Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more | Naomi Gleit

I really believe in frameworks for things that helps drive extreme clarity. I work on a lot of different projects. A lot of times I'm ramping up mid-project. I'm like, where can I learn what I need to learn about this project? I ask five different people, get five different answers. That is unacceptable. Of course, I'm sure there's hundreds of docs associated with the project, but there needs to be one canonical doc. Everyone should know exactly where the canonical doc is. That's the one place I can go to to get all the information I need about a project, and it will link to all the other docs.

Things on the canonical doc are Today, my guest is Naomi Gleit. Naomi is head of product at Meta. Other than Mark Zuckerberg, she's the longest serving executive at Meta. She joined what was then called Facebook as employee number 29 and has been at Meta for almost 20 years. She's seen the company scale from 30 employees to the $1.5 trillion business that it is today. Naomi does very few podcasts and interviews and so I was really excited to chat with her and have her on this podcast. In our conversation, we dig into the many lessons that she learned from Facebook's early and legendary growth team, her superpower of taking really complex and gnarly problems and projects, simplifying them and delivering results. We also get into leadership lessons she's learned from Zuck, including his recent transformation into possibly the coolest CEO in tech. Also, YPMs are the conductor of product teams, some very tactical tips for running meetings, writing docs, working out, getting better sleep and even how to get more protein in your diet. This was such a fun conversation and such a wide ranging conversation. And whether you are in product or growth or any other tech function, you will get something useful out of this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Naomi Glite [No translation] Naomi, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks so much for having me. As I told you earlier, I refer your podcast all the time, and so I can't believe I have the opportunity to actually talk on it.

Wow. I'm so flattered. I never get tired of hearing that. Appreciate you sharing that. I want to share a couple tidbits about you because it's pretty crazy when you see this list. Okay, so you're Meta's longest serving executive other than Mark Zuckerberg. You're employee number 29 at Facebook. You've been there for over 19 years, sorry, at Meta, formerly Facebook.

I do that all the time. That's what happens when you've been at Meta for 19 years, is you can't get the name right.

Okay, good. I won't feel bad about that then. And then the last thing is just you've been at the center of some of the most foundational products that Meta and Facebook have worked on, including working on the early growth team and thinking about the early growth strategy. Basically, you've been there from employee number 30 to today, a $1.5 trillion company, one of the largest companies in the world today. Very few people have ever seen this sort of growth and scale from the inside. First of all, I guess let me just ask this. Do you ever reflect on this and just realize like, holy shit, what a journey? I've been on how wild?

It's a great question. I would love to say that I reflect on it. The truth is, I think I barely have time to reflect right now. I'm thinking about all the things that I need to do on my to-do list. So I'm pretty in it still. Even after 19 years, I am really focused on the work that I need to do. I do honestly have moments where I get to reflect, for example, like on this podcast, sometimes people do ask me, you know, and I think especially as I approach the 20-year milestone, my 20-year faceversary, I'm sure that will give ample opportunity for me to look back.

Such a classic product manager answer. Like, I'm just, I have too much to do.

Too busy.

Think about this. Yeah. I gotta hit some goals here.

Yeah.

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At Facebook now Meta? Facebook, as part of being an academic, researching Facebook, also being a Stanford student using Facebook, I was like, I really want to work here. Facebook had just moved to Palo Alto. Mark had driven across country, I guess, and arrived in Palo Alto, opened up an office at 443 Emerson Avenue. or Emerson Street, it was right above the Jing Jing's Chinese restaurant in downtown Palo Alto. And I just went to the office, sort of cold called the equivalent of just walking into the office and seeing if there were any available jobs. There were not. I think I did that maybe five to 10 more times. Eventually there was an opening to interview for Sean Parker's personal assistant. He was at the time, I think, the president. I did interview and I did not get the job. A few months later, I found out about a marketing role that was available. One interesting thing I haven't really talked about was I got an offer from Facebook. I also got a competing offer from LinkedIn. At that time, I made the choice to go to Facebook because I was interested in the social networking aspect of it. Why was I so bullish on this website? At the time, it was www.thefacebook.com, why was I so excited about this thing? I think it's because I definitely saw that there was product market fit. I saw that students at Stanford were obsessed with it, but it also had a long list of colleges that were really excited and on the waiting list to be accepted onto Facebook. And so there was this product market fit piece and also a huge demand from other other audiences, other colleges, but our younger brothers and sisters were also sort of interested about Facebook and it seemed like it had this much broader appeal. So that's what happened. I got the marketing job. Cheryl also talks about when you are getting on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat. That was my foot in the door. And here we are 19 years later.

I was just going to say that that's such a good example of what she recommends of if you Can get a seat on a rocket ship. Don't ask which seat. And I love the Sean Parker piece. I did not know that. That's hilarious. What a different life it would have been if you got that job and went down that track. So a couple takeaways here for people that are trying to pick where to work. What I love about your story is one is just like you had so much, you just had confidence that this business would work and you just knew that you wanted to get on this rocket ship. You saw traction. So I told you, Give you, I guess, that added to this confidence that this is gonna work out. And then you said that you walked into the office kind of cold, not even cold emailing or calling, but cold arriving. Five to 10 times, you said?

Yeah, it was pure, pure sort of just like refusing to quit. I think I just walked into the office, I talked to the person at the front desk, is there anything that I can do? They weren't hiring non-technical people. I didn't have a computer science degree. I wasn't technical. I had this Bachelor of Arts degree. and that's why the personal assistant in the marketing role eventually did open and was something that I thought it could be qualified for. Cool.

I think that's such an empowering lesson of, if you look at someone like you and they're like, oh, she was so early at Facebook, how lucky, clearly wasn't luck. You knew you wanted to work at this company. You put a lot of effort into making it happen, no matter the job. I think that's a really good takeaway and lesson. Company today that you're excited about, that you're just like, this is going to be a massive success. What I'm hearing is just do everything you can to try to land a job there and eventually you'll be in a role you actually want.

It doesn't have to start there. When I got to Facebook, I knew I wanted to build. As someone who wasn't really technical, I wasn't going to be an engineer or a coder. I wanted to work with the engineers and the coders to build products. I thought product management was the right function for me. And so my dream was always to be an a PM. And it wasn't luck as to how I ended up becoming a PM. I sort of took the same approach showing up at the office asking if there were any roles. By then we had moved to 156 University and all of the PMs and engineers worked on the second floor and I was working in marketing like I mentioned and I worked on the third floor and all the business functions worked on the third floor. And My goal was to be a PM. I ended up going sort of the analogy, I went to the second floor most days after work, asked if there were any projects that I could help out with. You know, it was very early days. There was always more to do than people to do it. And so eventually I picked up a few projects, helping with program management, you know, giving my product feedback. And by the time that I actually applied formally, to be a product manager, I had been doing the job voluntarily, almost informally, for a few months. And I remember this because I had a seat on the third floor. I picked up all the stuff on my desk, put it in a box, walked down to the second floor once I got the job to become a PM. And when I got to the second floor, I distinctly remember everyone on the second floor standing. and clapping. And so it was a big standing ovation. I'll never forget Baz was there, by the way. I know Baz has been on your podcast, but even Baz was there sort of standing and clapping. And so I guess, you know, to the lesson that you were trying to extract from my story, I do think I sort of tried to create the luck by not giving up and just repeatedly cold calling or cold showing up or cold volunteering until I sort of, you know, was able to make it happen. Amazing.

Again, very empowering. It's not just like, oh, there's these people, they just get lucky and they get in this PM job. It's like, you landed at the company, I want to be a product manager, which is interesting. Most people don't, like, grow up and, like, I want to be a product manager. That's like a rare thing people even want, especially that early on. So it's interesting that you already knew that. But you basically did the job. You did the job of PM before you had the job. and by the time you actually asked for it, you've been doing it for a long time and you could show, Hey, look, I'm actually good at this. I can do this job. Awesome. By the way, I love the Buz connection. I'm finding that Buz is connected to the most guests of this podcast in so many different ways.

Really?

Curious. Yeah, like Ami and a few other people. It's just interesting. There's like a Buz spiderweb of connections throughout this podcast so far. Okay, so I'm going to fast forward to today. So your role today is head of product at Meta.

Yes.

What does that mean? What do you do at Meta today? How would you describe your role?

So, you know, there are a few thousand PMs at Meta. They do not all report to me. I would say a few hundred of them report to me on the teams that I directly manage, but I feel responsible for the entire PM community at Meta. There are things that we do centrally things like PM performance, PM culture, PM onboarding and training. And that's the kind of thing that I look out for. You know, obviously I wanted to be a PM. Head of product is my dream job. I am, you know, deeply supportive of the PM function. And so I really care and I think it's PMs are a huge point of lever, leverage in a company for how we can actually, you know, get stuff done and, and help accomplish the company's goals. And so that's, I sort of focus on PM as like a really important exponential lever for doing that.

I love that. Okay. I'm going to come back to what you've learned about what makes super successful PMs and what makes you really successful. I want to take a tangent to Zuck.

Please.

Yes. Okay. So you've known Zuck for over 20 years at this point. And I just have to ask a few Zuck questions because people are always curious to learn from what has worked so well for him? The first question is just, there's been a pretty profound transformation in Mark over the past few years, both in terms of how he leads and also just in his coolness and vibe factor. What are your thoughts on just this transformation and how he's been able to pull it off?

So I've always said that there is the biggest gap of anybody I know between what people think of Mark and who Mark really is. And so I think this is the mark that I've known for the past 20 years, and the world is finally getting to see what I've been lucky enough to see. And that gap that we've talked about is really starting to close. How did we get here? I always say Mark is a learn-it-all, not a know-it-all. He is the fastest person at upskilling of anyone I've ever met. He used to do these annual challenges. One year I did them with him. It was learning Chinese, and within a year he was able to basically achieve an eighth grade fluency in Chinese. And that's just one example. Obviously, he's gotten incredibly great at guitar, MMA, a lot of his passions, but he's also gotten a lot of, a lot better at some of the professional skills. And I think negotiation, public speaking is one of those. I think before in the early days, it just wasn't something that he was very comfortable with. He's talked to himself about Coming across as a little scripted. I think he was not confident and pretty careful about how he showed up. And he's upskilled here. He's just gotten a lot more comfortable. And so people are able to see who he really is.

He was also like, I don't know, 20 something when he started Facebook and now he's running a 80,000 person org, you know, I could see. I could see the evolution happen.

Yes, I think he was, I think he might have been like 19 or 20 whenever.

Oh, God, that's insane. So, yeah, I could see why someone would change. I was at the. The acquired podcast Chase event with him being interviewed, and he's just, like, such a cool dude now. He just has these, like, big shirts with his own, like, letters on it, his own, like, phrases, his chain, what a cool dude.

His. His long hair, his long hair, his watch. Yeah, I was at that event, too. I thought it was great, I think. Yeah, that's the no gap between who Mark is and what the world sees.

I love that. Is there something about Zuck that you know that most people don't know? Something that would surprise us?

One thing I would say about Mark is I think people know he is married. He has three daughters. He is a really great dad. He is a really great husband. I would say he is also a really good friend. Maybe that is something that I can sort of speak to from experience. He's just an incredibly thoughtful friend. There was a period in my life, I think it was 2014, 10 years ago when I was going through just sort of like a really hard time. I had come out of a breakup, but Mark saw that I was having a hard time. He asked me if I wanted to volunteer to teach a class in East Palo Alto after their school day. and in retrospect, it's pretty funny, but Mark and I taught a class about how to build a business. So you had the CEO of Meda teaching this class to a bunch of middle school students, and we got really close to them through that process. We made some really important mentorship connections. For years we met with them. I think we still continue to, even though they've now at this point graduated from college. have real jobs. But one of the lessons that we taught during that class that I remember Mark distinctly, like writing on the whiteboard, or not the whiteboard, the actual was a chalk with chalk on a chalkboard for the four life lessons. That was one, and I kept these for myself as well. Love yourself. Two, only then can you truly serve others. Focus on what you can control and for those things never give up. And that was sort of his life lessons, four steps to how to approach life. And we actually made stickers for these four steps that the students could actually put on their composition notebooks as a reminder. And I think obviously that has really helped me over time, but I think that In that you can see some of what I think we all see in Mark, for example, for those things never give up. He has that aspect of him and it makes sense. For me, number three is really the hardest, which is focus on what you can control. Because I think I probably think I can control more things than I actually can.

So do we all. I love that he was sharing that in a class on how to start a business. This is like life advice.

Totally.

That's amazing. I want to chat a bit about, so at this point, Meta is 86,000 employees, something like that. That's what I found online. So he has to run this massive org as this CEO, one person. I know that one way that he does this is he has something called the small group. Is that the term?

Yes, small group.

Okay, cool. So he's got this small group that he calls it, and it's essentially is like core execs, and this group meets regularly, and that's kind of how he's able to manage the entire org through this small group. For people that are struggling to run an increasingly larger org, are there any tidbits from how Mark and the small group operate that might be helpful to folks?

Sure. So I think the first thing is small group is sort of the leadership team. It's the leaders working on the most important projects at the company, sort of independent of reporting structure and stuff. It's like who are the leaders on the big on the big most important projects or functions, they will be represented in small group. What makes this group unique? A lot of them are people like me, sort of people that have been there for a very long time. So I think sort of the tenure of small group is really rare. Why I think that's important is you have a lot of people that are motivated by mission rather than sort of climbing the corporate ladder at this point. And so there are a lot of what I call disagreeable givers. So just to back up, I don't know if you've heard this framework, but I think I learned this from Adam Grant during a executive learning and development session. And he was saying that there are, if you think of a two by two, there is people who are agreeable and disagreeable, and then there's people who are givers and takers. And the most dangerous kind of person to have in an organization is an agreeable taker. And what that means is an agreeable person, super nice, everyone likes them, really easy to get along with, but they're a taker and maybe their motivation is more self-interested rather than what's best for the company, which is how I would define a giver. And the most precious person in an organization is the disagreeable giver. Those are the people who are really motivated to do what's best for the company, but they can be a little bit disagreeable in the sense that they may not say what you want to hear, they may push back on things, they may fight for things. And so I think small group is characterized by a lot of disagreeable givers. And I think that's really important for an organization. One thing I think Mark has done really well in general is just have a culture, including on his leadership team, of people who give him feedback. I think a lot of times as you get more successful or as you have more fame or if you have more wealth, you lose having an accurate feedback loop. And people may not want to be 100% honest with you for various reasons. And Mark has tried to ensure that he himself has an accurate feedback loop, or we as a company have more of an accurate feedback loop by surrounding himself and our leadership team and creating a culture of giving direct and honest feedback. So that is, that's, you know, Some of the unique properties of small group from a process perspective, we have one weekly sort of strategic meeting. It's more open-ended. There is time for discussion. It's longer and it's sort of more unstructured. We also have one weekly operational meeting, which is highly structured. We go through all of the priority projects. The person who owns each of the projects will actually speak to the weekly updates. for that project. And, you know, it's very operational and tactical.

Awesome. I just love this name, Small Group. It's like such a cozy name. It's not like executive staff or E-Staff.

Totally.

All these terms people always use. No, it's just their small group.

Totally.

And then this framework you described, it sounds a lot like radical candor of challenging directly but caring deeply. Yes. Towards being disagreeable but being constructive and additive. Is that the term or was it disagreeable but... A giver. Giver, yeah. That's great. Yes. If there's nothing here, totally cool. But is there something that you changed Mark's mind about? You've talked about he's good at seeing new data and being like, okay, I see. I see. Or is there anything that you were successful there that is an interesting story?

One of the things that we did in the early days on the growth team, because I'm not sure that necessarily, when we talk about this sort of legacy or the history or the lore around the growth team, and this may not be a direct answer to the question, but it didn't really necessarily come from Mark. Mark wasn't like, you guys should create a growth team. Here's how you should operate. and so I think in some ways we established and grew a growth team and Mark sort of got on board or saw the value in it and was a huge proponent of it, but I'm not sure it necessarily originated with him. And indeed, I think sometimes the focus on being so data-driven might have been something that myself, Alex Schultz, Javier Olivan, these are some of the original people that were on the growth team and that are my closest co-workers now may have really pushed on and highlighted the value of four and Mark. I'm happy to talk about the growth team, which is something I get asked a lot of questions about if you want.

Yeah, I'd love to. That's exactly where I was about to segue since you brought that up. So the Facebook growth team, it's a legendary team. I think it was probably the first real growth team in tech. The team developed some of the most core growth levers and techniques that companies use today. And so I'm really excited to chat a bit about this and what you learned from that time. One thing I wanted to start with is there's this kind of this, like, legendary activation metric that you all had of the goal was get, I think it was seven friends in 10 days or something like that. Is that a real thing? Is that what you guys actually did? Anything more there for folks that are like, oh, we got to come up something like this?

Sure. So yes, seven friends in 10 days was a thing. 10 friends in 14 days was also a thing. They're kind of the same thing. They're just different points on a retention curve. I would say the key insight here is when we started the growth team, I think we were pretty focused on acquisition. We had a notion though of growth accounting, which looks at how many, what's our net growth every day? And that would look at the number of new users that registered. minus the number of users that actually went stale. So after a 30-day period, that's how we define it, they no longer logged in. And then plus the number of users that resurrected, which is after 30 days they came back. And what we found was the churn and resurrection lines were actually much larger than the new user line, which implied to us that retention and driving those two lines was actually our biggest lever to drive net growth. And so while we were focused on acquisition, a lot of our focus shifted to be around engagement and retention. How do we drive engagement and retention? We look at the variables that correlate most with that outcome. What we found was friending. And so those two magic moments, having seven friends in 10 days or 10 friends in 14 days, really just map to when we feel like your likelihood of being a retained user goes up because you've seen sort of the value in Facebook. And it kind of makes sense, like Facebook is much more compelling if you have 14 days, 14 friends. And the other thing around 10 or 14 days is we wanted it to happen quickly. We wanted to have you experience the magic moment soon after you had registered on the site to prevent you from churning and then us having to resurrect you.

Again, one of the most interesting kind of lessons from this activation metric that people talk about, like right now everyone's like, yeah, of course retention is how you, what you need to focus on. That's what product market fit is. Like, I think right now it's like, that's what everyone knows. I love that that was, you guys basically figured that out. It was one of the first times of like, here's how we understand if our product will last and how to grow retention matters most. And retention cohort curves, I think was one of the innovations y'all thought about early of just like, here's how we track retention, people joining at a certain.

Time, how long do they stick around? Totally. And that was Danny Perrante who really came up with the growth accounting framework, which I guess is quite obvious, but like the plus new minus stale plus resurrected. The thing that I feel like may be valuable for PMs and is one of my Naomi-isms is I think what the growth team really pioneered was being data-driven and product-driven, especially in a area that was historically more of a business function. So I think at that time, a lot of the growth in new users was expected to come from like marketing or comms, whereas the insight that we had is actually the product is the biggest lever to drive growth. And that means we should have a product and engineering team working on optimizing things like the registration flow, the invite flow, then user onboarding, getting you seven friends in 10 days. One of my Naomiisms is really understand, identify and execute. That framework came from 2009 where the growth team at the time, it was sort of fledgling and it just started, was focused on only instrumenting data. And Alex often wears a shirt that says, why guess when you can know? We just didn't have the data that we needed to make informed decisions to know really what were the biggest levers to drive growth. And so in 2009 and January, we basically stop doing anything on our roadmap except data instrumentation. And that's when we, you know, instrumented every step of the registration flow, instrumented every step of the user onboarding experience. We knew where there was drop off. And so we understood, which allowed us to identify what were the key opportunities to drive growth. And maybe, hey, it's like, you know, increasing friending in the, the new user experience or 20% drop off on registered users at the email confirmation step. How can we address that? These are the opportunities that we identified, and then we would execute by building products. So having this data-driven, product-driven approach to what I think historically was more of a business responsibility at a company was sort of what the growth team, the special sauce of the growth team, we eventually extended that approach. I think that approach started with the growth team, but we extended to other areas. So for example, one of the products or projects that I took on after growth was social impact. And instead of what I think a normal company might do, which is start a corporate social responsibility wing, we decided, hey, no, we're going to take a data-driven product-driven approach to driving social impact. Instead of having a foundation that's distributing money, we're going to build a product that actually raises money from our community. And many years later, we've raised billions of dollars from the community for charity. So that's sort of the approach that I think is unique about the growth team that expanded to other areas and that I think that the company, in many ways, has taken to most of the problems that we face.

That's such a good point. And I almost took that for granted, but there was such a huge shift. that y'all started from moving from marketing being the driver of growth to product and data and experiments and all that stuff. And so I think that's such a good reminder of that. Fun fact on the social good team, I'm really close friends with the designer that was on that team. His name is Mickey. He was on that team for a while and really enjoyed and yeah, really enjoyed working with you.

Oh, that's so great. I remember Mickey. What is his last name?

Settler?

Okay, yes, I definitely remember this. I mean, yes, and social impact is just one thing that I think I'm really proud of. And again, remember social impact used to be a business thing. You would create this corporate social responsibility part of the company that was very separate from the product and engineering team. Another thing that we did in the early days was there was a juncture where it was like, how are we going to translate this site? And I think we could have taken more of a non-technical traditional approach and had professional translators translate the entire site into the different languages. And instead, sort of what the growth team suggested was, why don't we build a version of Facebook that allows you to make translations in line? And so the community of people using Facebook at the time who actually knew the product the best could actually insert translations and there's a whole system that we built around how to uprank the best translations and downrank Wikipedia. And to this day, we have over 100 languages supported. So we were trying to find these product technology solutions to these traditional problems.

I totally remember that where it's like you ask your users to help translate the site.

Yes. Yes.

I want to come back real quick to the activation metric because it's something that a lot of people somewhat misuse and think maybe incorrectly about. So to come up with an activation metric, as you describe, you basically figure out what's like the regression of if someone does X here's retention increases. And so let's focus on getting them there. And a lot of people struggle with coming up with that metric. Do you have any thoughts on just like how important it was to have that very specific activation milestone of like seven exact friends in exactly 10 days versus the value of just having anything that is a rallying point for everyone to focus on and drive.

I think the majority of the value is in the latter, is just having extreme clarity around the goal. And that allowed everybody to work towards optimizing the same goal. You're right, like we did sort of just pick a point on the curve. I think it could have been any of those. And indeed, as part of preparing for this, I was like, was it seven friends in 10 days? I had to go back and I asked a few people that I worked with back in the day and they were like, well, I thought it was 10 and 14. I mean, I think it just, it doesn't matter. It's just that we picked one of them. And what mattered there was we had the same goal. What mattered was that it was a retention goal or an activation metric. And one of the most important things that actually came out of having that goal was building a new user experience. Believe it or not, when we first launched Facebook, or I wasn't around then, but in the early days of when it was just a college site, we didn't need a news or onboarding. We didn't need to explain to people that they had to find their friends. They were sort of automagically connected to everyone on the college campus and sort of knew how to use this product. It felt very intuitive. Again, we were college students building a product for other college students. They were sitting next to each other in libraries or at desks. and sort of through osmosis, understanding how the product worked. It was more when we launched the ability for teens to register and then work networks and then in 2006, open registration, when we started getting all kinds of people with any email address. It was before it was.edu or like a microsoft.com email address that was required in order to sign up for Facebook. Then anyone with any mail just could register, including people like my dad and my grandma, that we realized, wow, in order to get people to this magic moment, how are we going to do that? What's the most effective way? That insight resulted in building a new user experience. I remember it was just like step one, upload your profile picture. That was really important so people could find you and know who you were. Step two, find your friends. That's where a lot of the sort of contact importing and people you may know and here are other people at your school and here at Mutual Friends, that step in the news or experience ultimately became one of the most important drivers of that activation metric that we talked about.

I love that you shared that. Such a recurring theme on this podcast, the power of onboarding, the value of investing in onboarding and the ripple effects of opportunities there. I love that you also kind of like were one of the first like we need like onboarding, that's a thing. Let's invent onboarding.

Users. I know. I mean, I remember the day where it was like, do we need to explain to people how to use this? Is it not obvious? And it's like, my dad's like, I don't understand this whatsoever. My dad would go on to become, like, Facebook's biggest power user because I always, like, you know, beta tested everything with him. But, yeah, the I, it was, that was not obvious to us at the time in 2006 that we had to explain to people how to use Facebook. And again, remember that it's fun talking about this because obviously the product has evolved so much, but the principles are relatively the same. It was the facebook.com, eventually it became facebook.com, but eventually we built a mobile app. And then it was a mobile first product, and then it was about mobile photos, and then it was about mobile videos. So over time, the technology has really changed, but the the core use case that we really need to educate people on, which is how to connect with their friends on Facebook in whatever iteration or product is the same. And so obviously we still have an onboarding today. And it's relatively the same principles. Get a profile picture and find your friends.

Along those same lines, just maybe a last question around the growth stuff that you worked on. For folks that are thinking driving growth, working on onboarding, maybe specifically just Are there any lessons from things that worked super well when you were looking to accelerate growth of the Facebook early on that you think people are maybe sleeping on as levers and tactics that worked back then that might still be really powerful today?

Well, definitely the understand, identify, execute. I would just ask yourselves, do you have the data that you need to know what you need to do on growth? And if not, definitely take the time to instrument that data. The thing that, you know, I think we were relatively lucky. I talked about why I was bullish on Facebook in 2005 even, was because there was product market fit. And so for us, growth, you know, as much as credit as we give to the growth team, I'm actually not sure how much credit we deserve and how much incremental growth we drove above and beyond the fact that this was a product that had product market fit, and we benefited in a huge amount from having high demand for the product. So at every step, and I talked about the growth team, the projects that we were working on were really at a high level around removing barriers. There were macro barriers, like the first project I worked on was high school students on Facebook, which is an interesting story in and of itself because at that time we almost created a separate website called Facebook High just to keep them separate from the college students. But at that time, we were like, no, this is one graph. This is one community. College students have friends and people they're connected to of all different ages. Why bifurcate the graph? And obviously we've maintained that principle ever since. But it was about removing barriers. So you had to be a college student, then you had to be a high school student, then you had to be in a work network, then you had to have any email address. One of the next projects I worked on was not everyone has access to a smartphone. How can we remove the barrier of having access to a smartphone and building more of a rich Facebook experience for someone that was using a feature phone or a lower end device? Internet.org, what about removing the barrier of having access to the internet or being able to afford a data plan? Those are the macro barriers that thematically the growth team has worked on. What I would say is maybe applicable is really the micro barriers. All of the work that we did on growth around optimizing the flows were really about removing micro barriers. One of the things that I thought was just so elegant was after we did that 2009 instrumentation of all the flows, the product flows relevant to growth, what we found is 20% of people aren't actually confirming their email. We tried sending them an SMS so maybe they would confirm the SMS instead. What we found was a lot of people are actually still clicking on notifications that they're getting, but because it wasn't the specific confirmation email, we weren't able to confirm the account. What we did was allow people to get notifications even as an unconfirmed account, and then if they clicked on any of those notifications, that would count as an account confirmation as well because they proved ownership of the email. It's just removing a micro barrier of having to like go find the confirmation email, click it before you can do anything on the site. So I do think we've been relatively lucky in having like a lot of high demand that meant that we could focus on just removing micro macro barriers. And then on the growth team, a lot of the iterations and optimizations were about removing just sort of friction.

I love that framework of like micro barriers and macro barriers, just thinking about ways to make this accessible to more people and also just getting helping them get through the flow faster. I also love your point about how a lot of growth teams get a lot of credit for growing a business when really, in many ways, it could have done really well even without that team potentially because product market fit was so strong. I think about this with Airbnb, honestly, it was just such, like after it gets to a certain point, such good product market fit that who knows what would happen if there was no one working on growth. It probably would have been okay for a long time.

Totally. And then You know, maybe where we do sort of see the impact is maybe something like the translations thing that we talked about. We would-- the macro barrier. Removing the language barrier. And so maybe the approach we took meant that we supported 100 plus languages instead of whatever the professional translators, you know, there's just sort of, we have the long tail of languages. So that last person who's still speaking, you know, whatever sort of near extinct language can still use Facebook. But yeah, I think that's right. I sometimes think that maybe some of our efforts were really more on the margin of a bigger trend around product market fit.

Final thing I just want to highlight again that you said that I think is so important and I've always thought is true, and I love that you confirmed it, is that the activation metric that you all rallied around, the biggest value of it wasn't this is exactly the right regression Connection to retention, it's more that we have something we are all going to focus on. And that is where most of the impact comes from. Let's get more people to that point, whether it's perfectly right or not. It doesn't really matter. Yes. Love that. I think that's really freeing to a lot of people because they're like, oh, we don't know if we're going to be as perfect about this versus just, let's just drive some growth and get people to are good enough thinking on that. Okay, great. You mentioned Naomiisms. I want to segue to that. So let me first read a quote. So I asked Adam Musseri, who's head of Instagram, what to ask you. I know you guys work together on a bunch of stuff. Here's how he described you. Naomi is called the conductor here at Meta. She has an incredible ability to handle the most complex projects and problems and bring the right people together to simplify and solve them. She is very firm yet kind. Her standards are extremely high and she sets the bar. Also, many other people that I messaged said very similar things about you about how you're incredibly good at taking very complex problems and getting shit done, getting them done, simplifying them and getting them done. So I wanna spend some time understanding what you've learned about how to do this well. What are kind of like skills you've collected that allow you to take really complex problems and get to a solution? Stay kind but firm. and take on these really hard challenges. So maybe just broadly, I'm curious, what are some of these skills that you have built that allow you to do this?

Yeah, well, also that's very kind of Adam. I adore Adam. Obviously he is one of the tenured people in small group. And I've actually gotten the opportunity to work even more closely with him than usual. We recently launched something called Teen Accounts and Adam and I worked very closely on that. In terms of how I do the things people say that I can do, I really rely on Naomi-isms. Like I said, and actually, I refer your podcast out a lot because there isn't just like a PM university that I can send people to. There isn't like a formal training that people can get to become a product manager. And that's where Naomi-isms came from. It was stuff that I learned on the job from other people, including from Adam, that I found myself repeating over and over again. A good PM looks for a way to make that more efficient. For me, that was writing them down. People started calling them Naomi-isms. I started sharing them internally, and then I think two years ago, I also started sharing them externally. Adam referred to me as a conductor. That's one of the Naomi-isms in my role as head of product. I want to educate the PM community about what is PM. It's the most common question I get from PMs and non-PMs. What do PMs do? What makes a great PM? And what I say is a PM is a conductor. It's as though the team that you are a PM on is an orchestra. There are many different functions in your team that includes legal, policy, comms, data, analytics, or sorry, analytics, engineering design, much like there are many different instruments in an orchestra. And as a PM, your job is to make sure everyone's playing their part correctly. Every section in the orchestra is playing their part, but at the same time, they're playing together. They're unified in the music that they're producing and that they're playing at the right tempo. And a lot of times, I think people use music analogies or vocabulary to describe the work. And that includes things like people being in harmony, like a good team, a good PM, a good orchestra is in harmony, they're in sync, they're at the right tempo, they have the right cadence. That's sort of how I imagine what a PM does at work. Important characteristics are the PM is not the star of the show. Conductors don't even say anything during the performance. And also, you know, but I would at the same time give PMs like little metronomes and conductor wands. This was something that I used to do when we were smaller just to sort of take the analogy way too far.

That's so funny.

You actually gave them Conductor 1s and Conductor 2s. Oh yeah.

Just to wave around, yeah.

I love that.

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So PM as conductor is sort of how I describe the product management function. But one of the key Naomi-isms that I think is really critical to getting stuff done is what I call extreme clarity. I think our jobs are super hard. Extreme clarity means everyone's on the same page. It definitely doesn't mean that they all agree with each other, but they just have the same understanding of the facts. So we can disagree, but we all believe in the facts, which is that there's A, B, C, our options are X, Y, Z, and here are the trade-offs, 1-2-3. That kind of shared understanding is what extreme clarity is. That came from a place of just being in many meetings, on many emails, in many situations where I felt like we actually agree on something. The nature of this conflict is a result of misunderstanding. And that seems like an incredible waste of time. And so we want to have extreme clarity so we can just focus our conversations on things when we actually agree, not when we are misunderstanding each other. There are a lot of tactics that I use to draw- yeah, I was gonna ask- extreme clarity.

How do you do that? That sounds great. How does one get to extreme clarity?

Another Naomi is canonical everything. That includes canonical nomenclature. I often talk about canonical nomenclature. One way to ensure extreme clarity is we have the shared vocabulary. I've been in a lot of situations where people are using the same or different words to describe the same or different things, which results in talking past each other. One of the most egregious examples of this is when I was working, I was in a conversation around how our reviewers and global operations were performing, and we were using consistency and accuracy interchangeably. Consistency refers to how often different reviewers agree on the decision. Accuracy refers to how often the decision is correct according to ground truth. Those are very different things. We don't want to optimize for consistency because you could be consistently wrong. We want to optimize for accuracy. That is what canonical nomenclature is, is literally writing out all the words and their definition. So when we communicate, we're using the same vocabulary. I really believe in visuals. I think sometimes just having a conversation or a big meeting where people are talking, I'm just not very auditory. I'm a very visual person. It's hard for me to follow along just by listening. I will often have a visual in a meeting. I will leverage that visual to literally real time edit what is being decided. So, for example, if we have multiple options, I will edit the slide that's being projected to say we decided on option one. Here are the next steps. One, two, a lot of times people are saying, that's not what I heard. I heard this as a next step or I heard that as a next step. I love that because that avoids leaving the meeting and being like, I don't know what we agreed to. I heard this. You heard that. No, actually we have an agreed upon set of decisions and next steps that we all real-time edited and looked at together.

Just to double click on that one real quick. So what you're describing for the visual is you're presenting here's our options, here's our three options on a slide.

Yes.

You all decide we're going to go with option two. You edit the slide with like a star, like here's what we chose and then maybe change some stuff. And this is exactly to your point of extreme clarity. People can see clearly this is what we're choosing. If they disagree and don't realize that's.

What'S happening, it'll be really clear. Totally. Awesome. And one thing people make fun of me a lot for, but I think is just a great example of extreme clarity, is I never use bulleted lists. because you can never refer to a bullet. I always use numbered lists because you can always in the visual in a meeting, you know, as referenced in, you know, number two, you know, I have feedback on that versus like the third bullet, two up from the second, you know, whatever, that is not extreme clarity. So it's very, very small tactical things to like bigger, bigger things like canonical, everything. Um, but yeah, I can be a lot more specific.

I love that very, I love that very tactical tip. That is awesome. That's exactly the stuff I look for. Uh, is there any other very nuanced tip along those lines that is helpful in extreme clarity or canonical everything?

Canonical everything and, stop me if I'm getting too wonky. I can really get into this.

We got a ways to go.

When people, when, when I had a face bursary along the years, people have given me posters and the posters say these Naomiisms, so extreme clarity is. is one, canonical everything is another. I think people really associate me with canonical, canonical, canonical. I always want a canonical doc. This came from a place of like me, I work on a lot of different projects. A lot of times I'm ramping up mid project. I'm like, where can I learn what I need to learn about this project? I ask five different people, get five different answers. That is unacceptable. Everyone should know exactly where the canonical doc is. That's the one place I can go to to get all the information I need about a project, and it will link to all the other docs. Of course, I'm sure there's hundreds of docs associated with the project, but there needs to be one canonical doc. That canonical doc really has to have the basic information that you need to know. For any project, the basic information that you need to know is what are the discrete areas of work? I call those work streams. This is pretty obvious. Who are the owners on those work streams? So for every work stream, there's an owner. Again, seems pretty obvious. Sometimes it's like, I'm like, who's working? Who's owning this? It's like, People don't know. That's why I think it's very important to have a single threaded owner. We used to call this a directly responsible individual or a throat to choke. We obviously don't say that anymore. Single threaded owner, every work stream has a single threaded owner. Sometimes work streams are really big. You have sub work streams underneath them. Everything canonical needs to recurse, so you should have an owner or an STO for the sub work stream. The other things on the canonical doc are, what is the process by which the people on this team work together? I hate pairwise conversations. I feel like they're a waste of time. I feel like you could have four conversations with four different people or one conversation with all four people. Everyone has the same context. Ideally, there's a visual in that meeting and you real time edited it. There is extreme clarity. The canonical doc will have what is the canonical meetings that people have? What is the canonical email list that you're going to use that what is the canonical workplace chat? You know, like let's not reinvent the same audience 10 different times with like different permutations of the people on the working team. Let's just have one canonical chat. And then often the canonical deck will have the canonical nomenclature. I really believe in frameworks for things that helps drive extreme clarity. A framework is best understood when there's a visual representation of the framework in my mind. And so we'll have canonical visuals and that's sort of what I mean by canonical everything. So anytime I start on a new project, everyone knows to send me the canonical doc.

I love this. If you come into a project that you've given that's really gnarly and complex, what do you find are the first couple things you do that make a big dent on helping everyone align and understand what happens, how to, what should, what they should be doing and what they should be prioritizing.

A lot of times I'm simplifying. A lot of times there isn't a canonical doc, and so I'll go through the process of creating that. But I think that really falls under the simplification thing. I often go into a project, everyone's operating at a PhD level, I'm coming in at a kindergarten level. And so I need to understand, it's almost like all of this complexity, we're at a PhD level, I need to create the curriculum. go back to basic building blocks for the kindergarten level. How do I explain and understand this project at a kindergarten level? It doesn't mean I want to oversimplify. That's not what a simplifier does. They're not oversimplifying. But what they are doing is identifying the most basic building blocks of a complex problem and then unfolding or revealing or building on top of them additional complexity and details as you go along. And so Sometimes I talk about a school pyramid, but like I need to establish the kindergarten curriculum and then the elementary school curriculum and then the high school curriculum and then the college curriculum, and then we can operate at the PhD level. But oftentimes people at different, you know, on the project are at really different levels of understanding or complexity. And until we have what we call the school pyramid, the curriculums for every level of the project, it's really hard. to it's really hard to make progress. A lot of times that process of simplification will often identify what are the most important things to deal with on the project.

And so what I'm hearing is when you come into a project and the way you simplify is you start putting together a doc that describes these things you're talking about. Here's the work streams, here's the owners, here's the process, here's our canonical meeting style. and that reveals here's what matters most in where there's confusion.

Yes, yes. Yeah, that is. And a lot of times what needs to happen in the project is some, sometimes there's a strategy or an execution issue, and sometimes there's a people or a process issue. I would say 80 of the time, I think it's a people or process issue, and that refers to not having the right people on the project or not having the right people, but not having the right process by which they work together. A strategy or execution issue. When we get to that, I first try to tackle those or in general, I think it's really important to have perfect execution. I want to make sure a project is perfectly executing because only then can we really reevaluate whether or not this strategy is right or wrong. We're sort of in the worst of all worlds where we are imperfectly executing. And therefore, at the end of the day, the project might fail, but we don't know why. Is it because the strategy was right or wrong, or is it because the execution was poor? The ideal case is the strategy was right and you perfectly executed on it. The next best case scenario is the strategy was wrong, but you perfectly executed on it because then you learned the strategy was wrong. Revamp the strategy and try again.

You're really tickling the PM part of my brain. I feel like most PMs listening are like, yes, clean documents, really simple processes, a one-person charge, links to everything. It just feels good.

Totally. And I, again, like sometimes I feel the need to defend that the process is not for process sake, it's ultimately to help us all move faster and work better. So hopefully that comes through. But I deeply believe that it is through this. approach that we can move faster. And I have to prove that. Nobody wants more process and more meetings and more, but my goal is that with this we're actually simplifying process and getting less meetings and just making things clearer and ultimately moving faster.

I'm going to read another quote from another one of your co-workers, Charles Porch. He's vice president of global partnerships at Instagram, and he basically said what we've been talking about. Some of the biggest strategic bets and biggest swings Meta has made have had Naomi at the helm. No one can herd cats, drive clarity, and get to outcomes more seamlessly than she can. She is legendary within Meta for her canonical documents.

Great.

If maybe just like following this thread a little bit further, what's the gnarliest project that you've worked on that would be a good example of you coming in and helping simplify and get it over the finish line?

Well, Charles, you know, maybe thinking of the most recent project that we worked on. I don't know if it's necessarily the gnarliest, but it's definitely one of the most cross-functional projects that I've worked on before. Basically, every team at the company in some way works on youth. And last week we actually launched teen accounts, which was a very complex projects again, like it involved the Instagram team, the central youth team, the, you know, different teams working on various aspects of this, every function, legal policy, comms, marketing, product. And I think we definitely leveraged a lot of these, these Naomiisms. And just to give you a sense of, what teen accounts is, it was basically putting all teens into the safest settings by default on Instagram. And the reason I'm working on this, I work across multiple teams at Facebook. So obviously Adam is the head of Instagram and I work closely with him on this like I was referring to yesterday. But this is something like these teen accounts is something that we are thinking about how we expand to the other apps that we have, including Facebook and WhatsApp and threads. And I tend to work on projects that are across our family of apps and future platforms. And that's sort of why I was involved in this. But basically what Teen Accounts does is put teens in the safest settings. It's super focused on trying to address parents' biggest concerns around their teens on social media. This has obviously been a really big topic. We've had a lot of these. features and tools. What this launch did is simplify things, standardize things, and add a lot more functionality that gives parents controls. I think the thing you really need to know is that for under 16 year olds, if they want to change any of these defaults, they're going to have to get their parents' permission. And so it's interesting that, you know, we're really going to create an incentive for teens to get their parents involved and to actually set up parental supervision. especially because one of the default settings is a private account. So there's tens of millions of teens that currently have public accounts today that we are going to automatically transition to private accounts unless they get their parents' permission to stay public. And so it's a relatively big shift of fundamental change for how Instagram works for teens. And yeah, I would say one of the more complicated projects that I've worked on.

Yeah, and it just launched, right?

Yes.

As a new father, I'm excited for you all to be working on these sorts of things. I don't need it yet, but I'm glad it's going to be there. And it's funny how meta and Facebook is in this world where people complain about teens using social media, and then you work on making the product better for teens and kids using social media, and then it's like Facebook's where getting teens on social media. There is no way to make it feel good to people, no matter what you do. People are going to complain. That is what it is.

Totally. And I think the goal of this launch was to orient ourselves and really there is a lot of complaints, there is a lot of different voices. I think we just are focused on parents. We think parents know best. Every kid is different and parents know their own kid the best. So that has been our North Star in terms of the approach here. When I talk about teen accounts, the as product people, I think one thing that you would appreciate is the thing that I think is really important when it comes to teens on the internet is really having an understanding of how old someone is when they're using our apps. And it's important that we know how old they are because then we can put them in an age appropriate experience. So now we have teen accounts, we want to put all teens into teen accounts. we all know sometimes teens lie. That's sort of been the biggest feedback that we've been getting is teens are really smart, they're going to find workarounds, they're going to be creative, they're going to lie about their age. And as a product person, the way that I think this should really work is that instead of everyone entering, you know, teens use on average 40 apps instead of Instagram and the other 39 apps that teens use trying to verify the age of the person using their app. It's for two companies to do this, which is Apple and Google. They do collect the age. They should make that available to developers. And we ask for information from the device all the time with user consent. Can Instagram have access to your camera? Can Instagram have access to your location information? Apps should be able to ask, can Instagram have access to your birthday? And that would, I think, sort of elegantly from a product perspective, from a simplification perspective, from a privacy preserving perspective, and what's easiest for parents, that would be the right product solution to solve this problem around age that we're all sort of trying to grapple with right now. And there's a lot of stuff that we're doing. Part of the reason that this project was so complicated, and I mentioned the age team is like we're building classifiers to try to predict how old people are based on not just the age that they've stated, but you know, based on who they're talking to, what kind of content they're looking at, what the age of the people they're connected to is. Do we think that this is actually an adult like they say, or is it really a teen? And so we're doing a lot to try to predict age or prevent people from lying about their age, but I think this would be a really big win for the industry.

Makes sense to me.

Okay, thank you, Lenny.

So to close out this portion in this chapter of our conversation on Naomiisms, I know something else that you're really good at that I've heard from a few people is running meetings. Something that a lot of people always want to get better at. Any tips? What have you learned about running great meetings?

A meeting is a high value, high cost sort of amount of time, and then I want to make sure it's as productive as possible. What I will do is send an agenda 24 hours prior to the meeting. That agenda will include a pre-read. I've talked to people who if the pre-read is not attached to the calendar invite or like associated with the meeting at least 24 hours in advance, they will cancel the meeting. That just goes to show we want everybody in the meeting to have full context, have read the pre-read. Often what will happen in the previous 24 hours is because we're all sending pre-reads on Google slides, there will be a lot of conversation and questions that get hashed out leading up to the meeting. During the meeting, like I said, I think it's really important for a group of people to be looking at something and anchoring people on something. If somebody joins the meeting, say five minutes late, they should know exactly where in the agenda you are in the meeting and what is being discussed based on catching up from the visual that's being projected. Usually a meeting can be, and hopefully a meeting is really either, is a decision meeting. So if there is a decision, I need three options and I need a recommendation that should hopefully help focus the meeting. And then, like I said, I will real time edit the visual such that we document and have extreme clarity on what is the option that we agreed on and any next steps. that we also agreed to. After the meeting, anyone who wasn't in the meeting, that's fine because within 24 hours post meeting, I will send the notes, reply all to the meeting invite and send the notes. So just like tactically, I use the calendar invite as the canonical unit by which to handle all of this communication because a lot of times meetings are one-offs, there isn't an existing sort of email or chat thread. that maps perfectly to the audience of the meeting. So for me, that is the meeting or the calendar invite. So I'll click on the calendar invite, reply all, include the pre-read, pre-meeting, and then do this like reply all again post meeting 24 hours with the notes and the decisions and the next steps.

I love this. So many very specific tactics here. I love it. This is Food for my brain. I love the always have three options and recommendation. That's such a simple thing to recommend, but such a powerful way of operating as a PM.

Just like, here are the options. Here's what I recommend. Here's why. Oh, one thing I forgot that I learned from Guy Rosen. He is our chief security officer is when you have three options and a recommendation in terms of evaluating the options, I don't love pros and cons. It's a flat list of text. It's hard to, you know, just get the big picture from that. Oftentimes we'll use a traffic light. That means that the three options are three rows. The columns in the table will be criteria by which to evaluate the options. Those could either be functions. So for example, if I have three options as the rows, column one could be the legal perspective, column two could be the policy perspective, column three could be the privacy or product perspective, alternatively the columns could map to different criteria like what we're optimizing for. So it could be the user experience, it could be the engineering feasibility, it could be the internal complexity, whatever are the criteria should be laid out in the columns. And then obviously it should be color-coded red, yellow, green based on how it stacks up against those criteria. And what this allows is to get back to the point of the visual is you can quickly look at the three options, see where's the most red and sort of rule that out. Ideally, the recommendation has some combination of like, you know, the more green or yellow than the other options. And then obviously within the cells, you can spell out the specific rationale for the coloring. But I think this is a really good way to, to run a meeting and just create extreme clarity around how you're evaluating the options in a way that like a flat list of pros and cons just doesn't.

What other podcasts would have this level of detail of how to run a discussion on a decision? And this is exactly what people want to hear. So I love it. It says product market fit for listeners of this podcast. I love it. I love it. And obviously the reason this is more effective is it's not just like, here's a quick sentence on the, on The pro and con, it's like, here's what I actually think if this is good or bad for the things that matter to the business. That makes tons of sense.

It also gives people a framework to plug into. A lot of times the creation of a pre-read for these discussions involves many different people from many different teams and functions. If you have a traffic light, they can own filling out their cell. They can own the rationale behind the legal position on option one, two, and three. And In general, I'm super into frameworks that allow people to plug into and clearly represent their point of view.

I love it. Final question, completely different topic. I saw a Wall Street Journal story about how you exercise and your exercise regimen and how important that is to your life and career. Now, most people don't have a Wall Street Journal story about their exercise regimen, especially a tech worker. And I know this is just important to how you, to your work that you, and they wrote that this basically helps you become better at your job. Any advice there for folks that want to, I don't know, lean into exercise, exercise more for how to actually do that because your advice is this actually makes you better at work and life.

I believe that people are always like, what are you training for? And I'm like, I'm training for life. Like, I have four musties. It is eat, sleep, alone time, and exercise. Those are the things that I need in order to perform in the other areas of my life. Seems pretty obvious, but until recently I actually did not prioritize sleep. My boyfriend is actually super into sleep, and we have the eight sleep, we have eye masks, we have blackout shades, we have good sleep hygiene. And so I'm getting much better at that, but exercise is something that I've always been on top of alone time is also a musty for me because I'm an introvert. I need that time to, to recharge. Otherwise, I think I get kind of weird around people. Um, in terms of how I prioritize it, I am, it's sort of a non-negotiable or table stakes every morning I have to work out. Um, I am also lucky enough to work in an environment where I can wear workout clothes to work, which I often do. I think Working out is sure the hour of the day that I'm doing my exercise, but I also view, like I said, life is a workout. Performing at work is a workout. I need to be able to move. I need to feel comfortable. It's very physical, I think, especially if you're trying really hard to be a conductor. I'm running around with a metaphorical conductor wand. I need to be able to move. A while ago, and that's what the Wall Street Journal article was about. I set a goal of doing five pull-ups. I'd read somewhere in an article that less than 1% of women can actually do pull-ups. I think having a goal is really helpful. That's something that I worked on and anyone can do this truly if you train for it. I think it's potentially more technique for me than like strength per se. And I worked up towards that goal. I think exercise in addition to all of the physical benefits primarily has a mental health benefit, I think, for me. And also there are just like a lot of lessons that I think I take from exercise. So for example, I think being able to do five pull-ups sort of taught me I can do hard things in this sort of really narrow, measurable way, which gave me confidence in other aspects of my life.

I had a friend who her goal was do one pushup.

One pushup.

She's like, I want to be able to do one pushup. And that was, that was really motivating to her.

And then she finally got there and.

Then she could do more pushups. That's awesome. Yeah. Similar. Uh, I have so many notes here as you were talking. The other is, sleep advice. So, I mask, I have an awesome eye mask that I'll recommend in the show notes. Please, what is it? Of all the things I've recommended in all the various places, I get the most comments about, thank you for this very specific eye mask. It changed my life. It's like a Wow-Wa. It's what Tim Ferriss is often recommended.

Okay.

W-A-O. I'll link to it in the show notes.

Oh, great.

Wow-Wa. Let me look it up real quick because people are gonna be like, oh, I gotta get it. Wow-Wa eye mask.

The one that we have has sort of cushions around the eyes such that it's not flush against your eyes.

Yeah, this is the same.

Oh, great.

W-A-O-W. W-A-O-A-W sleep mask on Amazon. It's 13 bucks and amazing. My wife and I both sleep with these eye masks. It's ridiculous until you're like, I can't.

Sleep without one now. Totally. Well, there's a lot of research that even ambient lighting results in lower quality sleep. So I think that's why the blackout shades and the eye masks just help.

Ensure it's truly dark. Yeah, I was just watching a podcast and the advice there was even your your smoke alarm with a little light is too much light. Like, you need to cover that up to create real darkness. And why not just wear an eye mask? You don't have to worry about any of that.

Yeah, that's totally okay.

And then one thing I didn't mention when you're talking about the conductor of the PM as a conductor, that's exactly the metaphor I've always used my entire career when people ask me about what is product manager. So we're like, Really? Yeah, I have all these slides of like, here's the PM and it's like.

A symphony and a conductor standing there. Lenny, do you know how happy that makes me? Because I, I feel like sometimes people are like, that sounds crazy, but the, the fact that you actually came to that same conclusion makes me like, like what, why did, why, why did you come to that conclusion? I'm just curious.

Uh, because as you said, the PM's not like doing the, not making the thing. They're just helping each of the people who are the most talented at their very specific skill do the best possible work. and their back is, you know, to the audience, they're kind of trying to stay out of the way, even though, you know, they come in, everyone claps for them.

Yeah, I was kind of get that. Yeah.

And then in theory, they could, like, step in a little bit to help out when you need, you know, they can pinch it on, like, design here and there and research here and there. Probably not engineering. So those are kind of the reasons. And, you know, they're not in charge that, you know, the violin, the chair one violinist is the actual person that's.

Making the music and the best at this thing. It's so great to hear somebody else talk about this too. Thank you. And I think that that is really how I view my role and what I do. And I think maybe just hearing you talk about it reminded me why I think I put so much emphasis on just elevating the people on my team and the people around me. And one of the, you know, sort of candidly, one of the development areas for me, and it could be sort of downstream because I do have this analogy of how to be a PM is that the growth feedback or the constructive feedback for me is really learning when to lead from the front more, maybe when to be less of a quiet conductor that's really elevating the first chair violinist and be more front facing. I think a lot of my approach and my leadership style is really leading through the people on my team and helping grow them. And a lot of times I think that, you know, they're dedicated, they're experts, they know, you know, particular areas, obviously, as a head of product, I manage a portfolio of different projects of which each of them has the incredible leader on it. And so oftentimes I'm just really trying to lead from behind and help them be as successful as possible. But there are, there is a time and a place when, when maybe that silent conductor needs to take more of a vocal in front-facing role.

I know exactly what you mean. I had the same problem when I was a PM because there's always this like fear that PM's in charge and telling everyone to do. And so I had the opposite of like, okay, that's not me. I'm like, I'm gonna just let you do the things you think are best and I'll just make sure the best ideas come to the surface. And I had to learn exactly the same thing. Sometimes people just want you to point them in the right direction and make the decision in the end. The best PMs are people that have the best opinions about what is going to work, have intuition of what users need, have strong product sense and all that stuff. I've had this post that I'm trying to work on along these lines where there's this kind of reaction to PMs aren't the CEO of the product. They're just, you know, like, no, don't call yourselves that. I think it's the opposite. I think PMs actually should think of themselves as the CEO of the product, not in terms of they, you know, in charge and can fire people and manage people, but They're the closest heuristic for what the CEO and the founder wants. They think of what does the business need? What is going to help the users, the customers, what's going to help us grow? And I think the PM is the closest to that role. And so I think it's important to think of that role as that, even though you're not, you know, technically in charge.

Yeah. And maybe, maybe you could call it something different, but I totally agree with that sentiment. I think there was some, I think we were trying to push against the criticism that PMs were sort of bossing everybody around and like, but I actually- There's baggage there. There's baggage there. I call it, there is something called the great non-technical sort of, there was a period of time at Facebook where I think the PMs really had to prove their value to the engineers and show that we were actually not slowing things down with all this extra process. You can imagine an engineer hearing me talk about, how to run a meeting in all the canonical docs and just be like, what? This sounds terrible. So yeah, we had to prove that. But I really like, I actually do think the PM is the closest to really channeling what the CEO or the founder wants. And another thing that I've worked on and that I am working on is really developing a much stronger first party perspective. Like, it's not enough for the PM to run this people in process that we talked about. Obviously, I love that stuff. I lean that that way. But at the end of the day, a PM cannot, like, Outsource their perspective or delegate their, you know, their thinking through people in process. And so for me, that has been a learning curve, and I am trying to, as someone who's very, like, sort of consensus driven. I want to hear all the different opinions from all the different people. I can still do that. I can still, through people in process, talk to all the different folks working on a project, hear their first party perspectives, and then use all of that to synthesize my own because it will be unique given my role on the team and just sort of what I'm trying to optimize for and really make sure that I both develop that first party opinion and communicate it clearly. And like you said, the best PMs, I think, can do it all.

Just to follow this thread, one thread further, because this is something I think a lot of product managers work on and are told to work on. Is there anything you found to be helpful in building this skill in yourself that might be helpful to folks that are working on it?

I'm lucky enough because I sort of have a big team, I have someone who helps me schedule my time. and I used to goal that person and goal our work together on just being as efficient as possible. But now what I am goaling that person and what we're trying to accomplish here is giving me as much time to develop a first party point of view. And so sort of how do I, what is the most effective way to do that? And for me, it is having, you know, two to three hour blocks of time where I can actually sit, think, have space, but maybe something that's different about me than other people is it's very, very helpful for me to talk to maybe one or two people, not being a big meeting with like 40 people, sort of trusted people. I have an incredible person on my team that I talk to that I think really helps me clarify my thinking. And so to go back to the beginning, just, I'm trying to find blocks in my day that I can spend time thinking and also within those blocks, they don't have to be alone time. They can also be scheduling sort of my chief of staff and my head of data to bounce ideas off of as a sounding board, because that is the process that I know works best for me in terms of really developing a first party perspective.

Such a good tip. It makes sense if you're just spending all your day coordinating in meetings, checking things, reviewing things, you have no time to actually think about what you think is the right move and answer and strategy. Next step. And so that's a really good tip. If you're finding that you're just spending, you don't have time to think about what you think is the right solution and the right strategy and the right product decision. Fine, just block time to think about this stuff. I always try to, I have these deep work slots in my calendar. I've written about this a few times where it's three hours and the invite, I don't know if you can do this these days, but it was just, if you book time during the slot, I will slap you.

Nobody knows. That's amazing. And, you know, I think for me, some people might need three hours on their own. I think for me, and I don't know about you, talking things through with one or two people really helps me as well. So sometimes it was, it was almost like quite challenging for me to think of going into a room by myself for three hours. And then I was just gonna, like, figure it out on my own. This is like a, And I don't know how people think strategically the best, but it doesn't have to necessarily be alone.

That's a great tip. Just have a sparring partner, someone that is just interested in exploring ideas and not just have a clear agenda. I love that. Okay, Naomi, I love this tangent we went on as we were wrapping up.

I know, totally.

That was amazing. There was a lot of good stuff that we covered there. But I know you have to run. So before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that we haven't covered that you wanted to cover or share?

I think honestly, I think I just did it. I didn't even realize I wanted to talk about that, but it just all came out.

I love it. I love that. Those are the best nuggets. With that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

I'm ready.

First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

I really love narrative nonfiction. So I like the Erik Larson books. They're a very compelling and page-turning way to learn about history. I recently read Devil in the White City and there is also one about Churchill's first year by Erik Larson. Another book that, you know, just the canonical book that I often recommend is Sapiens. I think he's a great example of what we talk about when we talk about simplifiers. he took a very complex subject, which is all of human history, and tried to pull out the nuggets. You know, I think his thesis that what differentiates humans from other forms of life is really our ability to tell and believe in myths or stories. And he cites money and religion as examples. But also there's a graphic novel version of Sapiens. And so he almost has the PhD level. And then he literally has the high school level, which is a graphic novel version. He also has Unstoppable Us, which I think is a kids version. And so clearly here is someone who is a master. There's a James Clear thing that a friend Shirley told me about, where it's like, if you're a beginner, you have ignorant simplicity and intermediate has functional complexity, and then a master of a topic. has profound simplicity. And that's what I feel like Noah Yuval Harari really has because he can go all the way up and down the school pyramid in terms of explaining this really complex topic.

What I heard about him is that he goes on a one month meditation retreat every year where it's just him silent meditation retreat. And people ask him, how do you have time to do that when you have so much work to do? He's like, the only way I'm able to achieve these books where I synthesize all of human history into a story is because I do that. because I can clear my mind and just be.

And Lenny, to our previous conversation, that is how he himself and like is best. That's what he needs to do. You know, I might need two to three hours a day in a sparring partner. No, Yuval Harari needs a month in silent meditation.

Great point. Everyone has their own way of unlocking their brain. On Devil in the White City, fun fact, when I read that, I was like, I need to go to Chicago and see this stuff that they wrote about in this. book about the World's Fair. And so I went to Chicago.

You did?

Because of that book, yes.

Wow. Have you read the Splendid and the Vile? Yes.

That was about the telegram, right? Yeah, right. Oh, no, there was Churchill's first year.

But he has like six books. I haven't read all of them. Okay.

I think it was either that one or something about a telegram. I did read it. It was less good, though, as what I find. I found the Devil in the White.

City was the best.

Was the best. Amazing. Okay, we'll keep going. Second question. Do you have a favorite movie or TV show you've recently watched that you really enjoyed?

We just watched Shogun. I thought it was really good. Have you seen it?

I have. Yes, I loved it. Very gruesome, but amazing. Yeah.

Yeah, it was. I had to cover my eyes for some of it. And then we also. The movie that we just watched was June 2. Chris Cox, who's our chief product officer, actually recommended that as one of the best films that he's seen recently, and I really trust his opinion on that. So we caught up by watching Dune 1 and then watched Dune 2, and it was really good.

I watched that in IMAX theater in San Francisco. That's like insanely large screen, and I would recommend that. I don't know if I don't think it's still out there. Yeah, it's ridiculous. Amazing.

I think there's another one coming someday. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Dune 3. Dune 3. I'm just, yeah, just keep them coming. Next question. Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love?

So, well, I'm going to check out that eye mask that you recommended, the Wah Wah thing. That's it. But I know it's super expensive. But have you tried the eight sleep?

I have. My wife doesn't love it. She doesn't like the noise. It's like a very slight noise when it, you know, starts up, but she wakes her up. So we don't have it anymore.

Yeah, and I noticed that too. I think maybe they just released the latest edition. One of the features that is the killer feature for me is that it does a vibrating alarm so that when I wake up at 6:00 a.m., I do not wake up everyone in the house at 6:00 a.m. And so it's a thermal alarm. It makes the bed on my side hotter and it also slightly vibrates underneath my ear to wake me up.

It's under your ear. I remember vibrating the whole part of the bed. I wonder if that's a new feature.

Maybe this is like, I'm on version three. Maybe there's a version four. I don't know.

Maybe that was version one. Oh, man. That's so funny. A nice thing about my life right now is that because I have no meetings or boss, I don't need an alarm. However, it's amazing. However, we have a young kid and he wakes up at 6 to 6:30.

So that's my alarm usually. oh, and then the other thing I wanted to mention, I don't know if you have this problem, but I'm like, I'm trying to get like 100 grams of protein every day. I think a lot of my friends and I are sort of, you know, focused on protein consumption right now. And so my trainer who helped me actually do the pull-ups and the push-ups started a protein, protein powder company, protein products company called ProMix that I really love. And he has like this rice I.

Just bought that. What? Yes. I was reading, Kevin Rose had a, his favorite, his like health stack and, I don't know if that's the brand, but it's exactly a rice crispy thing with 15 grams of protein. So I'm pretty sure that's it.

I'm pretty sure that's it because the rice crispy part of it is, is very unique. So let me, let me know what you think. I really like the chocolate flavor.

I love them and I love them. So that's a really good tip. Okay. I just saw a funny TikTok where it's like, I never thought when I'd grow up and be an adult, I'd be thinking so often about protein and how much protein I should be eating.

Maybe this is 40. I don't know. I'm not sure for me, but yes, I've been thinking a lot about protein. The other thing I really like is canned seafood, which has a lot of protein. So something called fishwife has like, It's just sort of, hipster like, chicken and biscuits. Oh yeah, very cute.

Yes, my wife gets those. Another protein tip. They were a former sponsor, but no longer, but it's an amazing protein tip. Maui Nui Venison beef sticks. It's 10 grams of protein and it's.

A delicious venison beef stick.

Thank you.

Look at what we've become, Lenny. Just protein obsessed.

Just gonna be so protein rich. Amazing. Okay. What else we got here? Okay, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to and find helpful in working life?

Last month we were watching, or I guess like two weeks ago, we were watching the US Open and we discovered that as people come through the hallway to come onto the court to play, the players all pass the Billie Jean King sign that says pressure is privilege. And I really loved that because I think just sort of with the teen accounts launch and just like a lot of the more public facing stuff that I have done recently, I do like we talked about, get nervous. And I think pressure is privilege just reminds me that a lot of this stuff is a really incredible opportunity that I that I have and to be grateful for it. I can still be nervous, but also recognize and be grateful for it.

I love that. Just remind yourself that you're lucky to be feeling this pressure, because that means something is important. Slightly different version of that is Zuck at the event in the Chase Center that you were also at had the shirt that said, Learning through suffering. Learning through suffering.

Learning through suffering. I really, I like that one too. I mean, it's been, I think he was, you know, he spoke a little bit about this. Being an entrepreneur is really, really hard.

Yeah, they had the Jensen line about how people asked him if he'd start NVIDIA again. And his answer was like, if I knew how insanely hard and stressful this was, I would not. Very, very honest. Okay, last question. So Charles, your former colleague, told me that you're an incredible surfer.

Oh.

And that you design your life almost around where and when you can go surf.

Yeah.

Any story or lesson or, I don't know, takeaway from surfing and the impact that's had on you? Lessons about surfing?

So, I think surfing and life have a lot of parallels. It is an incredibly mental sport for me. The biggest thing that I can do to improve my surfing is to improve my confidence. And so when I'm going for a wave, a lot of times I will hesitate or pull back or, you know, instead the best thing that you can actually do in that situation. is stand up into your fear. Like, it's to ride the wave. That is the safest thing you can do. That is the, you know, thing that you're actually supposed to do. But on every dimension, that's the right thing. And so it's almost, I guess, the motto there is stand up into the fear when you're going, you're about to catch a wave. And actually, the things that you can do when you're afraid, for example, like I said, pull back or, like, throw your board. are actually quite counterproductive and actually unsafe and could lead to more injury. And so it's just another reminder that you really need to commit and stand up into your fear.

I love it. Stand up into your fear and pressure is a privilege and learning through suffering. Naomi, this was so much fun. I'm so happy that you agreed to do this. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online? Where they find Naomi-isms and anything else you want to point folks to? and how can listeners be useful to you?

So, believe it or not, I have Naomi.com I know Baz has baz.com I bought that URL I think maybe 20 years ago, 15 to 20 years ago from a farmer actually whose name was Naomi and or whose wife's name was Naomi rather and his wife was not using it and so they got it for quite quite a steal and I will just say that I've had other famous Naomi is much more famous than much more well known than I who would like to have Naomi.com make offers for this URL. But I really like having just sort of a home on the internet where I can put my Naomiisms. They're also available on Instagram, Naomi Gleye. How can listeners be useful to you? I think Lenny, I mentioned this before we got on the call. I don't tend to do that much sort of public speaking or talking about Naomiisms. I did some of it two years ago when we first launched. But I, as a result of being on the podcast and stuff, would love to do more of this. And so I think any feedback on what listeners would like to see or hear from me, questions that would sort of give me a reason where I felt like it would be useful for me to do more on Naomi-isms would be super helpful.

Sweet. So if you have any of those, Liam in the YouTube comments is usually the easiest place for folks Leave that. Naomi, thank you so much for being here. This was so much fun.

Thank you, Lenny.

Bye, everyone. 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. @ lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.