the CEO of Meta teaching this class to a bunch of, um, middle school students, and we got really close to them through that process. We made some really important mentorship connections, uh, for years. We met with them. I think, you know, we still continue to, even though they've now at this point graduated from college and are... you know, have real jobs. But one of the, the lessons that we taught during that class that I remember Mark distinctly, like, writing on the whiteboard... or not the whiteboard, the actual it was a chalk, with chalk on a chalkboard, were the four life lessons. That was one, and I- I've kept these for myself as well, "Love yourself." Two, "Only then could... can you truly serve others." Three, "Focus on what you can control," and four, "For those things, never give up." And that was sort of his, his life lessons, four steps to, to how to approach life. Um, and we actually made stickers for these four steps that the students could actually put on their, like, composition notebooks as a reminder. And I think... obviously that has, has really helped me over time, but I think that in that you can see some of, of what I think we all see in Mark. For example, "For those things, never give up." (laughs) He has that, that aspect of him and it makes sense. For me, number three is really the hardest, which is focus on what you can control, 'cause I, I think I probably think I can control more things than I actually can.

   22. LRLenny Rachitsky19:53

       Mm. So do we all. Uh-

   23. NGNaomi Gleit19:56

       (laughs)

   24. LRLenny Rachitsky19:56

       I love that he was sharing that at like a class on how to start a business, this like life advice that he just developed.

   25. NGNaomi Gleit20:00

       (laughs) Totally.

   26. LRLenny Rachitsky20:02

       Oh man, that's amazing.

7. 20:04 – 24:28

   Small Groups and “disagreeable givers”

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky20:04

      I wanna chat a bit about... So, mm, at this point, Meta is 86,000 employees, something like that. That's what I found online. He... so he has to run this massive org as, as this CEO, one person. I know that one way that he does this is he has something called a small group. Is that the... is that the term?

   2. NGNaomi Gleit20:24

      Yes. Small group.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky20:24

      Okay, cool. So he's got this small group that he calls it, and it's essentially his, like, core execs, and this group meets regularly and that's kind of how he's able to manage the entire org through this small group. For people that are struggling to run an increasingly larger org, are there any tidbits from how Mark and the small group operate that might be helpful to folks?

   4. NGNaomi Gleit20:47

      Sure. So I think the first thing is, um, small group is sort of the leadership team. It's the leaders working on the most important projects at the company, um, sort of independent of reporting structure and stuff. It's like who are the, the leaders on the big... on the big most important projects or functions? They will be represented in small group. What makes this group unique? Um, a lot of them are people like me, sort of people that have been there for a very long time. So I think sort of the tenure of small group is, is really rare. Um, why I think that's important is you have a lot of people that are motivated by mission rather than sort of climbing the, the corporate ladder at this point. And so there are a lot of what I call disagreeable givers. So just to back up, I don't know if you've heard this framework, but I l- I think I learned this from Adam Grant during like a, um, executive, um, learning and development session. And he was saying that there are... if you think of a two by two, there is people who are agreeable and disagreeable, and then there's people who are givers and takers. And the most dangerous kind of person to have in an organization is an agreeable taker. And what that means is an agreeable person, super nice, everyone likes them, really easy to get along with, but they're a taker, and maybe their motivation is more self-interested rather than what's best for a company... for the company, which is, is what... how I would define a giver. And the most... the most ver- precious person in an organization is the disagreeable giver. Those are the people who are really motivated to do what's best for the company, but they can... they can be a little bit disagreeable in the sense that they may not say what you want to hear, uh, they may push back on things, they may fight for things. And so I think small group is characterized by a lot of disagreeable givers, um, and I- I think that's really important for an organization. One thing I think Mark has done really well in general is just have a culture, including on his leadership team, of, of people who give him feedback. Um, I think a lot of times as you get more successful, or as you have more fame, or if you have more wealth, you lose having an accurate feedback loop, um, and people may not want to be, you know, 100% honest with you for various reasons. And Mark has tried to ensure that he himself has an accurate feedback loop, or we as a company have more of an accurate feedback loop, um, by surrounding, um, himself and our leadership team in creating a culture of giving direct and honest feedback. Um, so that is... that's, you know, some of the unique properties of small group. From a process perspective, we have one weekly sort of strategic meeting. It's more open-ended. There is time for discussion. It's longer and it's sort of more unstructured. We also have one weekly operational meeting which is highly structured, um, where we go through all of the priority projects. The person who owns each of the projects will actually speak to the, the weekly updates, um, for that project and, and, you know, it's very operational and tactical.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky23:55

      Awesome. Uh, I just love this name, small group. It's like such a... it's just like a cozy name.

   6. NGNaomi Gleit24:01

      (laughs)

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky24:01

      It's not like executive staff or-

   8. NGNaomi Gleit24:03

      Totally.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky24:03

      ... East staff or all these terms people always use. No, it's just their small group.

   10. NGNaomi Gleit24:07

       Totally.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky24:08

       I love that.And then this framework you described, it sounds a lot like radical candor, of challenging directly-

   12. NGNaomi Gleit24:13

       Mm-hmm.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky24:14

       ... but caring deeply, uh...

   14. NGNaomi Gleit24:16

       Yes.

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky24:16

       ... or to being disagreeable but being constructive and additive. Is that the term? What was it? Um, disagreeable, but...

   16. NGNaomi Gleit24:23

       Uh, a giver.

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky24:24

       Giver, yeah.

   18. NGNaomi Gleit24:25

       Yes.

   19. LRLenny Rachitsky24:26

       Okay. That's great.

   20. NGNaomi Gleit24:26

       Yes. (laughs)

   21. LRLenny Rachitsky24:27

       If

8. 24:28 – 33:45

   The legendary growth team

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky24:28

      there's nothing here, totally cool, but is there something that you changed Marc's mind about? You've talked about he's good at seeing new data and being like, "Okay, I see, I see," or is there anything that you were successful there that is an interesting story?

   2. NGNaomi Gleit24:42

      One of the things that we did in the early days on the growth team, 'cause, 'cause I'm not sure that necessarily when we talk about this sort of legacy or the, the history or the, the lore around the growth team, and, and this may not be a direct answer to the question, but it didn't really necessarily come from Marc. Marc wasn't like, "You guys should create a growth team. Here's how you should operate." And so I think in some ways, we established and grew a growth team and, and, you know, Marc sort of got on board or, or, you know, saw the value in it and, um, ha- was, was a s- a huge proponent of it, but I'm not sure it r- ne- necessarily originated with him. And, and indeed, I think sometimes the focus on being so data-driven, um, might have been something that, you know, myself, Alex Schultz, Javier Olivan, these are some of the original people that were on the growth team and that are my closest coworkers now, may have really pushed on and, um, highlighted the value of, uh, for Marc. I'm happy to talk about the growth team, which is something-

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky25:50

      Yeah.

   4. NGNaomi Gleit25:50

      ... I get asked a lot of questions about, if you want. (laughs)

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky25:53

      Yeah, I'd love to. That's, uh, exactly where I was about to segue since you brought that up.

   6. NGNaomi Gleit25:57

      Awesome.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky25:57

      So the Facebook growth team, I- it's ki- it's a legendary team. I think it was probably the first real growth team in tech.

   8. NGNaomi Gleit26:05

      Mm.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky26:05

      The team developed some of the most core growth levers and techniques that companies use today. And so I'm really excited to chat a bit about this and what you learned from that time. One thing I wanted to start with is there's this kind of this, like, legendary activation metric that you all had.

   10. NGNaomi Gleit26:19

       Mm-hmm.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky26:20

       Of, uh, the goal was get, I think it was seven friends in 10 days or something like that?

   12. NGNaomi Gleit26:24

       Mm-hmm.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky26:24

       Is that a real thing? (laughs) Is that what you guys actually did?

   14. NGNaomi Gleit26:26

       (laughs)

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky26:26

       Anything more there for folks that are like, "Oh, we got to come up with something like this"?

   16. NGNaomi Gleit26:30

       Sure. So yes, seven friends in 10 days was a thing. Uh, 10 friends in 14 days was also a thing. They're kind of the same thing, they're just different points on a retention curve. I would say the key insight here is when we started the growth team, I think we were pretty focused on acquisition. We had a notion, though, of growth accounting, which looks at how many, what's our net growth every day? And that would look at the number of new users that registered minus the number of users that actually went stale, so after a 30-day period, that's how we define it, they no longer logged in. And then plus the number of users that resurrected, which is after 30 days, they came back. And what we found was the churn and resurrection lines were actually much larger than the new user line, which implied to us that retention and driving those two lines was actually our biggest lever to drive net growth. And so while we were focused on acquisition, a lot of our focus shifted to be around engagement and retention. How do we drive engagement and retention? We look at the variables that correlate most with that outcome. What we found was friending. And so those, those two magic moments, having seven friends in, in 10 days or 14, 10 friends in 14 days, really just mapped to when we feel like your likelihood of being a retained user goes up, because you've seen sort of the value in Facebook. And it kind of makes sense, like Facebook, you know, is, is much more compelling if you have 14 days, uh, 14 friends. And the other thing around 10 or 14 days is we wanted it to happen quickly. We wanted to have you experience the magic moment soon after you had registered on the site to, to, you know, prevent you from churning and then us having to resurrect you again.

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky28:18

       One of the most interesting kind of lessons from this activation metric that people talk about, like right now everyone's like, yeah, of course retention is how you-

   18. NGNaomi Gleit28:25

       Yeah.

   19. LRLenny Rachitsky28:25

       ... what you need to focus on, that's what product market fit is like. I think right now it's like that's what everyone knows. I love that that was... You guys basically figured that out. It was one of the first times of like, "Here's how we understand if our product will last and how to grow." Retention-

   20. NGNaomi Gleit28:38

       Yes.

   21. LRLenny Rachitsky28:38

       ... matters most. And retention cohort curves I think was one of the d- innovations you all thought about early, of just like, "Here's how we track retention. People joining at a certain time, how long do they stick around?"

   22. NGNaomi Gleit28:48

       Totally. And that was Danny Ferrante who, who really came up with the growth accounting framework, which I guess is, is quite obvious, but like the plus new minus, uh, stale plus resurrected. Um, the thing that I, I feel like, you know, might be valuable for PMs and, and is one of my Naomi-isms is, I think what the growth team really pioneered was being data-driven and product-driven, especially in a area that was historically more of a business function. So I think at that time, a lot of the growth in new users was expected to come from like marketing or comms, whereas the insight that we had is actually the product is the biggest lever to drive growth, and that means we should have a product and engineering team working on optimizing things like the registration flow, the invite flow, the new user onboarding, getting you seven friends in 10 days. Um, one of my Naomi-isms is really understand, identify, and execute. That framework came from 2009 where the growth team, at the time it, was sort of fledgling and it just started, was-... focused on only instrumenting data. And, and Alex often wears a shirt that says, "Why guess when you can know?" We just didn't have the data that we needed to make informed decisions, to know really what were the biggest levers to drive growth. And so in 2009, in January, we basically stopped doing anything on our roadmap except data instrumentation, and that's when we, you know, instrumented every step of the registration flow, instrumented every step of the new user onboarding experience. We knew where there was drop-off, and so we understood, which allowed us to identify what were the key opportunities to drive growth, and maybe, hey, it's, like, you know, increasing friending and the, the new user experience, or 20% drop-off on registered users at the email confirmation step. How can we address that? These are the, uh, opportunities that we identified, and then we would execute by building products. So having this data-driven, product-driven approach to what I think historically was more of a business responsibility at a company was sort of what the growth team, the special sauce of the growth team. We eventually extended that approach. I think that approach started with the growth team, but we extended to other areas. Um, so for example, one of the products or projects that I took on after growth was social impact, and instead of what I think a normal company might do, which is start a, um, corporate social responsibility wing, we decided, "Hey, no, we're gonna take a data-driven, product-driven approach to driving social impact. Instead of having a foundation that's distributing money, we're gonna build a product that actually raises money from our community." And, you know, many years later, we've raised billions of dollars from the community for charity. So that, that's sort of the approach that I think, um, is unique about the growth team that expanded to other areas, and that I think that the company, you know, in many ways has taken to, to most of the problems that we face.

   23. LRLenny Rachitsky31:55

       That's such a good point, and I, I almost took that for granted, but there was such a huge shift that y'all started from moving from marketing being the driver of growth to product and data-

   24. NGNaomi Gleit32:06

       Yes.

   25. LRLenny Rachitsky32:06

       ... and experiments and all that stuff. And so, I think that's such a good reminder of that. Fun fact on the social good team, I'm really close friends with a designer that was on that team, his name is Mickey. He was, uh, on that team for a while and really enjoyed, and ha- and yeah, really enjoyed working with you.

   26. NGNaomi Gleit32:21

       Oh-

   27. LRLenny Rachitsky32:22

       Fun fact.

   28. NGNaomi Gleit32:22

       ... that's so great. I remember Mickey. What is his last name?

   29. LRLenny Rachitsky32:26

       Uh, Settler?

   30. NGNaomi Gleit32:27

       Okay. Yes, I definitely remember this. I mean, I l- yes, and social impact is just one thing that I think I'm really proud o- and again, remember, social impact used to be a business thing. You would, you would create this corporate social responsibility part of the company that was very separate from the product and engineering, engineering team. Um, another thing that we did in the early days was, you know, there was a, a juncture where it was like, "How are we going to translate this site?" And I think we could have taken more of an, a non-technical traditional approach and had professional translators translate the entire site into the different languages. And instead, sort of what, what the growth team suggested was, "Why don't we build a version of Facebook that allows you to make translations inline?" And so the community of people using Facebook at the time who actually knew the product the best could actually insert translations, and there was a whole system that we built around how to, like, up-rank the best translations and down-rank, you know, sort of like, um, Wikipedia and, and to this day, we have over 100 languages supported. So we're always trying to find these, like, product technology solutions to, to these, these sort of traditional problems.
9. 33:45 – 43:44

   Activation metrics and onboarding

   1. NGNaomi Gleit33:45

      Yes. Yes.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky33:46

      I wanna come back real quick to the activation metric, because something that a lot of people somewhat misuse and think maybe incorrectly about. So to come up with an activation metric, as you described, you basically figure out what's, like, the regression of if someone does X, here's retention increases, and so let's focus on getting them there. And a lot of people struggle with coming up with that metric. Do you have any thoughts on just, like, how important it was to have that very specific activation milestone of, like, seven exact friends in exactly 10 days versus the value of just having anything that is a rallying point for everyone to focus on and drive?

   3. NGNaomi Gleit34:20

      Think the majority of the value is in the latter, is just having extreme clarity around the goal, um, and that allowed everybody to work towards optimizing the same goal. You're right, like, we did sort of just pick a point on the curve. I think it could've been any of those and, and indeed, I, like, as part of preparing for this, I was like, "Was it seven friends in 10 days?" I had to go back and I asked a few people that I worked with back in the day and they were like, "Well, I thought it was 10 and 14." I mean, I think at the, it just, it doesn't matter, it's just that we picked one of them, um, and what mattered there was we had the same goal. What mattered was that it was a retention goal or an activation metric, and, um, uh, one of the, the most important things that actually came out of having that goal was building a new user experience. Believe it or not, you know, when we first launched Facebook, or, you know, I wasn't around then, but in the early days of when it was just a college site, we didn't need a new user onboarding. We didn't need to explain to people that they had to find their friends. They were sort of automagically connected to everyone on the college campus and sort of knew how to use this product, it felt very intuitive. Again, we were college students building a product for other college students. They were sitting next to each other in libraries or at desks and sort of through osmosis understanding how the product worked. It was more when we, um, you know, we launched the ability for teens to register and then work networks and then in 2006 opened registration when we started getting all kinds of people with any email address. It was before it was .edu or, like, a Microsoft.com email address that was required in order to sign up for Facebook. Then anyone with an email address could register, including people like my dad and my grandma.... that we realized, "Wow, in order to get people to this magic moment, how are we gonna do that? What's the most effective way?" That insight resulted in building, like, a, a new user experience. I remember it was just like, "Step one. Upload your profile picture." That was really important, so people could find you and know who you were. "Step two. Find your friends." That's where a lot of the, uh, sort of contact importing, and people you may know, and here are other people at your school, and here are mutual friends. That step in the new user experience ultimately became one of the most important drivers of that activation metric that we talked about.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky36:40

      I love that you shared that. Such a recurring theme on this podcast, the power of onboarding-

   5. NGNaomi Gleit36:44

      Yes.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky36:44

      ... the value of investing in onboarding, and the ripple effects of opportunities there. I love that you also, uh, kind of like, uh, kind of like were, were one of the first like, "We need..." Like, onboarding, that's a thing.

   7. NGNaomi Gleit36:55

      (laughs)

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky36:55

      Let's invent onboarding and meet users.

   9. NGNaomi Gleit36:59

      I know. I mean, I remember the day where it was like, "Do we need to explain to people how to use this? Is it not obvious?" And it's like, my dad is like, "I don't understand this whatsoever." My dad would go on to become like Facebook's biggest power user, 'cause I always like, you know, beta tested everything with him. But yeah, the i- it was, that was not obvious to us at the time in 2006 that we had to explain to people (laughs) how to use Facebook. A- and again, remember that it, it's fun talking about this, because obviously the product has evolved so much, but the principles are relatively the same. It was thefacebook.com. Eventually it became facebook.com, but eventually, you know, we built a mobile app, um, and then, you know, it was a mobile first product, and then it was about mobile photos, and then it was about mobile videos. So over time, the technology has really changed, but the, the core use case that we really need to educate people on, which is like how to connect with their friends on Facebook and whatever iteration or product is the same. And so obviously we still have an onboarding today. Um, and it's relatively the same principles, like get a profile picture and find your friends.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky38:12

       Along those same lines, just maybe a last question around the growth stuff that you worked on. For folks that are thinking, driving growth, working on onboarding maybe specifically, just are there any lessons from things that worked super well when you were looking to accelerate growth of the Facebook early on that you think people are maybe sleeping on as levers and tactics that worked back then that might still be really powerful today?

   11. NGNaomi Gleit38:35

       Well, definitely the understand, identify, execute. I would, I would just ask yourselves, "Do you have the data that you need to know what you need to do on growth?" And if not, definitely take the time to instrument that data. Um, the thing that, you know, I, I think we were relatively lucky. I talked about why I was bullish on Facebook in 2005 even, was because there was product market fit. And so for us, growth, you know, I, I, as much as, like, credit as we give to the growth team, I'm actually not sure how much credit we deserve and how much incremental growth we drove above and beyond the fact that this was a product that had product market fit, and we benefited, eh, in a huge amount from having high demand for the product. So at every step, and I, I talked about the growth team, the projects that we were working on were really at a high level around removing barriers. There were macro barriers, like the first project I work with, worked on was, was high school students on, on Facebook, which is an interesting story in and of itself, because at that time we almost created a separate website called Facebook High just to keep them separate from the college students. But at that time, we were like, "No, this is one graph. This is one community." College students have friends and people they're connected to of all different ages. Why bifurcate the graph? And obviously, we've maintained that principle ever since. Um, but it was about removing barriers. So you had to be a college student, then you had to be a high school student, then you had to be in a work network, then you had to have any email address. One of the next projects I worked on was not everyone has access to a smartphone. How can we remove the barrier of having access to a smartphone u- and building more of a, uh, rich Facebook experience for someone that was using a, a feature phone or a lower end device? Internet.org, what about removing the barrier of having access to the internet or being able to afford a data plan? And so that, those are the macro barriers that thematically the growth team has worked on. What I would say is maybe applicable is really the micro barriers. All of the work that we did on growth around optimizing the flows were really about removing micro barriers. One of the things that I thought was just so elegant was after we did that 2009 instrumentation of all the, the flows, the product rele- the product flows relevant to growth, what we found is 20% of people aren't actually confirming their email. We tried sending them an SMS so maybe they would confirm the SMS instead. What we found was a lot of people are actually still clicking on notifications that they're getting, but because it wasn't the specific confirmation email, we weren't able to confirm the account. And so what we did was allow people to get notifications even as an unconfirmed account, and then if they clicked on any of those notifications, that would count as a, uh, account confirmation as well, 'cause they proved ownership of the email. That's just removing a micro barrier of having to, like, go find the confirmation email, click it before you can do anything on the site. So I do think we've been relatively lucky in having, like, a lot of high demand that meant that we could focus on just removing micro- macro barriers, and then on the growth team, a lot of the iterations and optimizations were about removing just sort of friction.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky41:56

       I love that framework of like micro barriers and macro barriers, just thinking about ways to make this accessible to more people, and also just getting, helping them get through the flow faster. Uh, I also love your point about how a lot of growth teams get a lot of credit for growing a business when really...... in many ways, it could have done really well even without that team potentially, uh, because product market fit was so strong. I think about this with Airbnb honestly. It was just such... Like, after it gets to a certain point, such good product market fit that who knows what would happen if there was no one working on growth. It probably would have been okay for a long time.

   13. NGNaomi Gleit42:27

       Totally. And then, you know, maybe where, where we, we do sort of see the impact is, is maybe something like the translations thing that we talked about. We would-

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky42:37

       Macro barrier.

   15. NGNaomi Gleit42:38

       The macro barrier, removing the language barrier. And so maybe the approach we took meant that we supported 100 plus languages instead of whatever the professional translators, you know. There's just sort of we have the long tail of languages, so that last person who's still speaking, you know (laughs) , whatever sort of near extinct language can still use, use Facebook. Um, but yeah. I, I, I think that's right. I sometimes think that maybe some of our efforts were really more on the margin of a bigger trend around product market fit.

   16. LRLenny Rachitsky43:06

       Final thing I would just want to highlight again that you said that I think is so important and I've always thought is true, and I love that you confirmed it, is that the activation metric that you all rallied around, the more, the biggest value of it wasn't this is exactly the right regression connection to retention. It's more that we have something we are all going to focus on, and that is where most of the impact comes from, is let's get more people to that point whether it's perfectly right or not. It doesn't really matter.

   17. NGNaomi Gleit43:32

       Yes.

   18. LRLenny Rachitsky43:32

       Love that. I think that's really freeing to a lot of people 'cause they're like, "Oh, we don't know if we're going to be as perfect about this," versus just, "We'll just drive some growth and get people who are good enough, uh, thinking on that." Okay. Great.

10. 43:44 – 53:00

    Naomi’s leadership and PM philosophy

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky43:44

       You mentioned Naomi-isms. I want to segue to that. So let me first read a quote. So I asked Adam Mosseri, who's head of Instagram, what to ask you. I know you guys work together on a bunch of stuff. Here's how he described you. "Naomi is called the conductor here at Meta. She has an incredible ability to handle the most complex projects and problems and bring the right people together to simplify and solve them. She's very firm yet kind. Her standards are extremely high, and she sets the bar." Also, uh, many other people that I messaged said very similar things about you, about how you're incredibly good at taking very complex problems and getting shit done, getting them done.

    2. NGNaomi Gleit44:26

       (laughs)

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky44:26

       Simplifying them and getting them done. So, I want to spend some time understanding what you've learned about how to do this well. What are kind of like the skills you've collected that allow you to take really complex problems and get to a solution, stay kind but firm, and take on these really hard challenges? So, maybe just broadly, I'm curious, what are some of these skills that you have built that allow you to do this?

    4. NGNaomi Gleit44:51

       Yeah. Well, also that's very kind of Adam. I adore Adam. Obviously, he's, um, one of the tenured people in small group. Um, and I've actually gotten the opportunity to work even more closely with him than usual. We recently launched something called team accounts, and Adam and I worked very closely on that. In terms of how I do the things people say that I can do, (laughs) , um, I really rely on Naomi-isms. Um, like I said... And actually, like y- Like, I, I refer your podcast out a lot 'cause there isn't just like a PM university that I can send people to. There isn't like a formal training that people can get to become a product manager, and that's where Naomi-isms came from. It was stuff that I learned on the job from other people, including from Adam, that I found myself repeating over and over again. A good PM looks for a way to make that more efficient. For me, that was writing them down. Um, people started calling them Naomi-isms. I started sharing them internally, and then I think two years ago, I also started sharing them externally. Adam referred to me as, uh, a conductor. That's one of the Naomi-isms in my role as head of product. I want to educate the PM community about what is PM. It's the most common question I get from PMs and non-PMs. What do PMs do? What makes a great PM? And what I say is, "A PM is a conductor." It's as though the, um, team that you are a PM on is an orchestra. There are many different functions in your team that includes legal, policy, comms, data, analytics... Or sorry, analytics, engineering, design, much like there are many different instruments in an orchestra. And as a PM, your job is to make sure everyone's playing their part correctly, every section in the orchestra is playing their part, but at the same time they're playing together. They're unified in the music that they're producing and that they're playing at the right tempo. And a lot of times, um, I think people use music analogies or vocabulary to describe the work, and that includes things like people being in harmony like a good team. A good PM, a good orchestra is in harmony. They're in sync. They're at the right tempo. They have the right cadence. That's sort of how I imagine what a PM does at work. Important characteristics are that the PM is not the star of the show. Indeed, conductors don't even say anything during the performance, and also... You know, but I would at the same time give PMs like little metronomes and, um, conductor wands. This was something that I used to do when we were smaller just to sort of take the analogy way too far. (laughs)

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky47:29

       That's so funny. You actually gave them conductor wands and-

    6. NGNaomi Gleit47:32

       Oh, yeah.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky47:32

       ... and metronomes.

    8. NGNaomi Gleit47:32

       Just to wave around, yeah. (laughs)

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky47:34

       I love that. I would love a conductor wand. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features.And EPPO helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. EPPO does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic cycles. EPPO also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. EPPO powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out EPPO at getepo.com/lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's getepo.com/lenny.

    10. NGNaomi Gleit48:57

        So PM as conductor is sort of how I describe the, the product management function. Um, but one of the key Naomi-isms that I think is really critical to getting stuff done is what I call extreme clarity. Um, I think our jobs are super hard. Extreme clarity means everyone's on the same page. It does, definitely doesn't mean that they all agree with each other, but they just have the same understanding of the facts. So we can disagree, but we all believe, you know, in the facts, which is that, you know, there's A, B, C. Our options are X, Y, Z, and here are the trade-offs, you know, one, two, three. That kind of shared understanding is what extreme clarity is. That came from a place of just being in many meetings, on many emails, in many situations where I felt like we actually agree on something. The nature of this conflict is a result of misunderstanding, and that seems like an incredible waste of time. And so we want to have extreme clarity so we can just focus our conversations on things when we actually agree, not when we are misunderstanding each other. There are a lot of tactics that I use to drive-

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky50:01

        Yeah, I was gonna ask, "How do you do that?"

    12. NGNaomi Gleit50:02

        ... extreme clarity. (laughs)

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky50:02

        That sounds great.

    14. NGNaomi Gleit50:03

        (laughs)

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky50:05

        How does one get to extreme clarity?

    16. NGNaomi Gleit50:07

        So another Naomi-ism is canonical everything. So that includes canonical nomenclature. I have to talk about canon... The whole nomenclature. One way to ensure extreme clarity is we have the shared vocabulary. I've been in a lot of situations where people are using the same or different words to describe the same or different things, which results in talking past each other. One of the most egregious examples of this is when I was working... I was in a conversation around how our reviewers and global operations were performing, and we were using consistency and accuracy interchangeably. Consistency refers to how often re- different reviewers agree on the decision. Accuracy refers to how often the decision is correct according to ground truth. Those are very different things. We don't want to optimize for consistency, because you could be consistently wrong. (laughs) You know, like, we want to optimize for accuracy and so we... That is what canonical nomenclature is, is literally writing out all the words and their definitions, so when we communicate we are using the same vocabulary. I really believe in visuals. I think sometimes just having a conversation or a big meeting where people are talking, I'm just not very auditory. I'm a very visual person. It's hard for me to follow along just by listening. I will of- often have a visual in a meeting. I will leverage that visual to literally real time edit what is being decided. So for example, if we have multiple options, I will edit the slide that's being projected to say, "We decided on option one. Here are the next steps, one, two, three." A lot of times people are saying, "That's not what I heard. I heard this as a next step," or, "I heard that as a next step." I love that, because that avoids leaving the meeting and being like, "I don't know what we agreed to. I heard this, you heard that." No, actually we have an agreed upon set of, like, decisions and next steps that we all real time edited and looked at together.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky51:53

        Just to-

    18. NGNaomi Gleit51:54

        Yeah.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky51:54

        ... double-tick, double-click on that-

    20. NGNaomi Gleit51:55

        Yeah.

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky51:55

        ... one real quick. So what you're describing for the visual is you're presenting, "Here's our options, here's our three options on a slide."

    22. NGNaomi Gleit52:01

        Yes.

    23. LRLenny Rachitsky52:01

        Y'all decide, "We're gonna go with option two." You edit the slide-

    24. NGNaomi Gleit52:04

        Yes.

    25. LRLenny Rachitsky52:04

        ... with like a star, like, "Here's what we chose."

    26. NGNaomi Gleit52:06

        Yes.

    27. LRLenny Rachitsky52:07

        And then maybe change some stuff. And this is exactly, to your point of extreme clarity, people can ex- see clearly, "This is what we're choosing." If they disagree and do realize that's what's happening, it'll be really clear.

    28. NGNaomi Gleit52:17

        Totally.

    29. LRLenny Rachitsky52:18

        Awesome.

    30. NGNaomi Gleit52:18

        And one thing people make fun of me a lot for, but I think is just a great example of extreme clarity, is I never use bulleted lists, because you can never refer to a bullet. I always use numbered lists, because you can always i- in the visual in a meeting, you know, as referenced in, you know, number two, um, you know, I have feedback on that. Versus like, "The third bullet, two up from the second," you know, whatever. That is, that is not extreme clarity. So it's very, very small tactical things to like-
11. 53:00 – 55:55

    Canonical documents

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky53:00

       for. Uh, is there any other very nuanced tip along those lines that is helpful in extreme clarity or canonical everything?

    2. NGNaomi Gleit53:09

       Canonical everything, and, uh, stop me if I'm getting too wonky.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky53:13

       Okay.

    4. NGNaomi Gleit53:13

       I can really- (laughs)

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky53:15

       We got this.

    6. NGNaomi Gleit53:15

       ... get into this.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky53:16

       We got a ways to go.

    8. NGNaomi Gleit53:17

       When people, when, when I had a faceversary, along the years people have given me posters and the posters say these Naomi-isms. So extreme clarity is, is one. Canonical everything is another. I think people really associate me with canonical, canonical, canonical. Um, I always want a canonical doc. This came from a place of like me... I work on a lot of different projects. A lot of times I'm ramping up mid project. I'm like, "Where can I learn what I need to learn about this project?" I ask five different people, get five different answers. That is unacceptable. Everyone should know exactly where the canonical doc is. That's the one place I can go to to get all the information I need about a project, and it will link to all the other docs. Of course, I'm sure there's hundreds of docs associated with the project, but there needs to be one canonical doc, and that canonical doc really has to have the basic information that you need to know. For any project the basic information that you need to know is what are the discrete areas of work? I call those workstreams. This is pretty obvious.... who are the owners on those workstreams? So for every workstream, there's an owner. Again, seems pretty obvious. Sometimes it's like, I'm like, "Who's work- who, who's owning this?" It's like, people don't know. T- that's why I think it's very important to have a single threaded owner. We used to call this a directly responsible individual or a throat to choke. (laughs) We obviously don't say that anymore. Single threaded owner, every workstream has a single threaded owner. Sometimes workstreams are really big. You have sub-workstreams underneath them. Everything canonical needs to recurse, so you should have an owner or an STO for the sub-workstream. The other things on the canonical doc are, what is the process by which the people on this team work together? I hate pairwise conversations. I feel like they're a waste of time. I feel like you could have four conversations with four different people, or one conversation with all four people. Everyone has the same context. Ideally there's a visual in that meeting and you real-time edited it. There is extreme clarity. The canonical doc will have, what is the canonical meetings that people have? What is the canonical email list that you're gonna use? The, what is the canonical workplace chat? You know, like, let's not reinvent the same audience 10 different times with, like, different permutations of the people on the working team. Um, let's just have one canonical chat. And then often the canonical doc will have the canonical nomenclature. I really believe in frameworks for things. That helps drive extreme clarity. Um, a framework is best understood when there's a visual representation of the framework, in my mind. And so we'll have canonical visuals, and that's sort of what I mean by canonical everything. So, anytime I start on a new project, everyone knows (laughs) to send me the canonical doc.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky55:52

       I love this.

    10. NGNaomi Gleit55:53

        (laughs)

12. 55:55 – 1:00:33

    Simplifying complex projects

    1. NGNaomi Gleit55:55

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky55:55

       If you come into a project that you're given that's really gnarly and complex, what do you find are the first couple things you do that make a big dent on helping everyone align and understand what happens, how to, what should, what they should be doing, and what they should be prioritizing?

    3. NGNaomi Gleit56:11

       A lot of times I'm simplifying. A lot of times there isn't a canonical doc, and so I'll go through the process of creating that. Um, but I think that really falls under the simplification, um, thing. I often go into a project, everyone's operating at a PhD level. I'm coming in at a kindergarten level, and so I need to understand, it's almost like all of this complexity, we're at a PhD level. I need to create the curriculum, go back to basic building blocks for the kindergarten level. How do I explain and understand this project at a kindergarten level? It doesn't mean I wanna oversimplify. That's not what a simplifier does. They're not oversimplifying. But what they are doing is identifying the most basic building blocks of a complex problem, and then unfolding or revealing or building on top of them additional complexity and details as you go along. And so sometimes I talk about a school pyramid, but, like, I need to establish the kindergarten curriculum and then the elementary school curriculum and then the high school curriculum and then the college curriculum, and then we can operate at the PhD level. But oftentimes people at different, you know, on the project or at really different levels of understanding or complexity. And until we have what we call the school pyramid, the curriculums for every level of the project, it's really hard to, it's really hard to make progress. A lot of times, that process of simplification will often identify what are the most important things, um, to deal with on the project.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky57:47

       And so what I'm hearing is when you come into a project and y- what, h- the way you simplify is you start putting together a doc that describes these things you're talking about.

    5. NGNaomi Gleit57:56

       Yes.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky57:56

       Here's the workstreams, here's the owners, here's the process, here's our canonical meeting style.

    7. NGNaomi Gleit58:02

       Yes.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky58:02

       And that reveals here's what matters most and where there's confusion.

    9. NGNaomi Gleit58:07

       Yes. Yes. Yeah, that is. And a lot of times what needs to happen in the project is some- sometimes there's a strategy or an execution issue, and sometimes there's a people or a process issue. I would say 80% of the time I think it's a people or process issue, and that refers to not having the right people on the project or not having the right people but not having the right process by which they work together. Um, a strategy or execution issue, when we get to that, I first try to tackle those or, in general, I think it's really important to have perfect execution. I wanna make sure a project is perfectly executing because only then can we really, really re-evaluate whether or not this strategy is right or wrong. We're sort of in the, the worst of all worlds where we are imperfectly executing and therefore, at the end of the day, you know, the project might fail, but we don't know why. Is it because the strategy was right or wrong, or is it because the execution was poor? The ideal case is the strategy was right and you perfectly executed on it. The next best case scenario is the strategy was wrong, but you perfectly executed on it because then you learned the strategy was wrong. Revamp the strategy and try again.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky59:22

        You're really tickling the PM part of my brain.

    11. NGNaomi Gleit59:24

        (laughs)

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky59:24

        I feel like as, most PMs listening are like, "Yes, clean documents, really simple processes-"

    13. NGNaomi Gleit59:28

        (laughs) Yes.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky59:28

        ... "one person in charge, links to everything." (laughs) It just feels good.

    15. NGNaomi Gleit59:34

        Totally. And I, again, like, sometimes I feel the need to defend that the process is not for process' sake. It's ultimately to help us all move faster and work better. So hopefully that comes through. Um, but I, I deeply believe that it is through this approach, um, that we can move faster and, and, and I have to p- y- you know, you have to prove that. Nobody wants more process and more meetings and more... But my goal is that with this, we're actually simplifying process and getting less meetings and just making things clearer and ultimately moving faster.

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:08

        I'm gonna read another quote from another one of your coworkers, Charles Porch. He's vice president of global partnerships at Instagram, and he basically said what we've been talking about. "Some of the biggest strategic bets and biggest swings Meta has made have had Naomi at the helm.""No one can herd cats, drive clarity, and get to outcomes more seamlessly than she can. She is legendary within Meta for her canonical documents."

    17. NGNaomi Gleit1:00:31

        (laughs) Great.

13. 1:00:33 – 1:06:37

    Teen accounts: a case study

    1. NGNaomi Gleit1:00:33

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:34

       If maybe just, like, following this thread a little bit further, what's, what's the gnarliest project that you've worked on that would be a good example of you coming in and helping simplify and get it over the finish line?

    3. NGNaomi Gleit1:00:46

       Well, Charles, you know, may be thinking of the most recent project that we worked on, I don't know if it's necessarily the gnarliest, but it's definitely one of the most cross-functional projects that I've worked on before. Basically, every team at the company in some way works on youth, and, uh, last week we actually launched Teen Accounts, which was, um, a very complex project. Again, like, it involved the Instagram team, the central youth team, um, the, you know, different teams working on various aspects of this, every function, legal policy, comms, marketing, product, um. And I think we, we definitely leveraged a lot of these, um, these Naomi-isms and, and just to give you a sense of, um, what Teen Accounts is, it was basically putting all teens into the safest settings, uh, by default-

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:47

       Mm.

    5. NGNaomi Gleit1:01:47

       ... on Instagram. And the reason I'm working on this, I, I work across, um, multiple teams at Facebook. So obviously Adam is the, the head of Instagram and I work closely with him on this like I was referring to yesterday. But this is something, like these teen accounts is something that we are thinking about how we expand to the other apps that we have, including Facebook and WhatsApp and, and Threads. And I tend to work on projects that are across our family of apps and future platforms, and that's sort of why I was, I was involved in this. But basically what Teen Accounts does is put teens in these safest settings. It's super focused on trying to address parents' biggest concerns around their teens on social media, this has obviously been a really big topic. We've had a lot of these features and tools. What this launch did is simplify things, standardize things, and add a lot more functionality that gives parents controls. I think the, the thing you really need to know is that for under 16-year-olds, if they wanna change any of these defaults, they're gonna have to get their parents' permission. And so it's, it's interesting that, you know, we're really going to create an incentive for teens to get their parents involved and to actually set up parental supervision, especially because one of the default settings is a private account. So there's tens of millions of teens that currently have public accounts today that we are going to automatically transition to private accounts unless they get their parents' permission to stay public. And so that's, it's a relatively big, (laughs) um, shift, a fundamental change for how Instagram works, um, for teens. And yeah, I would say one of the more complicated (laughs) projects that I've worked on.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:29

       Yeah, and it just launched, right?

    7. NGNaomi Gleit1:03:30

       Yes.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:30

       Um, as a, as a new father, I'm excited for you all to be working on these sorts of things. Uh, I don't need it yet.

    9. NGNaomi Gleit1:03:37

       (laughs)

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:37

        But I'm glad it's gonna be there. And it's funny how Meta and Facebook is in this world where, uh, people complain about teens using social media and then you work on making the product better for teens and kids using social media. And then it's like, "Facebook's getting teens on social media." Like, there's no way to make it feel good to people. No matter what you do, it's, people are gonna complain. That's what I think.

    11. NGNaomi Gleit1:04:00

        Totally. And, and I think the, the goal of this launch was to orient ourselves and really there's a lot of complaints, there's a lot of, you know, different voices. I think we, we just are focused on parents. We think parents know best. Every kid is different and parents know their, their own kid the best. So that has been our North Star in terms of the, the approach here. When I talk about Teen Accounts, the, as product people, I think one thing that you would appreciate is the thing that I think is really important when it comes to teens on the internet is really having an understanding of how old someone is when they're using our apps. And it's important that we know how old they are, because then we can put them in an age-appropriate experience. So now we have Teen Accounts, we want to put all teens into teen accounts. We all know sometimes teens lie. That's sort of been the biggest feedback that we've been getting is teens are really smart. They're gonna find workarounds, they're gonna be creative, they're gonna lie about their age. And as a product person, the way that I think this should really work is that instead of everyone entering... You know, teens use on average 40 apps. Instead of Instagram and the other 39 apps that teens use, trying to verify the age of the person using their app is for two companies to do this, which is Apple and Google. They do collect the age, they should make that available to developers, and we ask for information from the device all the time with user consent. You know, can Instagram have access to your camera? Can Instagram have access to your location information? Apps should be able to ask, "Can Instagram have access to your birthday?" And that would, I think, sort of elegantly from a product perspective, from a simplification perspective, from a privacy-preserving perspective, and what's easiest for parents, that would be the, the right product solution to solve this problem around age that we're all sort of trying to, to grapple with right now, and there's a lot of stuff that we're doing. Part of the reason that this project was so complicated, and I mentioned the age team, is like we're building classifiers to try to predict how old people are based on, um, not just the age that they've stated, um, but, you know, based on who they're talking to, what kind of content they're looking at, what the age of the people they're connected to is, do we think that this is actually an adult like they say, or is it really a teen? And so we're doing a lot to...... try to predict age or prevent people from lying about their age. But I think this would be a really big win for the industry.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:31

        Ah, makes sense to me.

    13. NGNaomi Gleit1:06:32

        (laughs) Okay. Thank you, Lenny. (laughs)

14. 1:06:37 – 1:12:10

    Running effective meetings

    1. NGNaomi Gleit1:06:38

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:38

       So to close out this portion and this chapter of our conversation on Naomi-um, Naomi-isms, I know something else that you're really good at that I've heard from a few people is running meetings. Something that a lot of people always want to get better at. Uh, any tips? What have you learned about running great meetings?

    3. NGNaomi Gleit1:06:54

       A meeting is a high value and high cost sort of amount of time, uh, a- and I want to make sure it's as productive as possible. Um, what I will do is send an agenda 24 hours prior to the meeting. Um, that agenda will include a pre-read. Um, I've talked to people who, if the pre-read is not attached to the calendar invite or, like, associated with 的 meeting at least 24 hours in advance, they will cancel the meeting. Um, that just goes to show we want everybody in the meeting to have full context, have read the pre-read. Often what will happen in the previous 24 hours is, because we're all sending pre-reads on Google Slides, there will be a lot of conversation and questions that get hashed out leading up to the meeting. Um, during the meeting, like I said, I, I think it's really important for a group of people to be looking at something and anchoring people on some- on something. If, if somebody joins the meeting, say, five minutes late, they should know exactly where in the agenda you are in the meeting and, like, what is being discussed based on, like, catching up from the visual that's being projected. Um, usually a meeting can be, and hopefully a meeting is really either... is, is a decision meeting. So if there's a decision, I need three options and I need a recommendation. That should hopefully (laughs) help focus the meeting. Um, and then, like I said, I will real time edit the visual such that we document and have extreme clarity on what is the option that we agreed on and any next steps that we also agreed to. After the meeting, anyone who wasn't in the meeting, that's fine because within 24 hours post-meeting, I will send the notes, reply all to the, the meeting invite and send the notes. So, m- just like tactically, I use the calendar invite as the canonical unit by which to handle all of this communication because a lot of times meetings are one-offs. There isn't an existing sort of email or chat thread that maps perfectly to the audience of the meeting. So for me, that is the meeting or the calendar invite. So I'll click on the calendar invite, reply all, include the pre-read, pre-meeting, and then, um, do this, like, reply all again post-meeting 24 hours with the, the notes, the decisions, and the next steps.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:11

       I love this. So many-

    5. NGNaomi Gleit1:09:13

       (laughs)

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:13

       ... very specific-

    7. NGNaomi Gleit1:09:15

       Yeah. (laughs)

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:15

       ... uh, tactics here. Uh, I love it. This is, uh, food for my brain. I love the, uh, always have three options and a recommendation. That's such a simple thing to recommend but such a powerful way of operating as a PM, just like here's the options, here's what I recommend, here's why.

    9. NGNaomi Gleit1:09:29

       Oh, one, one thing I forgot that I learned from Guy Rosen, he is our chief security officer, is when you have three options and a recommendation, in terms of evaluating the options, I don't love pros and cons. It's a flat list of text. Um, it's hard to, um, you know, just get the big picture from that. Oftentimes we'll use a traffic light. That means that the three options are three rows. The columns in the table will be criteria by which to evaluate the options. Those could either be functions, so for example, if I have three options as the rows, column one could be the legal perspective, column two could be the policy perspective, column three could be the privacy or product perspective. Um, alternatively, the columns could map to different criteria, like what we're optimizing for. So it could be the user experience, it could be the engineering feasibility, it could be the, you know, internal complexity. Whatever, whatever are the criteria should be laid out in the columns. And then obviously it should be color coded, red, yellow, green, based on how it stacks up against those criteria. And what this allows is, to get back to the point of the visual, is you can quickly look at the three options, see where's the most red (laughs) and, and sort of rule that out. Ideally, the recommendation has some combination of, like, you know, the, the more green or yellow than the other options. And then obviously within the cells you can spell out the specific rationale for w- for the coloring. But I think this is a really good way to, to run a meeting and just create extreme clarity around how you're evaluating the options in a way that, like, a flat list of pros and cons just doesn't.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:12

        What other podcast would have this level of detail of how to run-

    11. NGNaomi Gleit1:11:16

        Oh. (laughs)

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:16

        ... a discussion on a decision? And this is exactly what people want to hear.

    13. NGNaomi Gleit1:11:21

        Okay. (laughs)

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:21

        So I love it. This is product market fit for-

    15. NGNaomi Gleit1:11:24

        Okay.

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:24

        ... listeners of this podcast.

    17. NGNaomi Gleit1:11:26

        (laughs)

    18. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:26

        I love it. I love it. And obviously the reason this is more effective is it's not just like here's a quick sentence on the, on the pro and con. It's like here's what I actually think, if this is good or bad for the things that matter to the business. So-

    19. NGNaomi Gleit1:11:39

        That's exactly right.

    20. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:40

        ... that makes tons of sense.

    21. NGNaomi Gleit1:11:41

        It also gives people a framework to plug into. A lot of times the creation of a pre-read for these discussions involves many different people from many different teams and functions. If you have a traffic light, they can own filling out their cell. They can own the rationale behind the legal position on option one, two, and three. And i- in general I- I'm super into frameworks that allow people to plug into and, and i- clearly represent their, their point of view.

    22. LRLenny Rachitsky1:12:08

        Love it. Uh,

15. 1:12:10 – 1:16:36

    The importance of exercise

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:12:10

       final question, completely different topic, I saw a Wall Street Journal story about how you exercise and your exercise regimen and how important that is to your life and career. Now most people don't have a Wall Street Journal story about their exercise regimen, especially a tech worker. And I know this is just important to how you... to your work, that you... And they wrote that this basically helps you become better at your job.Any advice there for folks that want to, I don't know, lean into exercise, exercise more, for how to actually do that? Because your advice is this actually makes you better at work and life.

    2. NGNaomi Gleit1:12:43

       I believe that. People are always like, "What are you training for?" And I'm like, "I'm training for life." Like, I, I have four musties. Um, it is eat, sleep, alone time, and exercise. Those are the things that I need in order to perform in the other areas of my life. Um, seems pretty obvious, but, um, until recently, I actually did not prioritize sleep. My boyfriend is actually super into sleep and we have the Eight Sleep, we have eye masks, we have blackout shades, we have, like, good sleep hygiene, um, and so I'm getting much better at that. But exercise is something that I've always been on top of. Alone time is also a mustie for me, because I'm an introvert and I need that time to, to recharge. Otherwise, I think I get kind of weird (laughs) around people. Um, in terms of how I prioritize it, I am... It's sort of a non-negotiable or table stakes. Every morning, I have to work out. Um, I am also lucky enough to work in an environment where I can wear workout clothes to work, um, which I often do. I think working out is sort of the hour of the day that I'm doing my exercise, but I also view, like I said, um, life is, is a workout. Performing at work is a workout. I need to be able to move, I need to feel comfortable. It's very physical, I think, um, especially if you're trying really hard to be a conductor (laughs) running around with, like, a metaphorical conductor wand. Um, I need to be able to move. Um, a while ago, and that's what the Wall Street Journal article was about, I set a goal of doing five pull-ups. I'd read somewhere in an article that less than 1% of women can actually do pull-ups. Think having a goal is really helpful. That's something that I worked on. And I, anyone can do this, truly, if you train for it. I think it's potentially more technique, uh, for me than, like, strength per se. And, and I worked up towards that goal. Um, I think exercise, in addition to all of the physical benefits, primarily has a mental health benefit, I think for me. Um, and, uh, and also there are just, like, a lot of lessons that I think I take from exercise. So for example, I think being able to do five pull-ups sort of taught me I can do hard things, um, in this sort of really narrow, measurable way, uh, which gave me confidence in other aspects of my life.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:02

       I had a friend who her goal was do one pushup.

    4. NGNaomi Gleit1:15:06

       One pushup. (laughs)

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:06

       Uh, she's like, "I want to be able to do one pushup." And that was the, that was really motivating to her, and then she finally got there and then she could do more pushups.

    6. NGNaomi Gleit1:15:12

       That's awesome.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:13

       And yeah, similar. Uh, I have so many notes here as you were talking. The other is, uh, sleep advice, so eye mask. I have an awesome eye mask that I'll recommend in the show notes. It's funny.

    8. NGNaomi Gleit1:15:23

       Please. What is it?

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:24

       There's, uh, of all the things I've recommended (laughs) in all the various places, I get the most comments about, "Thank you for this very specific eye mask. Uh, it changed my life." It's like a Wawaw. It's what Tim Ferriss has often recommended.

    10. NGNaomi Gleit1:15:36

        Okay.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:36

        Uh, W-A-O- I'll link to it in the show notes, but it's, uh-

    12. NGNaomi Gleit1:15:39

        Oh, great.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:40

        ... Wawaw. Let me look it up real quick, 'cause people are gonna be like, "Oh, I got to get it."

    14. NGNaomi Gleit1:15:44

        (laughs)

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:44

        Wawaw eye mask. Um-

    16. NGNaomi Gleit1:15:46

        The one that we have has sort of-

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:47

        Uh-huh.

    18. NGNaomi Gleit1:15:47

        ... cushions around the eyes, such that it's, um, you have, it's not flush against your eyes.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:53

        Yeah, this is the same. Okay.

    20. NGNaomi Gleit1:15:55

        Oh, great.

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:55

        Uh, W-A-O, W-A-O-A-W sleep mask on Amazon. It's 13 bucks.

    22. NGNaomi Gleit1:16:02

        (laughs)

    23. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16:02

        And, uh, amazing. My wife and I both sleep with these eye masks.

    24. NGNaomi Gleit1:16:06

        (laughs)

    25. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16:07

        And it's ridiculous until you're like, "Oh, I can't sleep without one now."

    26. NGNaomi Gleit1:16:10

        Totally. Well, there's a lot of research that even, like, ambient lighting results in lower quality sleep, so I think that's why the blackout shades and the eye mask just help ensure it's truly dark.

    27. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16:20

        Yeah. I, I was just watching a podcast and the advice there is even, like, your, uh, your smoke alarm with a little light is too much light. Like, you need to cover that up to create real darkness. And, uh, why not just wear an eye mask? You don't have to worry about any of that.

    28. NGNaomi Gleit1:16:33

        Yes, (laughs) totally.

    29. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16:35

        It's pretty

16. 1:16:36 – 1:25:49

    The role of a product manager

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16:36

       cool. Okay. And then one thing I didn't mention when you're talking about the conductor, uh, the PM as a conductor, that's exactly the metaphor I've always used my entire career when people ask me about what is a product manager. So, we're alike.

    2. NGNaomi Gleit1:16:46

       Really?

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16:47

       Yeah. I have all these slides of, like, here's the PM, and it's like a symphony and the conductor standing there.

    4. NGNaomi Gleit1:16:52

       Lenny-

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16:52

       It's-

    6. NGNaomi Gleit1:16:52

       ... do you know how happy that makes me?

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16:54

       Hmm.

    8. NGNaomi Gleit1:16:55

       Because I, I feel like sometimes people are like, "That sounds crazy." But the, uh, the fact that you actually came to that same conclusion makes me... Like, like, why, why did, why? Why did you come to that conclusion? I'm, I'm just curious.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:17:09

       Uh, because as you said, the PM's not, like, doing the, not making the thing. They're just helping each of the s- people who are the most talented at their very specific skill do the best possible work. And their back is, you know, to the audience. They're kind of trying to stay out of the way. Even though, you know, they come in, everyone claps for them.

    10. NGNaomi Gleit1:17:27

        (laughs)

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:17:27

        You always kind of get that.

    12. NGNaomi Gleit1:17:30

        Yeah.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:17:30

        Um, and then in theory they could, like, step in a little bit to help out when you need. You know, they can pinch hit on, like, design here and there and research here and there, probably not engineering. So those are kind of the reasons. And, you know, they're not in charge. The, you know, the violin, the chairwind violinist is the actual person that's making the music and the best at this thing.

    14. NGNaomi Gleit1:17:48

        At this. It's so great to hear somebody else talk about this too. (laughs)

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:17:51

        (laughs)

    16. NGNaomi Gleit1:17:51

        Thank you. And I, I think that that is really how I view my role, um, and what I do. And I think maybe just hearing you talk about it reminded me why I think I put so much emphasis on just elevating the people on my team and the people around me. And one of the, you know, sort of candidly, one of the development areas for me and, and it could be sort of downstream, because I do have this analogy of how to be a PM, is that the, the growth feedback or the constructive feedback for me is really learning when to lead from the front more, maybe when to be less of a quiet conductor that's really elevating the first chair violinist, um, and be more...... be more front-facing. I think a lot of my approach and my leadership style is really, um, leading through the people on my team and helping grow them. And a lot of times I think that, you know, they're dedicated, they're experts, they know, you know, particular areas. Obviously as a head of product I manage a portfolio of different projects of which each of them has a incredible leader on it. And so, oftentimes I'm just really trying to lead from behind and help them be as successful as possible. But there are, there is a time and a place when, when maybe that silent conductor needs to take more of a vocal and, and front-facing role.

Episode duration: 1:38:13