Building a long and meaningful career | Nikhyl Singhal (Meta, Google)

When I was a kid and I was growing up in the Midwest, entertainment was, like, going to the dog tracks. The way that they motivated the dogs was they had these, like, fake rabbits. These tails would go around faster than the dogs, which would then motivate the dogs to go around in circles. And what was interesting is the moment that the dogs, if they accidentally touched the rabbit, they would never run again. Because there was, like, "Well, what's next? I've achieved what I was looking for." And so, I think this happens a ton, is like your listeners are spending time focused on like, "Well, one day I will be X. I will be that vice president. I will have more money. I will have built something. I will have started a company." But they don't think about what happens next. What's the second thing? What's your career next look like? How do you ensure that you are always going to have something important and motivating to do with your career? Otherwise, you'll keep working because you have no any- nothing else to do but you'll be sadder. Or you'll find ways to create war when peace is needed.

(instrumental music) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Nikhyl Singhal. Nikhyl has worked on and led large teams on four different influential consumer products, including Facebook, Credit Karma, Google Hangouts, and Google Photos. Currently he leads product teams for the Facebook app at Meta, overseeing groups, stories, messaging, and the feed. Before that he served as chief product officer at Credit Karma and held various leadership roles at Google. Nikhyl has also co-founded three different startups, and as you'll hear in this episode, is extremely passionate about coaching and mentoring, sharing his knowledge through his newsletter and podcast called The Skip. In our conversation, we cover all aspects of the PM career and what it takes to be successful at every stage of the journey, including the dangers of thinking too short term, the importance of avoiding what he calls ex-growth companies, why you're probably not getting promoted, what to focus on if you're a new manager, the rise of the senior IC path. Also, why top leaders often have huge development areas they don't know about and how to catch them, and also why people who make it to the top often run into serious mental health challenges. As I say at the end of this episode, this might be my new favorite episode, and I'm really excited to bring it to you. With that, I bring you Nikhyl Singhal after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Superhuman. How much time do you spend in email each day? How about your team? You may not realize this, but your email tools are wasting your time. Superhuman is blazingly fast email for high performing teams. Built to work with Gmail and Outlook, teams who use Superhuman spend half the time in their inboxes, respond to twice the number of emails, and save over four hours a week. That's over a month of saved time per year. With Superhuman, you can split your inbox into streams for VIPs, team members, and emails from your favorite products to reduce context switching and make sure you never miss an important email. You can set reminders if you don't hear back, so that you can follow up and never drop the ball on an email thread. You can also work faster than ever before with powerful AI features like writing, editing, summarizing, and even translating. Join the ranks of the most productive teams and unleash the power of Superhuman. Try one month free at superhuman.com/lenny. That's superhuman.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Microsoft Clarity, a free, easy to use tool that captures how real people are actually using your site. You can watch live session replays to discover where users are breezing through your flow and where they struggle. You can view instant heat maps to see what parts of your page users are engaging with and what content they're ignoring. You can also pinpoint what's bothering your users with really cool frustration metrics like rage clicks and dead clicks and much more. If you listen to this podcast, you know how often we talk about the importance of knowing your users. And by seeing how users truly experience your product, you can identify product opportunities, conversion wins, and find big gaps between how you imagine people using your product and how they actually use it. Microsoft Clarity makes it all possible with a simple yet incredibly powerful set of features. You'll be blown away by how easy Clarity is to use, and it's completely free forever. You'll never run into traffic limits or be forced to upgrade to a paid version. It also works across both apps and websites. Stop guessing, get Clarity. Check out Clarity at clarity.microsoft.com. Nikhyl, welcome to the podcast.