Resilience

“We're not powerless, even though this game is rigged. We can study the game, we can help each other, and we can actually start to call out some of those rules and then find ways around them.”

“As a PM you are a leader. You have to provide a buffering or damping effect on the team. Sometimes we're doing stuff that everybody thought was amazing, you kind of got to bring people back down to earth. And then when it's terrible and the press is telling you that you're the worst thing to ever happen, you kind of have to also go back and say, Guys, slow down.”

“It does take a certain amount of just grit and resilience, and the ability to really focus on the most important problems in a given moment. Also, the ability to let other things slide when you have to. But again, I feel like these are core product skills that we look for in terms of leadership and grit, and the ability to drive through really, really tough problems that there's no playbook for.”

“Open mics are the real live experiments. You put something out there, you get very clear micro feedback from users, and then you get tough feedback sometimes. And I think as product builders, that's actually one of the great skills to have, which is you sometimes launch stuff that have a fantastic vision, but the first version is not quite there.”

“All the things that you perceive that are happening to you that are bad, be it the systems against you or somebody undercuts you or racism or sexism or this or that or the other is very small compared to what you do to yourself. If you believe what people say about you, if you believe what they did to you, then that destroys you. But if you go, 'That's not me,' you can overcome almost anything.”

“The real world has entropy and it's hard and it's messy. Computers are deterministic, but humans aren't. And so building products that have a little bit more flex or a little bit more fail safes in case those things happen becomes a little bit more paramount.”

“The best executives I know have had down periods in their careers, where they were out of work for a while, where they were fired by a CEO. And what they have in common is endurance. They're just back in the ring. It's also important not to settle on a crappy job or a crappy company.”

“If your primary modality of product-led growth work is experiment-driven product development and you're hitting more than 30 or 40% of the time, you're thinking too small. Only 20 to 30% of experiments a growth team runs might be successful. If you're not resilient, you end up grasping for a win by making bets that are too small to matter.”