Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YT, IG, FB)

1. 0:00 – 6:31

   Bangaly’s background

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky0:00

      You were early growth PM at Facebook. You were head of growth at Instagram. You were VP of product at Instacart. You're now director of product management at YouTube, and I've heard that you've had a lot of impact on a lot of different cultures.

   2. BKBangaly Kaba0:09

      I've found this framework travels with me. It's got, like, these five components to it: vision, skills, incentives, resources, action plan. And you need all of those to have change. And then within those buckets you've got to figure out what are the right levers that you need to pull, what are the things that are missing.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky0:26

      You're really big on something you call understand work.

   4. BKBangaly Kaba0:29

      What I call the anti-pattern of what we want to do. Someone says, "Hey, you know what? This would be great to build." Then you go pull data to go justify why that would be great to build. Call that identify, justify, execute. First you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on, so understand, identify, execute.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky0:45

      You wrote this legendary blog post called How to Choose Where to Work and What to Work On.

   6. BKBangaly Kaba0:50

      There's impact that you're really trying to drive, and the impact is only achievable by looking at set of variables related to the environment and set of variables related to your skill set.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02

      Today's guest is Bengali Kaba. Bengali was an early growth PM at Facebook where he was responsible for how people make friends on Facebook. He was head of growth at Instagram, where he helped scale a platform to over one billion users. He was also VP of product at Instacart. He's also worked with tons of amazing startups as a growth advisor, including Twitter. He's now director of product management at YouTube, where from what I hear, he's already made a huge dent. This conversation went long, because there was so much gold to be extracted from Bengali's head, and I could not stop myself from learning everything I could in our time together. This episode is for anyone looking to level up their product and growth chops or also just do better in your career. We dig into his framework for how to choose where to work and what to work on, the importance of spending time on something he calls understand work, his adjacent user theory and how it can help you drive growth, a bunch of advice for coaching product managers and managers of managers, tons of lessons and stories from his time at Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, and so much more. 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 it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Bengali Kaba. Bengali, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.

   8. BKBangaly Kaba2:22

      Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky2:24

      So many previous guests have recommended that I get you on this podcast, which I already knew. Funny story. When I first launched this podcast, uh, I asked you to be on it. You were like, "Sure." And I included you on my launch poster of all the guests that were gonna be on the podcast, and then you decided to take on very, uh, hard work and jobs that kept you from having time. And so, I'm really excited that we're finally doing this.

   10. BKBangaly Kaba2:47

       I'm glad we're finally making it a reality. Sorry about that, Lenny.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky2:49

       No sweat. You actually mentioned to me that, uh, somebody came up to you in Zurich and was like, "I'm excited for you on Lenny's podcast."

   12. BKBangaly Kaba2:57

       Yeah. It was crazy. I was like, you know, visiting a team that I manage there, about to get back on a plane to go back to SFO, and just standing there, you know, doing some work, minding my business. And I get on the plane, I'm talking to a colleague and someone comes up to me, I don't think I'd ever seen him before, and said, "Hey, sorry to interrupt you. I am so excited for your podcast with Lenny." Like, "I- I can't wait for it." And then just walks away. And I was like, "What is going on right now? Lenny is a big deal. I don't even know how this person knows me." It's like... And that's how I knew, Lenny, that I had to reschedule with you, because I was like, "If people are coming up to me and telling me that they're excited," I was like, "There is a lot of anticipation, and Lenny, like, the power of your reach now is like legit."

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky3:37

       That is hilarious. That's like a- a new strategy for me to get people on the podcast. Just say they're gonna be on the podcast-

   14. BKBangaly Kaba3:43

       (laughs) .

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky3:43

       ... and then the pressure will start.

   16. BKBangaly Kaba3:44

       Oh yeah. I mean, totally.

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky3:46

       Okay. So there's two broad topics that I want to spend our time on today. I want to talk about career advice and growth advice, and they're both essentially growth oriented. One's career growth, one is product growth. How does that sound?

   18. BKBangaly Kaba3:57

       Sounds perfect.

   19. LRLenny Rachitsky3:58

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2. 6:31 – 8:39

   Choosing where to work and what to work on

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky6:31

      So let's maybe start with the career. You wrote this legendary blog post called How to Choose Where to Work and What to Work On that a few people have mentioned to me was really impactful in their career. And just to remind people of your career path, which they'll hear in the intro, but just to give people a reason to listen to your advice on career. You were eargl- early growth PM at Facebook. You were head of growth at Instagram. You were VP of product at Instacart. You worked with a ton of amazing startups as an advisor, including Twitter. You're now director of product management at YouTube. This is a career that many people would dream of having. So let's just spend a little time on this topic of how to choose where to work and what to work on. And I know you kind of have this framework in this post, so maybe that's a good way to start of just kind of how you broadly think about where to work and what to work on.

   2. BKBangaly Kaba7:17

      Um, yeah. That blog post that you're referring to actually came out of a personal struggle that I had, um, when I was at Facebook and trying to decide what my next move should be. Um, I felt like I was kind of stuck. Felt like I was working harder, but not getting, seeing incremental kind of benefit to the work that I was doing. And I knew that I needed a change, but emotionally I understood that, but I couldn't really have an objective way of thinking about it. And so I really pushed myself to figure out, like, what is actually going on with my situation, and how do I create a, a way that I can rely on objectively to understand what's actually going on? And so I looked at that situation, and I wrote that post. And it's, you know, the framework is really that there's impact that you're really trying to drive, and that is the thing that is the most important. And the impact is only achievable by looking at two sets of kind of variables: a set of variables related to the environment, a set of variables related to your skills. And really breaking down each and understanding what's happening in the environment bit by bit, and what's happening with your skills, and where are you hindered structurally within the environment, where are your skills kind of lacking, and what do you have control over? And using that whole kind of a output, that framework, to decide what makes the most sense.

3. 8:39 – 10:53

   The impact factor

   1. BKBangaly Kaba8:39

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky8:40

      Why is impact the key output of this equation? I think for a lot of people that isn't necessarily the intuitive variable that they think is important to focus on. Why is that so important in your experience?

   3. BKBangaly Kaba8:51

      Yeah. I mean, it, it's, it's ... I didn't really know how to think about what the right thing to optimize for was initially. And I realized that it's not compensation. Compensation is a reflection of the input, the impact that you're having. Um, and so ... And you're leveling, like how lepsy you are, how much scope you has, have is, you know, a derivative of how much impact you're driving. The more impact you're driving at your company, the more people feel like you can operate independently, you can drive real results, the more the scope they'll give you. So really impact became the thing to optimize for. It is the input, and compensation becomes an output based on that.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky9:32

      I think this is a really important point that is easy to miss, and this is what I always tell people when they're looking for ways to get promoted and do well in companies, just find ways to have more impact. Can you maybe give, make it even more concrete? Like what does impact mean to you when you talk about impact?

   5. BKBangaly Kaba9:46

      Yeah. I mean, so impact can be a lot of things, but I think for a product manager, for example, it's really, one, helping to get, drive extreme clarity about where there is, where the problems with the product, where there's opportunities, and what is the right focus and prioritization, right? Like that is actually a form of impact, just creating the clarity that people need to understand and believe in the investment. The reason why I name this, and it feels a little counterintuitive, is that the more senior you get, the more there are questions of are we even investing in the right place, right? Like is this area, is this team, is this org the right investment, right? And so being able to even create the clarity that there is opportunity, it is the right thing to do, it is strategically and structurally important is a form of impact. And then actually delivering on that impact, showing that you can make progress quickly, that you can deliver fast lane wins, as Casey Windows would say, or medium and slow lane wins, and then actually showing that you can do this again and again is how you actually validate the impact that you can see what, where the opportunity is and what's going on.

4. 10:53 – 15:53

   Evaluating the environment

   1. BKBangaly Kaba10:53

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky10:53

      Awesome. Okay. So this equation is impact equals environment times skills. Can you talk a bit about how to work on these two elements?

   3. BKBangaly Kaba11:00

      So the environment was the one to me that I think is most people overlooked and I overlooked when I was first thinking about this. Environment, in this case, I think I kind of discreetly named a few things. One is your manager, and there's the resources, so, you know, what kind of team do you have? Is your team staffed appropriately? Do you have the right, you know, PNL or whatever budget to get the things done that you need? Then there's the scope, like what is in your remit versus not in your remit? Because, you know, if you don't have enough scope, then you can't actually focus on the things that are most important. The team itself, you know, the skills, the relative skills of the team. Your compensation, in some ways, is part of the environment, because if you're not compensated fairly or you don't believe you are, then it's hard to feel like the work that you're doing is meaningful. And then there is the last part is the company culture. So to what extent is the culture a place where you feel supported, included, you feel like you can do your best work? And so you're really looking at each one of these variables, and I look at this every year, and I say, "How is my manager doing? Like how do I think about my manager? How do I think about the resources I have, the scope, the team, the conversation, the co- company culture? And to what extent?" And I score them, right? I score them as, you know, a 1 means it's kind of neutral. A 2 means that, like, I'm greatly, greatly benefiting from this situation. And, uh, like something even closer to 0 is, um, I'm not in a good place. So y- I assign a score in-... quarter point increments, .25, .5, .75, one, up to two, every year, and I would ask myself, you know, what is the state of each one of these and to what extent do I believe that they can and will change?

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky12:40

      Wow. I love this. Uh, okay, so this, there's this formula, impact equals environment times skills. Within environment, there's these five variables and they add up to 10 (laughs) if, if they each-

   5. BKBangaly Kaba12:50

      Yeah.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky12:50

      ... give you two points. That's so cool. Okay, so the five, just to be clear, uh, your manager, the resources you have, is team, team's number three?

   7. BKBangaly Kaba12:58

      Uh-huh.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky12:59

      Uh, compensation and then the culture of the team.

   9. BKBangaly Kaba13:01

      And then your scope as well.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky13:03

       And then scope. Okay, got it.

   11. BKBangaly Kaba13:04

       So it's actually six, yeah.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky13:05

       Oh, there's six. Okay, got it. So it's up to 12. And that, okay, so the idea here is you score each of these of how you're feeling, how the environment is contributing to the impact that you're delivering, and if one of these is not a great score, that's an opportunity to improve your impact, which in, will improve, improve your career.

   13. BKBangaly Kaba13:26

       That's right. And it, you have to really be honest. I think part of what makes this framework so powerful for me at least is that it helps you to be honest around what are the things that are limiting your ability to have impact and for your skills to really land, and to what extent do you believe that you can help to change or try to influence a change in the environment? Um, because, you know, no one wants to be in a place where there's a bad culture and the culture's a bad fit for you, but if you're not really thinking about it objectively and naming that, or maybe it's the culture of the team that is not the right place for you. Right? So it really forces you to evaluate what's going on around you that's limiting your impact.

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky14:05

       Is there an example from your career you could share where one of these was not where it needed to be and you either helped change it or realized you had to get out of there?

   15. BKBangaly Kaba14:14

       When I was actually at Facebook, I was running, um, the team that does all the people recommendations, and it was a great team. I actually had a massive, massive team. I had 30 engineers I was working with, 15 machine learning engineers and 15 front end and back end engineers. And so great team, incredible team, lot of resources, ton of scope. In some ways, it was too much scope. And to me, that was problematic because I really needed to bail it out. I felt like multiple teams to support the work that we were doing or to break it up because it was, I mean, the pace, the velocity, you can imagine at Facebook was incredible, and I felt like between all of the work that we needed to do, the amount of engineering capacity that we had, and the amount that was on the table, I felt like I wasn't resourced in a way where I felt like I could actually deliver on all of the things that were necessary without burning myself out. And I felt like I was burning myself out and I couldn't really see the forest from the trees because I was just, there was so much to do. And so that was a situation that I didn't really understand how to navigate at that point in my career, and there were like two or three manager changes concurrently, right? And so I didn't have a manager to lean on that I felt like I had a relationship with to help me to navigate that space, and I felt like the scope was actually too much for what needed to be done, and so I needed to find a better kind of fit for me. There was nothing wrong with the team. It was like a great learning environment, but it was like the confluence of scope and manager and all happening at once just wasn't a good fit for me.

5. 15:53 – 18:27

   The manager component

   1. BKBangaly Kaba15:53

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky15:53

      A lot of people are in these situations where they go, they'd say they go through this score, they identify, "I have way too little scope, way too much scope," kinda like you described, and there's always this question of, "Can I actually make a change or is this just not, am I not in a position..." Especially IC product managers. There's just always a lot of like, "I can't actually change anything." What do you often tell people around this that just feel like, "Uh, there's nothing I can do here and my manager sucks. What am I gonna do?"

   3. BKBangaly Kaba16:17

      Well, I do think one of the things that I recognize is your manager, not all of these variables is created equal, right? And the manager is the most important variable in the environment because a great manager who is empathetic, who is aware of what's going on, who is a great communicator, has the ability to move th- the chess pieces around and to like fix some of these for you, either immediately or in time. Right? There's no one other than your manager who can really help to increase your scope or to help make sure that the team has the right pieces in place or- Yeah.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky16:52

      ... you know, dial in some of the issues that you might see in culture. And so this is why people say, you know, they don't leave a job, they leave a manager, because the manager is the one that has a lot of the power to m- fix a lot of these variables. And so really, the question becomes like, you know, to what extent have you been able to clearly articulate what are the, you know, and dispassionately articulate what are the challenges that you're having, you're seeing across some of these variables with your manager? Help them to tie it back to how it's impacting your work and s- like, see if they can help you to create a plan to, like, uh, alleviate some of these things. That's super interesting. Then your experience with the manager is kind of the core of a lot of these variables. Is there anything you recommend to people if their managers is not someone they like? Is it just like try to find a new manager or potentially leave?

   5. BKBangaly Kaba17:39

      You're never gonna always like your manager, right? Like that's not the... The goal isn't to like your manager. Ideally, you respect them and they respect you. You feel like there's things that you can learn from them. Finding a new manager's always an option, but I guess sometimes the real question is, is actually spending time trying to understand what is your manager optimizing?

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky17:57

      Mm-hmm.

   7. BKBangaly Kaba17:57

      A lot of times, I think there is a big disconnect between an IC focusing on their discrete area and try to optimize for a local maxima versus understanding, okay, my, my manager's thinking about these things and this is how I fit in, and understanding maybe they have a gap to understanding why your area is important or maybe there's stuff that's on your manager's plate that is actually adjacent to your remit that if you understood what they're optimizing for, you can take that on and you would find more synergies with what they're

6. 18:27 – 23:49

   The skills part of the equation

   1. BKBangaly Kaba18:27

      trying to do.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky18:27

      I love that advice. Let's talk about the other side of this equation. We've talked about environment. Let's talk about skills. What do you advise there for folks that wanna improve their skills?

   3. BKBangaly Kaba18:37

      The skills part is really, really big and it's something that requires, like, I think consistent, you know, evolution of your own abilities. And so, you know, I broke it out in that blog post, uh, kind of communication, your ability to influence, you know, leadership, strategic thinking, and then execution, right? Like actually getting things done. The communication, uh, of these, again, not all of these are created equal. I think communication is the one that tends to be the most impactful. Uh, and you see this in a lot of ways, right? You see this with people who are poor executors, but incredible communicators, and they seem to continue to rise and rise because, like, you know, they can tell a great story but when you look under the covers, there's nothing there. There's no substance there, right? So communication, for better or for worse, is the mo- one of the most important things. But building out your skills, I think, is really just kind of a... It's an interesting time to be in product and to be in tech right now because you have so many more ways to build out your skills than what previously existed. Um, just, like, so many incredible blog posts, right? Like your podcast and blogs. There's so many incredible people who've come on here who tell you things like, you know, how to go to market, how to think about B2B SaaS and metrics. And so, like, you know, re- like listening to you, listen- reading Ben Thompson, understanding his mental models. You know, if you go to look at Elena Verner or whomever, right? Like, there's so many thought leaders who are out there. So I think being a voracious reader is really, really critical because it helps to build your toolkit, right? And you need arrows in your quiver to really understand how to think about the right framework and the right mental model at the right time. Um, one thing I also tell people is people think about mentorship as like, "I have a mentor. Manny i- Lenny is my mentor," or, "John is my mentor." I tell them it's actually better to have a stable of mentors. You want to have three or four. And ideally what you do is you meet with each one of them once a month on a different Friday of the month, right? And so you might have three or four people, on every Friday you're meeting with someone different. And the reason why this is so important is because if you, Lenny, are a mentor to me and you're busy one Friday and we only meet once a month, now I don't have anyone to talk to for two months, right? And you're going through a lot of things and you're not really able to bounce ideas or kids, build skills or learn how to influence others. But if you have three or four mentors, if, you know, y- you have someone different to talk to every week and if one or two of them cancel, you still have two people to talk to that month, right? And you still can continue to grow and to, to build your thinking. So, that's something I always recommend. And then the last thing I actually talk about is when it comes to execution, I think people don't, especially product managers, don't do enough of watching and learning from others. There's an art and a science to product management and in a lot of ways I come from a background of education and in a lot of ways in product management it's very similar. Like, you wanna watch how other people hone their craft, how they deliver, how they lead teams and kind of steal things from them. Like, figure out, "Well, wow, Lenny did this really, really well when he was at Airbnb and it was really incredible. I'm gonna take that. I'm gonna take how he runs that team or how he landed that framework or how he communicated this message and note it and use it in my own toolkit later on." And so if you're really a student of product, you can't just be a student of theory, you've gotta be a student of practice too. Meaning you're going and you're looking, it's like, "Hey, I'd love to sit in your team meetings. Can I come watch?" Right? Or your PM meetings or your leadership meetings. And you really, like, doing that for the sake of learning is really, really incredible. And that's some of the ways I talk about building skills.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky22:04

      Is there an example of that latter lesson that you learned from someone that comes to mind of s- watching someone and like, "Oh, I'm gonna use... I'm gonna do that"?

   5. BKBangaly Kaba22:13

      Earlier in my career when I first got to Instagram, um, I wasn't the first PM at Instag- growth BM, but I was one of the first and, um, a guy who was there before me, his name was George Lee, he actually stood up the growth team and ended up leaving six months right after I joined. But, like, I watched... George was, like, a really good listener. He had just a really incredible ability to be in a room and hear what was going on, to recast it back and make sure everyone felt good about where we were and what was being said and the path forward and really crystallizing the, the action items and u- and also, like, how people felt about what the next steps were. And walking out of that meeting, it felt like he always had buy-in and clarity and was, like, helpful to build trust. You could see him almost, like, winning trust in every, like, in every moment of that meeting. And that was something that I, like, really kind of admired and learned and kind of sought to emulate, uh, later on in my career.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky23:15

      That's an awesome example. It comes back to the skill of communication that you talked about, just the power of becoming really good at that. And this is such a simple skill you just described as just recapping, "Here's what we talked about, here's what we're gonna do, here's the decisions we made, here's action items." It's, like, not actually difficult, it's just...

   7. BKBangaly Kaba23:30

      It's not action. Yeah, but, like, what's, what was magical about the way he did it was, like, he would name people and their contributions and show how all of this came together into what is the path forward, you know?

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky23:40

      That's amazing.

   9. BKBangaly Kaba23:41

      And it's like, you know, it's, it's the communication but it's also the other side. It's the other coin, the side of communication which is the listening-

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky23:47

       Mm-hmm.

   11. BKBangaly Kaba23:47

       ... to figure out how you communicate

7. 23:49 – 25:42

   Advice on finding a mentor

   1. BKBangaly Kaba23:49

      back to others.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky23:49

      So good. Following up on something else you talked about, which was mentors, anytime someone talks about finding mentors, everyone's always, "How do I find a mentor?" Well, how do you... What advice do you share with folks of, like, how to find a mentor to help you, say, once a week or once a month?

   3. BKBangaly Kaba24:03

      Where I see people find the most success is they ask. They tell people what they should... working on or what challenges they have and they say, "Do you know someone who I might be able to learn from who has done this or has good thinking about this recently?" Right? So instead of just going to someone saying, "Hey, can you be my mentor?" So you're coming to me and saying, "Hey, Bengali, I'm actually trying to figure out how do I change the way this team operates because we need to go from this model to that model. But here's some of the challenges. So do you know someone who's actually really good at changing the way teams work or really good at communicating a new vision that, like, I can talk to?"And so, that, I think, is really important because what you do is you're creating a seed. And the seed is, you know, there's like a triad and you have the person who's looking for the mentor, you have the recommender, the recommender, and then you have the, um, the p-potential mentor. And the recommender's basically saying, "Here, there's common purpose between the two of you and I can see it, and I think this is important, and so I want you all to come together." Right? And that triading in that moment creates a higher affinity, a higher likelihood that the person who needs the help and the person who you're connecting them with are going to see mutual benefit from one another.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky25:16

      Mm-hmm.

   5. BKBangaly Kaba25:16

      Right? And I think, um, I, I find that like just doing that and seeding that and being really focused on what the opportunity or the challenge is tends to lead to better connections as opposed to just reaching out and saying, "Hey, I like your style. Will you be my mentor?"

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky25:30

      So essentially share with folks you trust, "Here's what I'm working on." See if they recommend someone that could help you-

   7. BKBangaly Kaba25:36

      Yeah.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky25:36

      ... with that specific skill, versus assuming that there's this person that can help you with the skill.

   9. BKBangaly Kaba25:40

      That's right.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky25:41

       I love it.

8. 25:42 – 31:17

   The power of “understand work”

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky25:42

      Going back to your advice on career, something that you wrote about in your post, plus folks have told me you're really big on, is this something you call understand work. Does that ring a bell?

   2. BKBangaly Kaba25:53

      Yes. Yes, it does.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky25:53

      Okay. Talk about that and why that's important.

   4. BKBangaly Kaba25:56

      I certainly cannot take credit for understand work. This is a part of, uh, like an old Facebook framework of understand, identify, execute. What I probably will say is, uh, I guess I've been the shepherd for understand work in other companies. Like I've taken it from my time at Facebook and really instituted it regularly at Instagram then at Instacart and when I worked, helped with Twitter now at YouTube. Um, the way I like to talk about it with my teams is that, you know, first I tell a story actually. And the story is, is, you know, we've all had a moment where we have worked on something with a team, super excited, finally launches and we go out to dinner and we celebrate. And, you know, we're celebrating, everyone's juiced, um, you know, it's a great night. You go back to the office the next day and you look at the metrics and the metrics are flat and everyone's a little bummed, like, "Why did this happen?" Right? "Why are the metrics flat? What happened when we worked so hard?" And ultimately, when you unpack it, you realize that you built something that you thought was gonna be a good idea, but you really didn't understand a lot of key components of what people really needed, what pain points really existed, or what were the alternatives and what the real value of those alternatives were in the market, or exactly how, like, the product needed to work with the flywheel or what the experience needed to be. And so that is what I call the anti-pattern of what we want to do, and I call that identify, justify, execute, right? Where you identify something, someone says, "Hey, you know what? This would be great to build." And you identify that. And then you go pull data to go justify why that would be great to build. And then you sink an ungodly amount of time working on it in order to make it work, but it ultimately doesn't succeed. And that is the anti-pattern to what is kind of like the Facebook kind of way of thinking, which is understand, identify, execute, right? So first you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on. So when we talk about understand work, there's a few ways to think about it. One is, it is an inten- an intentional affordance in your execution to do the work that helps you to de-risk a project and to learn what's going on. When I say an intentional affordance, meaning you put it down, like Lenny is gonna work on this thing, right? Lenny as a product manager is gonna write a strategy. Janice as a designer is going to design a prototype. Like, whatever the thing is, and you put it down as actual, an item, as opposed to assuming it's gonna happen in the background. We don't make an affordance for understand work, then the work doesn't get done, and everyone's just sprinting on execution. And so, it's a planned, uh, intentional time to the team's bandwidth to figure out what is it that we need to do to understand what's happening. And so, you know, for example, with Instagram, we did a lot of understand work of what makes for a good connection, right? Like, how do we want to think about that? How do we want to make sure that we're actually growing a graph, a social graph that makes sense? And so, I might work with data science to do understand work to, like, pull a funnel and look at the different types of connections for different types of users and make it make sense, right? And engineering might do understand work to instrument logging to make sure that we have the data that we need in order to tell the story. And so you're doing this understand work to basically better understand the gaps in knowledge. What's also really interesting is that understand work helps you to clarify what is a root cause? Like, or what is a job to be done? Or, like, um, what is the right use case? And because the team adopts this mentality, it becomes this forcing function for execution. So when someone says, "You know what we should build? We should build this," you have a team that's enabled and empowered to say, "That's a good idea, but we don't actually understand these three things before we start working on that. So maybe we should do understand work to make sure that that is actually the right idea." Right? And so what you end up getting by embracing this concept is two things. You get parallel paths of work. So every sprint, let's say you do a three-week sprint or a three-month roadmap, you're executing on the things that you have a lot of conviction around, and you're also doing understand work in parallel. And so at the end of the sprint, you have learnings from what you executed. "Wow, that test or that launch worked really well. We should double down." Or, "Wow, that test or launch didn't work. Here's how we should pair it." And you have insights from the understand work. And you use both of those to plan the next sprints or roadmap, right? And so, because you have this parallel path, you end up getting this velocity multiplier over time, right? So the next sprint and the third sprint and the fourth sprint, every subsequent sprint, you've de-risked new ideas, you've gotten more clarity, and so you do more execution, you do better execution, and you move faster. And-... the things you ship, you have a higher win rate on the things you ship. Right? And you know, you're sh- you're shipping when... I remember when I left Instagram, this was many years ago, but we had like, had 15 teams and we might have been running 12 to 20 experiments a quarter a team. And I would say probably 60 to 70% of them were like positive and shippable, which is incredible. I mean, you think about it, multiply the magnitude of that. Um, and it was because we were so effective at de-risking and understanding what was going

9. 31:17 – 37:55

   Operationalizing understand work

   1. BKBangaly Kaba31:17

      on.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky31:17

      This is really interesting. I imagine many people listening are like, "We, we put time into understanding. We run experiments, we write strategy docs, we do user research." What is it that you think people are... Where do you think they're missing? Is it that you dedicate people's, like, actual time, like you're just doing understand work instead of building a new thing for this next sprint? You're just gonna be telling us what the problem here or opportunity is. Like, how do you actually operationalize this versus just what people probably already do, which is user research, data dives?

   3. BKBangaly Kaba31:47

      What I found is a couple things. One is when your team does not fully understand a problem space, the balance of work tends to be higher. Like, I think when I started at YouTube, we were doing 60% execution, 40% understand work. Right? And over time, as we understand more and more, the mix shifts. Now my teams are probably doing 80% execution, 20 to... Or 80 to 85%, 20 to 15% understand work. And so it's not just about writing a strategy, it's about saying, "Okay, if we have these themes of stuff that we wanna work on, what do we know with confidence because the data tells us? And what do we need to understand because we don't have the data or we don't have the research, we don't have the insights?" And really being honest with yourselves around, like, what are the things that are low to medium effort but high likelihood of being impactful because you have the data? And what are the things that you are interested in perhaps doing, but bec- because you're missing something, you're missing research or feedback from your users or data or some insights or strategy, you should actually say, "I'm going to go do this before I do something else." Right? Um, you know, an example of this is, you know, one of my teams, um, does... Ships paid virtual goods in the live experience on YouTube, and that's a really, really important and hard problem to this. And when I joined, we didn't really fully understand the whole live ecosystem, like how we lived in that live ecosystem. How our products worked, where the biggest opportunity was. So the first and most important piece of understand work was instead of shipping iterations to the current product, we needed to actually get the funnel of what was happening, right? Like, what's happening with how many people are watching live every day? How many people are clicking through? How many people are seeing our experience? How many people are actually buying it? We didn't really fully have the experience mapped out and to understand where were the gaps and where are the problem faces in? Or like where should we be focusing? And so, you know, we had to do that. And that was understand work from multiple people, for multiple teams. We had to do it on an engineering side. We needed data science as analysis. We needed a PM to go and dog through the experience and figure out what was broken. But like all of that was intentional and in affordance on our roadmaps.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky34:07

      What's interesting about this is that this is very counterintuitive to how people would probably approach, "Hey, we need to ex- speed up execution. We need to speed up growth. We need to ship more, more execute, go faster, do more." And what you're saying is you find the impact comes from s- actually slow down how much we're doing and spend more time understanding to execute more intelligently.

   5. BKBangaly Kaba34:31

      That's right. Slow down and speed up.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky34:33

      Fascinating. Because it's interesting, uh, I have, I have a bunch of questions that emerged out of folks that you've worked with and many of them are around how you turn a culture around, speed things up and drive growth in a really meaningful way. And it sounds like this is one of your, uh, key strategies, is get people to spend more time understanding before diving into a bunch of stuff.

   7. BKBangaly Kaba34:54

      It does sound counterintuitive, but if you actually think about it, what is a better outcome? Is it a better outcome to just ship more faster now, but most of the things are unimpactful, right? Or is it a better outcome to ship fewer things, but really work on making sure that you're shipping them in the best way and de-risking a lot of other things so that a year later your win rate's higher and your velocity's higher?

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky35:19

      Yeah, I think counterintuitive is the wrong word. It's m-... I think it, like, makes sense. I think it's just no one does this. Usually everyone's like, "Move faster. We need more... Ship more experiments."

   9. BKBangaly Kaba35:28

      Well, I mean, this is the... This is the irony of growth, is people think growth is over- overnight success.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky35:33

       Mm-hmm.

   11. BKBangaly Kaba35:33

       And it's not, right? It is a lot of short wins and short-term execution for a longer term gain and really understanding. You have a lot of short terms chores towards the longer term outcomes.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky35:48

       So that people can take away this lesson, can you help people understand just when you say understand work, like what does that look like generally? Is it just a dedicated time to dive into data and answer a bunch of questions you've sent them? Is it, uh, running experiments to test hypotheses? Like, what does that usually look like when you're, here, let's do 40% understand work?

   13. BKBangaly Kaba36:11

       The understand work sometimes comes from me, but most often comes from the teams themselves.

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky36:17

       Yeah.

   15. BKBangaly Kaba36:17

       And under- every function can do and should be doing understand work at some point. Right? And so it really depends on what the function is. So for an engineer, it could be s- looking at the code and saying, "Okay, we want to improve this. I need to do understand work to understand do we need to refactor this code and how scalable is it and what do we need to do to make sure that we can execute fast and make sure that we're not gonna have a lot of starting stops?"

   16. LRLenny Rachitsky36:43

       Mm-hmm.

   17. BKBangaly Kaba36:43

       That could be understand work. It could be actually instrumenting the data and making sure that we actually have full visibility into what's going on.... data science. Like, we work a lot with data science doing activation metrics and, like, understanding proxy metrics, right? Like, that's understand work but it... 'Cause it helps us to figure out what we need to build and, and where to focus. Um, you know, for product management, sometimes understand work is figuring out the partnership strategy ahead of, like, actually launching the product because you need to go figure out how the pieces are gonna come together, right? And so, it really just depends on what the function is. But when I say it should be coming from the bottoms up, what I mean is, I encourage the team when we plan a sprint or plan a roadmap to ask a question to, like, identify the key themes that they need to work on. And when they ask a question on a key theme, also ask, "What else do we need to understand to make this happen?" And to... In that planning session to make sure that you're including cross-functional partners. So it's not just product. It's not just product design and data science and eng. You also include go-to-market. You also include marketing. Because if you're not inclusive, then you don't really understand what the issues are.

10. 37:55 – 41:25

    Balancing understand work

    1. BKBangaly Kaba37:55

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky37:55

       My PM brain is, uh, afraid of, uh, creating too much understand work and nothing getting done.

    3. BKBangaly Kaba38:02

       That's right.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky38:02

       How do you find that balance of we're just sitting, we're gonna be understanding for hours and days and weeks and months, and not shipping much? How do you, how do you do something like that?

    5. BKBangaly Kaba38:10

       Um, well, I mean, I tell, I tell them, "You have to ship."

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky38:12

       (laughs)

    7. BKBangaly Kaba38:12

       I mean, you always have to ship, right? Like, it's, it's... Uh, sometimes I give them... Sometimes it's helpful, especially early on because it is a... It takes a while for people to get their head around why this is so critical. I say, you know, "We should choose..." Sometimes I would give them guidance. "We should choose three to four understand projects that are gonna really help us this, this roadmap, and figure out what they are," right? "So, choose your top three or four, and then let's talk about it," and I'll give them guidance. Or I would say, you know, "Figure out, um... There should always be some execution." So initially, you know, you're looking for low-effort, high-impact things to execute against, right? And so build a portfolio of work to do every sprint or every roadmap, some of which should be low effort/high impact, some of which should be medium effort/high impact. And sometimes understand work actually looks like doing a cheap test, doing a test that's gonna help us to learn as fast as possible that we think is, like, a good enough experience that can inform us, right? So identifying ways to do that. And so, it's really about just managing expectations and helping people be clear that, um, the goal is to ship a product, but you wanna ship the things that you have more confidence and understanding versus not.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky39:29

       So I think a big takeaway here is if you want to have more impact, move faster, try to spend a little more time understanding the problems you're going after and the opportunity space.

    9. BKBangaly Kaba39:40

       That's right. Right. Like, I'll give you like a very tactical example, is when I joined Instagram in January 2016, believe it or not, the, the onboarding, the, like the signup flow at Instagram had literally no logging to it. It had logging of how many people started and how many people ended, right? And I joined in January and it was like, we had to write a roadmap. And so the roadmap looked like this. Okay, we know this amount at the top of the funnel and this amount at the bottom of the funnel, and there was eight steps in the funnel, and we don't know what is going on, right? So the first bit of understand work was we needed to do, um, like the instrumentation of, like, that funnel as fast as possible to get the data to figure out where the drops were happening and what to fix. But w-... Because we knew of what was happening at the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel, we can go and play around with the experience and see what was broken. So we ran a bunch of tests of stuff that was obviously broken to see what would, what would improve, right? Um, and so it was like a mix. And so what we did was we set up time where we did the beginning of like first couple weeks, add the logging, ship it to code, reevaluate in the middle of the quarter, look at the full funnel, and then add more things that we can do later on once we got that. But like in order to get that done, that involved understand work with growth marketing to figure out what was the schemas for the instrumentation, right? The engineering to actually do that logging, right? Data science to like pull together funnels and put dashboarding. All of that had to come together all at one pl- at one time.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky41:07

        I really like just this concept of calling it understand work. I think that alone is a powerful tool, is we're gonna spend more time on understand work.

    11. BKBangaly Kaba41:14

        Gives people... It feels like it gives meaning to stuff that otherwise people would brush aside.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky41:18

        Right. Where it's just like, "No, no. Wait, let's just ship stuff. Let's just try stuff. Let's just test this step. W- we'll see what happens."

11. 41:25 – 45:26

    Managing complex change

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky41:25

    2. BKBangaly Kaba41:25

       That's right.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky41:26

       Is there anything else you have seen and often do to help a team you join move faster and grow bigger? Uh, and I've heard that you've had a lot of impact on a lot of different cultures, so I'm curious if there's anything else that has really affected (...)

    4. BKBangaly Kaba41:42

       I've found myself in a, a bunch of interesting situations where I had to come in and help improve cultures or change cultures around teams. I found this framework, I don't even actually remember where I got it from, but like it travels from computer to computer with me and team to team. And it's, uh, you know, called Managing Complex Change. I actually think I got it from like business school or something. And it's really interesting. It's got like these five components to it. Um, you know, there's vision, skills, incentives, resources, action plan. And you need all of those to have change, right? Like you need... The team needs to have vision. They need to have the skills. They need to have the right incentives. Sometimes some teams are incentivized to do some things versus others. You need to have the right resources in the right places, and you need to have a clear action plan. And what I love about this framework is, is if you can visualize it and maybe you can share it with your, um, podcast.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky42:34

       Yeah, we'll put it up on the screen on YouTube so folks can see what you're talking about.

    6. BKBangaly Kaba42:37

       Okay. Yeah. It's, it... Basically, what it does is it shows where if you're missing any one component, you get different outcomes, right? So if you're missing the vision component, you end up in a state of confusion. Or if you're missing the incentives, you end up in a state of resistance because people aren't incentivized to do the right thing.... or if you're missing an action plan, you end up in a state of false starts. So I use this, and I think about this a lot actually, because I... You know, when you come in as a leader or as, uh, someone who's supposed to influence change, you have to really observe what's happening, and figure out w- what are the challenges, w- what... Like, anecdotally, and what are you observing? And then I figure out, like, where I can plug in and what I can do to make the teams better. And what I tend to find is, you know, moving from the right side to the left side of this, like, action plans are easier to institute. Right? So, you know, if I see a team that's, like, struggling to execute, I wonder, do they have the right type of PRD framework? Are they communicating well? Do they have the right type of team meeting structures? Right? Those are, like, kind of lower hanging fruit. It's a lot harder to change vision and skills. It will come in time. But what I also have done over the course of my career is I've built this, like, um, s- this deck, uh, that comes with me of, like, different... Like, how do... The different skills that matter, right? Like, what are different skills? What are different frameworks? How do we think about it to help up-level teams fast, right? Because I find that sometimes you walk in and not everyone is grounded in the same mental models or concepts. Um, you know, one example of this, um, I talk about a lot is, you know, at Instagram... Instagram had a j- just fantastic culture of thinking about how do we ship high, high quality products, right? And what does product craft mean? And so that is something that, you know, I came when I came to YouTube, and my teams particularly, they didn't have a mental model for product craft. So I found myself talking into an echo chamber in some ways, so I had to build a deck that, like, showed, okay, here's how I think about product craft, here's a framework for it, here's how I think about, like, all of these different things. And so now we have a shared language, shared communication for... And, and a, and a repository of skills that we're gonna build.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky44:47

       So I'm looking at this image that, uh, we'll have up. So in this case, their skills weren't necessarily there, which in this framework leads to anxiety. And so what I'm hearing essentially, you come into a team, you're like, "What am I feeling? Is it confusion, frustration, the wrong thing?" And that kind of tells you which of these buckets to spend time on.

    8. BKBangaly Kaba45:05

       That's right. And then within those buckets, you've got to figure out what are the right levers that you need to pull? What are the things that are missing? How do you really focus and, like, where do you kind of, like, spend your time?

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky45:16

       So interesting. I love that you, uh... This image is just, like, this very grainy-

    10. BKBangaly Kaba45:21

        So old.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky45:21

        ... screenshot from some old McKinsey deck or something.

    12. BKBangaly Kaba45:24

        Yeah. It's, like, from, like, 2006 PC

12. 45:26 – 51:35

    Effective management of product managers

    1. BKBangaly Kaba45:26

       or something.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky45:26

       I love it. So you have this thing, you have this deck, you just come in with all these tools in your tool belt. Is there anything else in that list of things that you bring with you to help change culture and help teams-

    3. BKBangaly Kaba45:37

       Yeah.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky45:38

       ... dr- drive more, be better.

    5. BKBangaly Kaba45:38

       Um, I think, you know, one thing I think about a bunch is... You know, I come from... My background's a little bit different, um, than a traditional tech executive. Uh, there was actually three phases to my career. I was in education for six years, taught in inner city DC, um, and then was a dean of a boarding school in Switzerland, which is, like, a little bit of a plot twist.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky45:57

       Oh, wow.

    7. BKBangaly Kaba45:58

       Yeah. I went to business school and then I worked on Wall Street for a bit, and then I left my job on Wall Street, quit, and started a startup. Startup was a glorious failure, as many startups are, but, you know, it was like a very non-traditional path towards tech. And, you know, I think a lot of my time in these other industries actually shapes the way I think about products and product management, and actually changing teams and, like, building teams. And what I mean by that is, like, you know, um, you know... I think there's a lot of similarities between education and product management, believe it or not. You know, when I was interviewing for my first set of jobs in tech, recruiters would say to me, "How does your background relate? Like, I don't really see it." And I would tell them, "You know, when I was in education, I would walk into a classroom of 24 seven-year-olds and these kids owed me nothing. And I needed... The only way I could be successful or impactful is I needed to be able to be a strong communicator, I needed to be able to have a clear vision of what was going on, I needed to be able to influence them in a believable way such that they would get on board with what needed to be done for 270 days of the year." It's like, you know, when you walk into a room as a product manager, PE- engineers, designers, researchers, go-to-market, nobody owes you anything. And the only thing that you're gonna do in order to be successful is you need to be a strong communicator, you have to have a clear vision of what's going on, and you need to be able to influence them to do the things together of what- what matters, right? It's very similar skill set, just different domain expertise. And so because of that, right, like, I, you know, I've really adopted a mindset of, like, how do I coach my teams? How do I enable them? Because it's really about the sum of the parts, versus me being a top-down leader saying, "You have to do this and you have to do that." And so I think a lot about that in both approach and, um, you know, and the processes that we create. And, you know, to give you a couple classic, uh, typical examples of this, um, there's two things I want to call out. One is, you know, there's this... actually this education, uh, framework, it's called Bloom's Taxonomy. It's... I think it's changed over time, but when I learned it was basically a pyramid. And the pyramid was... And Bloom's Taxonomy describes what's the different levels or order of critical thinking you need in order to be a master of something. And at the bottom of the pyramid was, was knowledge, and then it's comprehension, and then application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Right? And so going up the pyramid means it's higher order thinking. And I think about that a lot in trying to understand where, where are my teams struggling? Do they have the core knowledge that they need? Do they understand it, but they can't apply it? Are they applying it, but they're not able to, to analyze it across different business segments, right? And you can use this framework not only with the ICPMs and the teams themselves, but also for your managers. Like, what- what is breaking down? And then using that and attaching that to, like, the skills that we want to build to figure out how do you fill in those gaps, right? And it really is a grounding for me, a, a grounding mental model.... for how do you build teams that are actually effective and how you meet people where they are, as opposed to just saying, "Hey, you need to figure this out." Right? I find that too often in tech and also in product, people ask, you know, to figure things out, but not given the support to get there. And there's no way to really like, um, to really, uh, connect the dots for them.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky49:21

       Amazing. I am pulling up the Bloom, Bloom's Taxonomy. So essentially, if you see a PM struggling, what you try to do is figure out which of these things do they not have. How are you not supporting them? How can you support them better? So it could be-

    9. BKBangaly Kaba49:34

       That's right.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky49:34

        ... they don't have the skills, they don't have the understanding. What are some of the other things that often you find that maybe hinder a product manager's success?

    11. BKBangaly Kaba49:42

        A lot of times it's they might have the understanding, but they haven't had a chance to apply it to a variety of different scenarios, or haven't seen it applied to multiple scenarios, right? So oftentimes, you might understand a concept like machine learning, but you haven't actually worked on it in multiple, against multiple scenarios. So you maybe have one way of doing it that doesn't make sense, and you need to like, you know, have two or three. And you don't even know that two or three ways of doing it exists, right? Like that is like often a common failure point, right? Or it's maybe you know how to apply it, but you can't synthesize why this thing that you're doing actually matters for the business context, right? Like oftentimes, that becomes like a challenge with managers. It's like they know what to do, but they don't understand how to tie it back to the business context and the overall strategy needs, and so where to prioritize, right? And so what you, what I find is that like, you know, when you're trying to manage managers, you're really trying to live at the top of the pyramid. You are responsible or manager is responsible for basically owning that pyramid for all of the areas that they operate, but they need to be able to live at the top of the pyramid across all of them. They need to be able to synthesize and evaluate what's happening for each product team that they own in order to kind of make the bigger picture connections.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky50:56

        By the way, I loved your metaphor of product managers are like this group of seven-year-olds where you have to learn how to manage, uh, influence-

    13. BKBangaly Kaba51:03

        Yeah.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky51:04

        ... communicate. That's great.

    15. BKBangaly Kaba51:04

        Yeah, I mean it is the, not like a group of seven-year-olds, but-

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky51:07

        It's a skill.

    17. BKBangaly Kaba51:07

        ... I think it's actually it's-

    18. LRLenny Rachitsky51:08

        Yeah, the same skills.

    19. BKBangaly Kaba51:09

        Huh?

    20. LRLenny Rachitsky51:09

        The same skills that you-

    21. BKBangaly Kaba51:10

        Same skills.

    22. LRLenny Rachitsky51:11

        Yeah.

    23. BKBangaly Kaba51:11

        I mean, I, I think it's true. Like, I found it actually significantly harder for me to get 24 seven-year-olds to believe in what I was doing than to walk into a room with Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and explain to them what's the strategy for growing the next 100 million users on, on Instagram. Like, these are very logical adults who, you know, can reason with you. And like, you got a classroom of kids that's not quite the same. So, um, you know, those skills are

13. 51:35 – 54:52

    The role of product managers as coaches and team leaders

    1. BKBangaly Kaba51:35

       really critical.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky51:36

       I love that. I, I definitely want to ask about your Instagram days. Is there anything else in this bucket of wisdom of, uh, you kind of talked about things you've learned about how to manage product managers and managers of managers. Is there anything else there that might be helpful to folks that you've learned?

    3. BKBangaly Kaba51:50

       One thing that I also think about a lot, and I don't know if this is just a me thing, but like I think about PM as a team sport, right? It's leading product teams is really about being the coach and helping other people to like kind of see what their role is on the team and to maximize them. People talk a lot about product as a, you know, you're the CEO, and I don't actually fully believe that analogy. You know, if you think about it as a team sport, there's a few things that kind of shake out. One is not everyone's gonna be a star player, but not everyone needs to be a LeBron James or Kobe Bryant, right? You need, you need role players. You need really strong role players. You need people who feel valued in their role, and you need to understand how to groom those role players and how to make sure that they have the right seat at the table in the right place, right? And so I think it's, yes, you're the conductor of the orchestra, but you're really more than that. You're really like kind of the coach of the team. Another thing I think about a lot is, you know, I have a good friend who's a, a college basketball coach, and he taught me about kind of this idea of your coaching tree. Um, and this is a really important concept, especially in college basketball. It's like, you, as a head coach, you take a lot of pride in who were your assistants. Who was your first assistant, and second assistant, and third assistant? And where do they go on to be head coaches, and what legacy do they have because you were able to instill a bit in them, right? And so the coaching tree of a Mike Krzyzewski, the coaching tree of a John Calipari, these are like esteemed coaches not because of what... Not only because of what they've done, but because of the tree that they've built, right? And I like to think about this as well, 'cause I think it's really important for product leaders to think about what is their, like, leadership tree. Like who have you helped to build up and helped to grow and helped to get to their next role, right? And so I think about this a lot. You know, I have people who I've worked with who are running growth at Stripe or the CPO at Chief or now running stories at Instagram that were on my team in the earlier days. And, and, you know, their success is my success, and I'm proud for them, right? And I'm happy for them, and I think it kind of like, it reinforces this mentality that it's your responsibility to coach people up to greatness.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky54:04

       So what I'm hearing is you've, uh, put a lot of value in your team on them coaching folks, whether they're managers or even ICs, is helping them understand that it's important to coach folks on their team and, uh, help them develop, that it's part of your job essentially.

    5. BKBangaly Kaba54:21

       That's part of your job. I mean, you're trying to build a repository of skills and a repository of like knowledge and of team velocity, and the only way you can do that is everyone is like... So rising tide has to lift all boats.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky54:33

       Amazing, and interestingly, that probably teaches you how to do your job better because you're... In teaching, you actually learn things a lot better.

    7. BKBangaly Kaba54:40

       That's right. That's right. And it forces you to like figure out how can you get things off of your plate so that you can go work on bigger things.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky54:46

       Yeah, and how good does it feel when folks that you used to manage go on to do bigger and better things?

    9. BKBangaly Kaba54:51

       That's right. It's great.

14. 54:52 – 1:03:14

    Driving growth through flywheels and value proposition

    1. BKBangaly Kaba54:52

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky54:52

       I want to talk a little bit about growth, uh, within YouTube. I heard that... You, you haven't been there for that long, and apparently you've already 2X-ed or 3x-ed or more some- some- something important within YouTube. I don't know exactly the details, and people are very impressed with the impact you've already had. And apparently a lot of the success there, and other places, is how you think about growth through flywheels. You always look for the flywheel that helps drive growth. Can you just talk about either at YouTube, ideally YouTube, whatever you can share, 'cause that's pretty impressive, especially for a company of that scale that you're making so much impact, or other places, just how you think about flywheels and growth?

    3. BKBangaly Kaba55:29

       Um, well it's very generous of you. I would say, like we've done some really good work, some good work so far at YouTube. And it's been, you know, a journey. I think... I, I do, I do think a lot about flywheels. I think it's actually a lot of growth is really understanding what is the value prop at all of the different points of the experience, especially if you have a multi-sided marketplace, right? Like a multi-sided marketplace for YouTube is like, you know, the creator, and what the creator is like trying to achieve both from a engagement perspective, but also for me, from a monetization perspective. And then for the viewer or the purchaser, like, you know, where is their head at. Like what are they trying to do, and where are they missing the opportunity? I can't really go into specifics a bunch with YouTube, but, uh, what I would say is this, is that like, you know, one thing that I always do when I come in is I try to push my teams to really dog food products in their adjacent user state, if you will. Right? Um, and what I mean by that is, often a product that you and I use, that we've been using for years, isn't actually the product that we're building for, for other people. Like a power user who's using a product has so m- there's so much history and so much informed knowledge on how that product, on, for that product to actually create a great experience for you, that if you were go and create a new Gmail account and look at YouTube today, I guarantee you it's a completely different and significantly worse experience.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky57:02

       Mm-hmm.

    5. BKBangaly Kaba57:02

       Right? And there's a lot of obvious opportunities missed, especially with what is the flywheel and why things are working or not working, if you don't actually go and use things in a new state. Right? And an example of this when we talk about YouTube is, a lot of the YouTube graph for searching stuff is based on, what have you watched in the past? So if you go and search and use search history, it's going to be about like, well, what have you watched in the past or what have you searched for, and what can we show you that's gonna be what we can better predict? But if you don't have a lot of search history, then they're not gonna do as good of a job. So that's not exact- uh, direct translation for what we were doing, but for me, I work on creator monetization and there are really important flywheels around like, what does it take for a creator to make content that can help them to monetize? How do we get that content to people and where and to what extent are we getting that content to people? And how do we make sure that people feel good about what they're receiving, the people who are paying? Right? And all of those flywheels have to work. And so part of what I've been able to do is really think about like how do we connect the dots in a story that the teams can uniquely understand, can help them to lean in even more, and have clarity and purpose of work. Right? Sometimes what's super important about the flywheels actually is enabling for your teams to know what to work on and what not to work on. Right? And then it also helps us to understand what do we know and what do we not know about creators and viewers and monetization operations, so that we can do the understand work to improve the velocity and to prove the impact. And that's really where we've been focused. And so we did, I did a lot of this at YouTube, but, you know, also did this at Instacart really thinking about when I joined Instacart one of the big questions I had was like, h- how will people in their daily lives, how is their daily life actually reflected in the purchase experience? Are we making it easy for them? 'Cause, you know, when you buy groceries you're not going to groce- going grocery shopping because you want beautiful ingredients in your fridge. You're going grocery shopping because you actually have a meal to put together. Right? So like are we actually reflecting the real job to be done, which is I'm want to buy tacos. I want to make taco Tuesday. Right? Like can we make it easier for people to find the ingredients for tacos, right, as opposed to having them sort for tortillas and tomatoes and avocado. Right? And so it's really thinking about what is the job and then what is the flywheel to make that happen, and how do we make this come to life?

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky59:25

       There's so many things that I want to follow up on here. First of all, I realized that all of the things you worked on I am a daily active user of, or weekly active user. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Instacart about weekly active user. I think that might be... Yeah. Wow. Nice job. You got me, got me in the flywheels of all your flywheels. (laughs)

    7. BKBangaly Kaba59:44

       That was not intentional but I'm glad my, my efforts had improved your life just a little bit.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky59:48

       Nice work.

    9. BKBangaly Kaba59:49

       Ideally.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky59:49

        Okay. So, so a couple takeaways here. One is you think about the value prop at every interaction of both sides if it's a multi-sided marketplace or if it's just, just like why would I be doing this? So it's like why would I send an invite to my friend? Why would I share this photo? Why would I open up Instacart? And then you think about the jobs to be done during the day of s- of a potential user and how can we flow into that, versus like not, not connect to their actual day-to-day experience.

    11. BKBangaly Kaba1:00:17

        And is the product actually working? Like as I'm doing this I'm looking and saying like, "Is the product actually set up to deliver these things?" Like do we, do we actually see it work or not? I think there's a lot of assumptions that the product works, but a lot of times teams will surprisingly build the pieces of a flow, but not actually build the experience, the output. Like they don't design it in a way where you're getting the real output that you need.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:39

        That's such a easy to miss point you're making here, which is you just think about, hey, I may, I have taco Tuesday. I'm actually, as a product manager on Instacart, I'm gonna open up the app and use it in this use case and see how it goes.

    13. BKBangaly Kaba1:00:51

        That's right.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:52

        And most people don't do that, is what you've realized. (laughs)

    15. BKBangaly Kaba1:00:54

        Most people don't do that. Right? Another example of this, right, like at In- this was, you know, years ago, but at Instacart, Instacart made it really hard to reorder stuff. Super hard to reorder. And it's, it was shocking to me because when I thought about it, when I go to the grocery store, 90% of the time I'm getting the same stuff.... right? It's like, you know, maybe not every trip, but over the course of a month or two, you've got a list of things that are part of your staple. And then occasionally, you know, like holiday time, I want some peppermint bark chocolate or something, you know (laughs) , but like it's not, like it's, like there's like random snacks you're gonna throw in, but like there's... And so when we looked at the data, it turns out, like after five times when you go to Instacart, 90% of the order is the same, right? But like, when you wanted to reorder, at least back then, you couldn't go and reorder easily. You had to dig and find, it was like seven or s- eight clicks. And when you did reorder, you had to reorder the whole thing. You couldn't take pieces. You couldn't take, "I wanna take the milk and the blueberries," right? And so, you know, you think about growth, right? You think about what does it mean to grow in Instacart? What does it mean to, like, actually drive better retention? Well, it's actually really important to give, make it p- easy for people to make the next order, right? And so like, like the product wasn't really built for that, though people had the best intentions in mind.

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:10

        The adjacent order.

    17. BKBangaly Kaba1:02:12

        Yeah, exactly.

    18. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:13

        Uh, I imagine that was maybe one of the biggest growth wins in his- Instacart history is just the reorder the same thing, 'cause I do that all the time.

    19. BKBangaly Kaba1:02:20

        Yeah, you would be surprised.

    20. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:22

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15. 1:03:14 – 1:08:41

    Understanding adjacent users

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:14

       You mentioned this concept of adjacent user kind of adjacently, but I think it's worth spending a little more time here. It's like this term you popularized, and you explained it somewhat, but it... Maybe explain a little bit more, 'cause I think it's really powerful for people in how you think about growth.

    2. BKBangaly Kaba1:03:28

       It was, yeah, this was something that came out of actually my time at Instagram. Um, it was a kind of a framework that we came up with, because Instagram really was at that time, you know, we grew so fast that the people who were using Instagram in February were completely different than people who were using it the following October and then the next January. Um, you know, I think when I joined, we were at like 445 million monthly actives, January 2016. At the end of that year, we were at 636 million, like 47% that year. And so, you know, when we talked to users first half of 2016, you know, when we talked to women in the US in their 30s, they're like, "Why would I have an Instagram? I have a Facebook account." Literally people said that, right? Like it was that long ago, right? And then like a year later it's like, "Of course, I use Instagram." Like, "Instagram is, is my everything," right? And it... The world changed so fast. And so when you're in a hypergrowth product, it's really, really important to understand who your users are today and, you know, the persona of the user, what motivates them, why they're using it, but then also to understand who is the next user, who is the user who could be using this product but for some reason it doesn't work for them, right? And understanding who that adjacent user is and when you're actually starting to see that adjacent user adopt the product. And one of the ways you start to see the adjacent user- users starting to adopt the product, especially with the data, is you start seeing cohort- cohort curves decline, right? You start seeing the people who sign up today, s- three or six months from now, they're signing up and they're doing worse job. Nothing's changing in the product, but just the understanding of how the product should work is different. They might be less tech-savvy, right? On a scale of like an early adopter versus like late majority, they might be closer to the late majority. And so we saw this at Instagram, right? Like, we would always be working on our registration flow, and at one point we were converting at some insanely high percent, and then three months later, it would go down by 15%, right? Not because anything was broken, but just because we'd broken into new markets. You bring in on people in India or you're bringing on people in the Philippines. And their understanding of how it works, the phone they use, et cetera, are all different. So really the core of the adjacent user was a few things. One is like, you know, you have to understand who's using your product today and why, and when you're growing at some really strong pace, 30, 40, 50% or more per year, you've got to be on top of h- who, who is your next, who do you believe the next user is and why. And then you also have to be the adjacent user, actually use the product like them and see how it's working, what's broken with it, right? And so at an Instacart, the adjacent user... The original user might have been like, uh, you know, an office admin who is gonna buy this thing every week because of during happy hours and team staff, but then the next adjacent user might have been the mom of three or four, or the dad of three or four who's home with the kids, and they are, you know, they need to depend on Instacart, right? Versus, you know, like later on, it might be they're a single person in New York who, like, does this out of convenience, right? But like, what they're optimizing for, how they use the product all changes, and the functionality and the abilities are fundamentally different. So you have to be them, you have to watch how they use the product, you have to talk to them, and you have to visit them and l- literally see what they're doing in real time in order to make sure that you're enabling the right jobs for them.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:57

       I love just this ide- the visualization of the adjacent user. Basically, your growth is gonna come from not existing users, it's the users right outside that circle of-

    4. BKBangaly Kaba1:07:05

       That's right.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:05

       ... who your users are today. And you need to think about what do they need that existing users maybe don't need. You said that this is most powerful for hypergrowth companies. Is this something you think people, like all companies should be thinking about, or is it a lot less important if you're not a hypergrowth...... business.

    6. BKBangaly Kaba1:07:21

       So it's a great question. I think it's essential. It's mandatory for hyper growth. I think it's very helpful if you have a product or company that is not growing what it, what you want it to be, um, and so you're focused on capturing more share of wallet instead of expanding your audience, right? And so sometimes you can imagine like a cosmetics company, for example, right, that's like digitally enabled. You can imagine that like they've hit a ceiling in terms of like the growth of their users, and they're really just trying to get people to buy more products, but maybe they're missing... Like, the people who want to use that product are missing something from your current product, right? Maybe you're missing different skin tone shades, right? Or maybe you're missing certain types of tools, right? So really talking through who is just outside of your current user base, w- who's coming to your product and looking around and not buying and understanding what are their needs and figuring out how do you enable for them? How do you build the right experience for them in order to become adopters of your product?

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:21

       So what I'm hearing is spend some understand work to figure out who your potential new users are-

    8. BKBangaly Kaba1:08:25

       That's right.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:25

       ... and then use the product as them and see what is missing. Uh, I imagine user research goes into this. You're not like actually gonna understand necessarily all the things they need, so it's probably find folks in that cohort and see how they use the product. Awesome.

16. 1:08:41 – 1:16:08

    The role of partnerships and SEO in Instagram’s early growth

    1. BKBangaly Kaba1:08:41

       Yeah.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:41

       The question I had on my mind as you were talking, you've come into so many companies and helped them with growth. Where do you find most of the opportunities often lie? Is it like onboarding, activation? Is there, is there a trend like that? You're like here's probably there's gonna be opportunity here, or is it super mixed bag?

    3. BKBangaly Kaba1:08:58

       Usually, it's somewhere in the onboarding, so like habit building experience, right? Like what does it take for someone to actually f- understand the value, that first moment, that first aha moment in the product. And a lot of teams, it's shocking how many teams don't really understand what that moment is for them. And then also how do you get them to build a habit around a product? Oftentimes, a lot of people equate growth to top of funnel, and that is also critical. I think having the right top of funnel motion is really critical and then building on that. So I think there's... One part of it's like once you have the right top of funnel motion to get people to come in, how do you help them make sure that they're finding value and they're building habit and they're retaining? Because that's the thing that helps you to compound over time, right? Like, if you're bringing in a lot of people but they're not staying around, then you just have a leaky bucket and like it doesn't matter how big your top funnel is. So making sure that that first month, two-month, three-month experience is great, and then the other part is really figuring out how do you build compounding growth loops where it's not just one way of acquiring people, but you're building two and three and four ways that le- that layer onto each other that help you to really supercharge your, your engine of like acquiring people. So at Instagram, if you kind of look at where Instagram is and what (...) and grew, there's a lot that goes into it. But if you actually unpack the top of funnel for what worked at Instagram, there's certainly a component of it, which was our core component, which was invitations, where like people inviting you and making sure that those invitations work and they work well and that people's, um, their friends are coming on. You get notified. But, you know, another part that goes unspoken, still critical to this day, was like the celebrity partnerships was critical, right? Because basically, you know, they had this wonderful partnerships team that basically took Instagram and taught celebrities how to use it, how to make it work for them, how to tell their own story and be their own brand. And that was a critical growth funnel because, with that, you had the ability for them to just create... These celebrities and celebrity creators, to set the norm for how the platform gets used. They also were getting picked up by the news and the media, right? For, you know, all the stuff that was happening in the celebrity world, which then added on to this other growth level which had... Which was SEO, right? And so every time a news article came out, they would link to the creator's like or the celebrity's Instagram account or that particular post, right? And so you have this whole SEO engine that worked, and the SEO engine was because you have both web, which we launched at Instagram, which created the canonical kind of like SEO tables, and then you had the, you know, all of these inbound links from these celebrity sites and, um, and news media. But then what you also had is you had embeds for Instagram in all of these different sites, right? Like a news article, whatever, would post, you know, Lenny's podcast Instagram account, and those embeds help with SEO juice. And so you have not just the invites, but now you have the celebrities. Now you have the, you know, the SEO component, and then we would do a bunch of paid media on top of that, um, using a lot of those signals, and so we would have... And then we have our own content, um, and so you would have all of these different kind of growth engines compounding each other. So every time the invitations got better, every time we got more celebrities on top, every time the SEO gets better, it's like magnifying the top of the funnel, and at the bottom of the funnel like or in mid-funnel, we're making sure that people are retaining and getting value and staying around over the long term.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:12:47

       That is so interesting. I had no idea this was such a core part of the early growth strategy. Everyone's always talking about morality and word of mouth, all these things, and you're saying partnerships was a key part of the early growth strategy.

Episode duration: 1:42:04