Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG)
Lenny Rachitsky (host), Ami Vora (guest), Narrator, Narrator
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, featuring Lenny Rachitsky and Ami Vora, Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) explores ami Vora on curiosity, metaphors, and execution-driven product leadership Chief Product Officer of Faire, Ami Vora, reflects on her path from temp at Facebook to leading products at Facebook Ads, WhatsApp, and now Faire, emphasizing authenticity, curiosity, and learning by doing.
Ami Vora on curiosity, metaphors, and execution-driven product leadership
Chief Product Officer of Faire, Ami Vora, reflects on her path from temp at Facebook to leading products at Facebook Ads, WhatsApp, and now Faire, emphasizing authenticity, curiosity, and learning by doing.
She explains how subordinating ego, assuming others know something you don’t, and using genuine curiosity (“Fascinating, tell me more…”) transforms disagreement into collaboration and better outcomes.
Ami details practical approaches to product reviews, strategy vs. execution, goal-setting, and org design, stressing narrative, metaphors, and principles as tools for scaling decision-making.
She also discusses the realities of being a woman leader in tech, managing conflicting feedback, growing without shrinking yourself, and the importance of staying close to customers as companies scale.
Key Takeaways
Subordinate your ego to the outcome and lead with curiosity.
Ami shifted from needing to be right to prioritizing the best outcome, assuming others know something she doesn’t and asking, with genuine interest, why they think differently—turning conflict into a chance to learn and get to better decisions together.
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Use the “dinosaur brain” model: you own the recommendation; your manager owns context.
Executives can only hold a few facts in their heads; your job is not to dump information but to synthesize it into a clear, opinionated recommendation while they contribute broader context, patterns, and cross-company constraints.
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Design product reviews to teach principles, not just make decisions.
Instead of treating reviews as approval gates for every choice, bring one focused decision and aim to leave with shared principles, trade-offs, and risk appetite so future decisions can be made autonomously and coherently by the team.
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Anchor strategy and product direction in metaphors that capture how users should feel.
By asking when users have felt the desired feeling before (e. ...
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Execution beats perfect strategy—especially when you need to learn.
Perfect strategy with weak execution never reaches customers and yields no learnings; “good-enough” strategy with strong execution lets you discover what’s wrong with the strategy, iterate fast, and eventually converge on both great strategy and outcomes.
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Decompose company metrics and avoid ‘toddler soccer’ goal-setting.
If every team chases the same top-line metric (like GMV), they pile onto the same surface and trip over each other; instead, break business outcomes into complementary input metrics per team (e. ...
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Grow by adding tools and lenses, not by shrinking yourself.
Ami warns against responding to feedback—especially gendered, style-focused feedback—by becoming smaller or less yourself; instead, build more ‘keys’ (communication styles, approaches, behaviors) so you can work effectively with more kinds of people while keeping your core intact.
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Notable Quotes
“I think the hard part is sublimating your ego a little bit and saying it's more important to get to the outcome than to be right.”
— Ami Vora
“Working with Ami, she could have the most profound disagreement in the world and she would respond, ‘Fascinating, you have to tell me more why you think that.’”
— Boz (as quoted by Lenny Rachitsky)
“My manager owns context. I own the recommendation.”
— Ami Vora
“Execution eats strategy for breakfast… customers don't care about your five-year plan. They care about the product that's in their hands.”
— Ami Vora
“As you get more senior, the only problems you'll see are ones that are fundamentally unsolvable… all you can do is choose which branch of suboptimal you're going to put your name on.”
— Ami Vora
Questions Answered in This Episode
How can I practice responding with genuine curiosity—rather than defensiveness—when I strongly disagree with someone at work?
Chief Product Officer of Faire, Ami Vora, reflects on her path from temp at Facebook to leading products at Facebook Ads, WhatsApp, and now Faire, emphasizing authenticity, curiosity, and learning by doing.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What metaphor or emotional analogy could best guide my current product so the whole team intuitively builds in the same direction?
She explains how subordinating ego, assuming others know something you don’t, and using genuine curiosity (“Fascinating, tell me more…”) transforms disagreement into collaboration and better outcomes.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
In my org, are product reviews being used mainly as approval checkpoints, and how could we redesign them to spread principles and decision-making capacity?
Ami details practical approaches to product reviews, strategy vs. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Where have we created ‘toddler soccer’ with our goals, and how might we decompose our top-line metrics into complementary, customer-centric targets for each team?
She also discusses the realities of being a woman leader in tech, managing conflicting feedback, growing without shrinking yourself, and the importance of staying close to customers as companies scale.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
If I’m getting conflicting or personal feedback (especially about style), how do I decide what to internalize, what to ignore, and what new ‘tools’ to add without shrinking myself?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
Boz, the CTO of Meta, said something about you. Working with Ami, she could have the most profound disagreement in the world and she would respond, "Fascinating, you have to tell me more of why you think that."
I really enjoy being right. And then it turns out, in the working world, that did not serve me so great. I think the hard part is sublimating your ego a little bit and saying it's more important to get to the outcome than to be right.
I love this very tactical piece of advice. When you're trying to come up with a metaphor or analogy, think about what you want your users to feel when you're using the product.
If we all agree that the feeling of something should be, I'm sitting in Dolores Park with my friends on a sunny Saturday, then people will just naturally build something that feels more consistent.
There's also this metaphor about the hill climb.
For me, the hill climb is all about the difference between a local optimum and a global optimum. You're standing on top of the hill, you're looking down and you can see rolling hills, the sheep, the grass, whatever. But then way off in the distance you can see, like, a mountain and the thing that gets me through the valley is remembering what the summit feels like.
Today my guest is Ami Vora. Ami is chief product officer at Faire, which connects independent retailers and brands around the world, and I believe is the most successful and biggest B2B marketplace startup out there. Prior to Faire, Ami was employee 150 at Facebook, where she launched the first Facebook developer platform and was later head of product for the 55 billion dollar global Facebook ads business. She also oversaw the introduction of ads on the Instagram platform, and most recently she led product and design for the largest messaging app in the world, WhatsApp. In our conversation, we cover a lot of ground, including building your strategy skills, how to disagree with people skillfully, being a successful woman in tech, using metaphors and imagery to rally your team and get your point across, setting up effective goals, plus a bunch of jokes in the lightning round that you don't want to miss. This was a really special and authentic conversation that I'm very excited to bring to you. With that, I bring you Ami Vora. Ami, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
Oh thank you. I'm so happy to be here.
So, when I asked you about your goal for our conversation today, you said the most amazing thing, which I love. You said that your goal is to be as authentic as possible and to show that people can be pretty messy and imperfect at times, yet still be very successful. I love that so much. Let's definitely try to do this. Is there anything else you want to add on that?
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