Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy)

Pushback is, you know, it ... I couldn't imagine a word more viscerally that makes you feel like you're sort of physically going against what somebody else wants. And it gears people into a mindset of then, "Well, how should I push back?" It starts from a place of, "I need to disagree. I need to say no." It's a very negative mindset, purely based on the, the word that has come to label a behavior that, alternatively, could be about, "How do I shift the direction on something?" Or, "How do I help the business actually succeed when I disagree with somebody about something?" And that's a very different mindset. And so the two things that I've seen to be most successful would be, I think number one is actually understanding what a goal is or what somebody's kind of issue is with something, and then actually aligning those things in some way. (instrumental music)

Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today my guest is Jason Shaw. I was lucky to work with Jason while I was at Airbnb. And when I started working on this podcast, I knew that I wanted to have Jason on. He was actually my very first guest on this podcast when I was pre-recording some episodes. But, as you'll hear in our chat, we decided to take another crack at it for reasons you'll soon understand. In this episode we cover what it's like to be a PM in Web3 and how that's changed as crypto winter has returned, how to lead a team through ups and downs, which leaders in Web3 know all too well, including how to keep morale up and people focused when so much is changing around you. We also get into a ton of killer advice on leadership, hiring, pushing back on your CEO, working backwards, career advancement, and a lot more juicy stuff. Jason is a gem and I am really excited to share this episode with you. With that, I bring you Jason Shaw. (instrumental music) This episode is brought to you by Coda. Coda's an all-in-one doc that combines the best documents, spreadsheets, and apps in one place. I actually use Coda every single day. It's my home base for organizing my newsletter writing. It's where I plan my content calendar, capture my research, and write the first drafts of each and every post. It's also where I curate my private knowledge repository for paid newsletter subscribers. And it's also how I manage the workflow for this very podcast. Over the years, I've seen Coda evolve from being a tool that makes teams more productive to one that also helps bring the best practices across the tech industry to life with an incredibly rich collection of templates and guides in the Coda doc gallery, including resources from many guests on this podcast, including Shreyas, Gokul, and Shishir, the CEO of Coda. Some of the best teams out there, like Pinterest, Spotify, Square, and Uber, use Coda to run effectively, and have published their templates for anyone to use. If you're ping-ponging between lots of documents and spreadsheets, make your life better and start using Coda. You can take advantage of a special limited time offer just for startups. Head over to coda.io/lenny to sign up and get $1,000 credit on your first statement. That's coda.io/lenny to sign up and get $1,000 in credit on your account. I'm excited to chat with my friend Jon Cutler from podcast sponsor Amplitude. Hey, Jon.