Succeeding as an introvert, building zero-to-one, and PM’ing your career like a product | Deb Liu

you're VP of product at Facebook you're director at eBay and PayPal you're on the board of into it you've been the CEO of ancestry now for the past three and a half years this a career path that a lot of people dream of you know some of the best PMS I have ever worked with are terrible PMS for their careers they just Drift from job to job hey should I take this role or this role like how do I think about this but if I said you had to write a spec for your fear what

does success look like how are you going to get there you're with this awesome post about introverts and how hard it is to be successful as an introvert the workplace is really favor people who can speak up it looks like self-promotion I wouldn't want to do that because of self-promotion but instead what if I called it educating about all the great work your team has been doing helping people see why your team should get more resources you have to actually share what you do is there something that you believe that you think most other people

don't believe the most important career decision you make is who you marry is this person lifting you up or pushing you back you will have a much more successful career if your home life is in Balance it's like a yin and a yang [Music] today my guest is Deb Lou Deb was vpf product at Facebook where she spent over 11 years and while they created and led Facebook Marketplace which is now used by over 1 billion people monthly she also led the development of Facebook's first mobile ad product for apps and its mobile ad Network

also built the company's games business and payments platform including Facebook pay prior to Facebook she was director at both PayPal and eBay she's on the board of in and for the past 3 and a half years she she's been the CEO of ancestry I actually generally have a rule of no CEOs on this podcast but to me Deb is a great exception because she is a product person at heart in our conversation Deb shares a ton of tactical career advice including why resilience is so key to Career Success how to PM your career like you

PM your product how to be successful in business as an introvert what she's learned about building multiple billion doll zero to1 businesses within a large company like Facebook and so much more deis so full of wisdom and I'm really excited to share her insights with more people if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube it's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously with that I bring you Deb Lou Deb thank you so much for being here welcome to the podcast

it's wonderful to be here Lenny it's wonderful to have you here you have had such an incredible career you're VP a product at Facebook you're a director at eBay and PayPal you're on the board of in you've been the CEO of ancestry now for the past three and a half years this a career path that a lot of people dream of and honestly just like one of those roles is a dream for a lot of people and so I wanted to start with just uh this question and I want to see where the conversation takes

us if you could give one specific piece of advice to someone that's looking to do well in their career or to do better in their career based on what has worked well for you would that be always be learning and I tell this to everybody so I often tell people someone who's always learning is always going to exceed someone who's the expert today you're going to find people you know the one thing about school is that we go to school and there's such a thing as getting 100 on the test a perfect score on the

SAT graduating with a 4.0 well there's nothing like that in careers right we think it's actually a nonlinear experience and there's always someone better than you at speaking or presenting or strategy or execution but if you're always learning learning from the best getting feedback you're always going to get better every single day and that's what I have always held which is each job I took I didn't necessarily qualify for it I wasn't necessarily the very best at it and so I became a student of being better at that job and once I mastered that I

was a student for something else and something else and something else and so I always balanced learning and impact which was you could have the most impact the job you know the best but then you stop learning and if you're learning all the time you not necessarily having impact so how do you keep going back and forth and back and forth so that you're not going straight up a ladder you're actually lading back and forth into different things where you're having an amazing time where you know everything and then you're the Newbie again and learning

new things and you're incorporating what you used to know into what you're learning and the impact that you have today and so on and so forth this episode is brought to you by hendo the only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application tired of bouncing around multiple tools to uncover what's really happening inside your product with all the tools you need in one simpl to use platform pendo makes it easy to answer critical questions about how users are engaging with your product and then turn those insights into action also you can get your

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experiences or just like how do you actually do this so someone's listening they're like what how do I learn what am I learning well start with my career in Tech so I had um I had worked in Consulting before business school I went to Stanford for business school I came out to California didn't know that much about tech but I really loved using eBay so I interned there my fresh my first year in um business school and then when it came to finding a job I really wasn't sure what we wanted to do but we

wanted to move back to the the east coast and so I wasn't looking and I could find a job like it was really hard it was 2002 and so I kind of ran into Tim wiel and Katherine woo so they Katherine Woo is from Airbnb as you might know her and uh Tim wiel put together the PayPal Mafia he was the recruiter for PayPal went to this table and I said absolutely love PayPal use it all the time I'm a big seller on eBay and he's like do you want a job I'm like no I'm

actually going back east and he like just come in and talk to us and so I said okay well what kind of jobs do you have and he's likei have jobs in product and I have jobs in marketing now I had taken a marketing class obviously in business school and I said I wonder what this other product job is so I look over at Katherine and I kind of seen her around Stanford before so she had she was a year ahead of me and I said well what do you do she said product I'm like

that sounds good I'll do that and that's actually how I fell into product management well I actually and I'm embarrassed to say faked my way through those interviews because during the interviews they're like well what would you build and since I was an avid user of both products I could really richly say here here's the product feed feedback I have here are the new products you should build here's my feedback on things that we should be doing differently and they said congratulations and they gave me the job and embarrassingly I went to the first day

of work and I said to Amy Clement who was the VP of product at the time and I said okay I literally have no idea what this product job is and she showed me the ropes and she was so incredible she actually showed me she said you know all those ideas you had all that energy you had around building those things we go do that let's go do it and I said well how do you do that and she said well you write down what you want to build and you work with the engineers to

do it and I just remember thinking this is crazy I have no idea what I'm doing and it was such an incredible Adventure though those first few years I just learned so much about the craft of building how to really think through product use cases How to Think Through what customers wanted not just the customer one myself but really what true customers and customer cohorts wanted and so it was really a time when I felt like I was really blossoming but I didn't come in with Mastery I came with a curiosity and I think that's

what made me a great product manager was that I didn't have a set way of doing things there wasn't some Playbook I was trying to play there wasn't some framework but instead I was willing to learn so one takeaway might be from this uh the phrase fake it till you make it uh any thoughts and just had to like I imagine many people right now are like I'm trying to get a job as a PM how do I do this that sounds great I'm going to pass this interview figure fig out the job as I

after I joined coming in with humbleness was really important but during the interview process actually I didn't realize this but they asked me questions as if I was a product manager as if I knew what I was doing and I think when you have passion around a product or passion around a company or around a business model or around something it shows and so it's not necessarily faking the enthusiasm or faking the idea that you want to work there but you know you don't have to know how to write the spec or PRD or briefings

or anything like that you don't know how to have know how to do customer research or do data analytics or read read you know read reports but instead show your passion around the product itself around the use case around the customer show who you are and why you care I think sometimes people just say well I want a product job but you know you have to be able to fall in love with the problem you have to fall in love not with the product but I said the problem right the use case what problem are

you trying to solve and if you can do that you can be a great product manager even without a lot of experience that's an awesome piece of advice so just like lean into the passion one first of all part of it is you have to be excited about the thing you're trying to work on or thinking about the company are thinking about joining sounds like that's a prerequisite here uh I we have a podcast episode with early LaVine who has a whole book called fall in love with the problem which is all about that same

idea actually for startup Founders I'll have to read it yeah he he always wears a shirt fall in love with the problem not the solution yes yes that is absolutely the most important skill for a product leader something else I've heard you talk about in terms of of something that contributed to your success is is uh being okay with failure and just bouncing back quickly versus avoiding failure is that something that you come back to a lot well here's what I noticed about everybody and you know I've coached a ton of people in my life

I have managed big teens and you know the people who are most successful are not the people who had no failures who who would Liv Charmed lives and had up into the right careers and got promoted every cycle the people who were most successful were the ones who actually threw through adversity learned to turn stumbling blocks into Stepping Stones they were the ones who got hard feedback and then came back stronger because now they learned what to do differently they're the ones who products failed but they said you know what I'm going to turn this

failure into success I'm going to take those lessons and make this company stronger the on who you know when you live a Charmed product life you always work on everything that's easy you don't actually you know trees are strong because they Bend in the wind because they're tested because it's cold because that's windy because there's conditions and that's how a tree goes grows strong and and you know tall over many generations and I think sometimes we think oh yeah you know I wish I lived a term life and that is not what we want you

want to have enough adversity that you learn to overcome so that you can build stronger over time and build resilience in your career and I've seen that so much which is the best product leaders I ever worked with are the ones that have the toughest stories that had the hardest feedback but also the ones who were able to bounce back quickly and make it happen we have a segment on this podcast called failure corner where people share a failure they went through kind of along the same lines and something they learned from that experience is

there an example of that from your career where a failure made you stronger yeah I remember um there was a job that I really wanted at Facebook and I'd been there for a long time I had been you know leading different teams I was a VP of products and then GM and there was a job there was one job that I never got to do so I got to do all the jobs I wanted and Mark gave it to someone else and I told him at the time when he gave it to the first person

who was amazing at it I saidou know if this job were open I'd like to be considered for it the job opened up later gave it to someone else and I said to Lark again like I really wanted that job and he said not only well I'm not give you that job you know I'll you'll never have that job at this compan what and he didn't say it harshly he didn't say it but he was giving me feedback about something which he did not see me in that role in a role that I really wanted

and I had to decide each time like what do I do with this information right this is a my dream job I actually I decided I was going to turn the job I had and the job I wanted and that's a choice right I could have said you know what I can't have that job I could go do some something else but I didn't I took the job I had with the team I had and I turned it into a thing that was going to be something we wanted and so I think sometimes it's not

you know I think that that experience was a very humbling experience because you know to be told no and then to say that this never happen was really hard but at the same time it was a reminder that you're not right for every job even if you think you are and that you can't take the raw materials of what you have and turn it into what you want are you able to share what those jobs were that you wanted to get that you never got I never actually shared it uh publicly but it's something which

you know I had always had a role that where I I did new things for the company and there was a role where it was running something which you know more of an existing business but I had always been kind of the innovator the new the new stuff person right I had taken over so many new things and so you know maybe that wasn't the right thing at the right time for me but it was something that was really incredible and a turning point for me a great segue to an area I wanted to spend

some time on which is building zero to one stuff within a larger company so from what I can tell you built two billion dooll businesses within a large company Facebook Marketplace and then the ads platform within Facebook and maybe more I don't know uh the payments stuff the games I don't know maybe there's billions of dollars there even know about and this is very rare and very hard and it's something we talk a little bit on this podcast just the skills to build something new and I know with Marketplace it was not something people believed

in for a long time it took a lot of work to convince people to actually give it a shot so I guess the question here is just what have you found are key tactics to start something new and allow it to continue to exist and get to a place where people start to believe it what what has worked for you so first I didn't build the ads platform actually built the first direct response ad product the company overhead um but we'll talk about how that led to why direct response is a vast majority of the

ads U revenue for the company but one thing that it was really interesting is that I just you know I really saw my opportunity in Facebook to be somebody that zigged when other people zagged like there were amazing people who did a lot of the really core products right working on feed photos like videos and I you know I came in actually on the payments team and we worked on payments and eventually build games which was the first billion dollar business it was very successful uh we worked with the likes of all the game companies

that were on kind of the canvas games platform and it was just an incredible opportunity to start from scratch and build something really cool we built Facebook credits which eventually um became kind of the fa Facebook payment system and you know then from there on I built the first direct response ads product and again leveraging the skills that we had we had a lot of relationships with game companies because of my time and payments and so we just said hey look what ad product do you want and they said actually our biggest challenge like your

biggest challenge is the shift to mobile build us a mobile acquisition engine and we said that's doable and at the time the company was very brand oriented most of the ads in the actually almost all the ads on the platform were brand and we were not even on the ads team so we actually worked on this team called the platform team and we said okay we'll build an ads product for the Facebook feed the new mobile Facebook feed and suddenly became a billion dollar business within about 18 months which was such an incredible Journey um

we worked on the um advert the mobile advertising platform so basically the mobile ads U Network that was a great experience and so each time I worked on something it was just I the thing that you have to remember is the failure rate for something like this is very high you know you start something and the amount of iteration people think oh yeah it's very easy start something and it's linear because you have all the resources of this company behind you but actually everything in a company is like let's do the most important thing these

are kind of seeds and we'll just let them and so if you do that you have to know that you don't get a lot of resources you get a lot of attention and I appreciated that because I think I work best when people aren't there is not a lot of scrutiny I think sometimes large companies they say well this Innovation team and then they check in on them way too much they're like week to week progress where are you going what's your strategy but so much as you know of of building something new is the

iteration process it's the failing a lot we actually tested fif like five or six versions of the ads product before we got got it to take off and it took months and then we were on the verge of death multiple times in fact I actually went back to run the payments team while I was working on that product because the team we had gathered still want to continue working on it but I needed a second job back on the payments team because they asked me like this we don't think this thing is going to work

you should go run your old team again and I thought well I will do both and so I did both for a while until it really took off and I think the the thing that I think a lot of large companies don't realize is that you can love something to death right and say with every new product I'd rather kind of do it out of the L light do it with Lim minimal resources and have the freedom to fail because success and failure really is you know in startups failing failing fast is really important or

succeeding fast right it's the long slog that makes it really hard and in a company you end up getting cut if you're the long slog product and so being able to just say you know what we're pruning this we're doing the next thing the next thing and then having the time to iterate and grow is really critical so as a leader trying to do this and create space for this is there something you've learned about how to allow for don't over scrutinize us don't look at us too carefully uh we don't want to be in

the Limelight don't put too many resources on this yet is it just like hey Mark here's what I think imagine it's not as easy as that there's like a lot of you know influence and that kind of work is there anything any tactics there you could share to create this sort of environment I think the most important part of the environment is really patience patience with and you know again this is a portfolio strategy and I tell every PM who you know I used to do a new Hier PM class and I said look a

lot of you are going to go into the core product and your job is to grow X by three to 5% every six months right like growing you know engagement or growing sessions or maybe growing video views or whatever your metric is you're trying to grow something 5% and then you know you you you exceed expectations and I said and then a bunch of you are like like I want to do something new I want to build something from scratch and I said by the way a very very successful company for a new set of

products has a 50% hit rate so half of you are going to come back in a year and have a different job because that did not work out do you have the resilience to do that and I think somebody you know you enter a large company you're e By the way you can have an amazing career building core products like that is a incredible journey within because you learn so much about the mechanics of what that takes and yet at the same time I found a lot of energy from doing something that someone hasn't done

before and so I really enjoyed the hey this thing could fail let's pivot let's try to figure out let's prune this let's try that and you know not everything I did there succeeded but you know a lot of the things that are lasting the Lasting products are ones that gotten really big and so for me it was a greater reward and it it made a journey so much more interesting but for others I think you know work on the core product learn the skills it is absolutely respectable as well but if you choose to be

the person who works on Innovation new products expect in a year you might literally have nothing to show for it but the lessons that you learn and I think those lessons are really precious and we often underestimate that too along those lines do you think it's a good career move to do a zero to one thing within a bigger company or is it often a bad idea do you have any advice there for folks it depends it depends on your personality in the company so the one thing I realized about about my role was that

I did a lot of I I had like five different careers at the company over 11 years you know and so most people don't realize that when you work on new things you're constantly adding to your portfolio subtracting from it growing things pruning them and so you could just work on so many cool things except you know you're you're everything has similar kind of it's like it Rhymes but it's not exactly the same right so you learn the lessons of how to get things done how to get resourced how to get support when the product's

not working how to you know not get pruned in the next calling and those are really really important skills but I think for people who are just starting out the career it is a very high risk thing to do so if you're very early in the career I encourage people just learn the core skills first you can learn the core skills when there's a lot of stability this product is growing you know X percent like 5% you're going to grow at 10 that's amazing like that is because you are there you're going to change the

trajectory of the product or this thing is you know this thing has aund you know 100,000 users you're going to get it to 200,000 like that those are the kinds of things that are you know going to be successful for you and you can put on your resume but I think it reaches a point in your career where you have to decide when am I going to take the big swing because the big swings are the things that you can you know you write your career stories about they're not just I move this metric X

but I changed your trajectory in this way and so the big swings though have a lot of failures along the way and so you have to understand you're you're making trade-offs in that and I encourage everybody to take some time two three years in their career when they're ready to the big swing where if it doesn't work you know if it works you run the team you run this amazing product if it doesn't work you can always go back and go back to the core products it's interesting how your strategy here is very similar to

a product portfolio strategy where as a team you should have a few big bets and then a lot of incremental stuff and it reminds me you wrote this awesome post called you're in control of your career and the argument in your post is you should PM your career the way you PM your product so there's a lot of synergy here so maybe just diving into this post and advice around this how how should someone be pming their career the way they PM a product what's your what's your take there by the way for your PM

audience I want to say this which is a lot of the greatest PMS are the worst PMS for their careers they love products they love the craft they love you know the customer research the data they have plans they have timelines and then when it comes to their career they have none of those things they just Drift from job to job hey should I take this role or this role like how do I think about this and and I see that but if I said you had to write a spec for your career what does

what's in there right what are what are your Milestones what are the skills what are the features that you want to have of your career you know how are you going to get there what does success look like you actually have metrics for your product and yet you don't have metrics for your career and so often I often coach um I coach a lot of people and when I coach them I ask them well where do you want to see yourself in five years where do you want to go and half the people have no

idea and I think that's really tragic because you know when you PM your career it's about intentionality but I'll tell you the story of my career and how I was The Accidental pm and then eventually I told you how I accidentally fell into PM but also fell into so many of the things that happened in my PM career and if I had to go back I would think much more deeply about what I want to accomplish so I ended up at PayPal it's working for a guy named Dave Lee who reported to Amy Clement and

then you know he left and so she offered me his role I had only managed people for like I don't know 15 seconds I was two years out of business school and I was definitely not qualified to do his job he was a director of product I was even a director and I was running the the team for eBay so basically the pay PayPal vert part of eBay which is basically half the company's revenues and and profits totally unqualified I ended up in this job and you know I do a good job I end up

you know doing it for several years I I build up the team and we have a great relationship with eBay you know that our team was very close and we were able to actually build something really lasting that worked really well and then I had a baby and so this happens in a lot of women's careers I was turning 30 I had my son and you know I had to leave for you know six months and so I handed my my product to my successor Mike wo and he ended up taking over and he did

such a good job I was gone I didn't want to displace him when I got back so I thought well I'll go look for another role I couldn't really find a product role I liked I mean because there weren't that many product director roles and so I ended up um in corporate strategy so I worked for the amazing Reeve who was CEO at the time time he's since passed and I wrote his speeches worked on strategies I worked on digital goods and um charity and he ended up building that into a vertical for the company

so charity social commerce and and um and digital goods and I thought okay this is an interesting job so I create the job have a couple product managers wasn't really sure where this was going and then one day I was like you know what I'm not feeling this I have a child at home I just I got into the you know what Cheryl sber calls that kind of like between kids situation where I was bored of my job so I go to I go to the VP I was working was working one of the VPS

I worked with and I resigned I said I'm leaving Tech just I'm going to stay home and and maybe start something small and uh he convinced me to hold off and he said I'll find you a job he calls me a week later and he said found you a job with Stephanie telenius leading the buyer experience at eBay product and I said oh that sounds interesting so I said sure as you notice I do not have a plan I'm just drifting as I'm so fortunate that I had amazing mentors who gave me opportunities to but

you know end up working for you know Greg fans and Stephanie tus at eBay for two years I led the buo experience we did some really good work there and then you know I went on attorney leave again and I get a call from a friend my old engineering manager from PayPal hey I'm at Facebook you want to come you can't come into product you need to C us degree for that but you know we have a product marketing job open I was like sounds good dro in Facebook and so again no idea what I'm

doing back in product marketing so I spent a few years doing that eventually was invited into product and you know so so on and so forth and each job that came along was organic but also kind of accidental and I see that happen in a lot of careers which is my my story when you look back looks great right it looks like it all worked out but I had almost zero intentionality in any of these and I think that had I had more agency and I thought about what I wanted I could actually measure is

this the thing that would get me further or not I ended up extremely lucky but not everybody does and so I think having a plan allows you to compare every decision it's all like when you gra you know when you're offered a an admission to college you're looking at three different offers maybe you know with financial aid or not and you can make a decision oh they're offering me this department but I can't get into this you know and I'm gonna this is how far it is from home but jobs and roles are nothing like

that it's like someone calls you one day hey I'm at Facebook you want to come I'm like I'm actually you know on maturity leave and he's like just come talk to me I'm like why not and you know you end up dropping into different parts of your life and I think sometimes by by saying here's where I want to go and here's how I want to get there you can have such a better career and so I do encourage everybody to do this and to think about what does success look like in five years and

how far am I from that and am I heading in the right direction what's interesting is I also had a similar path to you where it was I had zero plan or intention or goal and also just follow things and things worked out I wonder how often that happens and I wonder if this idea of having intention and plan in a road map is something you do if things aren't working out because maybe thing maybe maybe there's some good to not overthinking it and just following P I don't know well I think the problem is

this with you and me Lenny is that hindsight bias is a problem we made it because we weren't intentional in a lot of ways but for how many people is that true right for how many people who aren't you you don't have a plan and you get there I always tell people you know if you if you aren't sure what your destination is that's definitely where you're going to end up but if you actually aim in the right direction you can shape your learnings you can shape the roles you take you can shape your you

know your skills towards the place that you want to go when you talk about getting this offer from Facebook usually those are like you have three days to decide yes it feels like that's when those the thing you've done ahead of time of here's what I want would be most helpful and also also I think the thing about job opportunities in particular is they tend to come serially you know it's only you present these offers it's like one role is so different from another you know and they often don't happen at the same time they

might say well you have to decide in two weeks and then you say well there's this other company I'm talking to and there you get a lot of pressure to say yes to this versus this and to really having a a measuring stick is this getting me closer or further away from where I go can allow you to actually take serial decisions making to a place where you're measuring against a long-term goal I did a Meditation Retreat once and when you're meditating there's this uh kind of guidance of don't try too hard don't don't like

push yourself to go into a direction don't like oh this I'm not doing a good job I need to get to this enlightened state and instead their advice is just like push your cart in a direction and think about that's the direction you want to head but don't you don't need to like grasp on to here's what I need to here's why I need to land here's where I need to go and I wonder if just having a thought of here's where I want my career to go I want to be on boards in the

future I want to start a company in the future I want to become a designer in the future is like at least start there maybe just like a direction that you're heading yeah there's a there's a woman who I worked with in product and now she's a she's the founder very successful founder and she said to me I want to join the board of this Fortune 100 company she told me the company and I said okay that's a lot so she said how can I get there and I said first it's probably going to take

you 10 years cuz look at who's on the board I happen to know a couple people on the board and I said why don't I introduce you to one of them and they can tell you how to get there but the point is she knew where she wanted to go and she said I'm willing to take the first step today and I said first you've never been on a board you you were very successful but this is not you know you have not you know you there's so many steps before you get there it's like

before you go to Harvard you know you have to graduate from you know Elementary School to middle school you have to take the SAT you have to apply say I said let's start from the first step and let's break this problem down but I love that she knew where she wanted to go and she's like even if I don't make it there I'll be happier having made this journey and I love that for her and I think she's still earlier in her career she has so much time ahead of her but it's really incredible to

see her kind of on this path and to know that that's her dream and that I could help her a little bit along the way and it also relates very much to your idea of thinking of your career like like a PM thinks about their product where one of the tactics is to imagine the ideal scenario and work backwards from that versus like incrementally what's the next thing what's the next thing so in this case she was thinking here's where I want to head okay what's the next thing to get to that direction I love

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rise to the challenge learn how teams like Dropbox Ideo and orange theory trust webflow to achieve their most ambitious goals today at webflow most resonated with me was about introverts and how hard it is to be successful as an introvert and that basically you have to learn to be an extrovert as an introvert because in business extroverts are uh most valued can you just talk about kind of your Insight what you've seen around this and how and your advice to introverts like me about how to be successful in business like what you need to change

well first I love the book quiet by Susan Kane she talks about the power of introverts unfortunately the world doesn't see the way the world the way she does and I think that you know there is and I I wrote this post it was a secret bias no one talks about right which is the workplace is really favoring people who can speak up and I tell the story of somebody on my team who's just an amazing product manager and yet every time she came up for promotion or calibration people were like oh what did she

do and it was because she was not good at broadcasting or explaining what she does and I would take her to Executive meetings and she was really bad at answering questions or talking and so we would prep and prep and prep and I just knew her skills and I could see her every day moving the product forward but for some reason people you know because your peers also have influence over you know people's ratings their promotions and I was constantly just trying to figure out how to get them to see her Brilliance and I asked

her once I said you know like I notice that you never answer questions when we do these presentations she's said yeah because I'm a processor you know and by the time I processed I feel like you know the conversation has moved on and so you know I really feel like the worlds it's all built for somebody like her who's a brilliant product leader but people couldn't see it and I realized that so much of what product and and just general leadership is is not just doing the work but actually it's like it's not just having

the product it's having great product marketing to go with it let's call it that okay so I've been in products and I've been in product marketing right you make a light bulb but you're selling light and I I really think about how that she was like making amazing number of light bulbs she was was lighting up all the houses and but she was not marketing the light and I think that was the the thing that was really missing is that fair absolutely not there are a lot of people who are born introverted is it fair

that a product manager who isn't EXT in introverted is an extrovert is struggling with that no but that's the world we live in and so you know it's one of those things where you get to choose what you do first I think for the individual is realizing that you are your own best marketer you have to actually share what you do you know if a if a great product is out in the world but no one's told about it did it exist and to one of the things that's very important is really to get that

product marketing right the second part is we should change our workplaces so everyone can be successful and I think that that's a really important skill as more introverts get into leadership they need to actually change the world to make more space for people like them as well so one of the things that I found was you know in my leadership teams over the last several years we have this thing where we all vote but we vote offline in a document and we put a number in and then we put our comments in and that way

everyone has an equal voice in this document and then when we talk about it usually of course the extroverts speak first but you know everyone has a vote and we can actually see what people's point of views are and I love that I love that when you know there's something we used to do at Facebook is we used to go around in a circle and everybody would give their opinion in a meeting and I do that still today I ask every single person as a business leader at this company would you do this and even

I joke with our chief legal officer Greg Greg I say you know you are a business leader and the lawyer you can't just say well legal advis is X I'm like but what would you do and so nobody can nobody can take a backseat to decision-making everybody has a voice so there's so many of these kind of bias interruptor things that we can do to actually make the world easier for those who weren't speaking up and taking 80% of the air in the room and I do think that we have to craft a workplace where

everyone can do their best in the post you also talk about like as much as we want to change the way people run their companies and think I love your advice of like you also still have to learn how to speak up and act more extroverted even though it's not natural to you is that right I think we do a disservice when we say we're not good at speaking up because it's a skill like any other and if I told you the difference between your product being successful and not being successful is you giving this

presentation they're going to kill your product if you don't sell this to the executives you would figure out a way to stand in front of those Executives and defend the freaking he prodct but why aren't you doing that every day and I think sometimes we forget that not everything's essential as they're going to cut your product if you can't convince them to keep it but every day you're actually building credibility for your team getting more resources getting more people to talk about your product inside your company getting more press for the product outside all of

those things combine into momentum for your product and don't you want the best thing for your product in your customers and so if you think about it that way it's not well I'm uncomfortable I hear this a lot where people say well you know you wouldn't understand I'm an introvert and I'm like so so was I and but instead I just said okay this is a necessary skill and it's a learnable skill you don't have to be comfortable with it you don't have to love it but you just have to do it what about from

the another perspective of why people don't do this which is it feels like self-promotion and it feels like icky like I'm just sitting around promoting myself I want to be doing that anything there that helps people get over that piece well I just remember I was I was talking to this um ERG group and um I I was asking about that there was an upcoming calibration and you know self- reviews were due in a couple of days and I said well what are you doing for your self- review and somebody somebody raised their hand and

said well I'm really bad at self-promotion how what advice would you have for me and I said if you think your self- review is self-promotion you've already you're you're just not going to do a great job at it what if I called it educating your manager about all the great work your team has been doing what if I called it you know um helping people see why your team should get more resources suddenly you're cracking open you're changing you're changing the question right from oh I was self-promoting to actually I'm helping my team get more

resources and support and suddenly she was like oh yeah I never thought about it that way but I think often if you frame it one way it looks like self-promotion I wouldn't want to do that because of self-promotion but at the same time if it's education what if I said you know I was talking to a PM who's really incredible I've mentored him and sponsored him for a long time and I said I don't understand why you don't have more of a voice like you've learned so much about the craft you've done this at multiple

companies and he said he said exactly what you said which is I'm not really self-promoting and I said if you see it as self-promoting you will never do it and so let's talk about why you don't actually do this and he said I've seen a lot of people who are really great on LinkedIn write these articles but they nothing to back it up and I don't want to be like them and I said okay well you read my blog you know you follow me in LinkedIn do you think I have nothing to back back it

up and he's like no of course not and I said well then why do you put yourself in his category instead of mine and I think it was just a moment where we just came to an understanding where he in his mind was like I don't want that person that's an empty vessel that has like nothing no substance behind it and I said do you think the things I write have no substance and but it was an interesting conversation because he had taken this mantle that it was self-promotion and that behind what if people think

I have nothing behind it I'm like I know you have something behind this I have been your manager I have worked with you for many years but you see how just reframing it has really changed his way of thinking about it still working on him but I actually think he is so much to give and I think he has learned so much about the craft and I wish that more product managers feel comfortable that they have something to give to the world I think what you're saying right now will resonate with a lot of people

when they see people posting like I feel the still of just like I don't want to be this guy that's just posting nonsense on LinkedIn just to get likes even though it's kind of what I do now full-time hopefully it's not nonsense but it is all substance so we know the substance behind it but I I think there's like uh posting LinkedIn posting on Twitter it's just like there's like an innate um just doing this because I want to get attention when often and the way I started this is just like I things I've learned

that I think are useful I'm just going to put them out there uh so just to double click a little bit because I think this is a really powerful Point what actually have you found helps people get over that is it like someone like you in his Corner being like you have really great stuff to share you should actually do it don't be as worried as you as you think you might be is there anything else that works there actually what worked for me was I was working with BOS and I talk about our relationship

in my book um but I you know we we made a contract when I started reporting to him and BOS for those of you who don't know is currently the CTO of meta at the time he was the head of ads and and then our team moved into into his team and so I was reared into his his U organization and as I said you know U we did not have the best relationship before that and so we made a contract to work together and I had written like here's here's how I want you to

take care of my team here's how I want you to support our products and I wrote him like this long my part of the commitment and then he wrote back here's what I'm asking of you I want you to write and publish something every month and I was like what are you talking about like why would you say that and he said you have so much to teach people just do it and I said 'I don't really have that much to say and he's like just trust me on this you'll figure it out and so

his advice was write what you repeat if you say something more than once just write it down and then just you know then the next time someone asks you you can just hand them and he has a great blog if you haven't read it I just want thinking that is a weird thing for your new manager to say after you had a lot of conflict together before that but he took my contract which was by way he's like oh do you want to like codify this in some way I'm like no I just so but

every month from then on I would Lally just write something and it was my promise to him and I did it faithfully and I published it internally so I didn't publish it externally for a long time and then sometimes they would ask me if I want to publish it externally from the company and I would say yes and so I did it for years I reported to him for years and then you know we switched managers he moved over to reality labs and then I had a new manager and and I continued and I've continued

this you know then I started doing it publicly and then obviously I wrote a book and you know because of him and his encouragement it got me to a totally different place and part of it was just the commitment I now had accountability because I knew he was watching I'm not actually sure if he was actually watching every month but I felt the accountability to do this and I've done it every single month since so it's interesting that that's another example of your manager giving you the space slash forcing you to share publicly being a

really good lever to get someone over this fear I think sometimes just doing it gets you over the hum yeah like for example my friend Ami Vora she writes an incredible blog if you had not read herself stock you should but um she's an incredible writer she write all these things internally and I think you should publish this externally she has now she does that and it's really great and I think part of it was just seeing her just put it out there because she is one of the wisest career coaches that I have and

managers that I have ever worked with and say like you have so much to say and to share so to see it out there I feel like for years we all got the benefit of it because we knew her but you know the world was not getting the benefits so in some way just having accountability so we created a little accountability group to like help each other right and it was just a reminder hey did you do it you know and so I think it's sometimes what's necessary to get over that hump is either having

Soul en forcing you like your manager who you made a commitment to or just having a friend to say hey by the way where's this month's post those things matter because now you got over the hump of I have to do it and now it's just about how good you're gonna make it and how much time you're gonna put into it awesome advice and by the way folks don't know we've had both boss and iy on the podcast in the past yeah and uh and aren't they both amazing amazing and I mean episode is one

of the most popular episodes more popular than boss CTO of meta what do you who would have thought um she has a lot of coaching wisdom I think that everyone should hear yeah she's amazing she yeah she has a great substack we'll link to it again in the show notes we'll link to your sub as well please do go subst I want to move in a slightly different direction talk about growth for a little bit you have a really nice perspective on how to think about growth I think a lot of people think of growth

as like here's a Magic Bullet we're going to do this thing it's going to go wow we're going to win win and your approach is it's you talk about it's a game of inches growth is a game of inches can you talk about your perspective there yeah and you know sometimes we think it's like what is the huge step function but actually most companies are like we call it points of growth right it's like if you can move things 1% a little bit faster every single week think about the amount of growth you get at

the end and so it's not just you know okay what's going to get you the 3x you can get to 3x 1% at a time 5% at a time single digit growth and sometimes it is the small things that matter the most and so when we think about product L growth it's really about finding the the AHA moments the opportunities and sometimes opportunities are things that seem really silly I heard the story at Facebook that one of the big things was just adding the next to ads they put the word create an ad you know

was like one of the biggest growth drivers and that was it just putting a link because people just didn't know how to get to the ads flow and you know it was things like that where you can actually bend the curve of things choices that you make same thing you know each of the growth themes I've ever worked on it's like really the Small Things adding up it is a list we used to work on payments growth and we had a list of a hundred things we're working on hypotheses and then we would pick and

we would grow them by picking the first 10 and we would start working on them the next 10 the next 10 and we would go through these Sprint cycles and the same thing when we were growing the ODS product as well Marketplace each of them were just like one of the small things that add up to big things and I think sometimes we overthink it instead you probably have a hundred ideas and by the way it is absolutely okay if like 80% of them don't work I tell people like sometimes we we overthink as product

managers right if we just had the perfect plan the perfect battle plan but instead imagine you're a team and you can ship I don't know like let's say four things but what if you're a team that can ship 20 things with the same with a 20% success you get just as much outputs and yet you now have you know what doesn't work also what if you can move it from 20% to 30% suddenly six things work not just four things and so in the same amount of time you have all the lessons of what didn't

work plus you're getting 50% more output and so you're thinking about growth as this engine of it's a learning machine of what doesn't work what you reiterate on what you change and you're constantly getting better and better and better I think what you're saying will resonate with a lot of product people where there's always this like we're just doing a bunch of optimization increment work so sucks boring why would we let's take some big bets and uh in my experience and sounds like in your experience a lot of the Winds actually and Facebook is famous

for this just like const relentlessly looking for ways to grow grow like optimize optimize optimize because that's where a lot of growth comes from at the same time obviously you need to take some big bets and take some swings and look for step function changes but I guess if for someone that's just like I don't know is there any advice on just creating that culture of like it's okay to optimize for a long time there's a lot of opportunity optimizing is there anything you've learned there or is it just like bring in a Deb and

like it has to be a top down I treat growth like like let's say a product marketing team right it is an augmentation for a product that works so if you have a core product that works you have a team that's working on so for us at ancestry it's like search and hints or the core you know what what is the mechanics you want people to add you know people to their family tree you want them to add stories okay there's teams that make sure that the uptime is good that the hints are working the

search delivers and you need those teams you need those core teams kind of functioning but growth is a is is actually optimization on top it is making it so that you get to the search flow faster that hints are surfacing better that people are accepting them that if we put the button here versus here that people are going to discover things faster and so it's really taking the core engine and actually wrapping it around the user interface around the experience around the flows so that people can get to it faster they can have more satisfaction

they can have more and that's what I see growth as it's not the core product it is the cheering on top making that product more accessible and more usable and better every single day yeah kind of along these lines I think it surprised people to learn there's like at least a 100 people at our BNB just working on like pricing optimizing pricing recommendations there's like endless opportunity to just make all these core components of an experience better and better and better over time okay last thing I want to talk about and this is like completely

unrelated to everything we've been talking about mostly which is your 30 60 90day plan so you wrote this post a while ago just like here's a great 30 60 90day plan when you join a company and I've heard that many people use this it's really effective for helping someone onboard and be successful and I think it's mostly for exec or is this for just anyone joining a company it's for anyone I created it's actually when I joined ancestry because I hadn't started a real new job in 11 years and I thought I'm going to be

a student of how to land well so I read a bunch of things I read you know it's like and I decided I was going to adapt all of those things into a summary and then I was going to try it real time in my blog so in my blog I write here's what I'm gonna do and then I tell you what I did and how it worked and some things that and then I actually do a look back as to all the mistakes I made and so I kind of did this live it was

not kind of it was not planned quite as as well as I would thought but I put it together and I I wrote the 3060 90day plan and I have a template and it's really I always tell people like it's focused on listening and learning first and then doing and so that's the Crux of it which is in those 90 days it's like you know you got to get used to the environment you want to have some impact at the start you want to have a couple quick LS but you want to understand the lay

of the land and you want to listen because you're you know you have something to contribute but if you don't understand the language you don't understand the culture you might actually make huge mistakes and so for the first 30 days I did a listening tour listen to you know I talked to over 60 people in 30 days and then I summarized you know a state of the union here's what I'm hearing here are the challenges people feel like we're facing here here's what people's wish lists are and by the way one person sent me a

wish list of five things and about year I think it took me till a year or two to finish his five things and then I sent him a note I said by the way the first time we met these five things you wanted to see we just finished the last one and he's like I can't believe you remember but I took extensive notes and I summarized it and I think it's important because people want to hear that you hear them and you don't have to be you know a manager CEO to do that I think

people on teams often feel like there's no outlet for the things that they want to they want to say and I encourage especially product leaders especially if you're joining an existing team to listen really behind what people are saying you know and then offer to help them do one thing so especially when you're meeting with a new engineering team for the first time actually ask them like what is one thing I can do to help you this week I we say one thing it's limited this week so getting 50 new head count probably not going

to happen and it's like how can I give back and suddenly you're building a reciprocal relationship and so a lot of this 30 6090 day plan is really to help you find your footing and then to start having impact immediately say you join a company you're like I'm gonna do 30 days listening and then your boss is like no we need to ship stuff get on it ship this stuff is there any advice for trying to push back on that create space for listening when there's like deadlines things are on fire like start I encourage

everybody to get on the same page on this 30 69 day plan with their manager so actually don't just keep it to yourself share it with as many people as you can so I think it's very important that everyone sees what you're trying to accomplish and what your output is going to be because if you don't know the output is Success there the second part is you know with your manager say okay I would like to carve 20% of my time listening and I'm happy to do this work 80% of the time therefore you know

every morning from 9:00 to 10 I want to you know talk to somebody somebody in the organization just make sure he's like I will do a better job and have more impact if I have this time to make sure that you know I'm not accidentally making you know mistake or I don't you know I didn't get a chance I'm asking something of somebody but I've never met them and to really you know carve out space because it's really important once you're in it you tend people give you kind of the new person card for maybe

a month or two and then suddenly it's all the problems are your problems but what if you don't know what the problems are and so I always say you know diagnose before you treat so make sure you understand so that you can help and deliver what your manager is actually expecting you I'm looking at your template so just to uh share the bucket so first 30 days learning Focus second 30 days is aligning on vision for the future and the last 30 days of the 90 days is executing setting up like actually getting starting to

get stuff done awesome uh anything else along these lines of this the one thing about having a plan also is that you don't you don't feel rushed to you know do something that you're not ready for because I do think sometimes you feel like you need to have impact and I always say I always tell people like do something small like give back in some way so people see you making you know but when you actually reflect one of the biggest things I could do was actually reflect back to the organization here's what I heard

from all of you I'm listening I hear this and here's what I want to do about it and then in aligning it's like do we agree this is a set of problems we want to tackle and then on execution is like do we agree that this is how we want to move forward and I think that is such an important part of building building into a team you know when you enter an organization you're also entering a team and you're part you know you're part of a dance that's going around what role do you play

and people are dancing around you and if you if you actually make a mistake you could trip other people up as well so really kind of finding your place in the dance is really important and as a as a PM the way I always think about it is people don't will won't assume they should trust you like you're just this person that's coming in to kind of tell them what to do and so much of your first month two three is building that trust with people so that they can actually feel comfortable listening to your

guidance and not just like oh my God this person's getting my way and earning that trust you know sometimes people really you'd be really surprised a lot of people feel like they're they're not heard and even just coming in and listening is a trust building exercise such a good point as we wrap up our conversation just a couple more question questions here so first is I want to take us to contrarian Corner which is a segment on this podcast and my question is just is there something that you believe that you think most other people

don't believe something that you think is a contrarian perspective so I don't know if this is a contrarian perspective but I tell um I go to speak in a lot of um universities so I speak at Stanford I'm going to speak at Duke and I always tell people especially young people the most important career decision you make is who you marry and it's not something we think that much about especially I started dating I met my husband I was 18 my first weekend in college started dating when I was 19 I we had no idea

what our life was going to be like and yet every single day like this week we had our board meeting I was in Utah the whole week I come home and you know he's taking care of everything right and it's that you you will have a much more successful career if your home life is in Balance it's like a yin and a yang right if something is out of balance it engulfs the other side both your job and your home life and especially you know we have three kids really really balancing that is very hard

over both of us having demanding careers and I think we just it's not something that's contrarian but it's something which we don't think about at all when we make that decision we think is this person fun to be with is this person you know somebody we see ourselves with but my question is what is the impact of this relationship on your career is this person lifting you up or pushing you back is this person someone who's G to be your greatest cheerleader or are they going to be the greatest weight on on you and how

do you think that that's going to manifest itself 20 years 30 years from now and I think it's just something I wish we thought about more and I encourage especially young people to think about that such a great point is what I want now is a a guide for vetting these things when you're dating Deb's guide to dating I need to write that although I've only really dated him and one person so maybe I'm I'm like the worst person to tell but but it worked so you're maybe the best person and now you look back

and here's the questions I asked that worked um that's so funny okay so before we get to our very exciting lightning round is there anything else that you think might be helpful to share something you might want to leave listeners with any other nuggets of wisdom or advice well there's one quote which I share which um I thought about when you were speaking earlier which is about um you know people who are resilient which is life this is a quote from Chuck swindall he's a Christian writer I used to read a lot and it was

life is 10% what happens to you and 90% what you how you react to it and I just looked him up uh recently and and he he actually published a book with that quote he actually had that quote in a previous book from 20 years ago and I just think it's so important you know you don't get to choose everything that happens in your life so much is just it just happens and but it's the people who choose a way forward to turn stumbling blocks and the Stepping Stones as I said somebody who actually says

you know what I didn't get the job that I wanted and I'm just going to figure out another path those are the people who have the most successful and satisfying careers they're zigging when other people are zagging you know vice versa and I think that they're you know are the ones who are the most resilient and happy in the long term it's such a good uh Circle back to one of your first pieces of advice of just most successful people are people that are resilient and don't avoid failure but embrace it and find a way

to turn it around I think it's such an important point it's so hard to do I guess just I don't know just to follow threat a little bit is there anything that has helped you build that has that always been the way your mind worked I imagine like coaching helps this helps people with this there anything just like coaching is incredible for that we joke it's work therapy but really I think it's you know for a long time I just I saw failure as this like catastrophic thing like I was one of those kids it's

like you never got a B until I you know then I got to college and I was like wow this is harder than I thought and so I got two bees in college and I'm like I'm never doing that again you know but I was that kid who always got the a who got the great scores I just thought my life would end if I got a be you know and which by the way is super unhealthy and looking back I realized that like work is not like that at all and every time I got

bad feedback I'm like this is catastrophic but if you look at feedback as an opportunity then it's very different it's like this is a gift right but you can't I would just I would be crushed every time I get a review no matter what rating I got I would read the things that people would say and I was like oh my gosh I'm a terrible person and I had to really rethink that and I think coach in leadership coaching has really helps me through that to say no how do you process this and how do

you get to the other side and that has been so transformative for me is to have that outlet to actually talk through no no no what they're saying is not that you're a bad product person it's said you need to do a better job communicating or connecting and I really struggled with that I was very transactional I was not a connector I was not warm I really struggled with relationships and a lot of the feedback I received for many years is this relationship issue and it took me a long time to realize that people aren't

saying this because I'm a bad person or that they hate me but because they want to connect and I was actually making it hard and I think sometimes we take things so personally that it becomes kind of this thing it's like your it's it is your white whale it's like the thing you're chasing but then what if you say you know what I don't need to do that I don't need to chase that instead I need to figure out what's behind the feedback and what are they trying to say and then actually change yourself over

a long period of time towards that I I had similar challenges where I had this pretty real imposter syndrome for a while when I got when I started doing well and a coach is the key was the key for me to help me get over that and see that if I made a mistake things wouldn't crumble and that it's very normal to make mistakes nobody and by the way I think perfectionism is a curse we place on ourselves and it's a very dangerous thing particularly for product product leaders because product managers you know things are

going to go wrong there's literally part of your job and yet when we have perfectionism it is a lack of trust in our ability to bounce back and our ability to actually adapt but the more adaptable you are the less you have to be perfect every single time just to leave people with a tactical piece of advice say they are like oh man I need a coach you have any advice for how to find a coach how to explore that route yes so I actually wrote an article because one of the things I I struggle

with coaching is very expensive often and not every company provides it my husband actually works at a coaching company called sounding board to make it more accessible but one of the things I encourage people to do is there are other ways to get coaches so one is go you know I'm in a lean in group and we're just like we support each other I'm in a coaching Circle and YPO so um that's like a a group of CEOs and I'm in a number of these coaching kind of circles which give you an opportunity to learn

from each other and to get pure coaching and I think that's a good great place to start especially early on your career when you're seeing kind of the same people making the same mistakes I think as you get more senior having an individual coach helps because the the situations are so much more unique but I do think that having that outlet having a place to say hey is it me or is the situation not right and how should I think through this that's so incredibly important I'm Le I'm listening to this book are reading a

book called listen right now that a previous guest recommended it's a parenting book and it's about just the power of listening and how much that solves many problems so with your challenges or with your child when your child is having having a problem just listening to them uh there's a lot of power this came from a coach that was on the podcast recently so great I'll definitely yeah read it or listen to it yeah I know it's weird I'm like reading it's called listening yeah he's like this is the parenting book The only parenting book

you need really solves all the problems that we deal with so anyway uh that was an awesome final nugget that would I'm glad we got there with that though we've reached our very exciting lightning round are you ready let's do it let's do it first question what are two or three books that you've most recommended to other people so um I love the book from uh Professor Jeffrey feffer I speak in his class now but I read it way before that it's called Power who has it and why and I love the book he actually

has the more practical one seven rules of power which came out more recently and so just it's a book that reminds us that you know power is not accidental that people often get it for different reasons and how you should think about the playing field um another book is the conversation Dr Livingston who wrote that about race in America and I just love that it's a very honest assessment of race in America it is a really tough you know it's hard to have that conversation and I love that he uses a lot of facts and

you know and encourages people to open up and have conversations around it and then the last one I would say is well Susan Kane's quiet I adore the book because you know I do have introverted kids I myself am introverted and just to read you know the power of introverts as a reminder that we do have amazing people who don't communicate the same way and I love that it's a tribute to those those uh the success of those even if our workplace is not adapted to it I do think we need to adapt to it

so that we can bring the best in everybody but her book is a reminder that there's so much power even in in silence uh the first book you mentioned Jeffrey feffer he's been on the podcast I think he may have mentioned you in our conversation or I love Professor feffer that was such a that was a fun conversation because I came into it very nervous for what his advice would be and then came up with it being like this is great this is he is very wise he's very wise and just very uh I don't

care what you think I'm just GNA tell you the reality of the world oh man okay next question do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed okay so I I know this is like so this a fandom thing but I love Fallout so I played the game Fallout 4 last year and then the the show came out and it was amazing and I know that sounds so nerdy but it was incredible and I know that video game movie annotations tend to be terrible but it was so great and having

played the game it was even better I you know so that is was that super nerdy no I I I've I watched Fallout I I don't know anything about the game but the show itself was really fun just I had no idea what I was getting even even getting into so no acceptable nerdy level uh there's I don't know if you can get too nerdy on this show next question do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you just really like well so actually what's really interesting is I never got into Twitter I

just couldn't figure it out and recently I really got into threads and I didn't think I would I was like well I'll just post some stuff on it but really I just love the real I just I could never figure out Twitter like you follow the wrong person the whole thing just it's terrible and you know somebody's posting about posting too much or too little but there's something about the threads algorithm that's really worked the first you know few months wasn't quite there but I just feel like it's spot on and now I see the

magic of it that's so interesting I've I've seen some stats that it's like bigger than x now Twitter and I wonder if that's true I gota look that up but I've seen more activity on threads so maybe I need to go back there I spent some time cheing from the sidelines that it's successful because I use it a lot now and I guess I had never had a place where kind of real time use and it's not exactly meant to be newsy but maybe it's just who I follow but I love kind of just seeing

like here's like five headlines you probably miss and I was like oh I know they're trying to downplay politics but I just love that it just feels like you know it feels like you kind of get a glimpse of what's going on in the world in five minutes okay two more questions do you have a favorite life motto that you often think about come back to share with friends or family find useful and worker in life oh that's a good question I would well actually you I would say that it's very similar to the Chuck

SEL one right about life so you can use that great that's what I imagined uh because you yeah you shared that one early on and I imagined that was going to be your answer final question you started Facebook Marketplace you built it now it has a billion users more than that what's the most interesting thing that you have bought or sold on Facebook Marketplace the best thing I ever sold on there was I sold my minivan on it and it in four days I made my husband do it because I wanted him to test the

product and we were selling our Minivan and I'm like just try Facebook Marketplace he's like I don't know about this and he's like there's too many people contacting me I need to I needed to stop so it worked really well for us um I think I have bought so many things on there it's actually sort of embarrassing I recently my daughter wanted the same desk as I had for her new room and I couldn't they no longer sell it at Costco and I found it for half the price from a woman who was moving and

she's like here and I I love it so I bought probably way too many things um on Facebook Marketplace actually but it's a great thing I actually use it as a great rental for kids stuff because you buy a kids's bike and then when they outgrow it you sell it back and the rental fee is almost free and I do have the store element so I love every part of it and I still am at Advent user and I send a lot of feedback back to that team that's amazing Deb this was amazing I'm so

happy we made time for this thank you so much for coming on two final questions where can folks find you if they want to reach out maybe read about stuff you're doing where's your substack and anything else people can check out yes so w. stubs act if you want to if you want to look you can you know I post probably about once a week I'm on LinkedIn I'm on threads so please do find me and then uh the actual final question how can listeners be useful to you well I would just love to hear

kind of what you heard from today that resonated with you and what you're going to do with it and how would they share that uh like LinkedIn I'm happy to read your comments or send it if you want to uh send it to me if you actually subscribe to my substack you can just reply to the first email and then I get it awesome but uh the easy way as you said a replying YouTube comments there we go get people to YouTube click that subscribe button dab thank you so much for being here and thank

you thank you so much Lenny it's great by everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast 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 lenp podcast.com see you in the next episode