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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

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.