How to own your career growth and become a powerful product leader | Deb Liu, Ancestry (ex-Facebook, PayPal)

00:00We don't talk about this by the way, but if you look at the very senior, people who rise faster in organizations, the senior executives, they have this skill. I noticed this as I got further and further in my career, I didn't realize how important this was. And then I realized that anyone who can go into a room and speak about almost anything intelligently without any preparation has a huge advantage in our industry.

00:24Deb Liu is maybe most known for incubating, launching, and scaling Facebook Marketplace, which is now used by over 1 billion people around the world every month. But before Facebook, where she spent almost 12 years, she was at PayPal where she led much of the product integration with eBay after they acquired by eBay, and then she went on to lead much of the PayPal product team. Currently, she's the CEO of Ancestry. She's also on the board of Intuit. In our chat, we cover what made PayPal so special, and what she learned from the people, the culture, and the way they build product that's informed her approach today. We also talk about how despite being an introvert, she was able to excel in numerous leadership roles, what attributes she's found to be most common to PMs that do super well, and also what skills she believes PM should focus on. Above all else, we also chat about Facebook Marketplace, her upcoming book, Take Back Your Power, and a whole lot of stories from the course of her incredible career. As you'll see, I so enjoyed my chat with Deb, and I'm really excited for you to hear this episode. Hey, Ashley, Head of Marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?

01:33At least 40%.

01:35And how many of them screw that up, and what happens when they do?

01:38Well, based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chockfull of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave.

01:57I am 0% surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both signup conversion and increasing long-term retention. Giving people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important.

02:12Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify, and Zuora are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile. It's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster.

02:29If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile at flatfile.com/lenny. If you're setting up your analytics stack but you're not using Amplitude, what are you doing? Amplitude is the number one most popular analytics solution in the world used by both big companies like Shopify, Instacart, and Atlassian, and also most tech startups. Amplitude has everything you need including a powerful and fully self-service analytics product, an experimentation platform, and even an integrated customer data platform to help you understand your users like never before. Give your teams self-service product data to understand your users, drive conversions and increase engagement, growth and revenue. Ditch your vanity metrics, trust your data, work smarter and grow your business. Try Amplitude for free. Just visit amplitude.com to get started. Welcome to the podcast, Deb. I am really excited that we're finally doing this.

03:30I'm so happy to be here, Lenny.

03:35You are currently the CEO of Ancestry, and before that, you were at Facebook for about 11 years where you led the Facebook Marketplace team, which is a product I love and I've used so many times and I've sold so many products on it. You also did a bunch of the payments work at Facebook, led a lot of the teams that did the payments work, but before that, you were at PayPal for six years where you led the integration between PayPal and eBay, and also led a lot of the product team at PayPal, and so my first question is around that. There's been a lot of writing coming out about the early history of PayPal. I read this book called The Founders.

04:13Jimmy? It's awesome. He actually interviewed me, it's part of that book.

04:18Okay, I missed that part and I will have to go read it. It's such a fascinating tale, the story of PayPal, and there was a story about Meg Whitman coming to the office when the acquisition was announced in her very corporate T-shirt. And everyone at PayPal was like, "Oh no, what are we doing joining this big company?" I'm really curious from your time there, and I think you joined right before that happened, what was it like to be on the PayPal side of this acquisition going through this acquisition by eBay?

04:45I actually stumbled onto my career at PayPal. I was graduating from Stanford and I saw this startup, PayPal, and I loved PayPal. I was an eBay seller, and I went to the booth at PayPal had at the Stanford graduate school business, and I just wanted to tell them how much I love their product. They said, "Why don't you come interview?" I thought, no, moving back to North Carolina, I'm not sure what I want to do. I ended up going to interview and it was really incredible just meeting the people, and they convinced me to join at the end of June and we were acquired, I believe the first week of July.

04:45Oh, wow.

05:17And before I joined, I actually had had a sale dinner, so Peter Thiel and David Sacks took me to dinner. I said, "Is any chance we're going to get acquired by eBay? Because it would be really awkward. I actually interned at eBay, had an offer there, and I turned it down." And they said, "Absolutely not. We're going to stay independent." And about two weeks later, we were acquired by eBay, and I actually started working with the same colleagues that I had worked before. It was an incredible journey. I think PayPal is such a small scrappy company trying to do so many amazing things with a few hundred employees and it was just the adventure of a lifetime, but it was really different being bought by a company that was run in such a corporate way. It was a very corporate tech company. eBay was a wonderful product, and I had worked there and so I really loved the people there as well. But it was the culture clash between the two experiences, between the two cultures, between the two teams. It was very alien, I think to really have one culture, and at one point they called it the mothership. It was that kind of culture. PayPal was the smaller scrappier cousin, and it was just a very different vibe. I think looking back, what made the product successful was the two things just belonged together, right? Commerce and payments and I think that it really unlocked a lot of value, but I think most people saw the value unlocked. I mean the value that you've looked at PayPal is now larger than eBay from market cap perspective, which was what Meg had wanted at some point. But at the same time. So she was very prescient in a lot of ways, but I think the differences were, the culture differences were really hard to overcome. And now, even as we talk about acquisitions, as I advise companies who do acquisitions, it's to remember that there are people and cultures and real human beings behind each of these products, that it's not just you buy a company and you slot them in like it's a stock. It is a completely different thing. There were a few of us who became very close during the integration. Ha Nguyen, who now heads of customer experience at Swimply, she and I stayed friends over the last 20 years. We talk about those days and how crazy it was, and how we kept our teams from fighting it out and how successful it ultimately was. But I think that people look at the story, and it's very easy to just gloss over the details, but there were real humans that, and a lot of detailed, how do we make this work?

07:31Are there any stories that stand out of culture clash and how different these two companies work? And then also just how did you as a leader help people through that? Because I imagine many people are like, "I'm out of here. I'm not going to go work at eBay." How did you keep people excited and sticking around?

07:46Well, I just remember, we did all of our product planning on one shared worksheet. It was a spreadsheet, an Excel spreadsheet, and we had to check it out. So it was on a webpage, on an internal webpage, and we would check it out. If somebody left it open, other people couldn't get in, and we would send each other haikus to get people to actually shut down, to close the worksheets other people get in.

08:08Wait, what's an example of a haiku that you send to key people?

08:11I need to find some of those haikus, but I remember Yee Lee, Brian Phillips, one of them would send haikus to each other. They would send these crazy emails and they would say something, I think it was 5, 7, 5, and they would actually beg people to close the worksheets so something else could get it. It was a cultural quirkiness. But eBay worked on the system that was an internal tool called Tracker, and it tracked train seats. Instead, we would walk over to engineers and say, "How many days does it take to build this?" And we would give them a spec. The spec would be a few pages, and we would link to it from this shared worksheet and that would literally the entire product planning process. At eBay, they had this thing called Tracker. They would submit a PRD and then they would have tech specs, and it was just the whole system. And you would book train seats, you had to go through product council, but before you went to product council, you had to lobby all the executives and product council to sell your product, so you'd have to set up a series of meetings and you'd have to book a time in product council. You'd have to get the green-green or green. Green-green meant that you could go forward. I just remember us just being bewildered. We would drive down to eBay. One time we had a meeting, it was 9:00 PM, and we're trying to get clearance in product council because it was the only time we can meet with somebody ahead of time. I just remember all of us going, "What are we doing? How are we doing this all wrong?" There was just a lot of cultural differences in how booking a train seat. One train seat by the way was 15 days of engineering. Our estimates were 2, 3, 5 days. A big project was 50 days and it was just so different. We really had to navigate how to work at two companies at once that really had very, very different cultures, especially the teams that were in between the two.

09:46What did you take away from that experience that stuck with you to other work that you've done about keeping people excited and onboard with some radical change like that?

09:54Well, I think the biggest thing I learned from that entire experience is that people are people, but they respond to the process and respond to culture in different ways. People would go back and forth between the two companies and completely go native. They would adapt immediately because you just had no choice to get through a process, to get through a system, you had to do that. And so you realize that this is the same amazing people you worked with on the other side of you with different incentives, and they were still the same amazing people you could go have drinks with, but their incentive system was completely different. Now it was like, "How do you get through this process? How do you get booked? How do you get support?" And I realized that sometimes we often blame individuals for things that are actually systemic process problems. If there's a process broken, we think, well, if they just try harder to work better together, they just had a better relationship. And I'm like, "No, actually are you setting up a system where you're putting two people against each other and you're pitting them against each other and then saying you should collaborate better." I realized that there were so many amazing people who went back and forth over the years. I went from one side of the integration, I ended up on the other side of the integration and just to see how the perspectives were completely different. To be on both sides of an integration meant that you could see why one team felt the way they did and another team felt the way they did, but they were completely immersed in their own ecosystem. Sometimes we think that if we just had hired the ideal person, it would fix everything. But we never look at our systems, our processes, our cultures and say, "What are we doing wrong? What are we rewarding? How are we asking people to do their jobs?" And saying, "Actually, this is not about the people, it's about the water they swim in."

11:33That's such an important point, and a reminder of just the power of incentives and processes and systems and how that more than anything influences how people work. Is there a story or an example that comes to mind of how that went well or didn't go well or something that you changed or someone at eBay or PayPal changed to take advantage of that insight?

11:52I just remember we were working on a project called next-gen checkout. It was the next generation checkout, and I was about to go on maternity leave. My son was going to be born, it was my first child, and we kicked off the project. And then right after that, I went on leave. I came back, I actually handed my team over to my colleague who was a friend of mine and he was my successor, Mike Woo, and he took over the team and he was doing a great job and I didn't want to displace him so I went to corporate strategy. I worked with Rajeev who was the CEO of PayPal at the time and did strategy for him. And then eventually, I started the charity and social commerce verticals at PayPal. I was in the verticals job for a while, then I ended up going to eBay. And when I got to eBay, I led the end-to-end buyer experience, including next-gen checkout. And they were still working on it. Actually, and we celebrated. We actually had drinks on the lawn of eBay, and we celebrated when the project was done and my son had just turned two. You think about that, we did the first integration between the two sites. We actually planned it, my team and the team at eBay between the announcement of the integration, which was July, and we shipped it on October when the deal was cleared. We actually, we weren't even allowed to talk to each other for a long time because the deal was actually a due diligence, so we actually only did the integration in a very short period of time. You think about the next gen of that checkout took two years. And then after that we shipped that product and it was successful. And then they said, "Okay, we're kicking off unified checkout. We're going to integrate the checkouts even more." We looked at the roadmap and it was going to be another two years. At that point, I said, "I can't do this again." I ended up leaving to go to Facebook at that point. But what I learned from that experience was that it wasn't for lack of trying or care. It wasn't that the teams weren't working hard. On both sides, the team was eagerly eager to work on it from both PayPal and eBay, but each individual team had insufficient information and support to actually get it done. And that was the big issue. And yet, there was a lot of misunderstandings in between. It was like, "Well, they're not supporting us, they're not picking our features." But actually, I was literally at both sides of the project and that was not really what was happening. What was happening was there was insufficient support on both sides. And so thus, you end up in a case where you end up fighting over prioritization, and in the end, when you're starving, what you're focused on is what you need to get done on your side. And so really I think instead you either fund something like that, fully get it done quickly, or when you elongate it like this where things are just, you're just creating hostility between the teams.

14:28It's so cool that you were on both sides of this experience and saw how very different teams and approaches worked. Something that I don't know if people know is that you joined PayPal when you were very young and it was maybe your first PM role and you ended up taking on some significant responsibility super quickly. I'd love to hear a bit about that part of your career and how you were able to take on such a big role so quickly and how you scaled and learned as you went.

14:52I had come to the table at the career fair, and I saw Tim Wenzel who had put together a lot of the PayPal Mafia. He was the recruiter. He is one of the first recruiters at PayPal. I think he might be the first recruiter at PayPal. And then Katherine Woo, she's the head of airbnb.org today. She was a year ahead of me at Stanford and he said, "Hey, we have jobs in marketing and product, which do you prefer?" I look at Catherine since she was, I kind of knew her. I said, "What do you do?" She said, "I'm in product." I'm like, "That sounds good." I have no idea what a product manager did. I mean, at the time it was just not a thing. It was not the thing it is today. And so thus, I ended up interviewing for product. As I was interviewing, they would say, "What would you build?" I had all these ideas. As an eBay seller, I had many things I wished PayPal did, and so I would describe all these ideas, all those things I wanted to do. And then I started the job and I went to the VP of product and I said, "What is the actual job of being product manager? I have no idea." I realized that I had taken a job, I had no idea what it entails. And she actually very patiently isolated, my manager, Dave Lee also did, and just really mentored me and showed me the ropes. Being a new product manager and having no idea what your job is, I was able to really look at the product from a very customer-centric way. A lot of PayPal employees were not eBay sellers. In fact, some in the company were hostile towards eBay. Whereas I said, "This is the best opportunity. You have this marketplace of sellers who have their own websites. If we could just get them all on board, this is a massive win for both companies." And so I looked at it from a very different perspective, and I think that it gave me this ability to see the world from a customer perspective, but also from a product lens. Turns out that I'm a very natural product manager, but I think if you had asked me at the start, I just had no idea what it entailed.

16:37I love that you decided to be a PM on the spot in an interview line, talking to a recruiter, that's amazing. And you were in your early twenties at that point, and that turned into basically leading this integration between PayPal and eBay, right?

16:50Yeah, so at that point, I was pretty young, and I knew very little about anything obviously. I was early in my career and eventually my manager left. A couple of years later, my manager left, I ended up taking on the entire team. I was working on the integration for a long time and then after a couple years I actually took on his role as well. It was just an incredible opportunity at the time. I think that's what's really great about a career in tech is if you're in a high growth company, they give you so much responsibility that you have no business deserving the right to do, and yet you have this opportunity to shape a product that's touched by millions and millions of people, and you can grow your career so quickly because you can have such impact in such a short time. That was it for me, was that I had this opportunity to build something that was really special, and be a part of a company at a growth phase that was so incredible and to be part of one of the most really wonderful stories of two products that came together. And as Meg had said at the time, one plus one equals three.

17:53That's how it turned out/one of the ones became 10, the PayPal side. Just thinking back to your time at PayPal and eBay, what's one or two things that you've taken to where you work now that informed the way you build product, hire, lead teams, anything like that? What's a lesson that you've learned from that experience?

18:11Well, what's really wonderful about PayPal is they did not look for credentials from a you need 10 years of product experience to be a senior PM here. Instead, the way they shaped their product team with let's hire really smart people who have product orientation, and let's just let them loose and we're going to build amazing things. It was just incredible, so few people had tech product experience at the time, and so they said, "We're just going to hire amazing people with great ideas," and they did. And to this day, a lot of those PMs have now spread across the Valley doing amazing and incredible things and are now senior leaders across so many different places, and nobody had had any experience. I think that that part is something which I think we overvalue experience over instincts and learning mindset. And it's something I have kept in mind is that you can have someone who is an incredible expert, has tons of experience, but they're not growing, they're not scrappy, they're not pushing. But somebody who is excited, someone who has passion, someone who understands the customer and really cares is getting to see them every time. I remember one day we went to lunch a few years after all of this, we had joined PayPal. And by the way, the PayPal PMs, the early PMs still have reunions every year thanks to our friend, Alan Tien, one of the early PayPal PMs. And we still get together, we're friends to this day. And I remember one day we got together, this is when we were still there, we joked that none of us could get a job on our teams because we kept raising the bar saying, "Okay, you need this much experience to be a APM, to be a PM, to be a senior PM." And we said we weren't even qualified to even be on our own teams. And at that point, we were all directors. GPMs, pretty senior at that point, and we said we couldn't even get hired here today. And that's the difference is that we grew up in a culture and a company. I'm going to actually say that as you look at the cultures and the cultures I want to build, I just want to hire really amazing raw talent. It's great to have experience, it's great to have the credentials, but more than that, you have the passion. Do you have the ability to actually show that you can grow? And I think that's something I really look for.

20:15I want to get more of your insights on hiring and leadership, but before we get into that, I wanted to ask you a question. I read that you consider yourself an introvert, and it was always a lot of work to push yourself into these leadership roles that you're in and have been in for so long now. For people going through this themselves that are just like, "Man, this is so hard for me. It's so unnatural for me to become a leader and to be the center of the team." Do you have any advice for what helped you through that and push through that innate aversion maybe to leadership in the limelight?

20:47Well, first I want to ask you, Lenny, are you an introvert or extrovert?

20:50100% introvert. I've moved closer to extrovert and I've come across as an extrovert a lot of times, but I'm definitely a index introvert.

20:59The reason I ask is I have a sense that we are very similar. As a PM though, you're expected to connect the dots. You're the connector, you're the culture carrier, you're the convener of groups, you are in a lot of ways the defacto person who brings together the teams that build the products. I found that job really hard as an introvert because your job was literally to pick up the phone and call people back in the day when we used the phone, or to gather groups of people, really to lead from the front. And it was very uncomfortable for me, and I can see that in you as well as over the years we've talked. I don't think you have to be an extrovert to be a successful PM. You can be an introverted successful PM. However, you have to exercise the muscle of communication in such a broad way. And so if I told myself 10 years ago, 20 years ago that I would be doing this, speaking publicly and leaving a company, I would not have believed it, because I was so introverted. And I think that's probably true of you. You have been 50,000 subscribers, you showed up to meet up at events, I think that's not our natural inclination, but I also think that you and I have one thing in common and I hope that our listeners will know this, which is we also are people, who when the occasion comes, we will rise to the occasion because that's what needs to get done. And that's what a great PM does. I think sometimes we forget, it's easy to say, well, I'm fixed. I'm an introvert, I can't do this. I said, "Yeah, I was not born knowing how to write specs or doing customer interviews. I was not born knowing how to do strategy." Anything can be learned if you treat it as a skill, but if you treat it as a natural inclination, if you say, I am just this person, our height is fixed. That is very difficult to change, but our ability to learn something like speaking up, convening people, leading from the front is a skill that can be learned if we treat it that way, then it's no longer well, I am X height or I'm fixed here. Instead, we treat it as something that's learnable where we can grow into it.

23:02I love that, it touches on a recurring theme on this podcast that comes up a lot with guests is the power of being proactive and having high agency and not just defaulting to here's the way things are and here's who I am and there's not going to be much I can do about it. That just leading into that and understanding that you can use your strengths, whatever they are, even if they're not necessarily innately extroverted, you can accomplish a lot of the same kinds of stuff that someone that's more natural at it can.

23:28Someone is always going to be smarter than you, someone is always going to have more experience. Someone in the room probably knows more than you, but at the same time if you say, "You know what, that's okay. Someone is going to be more extroverted as well." But the question for you is what is the best version of yourself that you bring to your team, to your work, to your product, to your customers, and what are the things that you must do? And if that thing is, if I told you the success or failure of your product is you being willing to stand in front of 10,000 people and talk about it, you would go do it because you want your product to succeed. You want your customers to be served, you want to fight for the resources that you need. You want to get the word out. But I think sometimes we can give ourselves a free pass, and my friend Carol Isozaki, she's a career coach, she says this unintentional, ridiculous strategies is we give ourselves a free pass. We say, "Well, I'm an introvert so therefore I can't." But instead, say, "This is what's absolutely necessary. How do I rise to that occasion?" In the back of your head, you don't go, I'm just going to show up to this meeting and not say anything. But that's a ridiculous strategy. But how often do we do that because we give ourselves a free pass. And so one of the things I encourage each of us to do is, as you said, high agency. Take control and say, "What is the distance between here and there and how do I get there? It might be harder for me, it might be a longer distance. I might have physical differences in ability. I might not have the same access and privilege, that's okay. I can still get there."

24:55And I find that a lot of times you do that thing that feels so scary and it always ends up being great, it always works out. Rarely is it the fear that you have that comes true. Usually it's like, "Oh, cool, that was a great presentation, everyone loved it. All right, well why was I so worried about that?"

25:10Yes, absolutely.

25:11I wanted to ask you about your experience hiring teams, leading teams, promoting people. I'm curious, what have you found separates PMs that go on to be really successful and have really successful careers versus those who just drift and stagnate and just don't go anywhere? What have you found to be one or two common habits or behaviors or ways of working of someone that ends up being really successful as a PM versus not?

25:37I definitely think the growth mindset is absolutely the most important thing because someone who's constantly growing is going to listen to feedback. Someone who's growing is going to seek out information in areas they're not good at. I had one PM, he was an analyst, he went to move over to PM. He just, he's like, "I don't have a design eye." So I gave him three books. We prepped for the design interview and now he is the head of product for one of the most design oriented products in the world. But he said, "You know what? I know what I don't know. I'm willing to learn." One of the things that we need to do is really have that mindset of I'm not an expert in this. He wasn't even a PM, he was an analyst and he said, "But this is my dream." And just seeing the people who rise to the amazing careers, 10X careers are the ones who have that mindset of growth who say, "I don't want to just work on my strengths. I want to shore up my weaknesses. I want to grow in ways that are asymmetrical." I see this in the best people that I've worked with is they're the ones who are the most hungry, and are willing to do whatever it takes to get to where they want to go. Enough hunger is just hard. It's not something that people can have, that ambition. It's not something people can have at every phase in their life and that's totally okay. It's to say, "I'm going to push when I have the ability to push, I'm going to take a step back when it's time to step back." But I think a lot of people are like, "I'm okay. I'm happy here," and if that's okay for different seasons of your life, but the most successful PMs are the ones that say, when the time is right, I'm going to really push, and I'm going to drink it all in and make it as possible to get as far as I possibly can during this season of my life.

27:10For people going through that are wanting to push through that and develop, and maybe in this example, what do you find is worth your time? Do you find courses are a good way to improve? Is it mentors, coaches, just doing the work? Do you have a general mental model of, "Hey, I want to improve it," say design, I don't know. Do you push people to one direction versus another to actually get better at a lot of these things?

27:33I think one of the most powerful things that we can do is actually first start in a coaching circle because getting feedback is incredibly important. If you have an amazing manager and peers that give you feedback, that's amazing. But I think often you don't have that. If you can find a coaching circle or mentoring circle of other PMs, they will actually help you see your blind spots, because I think seeing your blind spots helps you to work on them. Second is actually taking that feedback and saying, "Okay, here are the three things I want to work on." So every year, I do a new year resolution, and this is not just for PM, but across the board. I write down, here's the things I want to improve in my life, and here's what I'm going to do to do them. Having a written goal, and the goal isn't checking the box like I'm going to do X. The goal is I want more of this and here's how I'm going to get it. And every year I publish that, and then I give myself a score for the previous year. It's really, as you know, if you measure, you're going to get more of what you measure. Well, how many people are really measuring their careers? How many people are measuring the output of things that they're learning? I really encourage PM your career like you PM your product, you put so much care into writing specs, having goals, having metrics, doing reviews. How is it do you think about your career? Not nearly as much. What I encourage PMs to do is your focus group is your peers. That's where you're getting feedback from. Those are your customers, those are your peers, are the ones who are giving you feedback, who are telling you things you need to work on to make your product, your career better. The second thing is then what are you going to do about it? What a true roadmap. Often, we don't have a roadmap for our career. We have amazing roadmaps to your roadmaps, five year roadmaps, visions, all of those things for our product, and then our blind spot is ourselves. I just tell people, write out what you want to be in two years and five years. Write out your pre-mortem for where your career is going to go, and then work your way backwards. Sometimes, it's just very easy to drift from, "Oh, I have this opportunity, should I take it or not? Someone called me about X, or this company." And not to be intentional, but if you say, "Hey." Somebody called me up and she said, "I would like to be CEO by the time I'm your age." So I said, "Okay, let's work our way backwards." And we did the math and she's not even a manager today, but she's 35. I said, "To be eligible to be CEO, you need to get on a board. You need to be a GM of a very large product. How fast can you get there?" She said, "Well, I'm probably a year or two away from getting promoted and getting the opportunity to manage." "At the pace you're going, you're not going to get there." And so I've been mentoring her and coaching her and finally she found a new role. They're giving her management responsibility. She got at a higher level, but she realized that on her path, her roadmap was going to elongate way further than when she needed to ship. Instead, we worked on a new plan, but I think a lot of PMs are like her, not because, and she's an incredible PM, but she put so much more care into her product than she really thought about her career.

30:22I love all these tactical pieces of advice. I'd love to get even more tactical. Is there a framework or a template that you use for these sorts of exercises, either working backwards or your resolutions?

30:33That's actually interesting. One of my first posts was actually about my resolutions. It wasn't a template that maybe this year I'll put together a template.

30:38Amazing.

30:38But my first post is How to Change Your Life Through Resolutions or something like that in my Substack. So if you go to my Substack.

30:44Great, we'll put that in the show notes.

30:46You could read about it, but I use that as marking time and actually being able to make progress just like you do for your product. What are your metrics? What are you measuring? The second thing, I do think that for your career, I should work on a template for this, I actually have a pre-mortem I wrote when I first joined Ancestry for example, of what I hope to accomplish in 10 years here. I had a template for how our product would evolve over two years and five years that I've started with and anchored the company against. We show that every all hands for example. These are the kinds of things that are useful because you're now... And then each of the PMs takes the vision that we put together when I first started with our leadership team and says, "Here's how my product contributes to us evolving our product to the two-year, five-year roadmap." And so it's great to actually have an anchor, and it's the same thing if you don't have some sort of measurement for your career that every opportunity comes along, it has to be evaluated on its own. But if you say, "My goal is to reach management by X, to have the opportunity to head up a product by Y to do X," then you can say, "Does this opportunity take me closer or further away?" You actually now have an evaluation criteria, and I think too often it's by instinct. You'd have too much instinct on, "Well, is this the right thing?" But it might actually take you off course. And so instead actually focusing on, "Hey, that's scope creep. Let's focus on what's important. The thing that matters most is what matters. Let's focus on that."

32:06Basically it's like a personal vision statement or a vision for your product for yourself, I love that.

32:10Yes.

32:11You also talked about mentorship circles. What is that and how do you create one?

32:16Yeah, so I've had access to coaching circles or mentoring circles. I've been in a couple lean in circles. I'm a couple, now I'm in a executive circle. And these are really your peers who help you think through problems but also point out your blind spots. They say, "Hey, I think you're weak in X." And one example was in our lead circle, one of the things that was a huge challenge was there were a few folks who said, "Hey, I want to get promoted." And someone else goes, "Well, have you asked your manager?" That's a very simple question, but that really lit up one of the women on the team, she's like, "You know what? I haven't asked. I was just waiting for him to offer it." And instead, she asked for it. And another woman was offered a position in a different office and we said, "You should ask for, what are they promising you? Can you get that written? When do you have the opportunity to come back?" And made her really think through not just saying yes blindly, but actually very thoughtfully saying, "If you have the option come back, would they compensate you, would they cover your travel? What are the things that you need?" And she said, "I never really thought about that." But I think having a group of people who are brainstorming your career and your challenges with you gives you so much more perspective, and they're not there to tell you the answer. They're there to ask you the hard questions that you probably have forgotten to ask yourself because you're so deep into it. I've been a member of four of these circles over the years, and they are just incredibly powerful because they give you very different perspectives. One of the circles was the women VPs at Facebook. It was just great to be able to run, if something happened, you could run it by them. We called it the Leading Ladies. It was just an opportunity to have people who are in the same situation as you, and you could run the ideas by them, but they can also say, "Hey, I hear that you're having a rough day. Let's talk." And that kind of support is something that's really invaluable, and I think we don't use that enough in our industry honestly.

34:07For someone listening that's like, "Oh, I want one of those," do you just create one? Do you find people and let's start a circle, or is there a place they can go to see what's out there?

34:15Well, there are some more organized things like Chief and things like that where you can join a more organized one. But I actually think, for example, Lenny, you have an incredible community. I think your community should create circles amongst themselves, maybe local circles, New York and San Francisco and Seattle and Chicago. I think this is a natural place for you to find, make sure though that they're your peers because it is really important that people understand at what place you are and differential in level makes it really difficult to have rich conversations. But having people where your peers really reflecting on you, what you're hearing. The same thing writers use, these critique circles where they're all writers, they're all sharing and helping one another, I think we should have that, and this should be something that's really standard in our industry. I think way more PMs should be part of these circles, and it has been a huge unlock in my own career.

35:04Awesome. There's actually in the works in our community. My community lead Trey is really excited about mastermind groups. He is looking for someone to help run those things, so that might actually come together and I'd love your advice and help as that comes together.

35:16Absolutely. I am here to help.

35:20If a feature ships, but no one knows about it, did it really ship? Keeping customers and internal teams like sales support and marketing in the loop on what's changing across your product is surprisingly hard. First, you have to dig through tickets and pull requests just to see what's been done. Then you have to figure out what's relevant to each person, craft updates, and then share them across all of your channels. Multiply this by the number of things that ship every week, and that's basically a full-time job just to keep everyone updated on what's changing. That's why high velocity product teams like Monte Carlo, Armory, and Popsicle use Makelog. Makelog makes it easy to see what's happening across tools like Jira, Linear, Asana, and GitHub. And then to write bite-sized updates, which you can immediately share with your audience wherever they are, including within your app on Slack, over email and even on Twitter. No more long boring log style change log posts that slow you down. Just quick and easy updates that keep your users informed and happy. Try make log for free today. Just visit makelog.com/lenny to get started. One more question before we get to Facebook Marketplace stuff, which I'm excited to dig into a bit. If you had to pick one skill for an early stage PM to focus on to help them in their career, and then same question for mid-stage PM, what would you suggest they focus on most?

36:42I would say for both actually, one of the most important things that I think we lack is communication skills because I don't know if you, the communication is the job. You can't do anything alone. You're not coding the product, you are not designing the product, you are not doing the research, you're not doing the data analysis. Your job is purely communication, and how good you are at communication is really, really critical. I think we underestimate that. We think our job is something else, but actually most PMs, the job is communication. Actually many jobs, your job is literally communication, and I think we underestimate how important that is. Having clear and good written communication skills, but also communication skills around broad communication. Can you get up and actually convince a group of people that your strategy is the right one? Can you write a six pager that seems so obvious that everyone's like, "Yes, we should do that?" Can you communicate the need for additional resources to get your team what they need? Those are all communication skills. One of the biggest challenges I see is, it's actually not just the communication skills, but the lack of courage to actually communicate. I get emails that say, "I don't want to bother you, but." Or, "I'm sorry to waste your time." And I'm thinking, no, don't say that. And I've coached a lot of people on this. Don't say just. Don't devalue yourself before you pitch your idea. And so I do think that it's small things, but it's also the big things being really comfortable in a room. One of the biggest biases we have in our industry is that we have a bias towards people who can speak intelligently about almost anything on the spot. We don't talk about this by the way, but if you look at the very senior people who rise faster in organizations, the senior executives, they have this skill. And I noticed this as I got further and further in my career, I didn't realize how important this was. And then I realized that anyone who can go into a room and speak about almost anything intelligently without any preparation has a huge advantage in our industry. Is that fair? Absolutely not. There are a lot of people who are quiet and are very thoughtful or need time to process, and it is a huge bias against those people. And it's also a bias against people who English is not their first language or they're extremely introverted or they have other abilities, I think. But I just want to acknowledge that here because if you have that skill, it will be rocket fuel. It will be so powerful for your career, and if you don't, it'll hold you back. I don't think it's fair exactly, but at the same time, when you go to an executive review, and I've done these product reviews where we have multiple teams, maybe 10, 15, 20 teams come in and there's a huge bias from the people who can actually answer the questions on the spot, and a huge bias towards those who could riff with the leaders. And it is just something that's systemic. Now, I don't know how to solve that problem, because the actual work matters way more in the day-to-day, but you're being judged on the 5%, which is your presentation or your ability to answer questions on the spot. I think it is something that we need to wrestle with, and I do think it's something which will play our industry. We might not have the best people at the helm because we have this bias, but it is real.

39:58That is such a good point, I have never thought of it that way, and it's so true, and I'm not great at that. I'm much better when I can think about it and come back to someone with an answer, and that is not fair. Such a good point. Your answer about communication being the most important thing to work on, that's exactly my answer to that exact question always. I'm curious if you have any advice for how to get better at communication. What have you found helps people most other than just doing it again and again and again?

40:25Well, so I was extremely introverted as I said. When I was growing up. I grew up in a small town in the South. I was extremely quiet because people would say, "Go back to where you came from." They would make fun of me and my sister and my family. We just had a lot of things happen, and again, it was a very different time and I hope things are changing, and I just realized if I just stay silent, maybe no one would notice me. If no one notice me, they won't say anything and so I just learned that silence was my protection. Then I realized when I got went to college and I studied engineering, you're doing problem sets. You do labs, and it's very easy. You never have to talk. There's no class participation grade, so it's great. And then I went into consulting and I sucked at the client part of client service. I was a pretty good analyst. I understood how to do the analysis. I was pretty good at strategy, but I was terrible at the client part. And they would say, "You need to hang out with the client." I'm like, "Why? I do really good work." And I realized that so much is not just, if a great strategy falls in the forest and no one knew about it, it doesn't even matter, right? And so I learned that I was failing at the part that was the most important part of consulting, wasn't just getting to the answer, but it was making sure you could convince people of the answer. And I really struggled with that. And so when I got to business school, 30, 50% of the grade was class participation. I was terrified because I had never really spoken in class, I'd never raised my hand. I actually taught myself how to speak up by actually having tally marks how many times I spoke, and then I started rating how good the comments were. And it was a practice. I practiced it like a language, and it was a skill. I think that is really important for somebody in the workplace today. Join Toastmasters, I've seen a lot of success where people are very comfortable. Joining Toastmasters and then being forced to do it, having a group of people around you, encouraging you and teaching you, that's really incredible. Another thing is really joining circles. Having a safe place to speak up lets you try out different things, and then you'll get more comfortable in speaking in groups, and it'll give you more confidence for the next conversation. And then I would say this, which is actually try what I did it in business school. Go to a meeting, and try a strategy where you really show up, and the strategy is I'm going to show up and this is how, and this is the thing I'm going to do differently and try it out then get feedback. I remember that we did a two-day product review, a marathon, went through every product that we had, and it was a couple dozen. And at one point, one of the leaders hadn't said anything in two days. I wasn't even sure she'd come, and her manager came to me, she's a lead of one of our functional areas. Her manager came to me and said, "How is so-and-so doing?" I said, "We had a two-day off site, I don't think she said anything." I went to her and actually spoke to her about this. And I said, "You are an incredible leader. Your pulse scores are great. Your team speaks so highly of you, but we were together with everybody and you didn't say a single thing." And she said, "Oh, you're right." But she goes, "I didn't feel like it was my place." And I said, "But then every single person from your function feels like it's not their place now because you're their leader." And so when I've said it that way, she said, "You're right," and she started working on it. She wouldn't do it for her, but I think she did it for them, and to have a motivation, a reason, and then start working on it. And just like any product, have a roadmap, have measurements, really understand whether you're making progress.

43:56Such good advice. I imagine part of this is also don't expect every time to go great. You have this tally and maybe 50% of the time it'll go great, 50% maybe not so great, and that's okay, right?

44:08Yeah. Well, the other part is if you only speak once, it better be brilliant. But if you're part of the conversation, you're trying different things, you're part of the group, you're part of the discussion, and not every comment then has to be so fraught. But the less you speak, the more people when you do speak, put so much weight in what you're saying. And so in some ways actually having a conversation, this is like growth tactics. If you only pitch once, you have to hit that home run. But if you're up to bat a lot and you take lots of shots, and growth teams take lots of shots, they're like, "You know what? For the teams that are only take two at bats, they better hit a home run each time." But if we have 20 at bat, our hit rate only has to be more than 10% to beat the other teams that we're doing that have to hit 100%. And so really playing the odds and giving yourself a little bit more space then makes it much less fraught.

44:58And I imagine people may feel like they say one dumb thing and their career is over, they're going to be fired, everyone's going to think they're terrible. And in your experience, would you agree it's not actually true? People just forget it and they would even ever think about something you said that you think is really dumb?

45:14Well, I always ask people, think about the last three meetings you had and somebody, I'm sure somebody's kicking themselves or saying something dumb. Do you even remember when it is? I bet you don't. I think we are in our heads so much more than other people are in our heads. And so instead really say, "You know what? I want to add overall value. Every single thing doesn't have to be perfect. It has to just come together." And not everything has to be ideal. Not every word has to be gold wisdom. Instead, actually say, "You know what? I want to be part of the conversation and I want to be in this room and present." I think we overthink the downside risk and we actually underweight the upside risk. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. You're definitely going to fail if you say nothing. But if you say one thing that's bad, most people don't even notice you miss the shot, so what? But you took a lot of shots and you're able to sink the ball enough that you're going to help win the game.

46:06I have a friend who was promoted to be a senior leader at a big tech company, and he used to be really nervous saying things in big meetings with all the execs. He thought they'd think about it and remember it, and he just thought about it for the next week every time he said something dumb. And then being on the leadership side, he's like, "I don't remember anything anyone said really? What was I thinking? Would they have time to think about my dumb comment?"

46:29Well, you do two days of product reviews straight, and it's 16 hours. Do you remember any individual comment? Instead, you remember how that team made you feel? Are they moving in the right direction? Are they scrappy? Are they fighting for their product? Do they understand their customers? What you feel as a leader often is not about the individual comments, but it's about did they communicate the problem and the solution in such a way that I'm convinced that they should continue and they should get more resources.

46:55This is maybe a good time to chat about your book, which is coming out later this year, Take Back Your Power, which touches on a lot of these things. Can you just share what this book's about and who might find it most valuable? Then I'll ask you a couple more questions about it.

47:09Yeah, so I started the book actually almost four years ago now at this point. I wrote it because I always had an open door policy, and for many years at Facebook I had an open door policy where anybody could reach out to me, and I would just spend 15 minutes coaching them, venturing them, whatever they wanted. I think for me, I always needed an ally. There were just times when I felt like I needed to talk to someone who wasn't my manager, or wasn't someone who was really close to me, and I felt like I didn't have that. I ended up having these amazing coaching circles, but not everyone has that either. And so I said, "You know what? If you need a friend, call me." And I did new hire training for many, many years and every time a new hire training, I'm like, "Call me. It could be tomorrow, it could be five years from now." And by the way, there were people years later that I'm using your open door policy you mentioned years ago, and sometimes people are just in a tough situation. I got a lot of, "Am I crazy, but this happened, my manager said this, what should I do?" Or other people saying, "I'm really not resonating with a product," or something like that. I realized something though is that a lot of people were asking me questions that I realized I was repeating the answer, which was, "Hey." People said, "I feel really stuck." They said, "I want to get promoted." Have you asked? You'd be surprised at how many people said no, or how many people said yes, and when I asked them how they asked, they didn't really ask. I realized that some of these lessons were really repeatable. My manager Boz said, "Write down what you repeat." I started compiling these things and I pulled together the stories of over a couple dozen women also and their lessons of how they succeeded in the workplace. And these were not all up into the right shiny, happy stories because there were a lot of people who faced a lot of circumstances. And the question about how they got there was that these are the ones who had the resilience to overcome and the lessons that they learned along the way. And so I wanted to share those stories and the lessons I learned as well. And so this book weaves that together. But I want to be able to hand people this book and say, "You know what? What you don't need is necessarily me asking you the hard questions. You should just read this," because I've coached over a thousand people, but I only have so much time. I talked to someone last night because my kids and husband were in bed and someone texted me and I said, "Sure, happy to do it." She reached out to me via LinkedIn. It was a simple thing, but I hope then I can increase the reach. Reach of a thousand people is incredible, but it's never going to reach 10,000, a hundred thousand people. I just don't have that kind of time or ability. And so really in tech it's all about scalability. You can write a beautiful email and one person reads it, but you can post a post and on your Substack and 150,000 people read it. It could go viral and even millions of people could read it. And that's the point is scalability. And so I wrote this book with all those lessons because I just think in some ways they're really obvious, and in some ways it's really important to remind ourselves. It's like eating right and taking care of your health. People said you should exercise and eat right. It's not like we don't know that, so they should sell notebooks about that, but instead this is a reminder that these are the things we need to do and here's a guide. So it's 10 New Rules for Women at Work and it's just really focused on specific rules, what other women have done to implement those rules, and how it really changed their career.

50:15When is it coming out and where can folks, can people preorder it yet or no?

50:22Yes. So it's pre-orderable on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and all the big sites, but also, we can send you a link for the show notes.

50:28Absolutely.

50:29And then also it comes out the beginning of August, August 9th, and so it's coming right up.

50:35Awesome. We'll revisit it when it launches. Is there a tactical tip you can share from the book for folks listening to this right now to give them a little peek at the kind of things they'll find in there?

50:47I touched on this a little bit earlier, is the unintentional ridiculous strategies. My friend Carol Isozaki teaches this. You don't go into a meeting thinking I'm just going to sit in the back and not participate. I'm just going to join the Zoom and not comment at all. I'm going to pretend I'm not even here. Nobody goes into a meeting doing that, but how many times do you leave a meeting having done just that? And so instead, really choosing intentionally, for everything you do, what is the output you want. In this meeting, I want to achieve X. Sending five seconds before we walk into a meeting and saying, "This is what I want to achieve and here's how I'm going to do it." And just thinking about that, that's just something that's so important and I think that we don't do that enough. And so instead, when you show up, really show up, or don't go, don't be a free rider. And I think that's something which how many Zoom meetings do you drift off in? You're there but you're not there. How many times do you go to a meeting but you're mentally checked out. Instead, when you go be 110% of yourself really show up and be there. I think that's one of the things that I see, which is if you are going to do anything, make sure that it's worth your time. And if you don't, it's totally okay to say no.

51:54I like the option of not going. There's so many meetings people have and it's like important to just recognize you don't have to go to every meeting, it's fine. You got other work to do.

52:05Absolutely. Pick the things that you really care about, and it is absolutely okay to say no.

52:09Awesome. I definitely want to get to Facebook Marketplace questions, but one last question while we're on this topic is Women in Product, which is an organization that I believe you co-founded and you're on the board and you run. And it's such an awesome organization that I look for every opportunity to collaborate with, we've been doing partnerships on meetups and be giving away subscriptions. I'd love to just get an overview of what this organization is, what kind of work it does, and then just how folks can get involved if they're not already involved.

52:36Women in Product was born when I was at Facebook. We actually had less than 10% women product managers, but I started out my career at PayPal. The head of product was woman, the head of product at eBay was a woman. A lot of the directors at one point, Amy Klement, who was the VP of product at PayPal, 100% of her direct staff who were product managers. All the product directors were women around her table. And when I went to Facebook, I was really confused, what happened to all the women? And in fact, I'm going to actually enter through product marketing and some of the most successful PMs at the company. Naomi and Fiji also came in through product marketing. We could not be product managers at a company where we eventually we not only ran our own product teams, but also engineering. We were just wondering what happened. One of the things that we did was because we wanted to recruit more women product managers and we wanted to network with more women product managers, we started doing these dinners, and we hosted these dinners for years. Our first dinner was years before we started Women in Product in 2016. The dinners started maybe in 2012. And for years, we would host quarterly dinners. We'd invite everyone we knew, we'd invite other people to invite other people, and we would just get together and talk and connect and get to know each other and so many friendships were born of that. And then one night we were thinking, were talking about who was going to Grace Hopper. We said, "Why don't we have a PM conference of our own?" And suddenly a group of strangers at a dinner said, "We're going to start our own conference." I don't know, it's pretty crazy to do that. But we got a group together and a lot of those women are still on the board. And we started a conference. I remember when we were putting together this conference, a lot of the event planners that were helping us from Facebook were like, "You shouldn't do a conference. You're not going to have anyone who wants to come. Maybe you should just do an evening event or something." But at that point, we had announced it, so we were committed. So when we opened up registration, almost 4,000 people applied for 300 slots and we thought, and I remember Ami Vora saying, "That's what product market fit looks like, and what do we do now?" One of the things that we needed to do was to first put on a conference, we had no idea how to do it. We had no organization, we had nothing. And I just remember thinking, this is amazing. There's so much hunger for this. So we started a Facebook group and we just saw women just starting the communities form around it. We didn't do that much, but people would find each other jobs, they would coach each other for interviews and they would help each other and network. And that's really incredible about these communities is they're organic? Very little that we did and we continue to put on events and now we have chapters in two dozen cities, which you talked about partnering with. These are women who volunteer, really put together a community in their local area to support each other, and it's just been an incredible journey. We started it because we wanted women to be able to connect and build community, but the ultimate goal is to have more women in product management, because what happens was the reason that companies like Facebook and a lot of other tech companies didn't have a lot of women and that we lost so many women was that a decision was made 2004 to require a computer science degree to become a product manager. And only 20% of computer science degrees are actually earned by women in America. And so a lot of women, including myself and a lot of the people I mentioned, couldn't get the next job because we didn't have a computer science degree. And so we went into other organizations and other roles. And so you could be swept out a generation of women who were already pretty senior unless they were rising their own organization. And then with the next generation of women, product managers didn't start. We went from a field that was almost 50/50 to one that was drastically different, and now we're climbing our way back. I started the community because of that. I think that part of that work is to continue to bring more diverse voices to the table that we went from diversity, a lack of diversity and progress shouldn't be taken for granted. We're making our way back. We have worked with companies to drop the computer science requirement. We have encouraged companies to drop the technical interview. We encourage companies to create rotational programs or APM programs that people with very, very different backgrounds can enter. But you think about where product managers go, they eventually become the investors and founders. They become advisors, they become board members. And so if your pipeline for one group of people is much worse, you're just never going to equalize what products are built into the world because we don't have the diversity starting at the very beginning. And so that's the work that we've been working on over the last now six years it's been, and we have a lot of work ahead of us.

56:54I had no idea that that requirement was such a big component of the lack of diversity in product, wow. What can companies do if they're finding it tough to have a diverse PM team? I imagine step one has dropped that requirement, don't expect your PMs to be technical. Is there something else that you'd recommend?

57:11We actually went through this at Facebook. I was leading the recruiting and I was working with the recruiting team, so I was the PM advisor for the recruiting efforts. First, dropping the computer science or technical degree and seeking out people from a broad background because I've seen some of the most successful PMs do not have a technical background or any type of background like that, but could be incredible leaders. Second is not having a technical interview and not requiring, not having engineers ask about that. The third thing though was actually the way the interviews were conducted, the way that bias works is that one of the things we did, we used to have is something called a futurist interview. And we found out that the futurist interview was actually not correlated with success of the PM at Facebook, but the futurist interview favors those who are willing to riff on the future. However, people who are minorities and women tended to be more realistic because they tended to be hired based on the realism of their plans and how concrete they were. And again, it was not that the company was intentionally doing anything, it was just the way that we realized it wasn't even correlated with success, and so all we did is to drop that interview. The other thing I think companies need to do is, especially if you have low representation from women and minorities, is to, one thing I did personally was I volunteered to interview every single woman PM who came through the pipeline for years because there were only four of us. I was on every first person interview loop that they needed somebody. And it was because I read that this was from Google, I believe it was from Marissa at Google or something like that. It said something like, "If a woman is on the interview panel, the woman candidate is much more likely to accept the offer if they got one." And so I said, "Here's the thing. People drop out after the first round interview if they feel like these people are not for me." And so I made it a point to interview every single first round candidate that I could. And it was something I did behind the scenes, but as we brought on more women, a lot of them like, "Hey, I met you in the first round interview." And I realized it did mean something to some people. And so I do think there's a lot of these studies that have shown how to build more diverse workplaces, but sometimes we forget, just like we have signals on our products, we should look at signals in our interview process too.To build a great product team, it's the same way you build a great product and it's really looking at the signs, where are you failing? Who are the people who are turning away? You don't look at who made it through, you look at who dropped out, why is there a blocker for this person? Do we lack product market fit with this group? And if we treat it that way, I think we would look at the problems very differently.

59:39Such good advice. Knowing how hard it is to do interviews and how time-consuming that is, that is an incredible commitment that you made to be in every first set of interviews with every female PM. And that was at Meta, right? Where they're probably interviewing hundreds of people a day.

59:56This was earlier on, but yes, it was when they only had a few hundred PMs, so it was a little bit easier. And today it's like there's many more people.

60:04Wow, okay. I want to make sure we chat about Facebook Marketplace, which I keep talking about that we will. And so just to set this up, you basically help come up with the idea for Facebook Marketplace, build the team, build the product, launch it. Now it's got over a billion monthly active users as far as I know, probably a lot more, I think that was the last public number. You basically smoked Craigslist, which nobody has done before. And like I said, I've used it many times. It's amazing, it just works. It's like what you want Craigslist to be. Just a couple of questions here. One is I imagine it was really hard to incubate and protect this really big bet that early on was not showing any promise and everyone's like, "No way. This is going to work. We're not like a e-commerce company. We're a social network." How did you keep it from being deprioritized and resources being pulled away in the early days before [inaudible 01:00:58] promise? Because there's a lot of PMs that are trying to do that for their own project, I imagine.

61:01So one of the things that was really important early on was that we didn't go full bore. We actually had a small team, but the leaders actually worked on other products, and I think that helped a great deal because you don't put a giant target on something. When you incubate something, you want to start small, get product market fit, then double down and so on. And I think sometimes some companies are like, "We're going put 100 people on X." I'm like, "No, no, no, don't do that," because when it fails, it's so painful. Instead, actually start with two people, five people, get there. A startup doesn't start with a hundred people at $100 million worth of funding. It's the scrappiness, it's the seeking product market fit that makes it successful. And it's absolutely true in a company as well. I think sometimes you have the luxury of too much resources is actually a curse because it also becomes a target. And so instead, the way we did it was with small teams testing out different things. I think the other thing was really the user research was incredible in this product. We would go around and say, "We need to build Marketplace. Here's what we're going to do." And so many people are like, "Why would you buy anything on Facebook?" And what we realized is there were two groups of people, people who want stuff on Facebook, people who never could see anybody doing it. I realized the difference is because I'm a mom and I was part of all these mom groups, and these mom groups were people buying and selling things in the local community. So mom sale groups, I bought a ton of things. I sold our stroller, our crib. Before the open Marketplace, these secret mon groups would crop up and people would just trade products with each other. And I think that that was the real power, which was the community built the product first, got to product market fit. And then we came in and our question was how do we take these local communities that were closed? And they were very close to outsiders, for example. So you couldn't get distribution. So yes, if it was a mom group, you could sell a crib or stroller, but you couldn't sell, for example, a car because the probability another mom needed the exact car you had at that moment was very low, so we needed liquidity across a broader range of groups. And so what we were solving was we actually had plenty of supply, but the demand was very fragmented. And so we needed to think about actually how to drive demand liquidity. And that was a lot of the work we did in the early days. It wasn't a success in the beginning, it was a long road. And part of it was that we were just not a commerce company, and that made sense, but there was a lot of organic behavior, but how do you really harness it? How do you actually pull it together? And there was also, frankly, I mean with every marketplace you go through periods where there's fraud, where there's things that might be inauthentic, where there's a lot of issues, and you need to make sure you put all those things in place, and so we had to do a ton of the groundwork as well. Something that the company had not been used to before, but as we built it was really the stories of the people whose lives were changed that really changed people's minds. People building businesses on Marketplace, people sharing stories of how this was. There was a woman, Clara's Greenhouse, she built a business, she's deaf, she works in the government in DC, and she built a community around plants and she sells cuttings of her plants, and teaches people to bring plants into their lives. She became a wild success locally and sold thousands and thousands of plants, and her son is her translator. And it's just so incredible to hear these stories and we would amplify those stories and say, "You know what? These are the people we're serving." And so internally, it was really about communication as I said earlier, how incredible important that is. Externally, it was really about drawing people in, having them come in and actually explore the product. We sold our car on Marketplace within 24 hours. Literally, my husband listed it. He got so many contacts, he's like, "How do I turn this off?" He met two people, second person picked it up, we sold our minivan and it was magical. And what was really incredible is he had gotten a quote from CarMax or something like that, and we sold it for way more, and it was a very smooth transaction. He's like, "This thing really works." I was thinking, I work on this. Of course it works. But I think it's that kind of thing where people then the word of mouth read, "Hey, if you want to sell a car, you should go here," because there's trust too. People were like, "Well, I don't want to meet a stranger," but he has this profile picture was just him and our daughter. They were going to meet near our house. And it was really that trust element that was really different than other marketplaces too. It's not anonymous, it is like human beings, but people are coming and look at furniture at your house. They're test-driving your car, in your car. And so that trust that Facebook offers, which is how long you've been on the site, whether you've changed your profile pictures eight times, whether your pictures for your kids, what you've talked about, all of those things, the things you have in common, friends, I've bought things from mutual friends it turns out. That level of trust was something that was a killer piece of the product that most people didn't understand. It was real identity, authentic people, and real connection.

65:42I love so much of this advice. Keep it small, don't create a target on your back, share stories of success internally because just people always, I don't know, don't take one-off anecdotes that seriously as evidence, but they're so powerful in getting people to just buy into an idea early on. And so that makes a lot of sense. With the success of it, you mentioned a lot of things. I was going to ask you just what was core to the success of this thing and trust? You talked about also imagine just the fire hose of traffic that Facebook brings and being in the Facebook app, but I imagine that also has downside of people are fighting for that real estate and trying to be like, "What the hell is Marketplace here versus my product?" So that's probably a blessing and a curse. Is that what you found?

66:25Yeah, I mean, so here's the thing. The Facebook app is about relevance, right? And so you want to show Marketplace the people who want it, and you want to show video for the people who come for the videos and games with people who want to play games. And it was constantly like, "How do you balance all those things?" And so our team was just really incredible at saying, "You know what? We want the audience of the people who come here for this. We don't want to take up space for no reason." And so the team was very focused on that, making sure the audience was targeted and that the people who logged it got access to it all the time. But yeah, I mean in some ways it was a blessing and a curse, but what made Marketplace successful was that it was part of Facebook, that the real identity, the history you had with the company, the relationships you had. A different Marketplace would be very difficult to build separate from all of the assets of what Facebook is, which is the history of 10 years that you've spent on the site doing other things and your access to your messaging history and your access to your friend graph, who you have in common. And so those types of things are absolutely what made it successful, which is also why it's not a separate app. People always ask, "Well, why is Marketplace not a separate app?" And that's why, because it's so embedded in the fabric of the community that you actually live in, that you're already in those community groups. You already know these people. And so it's really a very different take on the marketplace.

67:42What an incredible product. Imagine it's in the hall of fame of most impactful products in the world, a billion people are using it. How many products have gotten to that scale? It's unbelievable.

67:54Yeah, it was an incredible team and incredible experience to really build something that touched so many people's lives. People made a living on the platform, people supplemented their incomes and were able to really build businesses. That was what we were really excited about, was that people could get financial independence at a time when things are tough, you can actually build something. And it became a platform for a lot of people to really build their business all around the world and I think it's in over 100 countries.

68:27Wait, is it more successful than eBay right now? I just realized that you worked at eBay and basically disrupted eBay.

68:34Well, it's different because a lot of it's local community, so it's local businesses, local people trading. And the other part, I mean, I would say absolute numbers, sure, but it's because there's access to the Facebook, the Facebook community. But more than that though is that it was less about the absolute dollars. It was really about are you actually, because a lot of the people by the way, were very mission driven on the team, like being able to sell products that you no longer needed or no longer use and not create more greenhouse gases by getting it from the store, baking things brand new, but instead actually upcycling, recycling, reusing was part of the ethos of the team. When we talk about success, how do you define success? We define success was how many people were getting value out of this? Not necessarily GMV, not exactly. I don't know what the numbers are today, I left almost 18 months ago, but I think that the most important thing, our North Star was not necessarily just dollars, it was really are we helping the world? Are we connecting people? The mantra of the team was connecting people through commerce.

69:35I love it, I love the product. Okay, final question. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, learn more, and how can listeners be useful to you?

69:46I have a Substack, debliu.substack. And on Twitter, DebLiu_, as well as on LinkedIn, so you can find me on LinkedIn as well. I do post there, and I'm on Instagram. I can send links for your show notes for all of those things. One thing I would love to see is I would love to see your listeners talk more about their experiences, to share more about their experiences because I think we learn more when we have conversations and we're open. I know we do that in smaller communities, but I do wish more people shared a little bit about their product journey and some of the challenges that they have because it's through those stories that we can learn ourselves. I learned so much from people. I follow for example, Will Lauren. He said, "Deb mentioned I was one of her favorite newsletters," but here's the thing, he was an RPM on my team a few years ago, but he's willing to put himself out there and learn in public. And I love that about people like that, and I hope more people are willing to do that.

70:38Would you encourage people to tag you in their sharing if they post something on say, LinkedIn or Twitter?

70:43Absolutely. I read what people tag me on. I absolutely am on those platforms, and I want to learn more about your experiences too.

70:49Awesome. Deb, this was so much fun. I learned a ton. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.