Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product)

My probably most spectacular failure was, I was the first PM on Hangouts. We had thousands of people working for me. We had the entire power of Google. We had Larry literally sitting with us saying, we can do anything we want Chrome to do. And we still didn't manage to build a great messaging product. The main kind of learnings from that is don't take on projects that are gonna be six months, a year, because you just generally don't have control over the macro. The challenge with being a product manager is everybody thinks they can do their job. Anybody who uses the product thinks they have ideas. So at some point in time, you're like, what is my discipline? Like, what is my science? The moment you build experimentation, you've now made it scientific.

A lot of new people in their career are like, oh, I just want to think about strategy.

I'm going to think about the big picture. Strategy is a little bit overrated for product. For most product managers, your strategy should.

Be how fast can I go from hypothesis to data? Today, my guest is Mayur Komet. Mayur is Chief Product Officer at N26. one of the most successful fintech startups in the world, and which in my research came in amongst the top five companies in the world who are hiring and producing the best product managers. Prior to N26, Mayur was global head of product at Binance, VP of product at Agoda, which is over $100 billion company based in Thailand, and a PM at Google and Microsoft. In our wide-ranging conversation, Mayur shares what he's learned about hiring and developing great product managers, what he learned from his time working at Binance, which as you'll soon hear was one of the wildest and most unique ways of working. What he learned from the failure of Google's early attempts at Hangouts, where he was the first PM. Also the pros and cons of working in Asia versus Europe versus the US, and why you should be starting your career on the west coast of the US. Also why comp early in your career does not matter. And so much more. This episode is so full of golden nuggets, and advice for product people throughout every stage of their career. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of amazing products, including Superhuman, Notion, Linear, Perplexity, Granola, and more. Check it out at lennynewsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Mayur Comet. This episode is brought to you by Work OS. If you're building a SaaS app, At some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine-grain authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control, or other enterprise features like single sign-on, SCIM, or user management, you should consider Work OS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com Many of you are building AI products, which is why I'm very excited to chat with Brandon Fu, founder and CEO of Paragon. Hey Brandon. Hey Lenny. Thanks for having me. So integrations have become a big deal for AI products. Why is that? Integrations are mission critical for AI for two reasons. First, AI products need contacts from their customers' business data, such as Google Drive files, Slack messages, or CRM records. Second, for AI products to automate work on behalf of users, AI agents need to be able to take action across these different third-party tools. So where does Paragon fit into all this? Well, these integrations are a pain to build, and that's why Paragon provides an embedded platform that enables engineers to ship these product integrations in just days instead of months across every use case, from RAG data ingestion to agentic actions. And I know from firsthand experience that maintenance is even harder than just building it for the first time. Exactly. We believe product teams should focus engineering efforts on competitive advantages, not integrations. That's why companies like u.com, ai21, and hundreds of others use Paragon to accelerate their integration strategy. If you want to avoid wasting months of engineering on integrations that your customers need, check out Paragon@useparagon.com/lenny. Mayur, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. This is super exciting. Thank you for having me.

I want to start with your time at Binance. So you've worked at Google, you worked at Microsoft, you worked at a company called Agoda, now you're at N26. I imagine Binance was the most unique place that you've worked at. And I've also never heard much about what it's like to work at a company like Binance. I was just looking them up on Wikipedia. I saw they started in China, they moved to Japan, they moved to Malta, and now they have no official headquarters. What was it just like working at Binance? How was it most unique from other places you've worked?

Yeah, so maybe just a background for Binance because I think a lot of people have heard it, some in positive connotation, some not so much. The scale of Binance is pretty mind boggling. So just to give the history, they started in 2017 as a crypto exchange when there were other crypto exchange on the market for years, the Coinbase. And within six months they became number one.

Right?

So that's unprecedented. That's like launching a search engine today and then six months later beating Google. And then they went within five years to add a peak valuation of somewhere like 400 billion or so with 2,000 employees. So that's 0 to 400 billion in five years. So it's at a scale that's never been done before. Google couldn't do it, Facebook, none of the names that you hear it. And so it's remarkable. When I was there as the head of product, my KPI, my top line KPI was the trading volume and my monthly KPI was in trillions of dollars. So that's just the scale was mind boggling. We had teams of 10, 20 people running multi-billion dollar profit businesses. And that brings it with it like a first, like how did they do that to that scale? and two, what kind of culture requires to keep that running? Both are very fascinating. I think we could spend a lot of time talking about it. But the truly interesting thing, the first one is this, you can't do this by having a traditional org structure. So CZ, the founder and CEO at one point had like 55 direct reports, and his direct reports had about the similar ones. So for a large portion of the history of the company, there was just one level between the individual employees and the CEO, right? And that leads to like an extreme level of decision making and execution. You cannot have one-on-ones when you have 55 direct reports. So there's a culture of one too many and doing that as often as possible. So the leadership team, for example, met every day. And because the leadership team was spread across the world, we met at like 11:00 PM when I was in Singapore every day. that includes the weekends, holidays, like the leadership team was there 11:00 p.m. every single day, which meant that none of the decisions were blocked for more than 24 hours. And most of them, we made it on chat even within those 24 hours. But if there was something big, it was escalated, decided. We executed largely based on this concept that I now take with me. I call it the running products via daily meeting. So we would pick an owner for something really urgent at the nightly leadership call, and then that owner would be expected to have all hands on deck for however long that problem is every single day, and then report the updates on the daily call. And some of these were really massive topics, like how do we get 15 financial licenses in 15 countries in the next three months? Right, so it wouldn't be at a scale that was- Like 24 hours. Yes. And people did it. Like it's extremely interesting to see that when you have really smart people, you give them really hard problems, you have no constraints on what can you need to solve them, whether it's money, people, except time. Time is always at a premium. People can move mountains in small amount of time. And that's that extreme ownership culture, I think probably was the most fascinating part of working at Binance that I've now tried to take some good parts of it in terms of attention to detail, being able to pick certain areas and own it irrespective of what your title is and how many people report to you. There are certain downsides in terms of the amount of randomization that it can cause teams. especially if it's not super well thought through. So I'm trying to see what are the great parts of that that I can bring to different roles. But that concept of daily meeting, if there's something super urgent, how can you own it directly and run it yourself, but you are in the details so your team knows that they need to be in the details and then be able to execute that. So that's probably the most fascinating. There are several war stories. I was there for two years and the amount of interesting stories that happened during that time is a lot. But then maybe we can follow up later if you have specific questions.

I would love to hear a war story. This is definitely as interesting as I was expecting it to be. So just what I'm hearing so far is just things that worked well for them to operate at this insane pace and scale is the entire leadership team meeting every single day. 11:00 p.m. your time, hopefully better times for other folks around the world.

Well, there's some people in Sydney, Australia, so it was 1:00 a.m. for them.

Okay, great. This idea of a flat structure, yeah, it's interesting because I imagine that it's not necessarily great for other reasons. And then this idea of being in the details, let me ask about that actually. What does that actually look like? Because I think a lot of people, a lot of leaders are like, oh yeah, I'm in the details. We should be in the details.

What does it actually look like?

In real life at Binance.

So let me get an example. So one of the areas that's when I joined, one of the biggest kind of product problem we had was crypto before was fairly unregulated. So you could just sign up with an email address or even just a wallet and start trading. Like there was almost zero friction. And then it suddenly became regulated where you had to almost have a full KYC flow like a bank. And that just meant that the conversion rate dropped from, let's say, 100% to like 2%. and now we had to solve this problem. This was the daily meeting level problem. And it's okay if you're operating in one country, you can do it easily. If you're operating in 200 countries where there's not even a standard for what a document acceptance criteria might look like, now you have a significantly larger problem. You cannot say, let's work with the KYC vendor and do the onboarding. So we would need to, we had to literally have this, the top 50 countries, the top 10 document types. So there's this spreadsheet of basically 500 sales with the conversion rate at each level. And then we are looking at, okay, a passport in Kazakhstan has very low level of conversion. What can we do about that? Do we need a new vendor? Do we need better imaging technology, do we need a new SDK from a vendor? And then we go cell by cell based on, let's say if I was running a typical product team, I would say, okay, let's just look at maybe the top 90 percentile of our users. But this was Binance and then CZ is like, no user left behind. Even that one user in Congo is important because this is financial inclusion for them. So then all of those 500 cells matter. no matter how low their impact to the conversion rate is. And so that's a little bit of balance flavor there. It's extreme customer focus and it doesn't really matter. It's not that customers are not a number. It's a person at the end of the screen and we care about them. So you would need to know like, hey, you would get questioned, why is the driver's license acceptance rate in Kenya falling suddenly? So when you have and that's just one piece of the problem in a large product with like 80 different products. So you would of course cannot do it for every single product, but the concept of like what is the most leveraged decision you could be working on right now? And if it is for your growth, it's the onboarding, then you better know exact every single screen of the flow, why is there a drop off and what are your teams doing for it? Right, so that level of detail and you just do it on different products at different parts of your journey.

I imagine there's people listening where they're like, there's a team responsible for the onboarding flow and KYC flow of their product and it's like so hard. They're like, oh, there's all these problems with our flow. Imagine that for like a hundred different versions of the flow across a hundred different countries.

And documents. So it gets very tricky. It gets very tricky, but we also had resources. At one point in time, we said we had like a team of 20 people working on KYC, and we said for the next three months we want.

500, which has its own downsides too.

Has its downsides, but if you're running in this kind of extreme mode and you're not as worried about just the team stress and personal development aspects of it, We're just purely looking at the execution of the product. There's a surprising amount of power that comes with it. This was probably the second time in my career where I had that, wow, you can do this. Because in other companies it would take years to do it. The first one was just going back at Google. I remember I joined Google was my first day at onboarding and I was the product manager for Gmail for mobile, for sync. And I was in my onboarding meeting when they pulled me out and said, hey, we have an issue. The service is down. And Wall Street Journal is writing an article that Google, Microsoft, Apple not working together, causing the service to go down. So we need you in this war room right now. And it was a bug in iOS 4, this is a long time ago, which caused every single user to pull the entire Gmail inbox, resync the whole inbox. So a bug on the Apple side is gonna take two, three weeks to fix. And it was causing like a 1000x load to our servers. And I remember Connie O'Roarke, who was the head of infrastructure at Google, and he's like, sure, he slipped a button and there were 1000x servers that showed up for the next two weeks. And I was like, wow, that is scale. Right? So this was my second time kind of feeling that wow moment, like, oh, we just put 500 people in and solve the problem. It's best about having the 500 people and being able to maneuver them that quickly. I don't think I've been able to do that at any other company.

To close kind of the loop on some of these sort of radical ways of working, this idea of 50 reports per person and this idea of caring about a person in Congo not being able to sign up. Do you think that's a good idea? Do you take those in the way you work now or is it just in this particular situation it's important other places maybe not?

If there are several preconditions, one is you're growing really fast, right? So the growth for the employees comes just from seeing problems at scale that are growing every day, that it needs less of a manager's attention to figure out what you need to grow. And the best way to grow in general is that you work at a really fast-growing company. So if that's true, two, people are extremely well compensated. So they care about the KPIs more than they care about what's the next stage in my career and how do I get promoted? Because I mean, our bonus structure went from like 0% to like 500%. So a lot of people didn't really care getting a 10%, 20% pay raise. They just want to do incredible work. because we know they would be taken care of. And three, there's like some, it's a mission driven company, still believe at the end of the day that you're doing this just beyond the KPI. So at Binance, there was a very strong belief that 80% of the world doesn't have access to financial tools. They don't even have an access to currency that they can trust. And when we see, look at, like live in Europe or in US and we think about crypto, It's largely about speculation or Bitcoin. For most of the world, they just need access to a US dollar stablecoin. And just knowing that my currency is not getting kind of de-inflated because of things beyond my control. So everyone having come from these kind of a lot of our employees were across all these countries, they had a very strong mission believe that what we are doing will truly empower billions of people. And there's a power in that. A lot of people go through, hey, I'm going to move mountains because it's not just about the money, it's not about my career. It's about doing something that will change the world.

Let's follow this thread on accelerating your career and talk about where you're at today in 26. So as you know, I've been doing a bunch of research on which companies hire and produce the best product managers. I've done a couple passes at this and N26 has come up in the top five of both ways of approaching this of essentially which companies, alumni's go on to do the best in their career. N26 is way up there. I want to come at this from a couple directions. One is what N26 as a company does to hire and incubate the best people, but also just you personally, what your advice is to people and how you help them become great PMs. So let's actually start in that second bucket. what is the most kind of common and most impactful career advice that you share with product managers that you manage that you find most helps them move ahead in their career and get unstuck in their career?

I think the number one thing I shared before, the best thing you can do is find companies that are growing fast because it kind of compounds your learning at a much faster interval. Just the basic compound interest formula, right? Even if your interest rate is low, if you're compounding daily versus compounding yearly, after two years you would be at a whole different stage at the end point. Companies that are growing fast just lets you get that learning much, much quicker. I remember joining Microsoft first in my career. Some of the products I worked on during my internship had not shipped till I left Microsoft three, four years later. That's a very, very low rate of compounding. and Microsoft's a whole different company now, 20 years later, thankfully. And then you contrast that something like Binance, where every day or every hour or every minute, you're shipping something and then learning from it. So the faster you can compound your learning, the faster you will grow. The second piece generally is like, if you need to optimize for what you're great at, and now after having two kids, I'm like fairly in the fact that your strengths kind of get defined very, very early.

Right?

I'm looking at my nine-year-old and 12-year-old, and they have a whole different set of strengths. So if you're like 25 years old early in your career, it's very hard at that point to say, oh, here are all my weaknesses, and I need to improve on those. A lot of the career feedback typically tends to be around like, hey, here are the things you need to be better at. Why don't you do more of that stuff?

Right?

Firmly in the camp that you need to know what you're great at, what are your superpowers. and you need to find jobs where success is determined by how much of that superpowers you get to use. And early in your career, you can't get away with the fact that there's some stuff you're not gonna be great at and you just have to manage around it. If you get higher up in your career, then it gets easier because you can build a team that complements your strengths. But again, if you're early in your career, find places that if you are a great kind of creative person, if you can look at a product and think of 100 things you can do better, you're always about what's the next best thing and how quickly can I implement it. You need to be working in teams that have a high experimentation culture, need to be working in growth teams in large companies. If you work at in a fintech company on a compliance side project or launching like a new business vertical, you're gonna struggle, right? On the same time, if you have like extreme management, like structured thinking, you have great stakeholder management, you have high EQ, you should work in teams where there is a large amount of complex people management and process management. You would struggle in a kind of a growth team where the expectation is you're doing things really quickly, right? So I would look at like first, like very introspectively, what are my true strengths? What do I and then look at jobs where that has a much higher profile of winning. And thirdly, like largely, I would say do not optimize for compensation, especially early in your career. If you're truly on a track to become like an executive someday or found your own company and make it successful, you will find that the compensation is so much backloaded. that you would make 90% of your compensation in the last five years of your career. So optimizing for 10%, 20% early in your career. So if you have two jobs and I would like rank in your first 15 years of your career, I would say do not look at the compensation. And then the last one, this was kind of strange. Like I never thought about this longer, but now I think it's probably the the most interesting advice I can give people is determine very early in your career if you truly want to be a C-level someday, you want to be an executive someday. Because it's almost like if you're ambitious and successful, you enter product management, you're in like top of your, it's almost like an expectation of you that you would become that and you'd never really challenge or question yourself. Is this the thing that needs me, that I need to do to get there? Is that something I'm going to truly enjoy? Not just the destination, but the process to get there. And a lot of people think that and they make suboptimal decisions based on that. There's like incredible careers you can build and incredible lives that you can live by just being great at what you do, doing more of that stuff. and you end your career, maybe as a director, maybe as a group product manager, but throughout the stuff you have like build a holistic life that doesn't revolve around your work and gives incredible meaning to you. Or you can be saying, you know what, work is a huge part of my identity. Somebody asked me what wakes me up in the morning and what gives me that energy, it's my work. I can't separate my identity from your work, then maybe you should pursue that C-level path. because it will truly be fulfilling and you would be able to make those challenges and sacrifices that are going to be asked of you to make that. So if you can calibrate that early and have that true conversation with yourself, like, yes, I want to go down that path and I want to do, you would make different career choices. And in that path, I would definitely say, don't look at compensation. The two jobs, look at the three things. Is it going to give me high compounding of learning? Is it high overlap with my strengths? and is it, am I going to have a lot of fun doing it? Because if you have fun doing it, then it becomes a virtuous cycle and.

You do more of it and you're great at it. On the question of do you want, decide if you want to be a CPO essentially, is the implication there is if you do that's like a big sacrifice, you're going to be stressed, work-life balance is worse.

Is that the kind of the- no, no, no, no, absolutely not. Absolutely not. It's like, if you truly enjoy your work and what you're doing, it won't.

Feel like a sacrifice.

When you're constantly, when you look at a new product, you're walking down the street, you see a new product, you're on the app store, you see a new product, and you're like, oh, this is cool. Oh, look how they're doing the onboarding. Oh, look how the app store entry looks. If that truly fills you up, it fills your cup. Every moment you're looking at why things can be better, how you can be better, how a certain thing, you would be, the sacrifice will not feel like sacrifices. It will not feel like you're working long hours. You not feel like, hey, when you're talking to PMs and giving them some guidances, when you're building teams, when you're recruiting new people, all that stuff feels, it like fills your cup, right? It doesn't drain it. And then you would be, you would have incredible fun on the journey. So it's less about the, that your sacrifices or work-life balance, the moment you start having those conversations, you are probably not on that track. You should not be on that track because the moment the word work-life balance comes, I think Jeff Bezos has this thing that he hits the word because it means like there are opposing things that need to be balanced, right? It needs to be work-life awesomeness or something like that where every moment is awesome whether you're working or we're living. But for some people, that comes naturally because that's how they're wired. And those people should absolutely pursue it because it would be incredibly fulfilling. And the things that are challenging would also feel not as onerous. Whereas for everything else, it would feel like a sacrifice. It would feel like something you need to balance. And then you would, again, even if you're great at it, you're not going to have fun doing it. And at some point, you will not be great at it.

For folks that are PMs today, there's almost an implication their career is heading towards CPO eventually. That's the ladder they're on. What are the, say, top three most common other options you've seen, other paths you've seen of folks that you manage so that people can think about, okay, I don't need to maybe just keep climbing this ladder. There's these other directions I can go.

I mean, the number one, and that's, I think, back to your original question on N26, if you work in incredibly high growth companies, especially fintech, where there's a higher reason people end up being founders because it's probably a whole different kind of track we can go down on. The founding your own company is probably the most kind of obvious slash exciting alternate path. The only thing I ask there is like, Again, the same question, like what you are good at and what you love doing. The challenges with founding a company is like a large portion of running a company has nothing to do with building a great product, especially as the company gets bigger. I've worked for founders now for 17 of my 20-year career. So even at Google and stuff, like Nikhil was my boss at Google, used to be a founder. and the CEOs now, the thing they tell me when they hire me is like, I wish I had your job. That's because that's what I used to do. That's what I have loved doing. And now I spend 90% of my time doing stuff that is not the stuff that I truly enjoy. But folks enjoy building stuff. As a PM, there are a lot of things you don't have control over. And you feel like, hey, that's what's stopping me from growing. That's what's stopping me from truly enjoying. founding is a great path, right? You have that control now. You own the decision making. There's rarely times you can say, hey, this did not work because of that person, right? If you're constantly hitting that, then founding is a great path for you because then you, you have the ball control for better or worse. The other is just like, I mean, it's, it's less about being a CPO and just like growing your, your. your breadth and your depth instead of just the ladder. So you are incredibly either getting specialized in a specific domain where there is now enough value for you to separate yourself from the pack, right? Whether it's like in fintech now we have folks who are onboarding experts with KYC. We have people who are fraud experts. We have people who have really great understanding of how card schemes work and how mastercards work and where can we get the the right incentives for the user, the folks who are experts on customer loyalty and retention. You build that domain expertise and then you realize that everyone needs that. And that could be an incredible way to specialize. So you may lead growth at certain team even though you're not a CPU. So that's kind of the second way of doing it. And the third one, again, just not to knock it out, is you realize that work is not going to be my big part of my identity. My identity is who am I as a parent, who am I as a community member, who am I as a son to my parents, who am I as an artist or a contributor? And that's what my desk is going to be a well-rounded person. And a job is great, I'm great at it, but I'm going to do it as much as it's needed. And the value and meaning that the top part of the Maslow's pyramid comes from everything but work. And then you just lead a kind of a balanced life because then work is a certain portion of it and the rest kind of fills the picture.

So just to summarize these four really good pieces of advice for how to essentially keep your career going and get unstuck and accelerated is work at companies that are really high growth because your learnings will compound and also the network you build. I didn't even mention that, that becomes really valuable because especially if the company does well, sometimes companies grow really well and there's extra benefits there. But even if they aren't, you still earn a lot.

Absolutely. Well, it's N26, like one of the reasons why they have so many founders is the fact that it was a category defining, like we were the first kind of mobile bank, right? So a lot of the problems we saw in early days, nobody else saw them. Right, so every product manager had to solve it for the very first time in history. And that kind of is a whole different level of kind of trial by fire. Same thing with the revenue, like they about started about the same time. Those are the companies that show up in like the top rankings because you did this before anybody could do it and you learned by literally moving mountains. I think two is also the fact that you see we have this whole PayPal mafia, right? Like when you see this early success, like everyone sees it together. So when they go, they have that network, as you said, built in. These are like maybe it's a product manager who starts a company, but maybe there is a business development manager who has also started his company and now you can collaborate and have partnerships. So that success, the mutual success, which a lot of early startups see, that creates a kind of a more denser network than you working at a large company where not all of you see the success at the same time. And three, I always comes down to the founders as well. Like they're incredibly mission driven founders. I always find it super admiring now when I look back at Valentin and Max here at N26, or I look at CZ. Like they have reached from a, whatever metric you can define of success, whether it's the size of the company, whether it's their personal network, beyond like whatever anybody would think success means, right? And then to wake up every day and to do this hours and hours single day, every single day, you are driven by a whole, these are the voyagers of the folks who would go explore new planets in the future. are the folks who sailed out on the seas in 1600s to discover new land. And that being access to these people directly is extremely, extremely empowering. Like you not just learn from it, but you get inspired by it. If you have an X definition of success, now your definition of success is 10X, right? You automatically push the boundaries more. So I think those two things, those three things, early start, category defining companies, mutual success and creation of dense networks, and just being inspired by incredibly successful and talented people.

You pointed out this really interesting insight that I forgot to mention with the list of companies that seem to hire and create the strongest PMs. There's a lot of fintech representation there. And I think you touched on why that might be the case because all these problems are extremely complicated and never been solved and you're solving at scale.

Here's the thing about FinTech, which is probably the most interesting is FinTech, you have two customers. You have your usual customers and you have your regulated. And you need to keep both of them happy. And usually what makes one happy, it makes the other one less happy, right? So you are constantly dealing with trade-offs. Like in most PMs and most companies, you have some trade-offs, but they're not existential. Whereas in FinTech, like every trade-off is existential. Like when you found a company, every trade-off is existential. You may not exist as a business if if you make a wrong decision. In FinTech, a lot of the PMs see that day in, day out, and that probably kind of conditions them to a whole different level of juggling balls than you would be a PM at other company.

Yeah, that's such a good point. Just really good stakeholder management influence, dealing with all these trade-offs. I think that's a really good point. I want to come back to the strength stuff because that's really important and I've been meaning to come back to it. reflect back the four things you pointed out are really what you want to look for to accelerate your career. Companies that are going really fast, working on things that you're good at and finding a role that leverages your strengths versus things you're not good at. Not optimizing for comp early is such a good point there. Your point essentially is you'll make most of your comp later, like probably the 50% the second half of your career, you probably make, I don't know, 10 times more than you make the first part of your career. And so optimize for the future comp, not today's comp. And then this idea of making sure, ask yourself, do you want to be CPOs? Do you want to go down the C-suite route? Or do you want to maybe probably plan to start a company, something else? And that informs the role you're in. Coming back to the strength stuff, how do people figure out their strengths? Do you have any advice for someone sitting around? They're like, what am I actually good at? I don't know.

So there's several ways to do it. I remember I read this book, this was I don't think it shaped my understanding of it because I was already operating in that mode. But it used to be called now discover your strengths. I think now it's called strength finder 2.0. It's still 20 years old now, but there's a lot more newer ways to do it. There are two things I have done and they're both kind of, I'm not sure how accessible they are, but I'll give you the examples. So at Agoda, we used to pay a psychologist $5,000 for every single PM we interview. So after you finish your PM rounds, we would send you to this psych assessment. It would be a six hour psych assessment and they would tell me what your strengths are. Not just that it would be an IQ component. So we would know what percentile you are and not just like an IQ score like Einstein or not, but IQ score across different across pattern recognition or structured thinking, across numerical ability, verbal ability.

Right.

So a lot of people say they hire the smartest people. At Agoda, we literally hired the smartest people because we, we paid a psychologist a lot of money to tell whether they're smart or not. But other than that, they also gave you your strengths and weaknesses. It used to be called. I know it's a company still around. It's just called Q4, and it's called Q4 because they had this. there's four quadrants on two axis. One is on dominance and one is on warmth.

Right?

So you want people who are high dominance, high warmth. So the Q4 quadrant. And that, as you can realize, if you also want smart people to find those who land in that quadrant is literally looking through a needle, through a haystack. But when I, I almost didn't do it. Like, I was like, this is like, I've been doing product for 15 years. This is insulting that I need to go. do a six hour. The only reason I did it at that time was my son was like four and a half years old and I was teaching him like, because he was going to go to kindergarten, I was starting like do some math with him. And then in like six months, he knew all the math that I knew. Like he was solving quadratic equations and stuff. And we thought, oh, we have a genius in the house. We got to get him tested. So we were testing him and that's the only reason I took this test. because I thought, hey, it would be interesting to understand what this process looks like. But then when I got the results, I was like, it was so spot on. It was incredibly spot on. It's saying areas where I would do well, areas where I would struggle and need help. So that's one way to do it. It's super extreme. A little bit. A year, two years ago, we had the opportunities. CZ is good friends with Ray Dalio, so we had Ray Dalio come to our executive offsite and he walked us through how he and his company does strengths assessment. So he has a, that one is a lot more accessible. I think it costs like $50. You can go to, I think we search for Ray Dalio's strengths. There's a website that you can go in. The way it works slightly differently for executives because you do it. So there's a, your components tells you how good you think you are. and then it has your leadership team vote you on certain different aspects. So there's a two layer assessment, how good you think you are and how good everybody else thinks you are. And then the overlap is where your true strengths are. And as a CEO, I can say, oh, Mayur's great at design. Everybody else knows that Mayur's great at design. We should give design problems to Mayur. So that's another way of kind of, so there's a scientific way of doing this. It's gotten a lot better since I read that book a long time ago. Again, if you're truly, truly curious, it doesn't take that long and now it's a lot more accessible. That's one way to do it. And it kind of separates in terms of execution, in terms of structured thinking, innovation and design, creativity, stakeholder management, EQ, like you get a little bit of a more scientific picture on what your strengths are. But there's also a simpler way, right? Like you know, there's as a PM, you do pretty much a large portion, everybody does the same few things, right? You think you're designing the roadmap, you're coming up with what you think is the product strategy. There's a lot of time around just managing engineers, making sure they do stuff. There's stakeholder management, marketing, compliance, whatever. there's launch and just tracking data analytics. So this part is true for most PMs. Some jobs require more of one versus the other. And you just know when you do these things, which ones you're truly great at and should have a lot of fun doing. Maybe you just don't like Jira and the ticket tracking and just following people on that. That's the worst part of your job. stay away from more structured, complex stakeholder management jobs. Or you find that, hey, you do really well at that, and somebody asks you, hey, what are the 15 things we're going to do next week to improve our conversion? That's where you kind of have a hard time to sit down, spend hours thinking about it. Then maybe that's not your strength. So over time, you kind of build this self-calibration. on areas that you have fun doing and areas where you don't have. And then when you look at the next job, just try and gauge, are they hiring me because I did really well at some of the stuff that I didn't love doing? And if that's what they're hiring you for, probably you're not gonna have a lot of fun or high acceleration if you go there.

There's so much there. There's I think an important point that I'll add, and I'm curious if you agree, a lot of new people are like new people in their career, like, oh, I just want to think about strategy. I'm going to think about the big picture. I don't want to just sit there and optimize the roadmap and like, you know, be in Jira. But it's actually, that's your job when you're just starting out. You need to earn the right to contribute to the vision, to the strategy.

There's one of the, and there's a pre-conversation you talk about contrary and view. Product strategy by definition seems like a, this is gonna be a controversial.

Great.

Like not really, those two words feel very at odds with each other for me. Like a product, you have a hypothesis, you know, and if you can test it, you don't need a strategy. If I say, hey, if I build this and I know this will add this much users and this time with this conversion rate, this customer acquisition cost and this LTV, that's your hypothesis and you could test it in the market very quickly. And if it works, you have your strategy. Keep doing more of it. Strategy is always like keep doing more of it or don't do it. That's all there is to strategy. The key part is just figuring out which one goes in which bucket. And if you're really executing fast enough in a kind of a structured experimentation driven manner, your strategy becomes largely largely solved problem.

And.

That'S a challenge. A lot of people think strategies about looking at Porter's four forces, a lot of slides, looking at some data and slicing it and saying we need to go here or there. All of it is largely some sort of package intuition. And the challenge with that is usually you go with the loudest voice in the room. And if you're a junior in your career, it's a very frustrating exercise because you think you know the strategy better, but it's all it is. It's a sense of packaged intuition. And then the guy with the loudest, biggest title or the loudest voice is going to go do it. It was very early in my career, Jonathan Rosenberg, he was the head of the CPO at Google. Like all the PMs reported to him. He was not called the CPO back then. and he had this one thing he would say all the time that come to me with data. If you come to me with ideas, we'll go with mine, right? That was the saying. It's like you can come with any ideas, we're just gonna do what I think. But unless you come with strong sense of proof to override me. So again, strategy is a little bit overrated for product. So market expansions for Investments for licenses, compliance. There's several areas where it makes sense and it's kind of useful. But for most product managers, your strategy should be how fast can I go from hypothesis to data? The faster you can go there, the easier your strategy gets.

That is certainly a hot take. So the idea here, I'm curious how you operationalize this with folks at N26. Is it just like, I don't need to see like a whole strategy for the year. Just give me, here's the plan, here's what we're going to test, here's our hypothesis. How do you actually, what do you tell your PM team?

We use this tool. I'm going to give a shout out to StatSig because they're awesome. Vijay who used to run the experimentation at Facebook, he spun off and now has this tool. There are several of those, but if you're running proper proper experiments. I just look at the stat save dashboards, right? And I'm looking at experiments, I'm looking at what metrics they're moving, I'm looking at the p-value, I'm looking at how quickly can they get to statistical significance. And I'm like, oh, this is working, let's do more of these.

Right?

So now there's some areas where you can't do it, like in compliance, in legal aspects, in Europe, especially pricing, In the US, you can run pricing tests in Europe. It's a little bit different. Those areas, you would need to have a lot more deeper thinking, understanding of your cohorts. You're coming up with more structured reason for why you should do it, but you can't really test and know within a couple of days or a couple of weeks at max whether this is a good idea or not. If there are irreversible decisions, or they're just extremely time consuming to find out, then do some pre-work. You look at largely, find a lot of companies really look at data without looking at cohorts. You make completely bad decisions, right? Because if you look at your dashboard, it's a mixture of users over 10 years, 20 years, even six months, and they all behave differently. If you look at a cohort level development or certain users, you generally end up making better decisions. But even over there, it's still a lot more, there's a lot of noise between the moment you start tracking it, then the moment you start making decisions based on it. The world has changed in that meantime. At Binance, this was kind of a very foreign concept when I brought this in. I'm like, oh, the conversion's down now, even though the product's done really well, because Bitcoin has crashed, right? Nobody wants to go sign up for an exchange account. so if you just measured pre and post, you would think that you have done something wrong in the product. If you measure it as an experiment, you would know that, yeah, between the variant and control, it's still doing great, even the overall conversion is down. So largely the more you kind of, one of the first thing kind of do when I take on a role, the company already doesn't have an experimentation culture. That's largely why they hired me in the first place, right? So. So the first thing is to say how can we bring it in? First, the kind of right culture, the right incentives and the right tools. And then once it's set up, it gets a lot of fun. You get a lot of fun for the PMs because you have kind of democratized performance for the product manager. And the second thing which I tell my PMs now, which is truly kind of empowering if you think about it, the challenge with being a product manager is everybody thinks they can do their job. You go to the CFO might have an idea. The head of accounting has an idea. Anybody who uses the product thinks they have ideas. So at some point in time, you're like, what is my discipline? What is my science? Nobody goes to the accounting guy and says, hey, this is how I have a great idea for how to cook our books. Nobody does that because there's a science behind it. There's a science for financial forecasting. Even in technology, a lot of the times people just don't go and say, hey, just jump this thing and let's use this code that the AI code generator has used. There's a little bit of science there, whereas in product, you largely find that it's a combination of data and ideas and stuff, and anybody thinks they can... The moment you build experimentation, you have now made it scientific. Now somebody comes up with an idea, say, that's a bad idea. Here, this is why it's a bad idea. Because we have done this experiment six times and it has failed across this user groups at this exact level of impact created. So it kind of gives the PMs the kind of, hey, I'm not just a general purpose technician, I'm a specialist now. So it's extremely empowering once we can, it takes a long time to move the team in that direction. But once you get it there, the PM's just, it's a natural kind of dopamine hit every time you run an experiment and see it move metrics.

I'm a huge fan of experimentation. I think most guests on this podcast are on your side of the debate. I feel like we could do a whole podcast episode on just how to create a culture of experimentation, how to change culture. This episode is brought to you by Vanta, and I am very excited to have Christina Cassioppi, CEO and co-founder of Vanta, joining me for this episode. Very short conversation. Great to be here. Big fan of the podcast and the newsletter. Vanta is a long time sponsor of the show, but for some of our newer listeners, what does Vanta do and who is it for?

Sure.

So we started Vanta in 2018, focused on founders, helping them start to build out their security programs and get credit for all of that hard security work with compliance certifications like SOC 2 or ISO 27001. Today, we currently help over 9,000 companies, including some startup household names like Atlassian, Ramp, and LangChain, start and scale their security programs and ultimately build trust by automating compliance, centralizing GRC, and accelerating security reviews. That is awesome. I know from experience that these things take a lot of time and a lot of resources, and nobody wants to spend time doing this. That is very much our experience, but before the company and some extent during it. But the idea is with automation, with AI, with software, we are helping customers build trust with prospects and customers in an efficient way. And you know our joke, we started this compliance company so you don't have to. We appreciate you for doing that. And you have a special discount for listeners. They can get $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com/lenny that's vanta.com/lenny for $1,000 off Vanta. Thanks for that, Christina. Thank you. I want to come back to the question of what N26 has done well to create and hire great PMs. So you've spent a bunch of time on here's career advice that I often give and what helps people most in their career. Is there anything, just to kind of close this thread, is there anything N26 did or is doing that either from the hiring perspective or from training I know you haven't been there from the beginning, just like as a business, as a company that they've done really well that other companies may want to copy.

Some of it is just the hiring philosophy, right? Like we tend, like one of the advantages you get for being like a big fish in a small pond is you get to have your pick of the cream of the crop. So in Europe here, where we don't have like the same level of unicorn or decacorn density you have in the Bay Area, being one of the first ones or the few ones, you do get a little bit of that branding working in your favor. So some portion of that is just the input, right? If you're taking really smart people, like very chance at N26, they will stay smart. Two is, again, the level of problems that they work on are harder, just the fintech angle we mentioned. And now with this whole experiment, tation driven kind of change that we made in the last year or so. There's also a new kind of tool toolkit that they get, especially if they're going for like larger big growth companies as the next step of their career.

Right.

Once you kind of, this is still so like all the people companies I talk to, the amount of companies that are truly world class at experimentation is so low that if you work in one of these companies and you build this tool set, you can build a whole career on this. You can go to any other company and say, this is what I'm going to bring to the table. Because there's no growth without, as I said, without compounding wins faster. Nothing compounds wins faster than experiments. And there's no company out in the world that says, we don't want to grow. So that is an incredible kind of brand that you can build alongside with it. And then the third piece is just the scale. I mean, one of the other interesting aspects of banking is a, what I call a 100 product.

Right.

And it's actually more than 100. There are more bank accounts than human beings, right? Because a lot of people have more than one bank account. So you never run out of Target addressable Market. You're, it's, it's as big as, as it can get, which means that there's no upper bound on how much. But at some point, like, if you're, I don't know, building in kind of an AI code generator. Your market is capped, and maybe developers or people want to be developers, or you're building, I don't know, AWS. It's a massive market, but it's still like all the companies that need online hosting. You look at banking, everybody needs. And the fact that it's oldest or the second oldest, depending on how risky you are or not, profession known to man. Right? It is a self-hedged product. Like when things get tough on one side of our business, the interest rates, let's say, go high, spending goes down, but we make money on deposits. When interest rates go down, spending increases, so we make more of your money on interchange, right, and investments. So it's a very self-hedged business that lets you kind of go through the troughs and the peaks kind of better than most companies. and that understanding that how do you build naturally hedged products is probably another kind of reason why it just influences how you make decisions and how do you kind of scale your core product portfolio. Just one example, like we, for longest portfolio, about a year and a half ago, we were largely a bank with a card, right? And that was, we were the first mobile bank and that was a big enough market. But in the last year or so, we have just fleshed out that product portfolio. We have a big lending portfolio now. We launched savings last year. We invested heavily in savings because the interest rates were high. It was a super amazing tool to attract new users by offering high interest rates. But as the interest rates are going down now, which is investing heavily in lending, because now you can get loans for lower prices than which was super hard to get last year. So being able to build products that complement the macro also gives you that kind of additional balancing act that you don't get in typical single focus companies. So I think it's a combination of few of those things, being able to get great talent, being able to train them now more so, especially around experimentation, and just seeing how you can build a product portfolio that complements each other, but also naturally hedges against each other. Just gives you a better kind of well balanced way to operate.

I think this explains something really interesting as you were talking, I realized that a lot of these companies that produce the best PMs are, to your point, non-US based, but incredibly successful in their location. And so it draws in the most talented people in that region. And I know Intercom, I think technically, so Intercom was number one on this list of companies that produce the best PMs. Intercom, Palantir, Revolut, and then N26, Chime, Stripe, Dropbox were kind of at the top. And four of those essentially are, or three of those are non, like Intercom, I think was Ireland. A lot of their team is based in Ireland. Then Revolut is the UK. And then you guys, so it's interesting that that explains some really interesting insights of just be the best, be the big fish in a small pond, draw in the best talent, and then work on really hard problems and be really successful. There you go, there's the formula.

Yes, yes, it's very simple when you put it that way.

Oh man. Okay, you interestingly have worked in a lot of different places. I want to spend a little time here. So you've worked in Europe, you've worked in Asia, you worked in the US, obviously. For someone that is maybe thinking about moving out of the US or maybe moving to the US, what have you found are kind of the big trade offs?

Yeah, so I would say like early career you want to be in intensely talent dense areas. For all the reasons that we mentioned before, finding the high growth companies, finding the networks that will make you successful. There's no, for general tech, there's no better place than West Coast of the US. Not everybody doesn't have the option, especially now with the immigration policies and so forth. I mean, things were always hard. They seem extremely harder now. So you may not have that option. But if you do have that option, I would encourage everyone There's no better place than West Coast to start your career. There's some exceptions, like for crypto, I would say Dubai is like very strong, very great, has a really high density there. But again, it's a very industry specific. Bangalore, if you're an Indian, has managed to recreate some of the magic of Silicon Valley, not at the same scale, but getting better. If you're in finance, maybe there is London, Singapore in Asia has now at least not as much new innovation, but each of the big companies has a presence there. So at least secondary talent density is there. Those would be your options if US is not available early in your career. And in some ways it helps define you, right? If you work at Microsoft or Google or OpenAI, or some of these companies that become brands later, it's something you can take with you when going part. The second part of your question is when you, if you decide to move, having that experience and that brand and that kind of achievements there can help you kind of make the find great opportunities elsewhere. I mean, I've been a little bit privileged that some of these opportunities have found me, like N26 here in Europe or Binance before in Asia, where I wasn't really in that super talent dense area in the first place. But Lux is not a great strategy, right? So if you're planning for it, I would say build your early career in the US. And then honestly, when we moved to Thailand in 2018, it wasn't a At that point, I didn't think I was making a great professional decision. We were just struggling in the US with both me and my wife working, both our kids in Seattle were tiny. My daughter had asthma at that time. She was just constantly sick and it was a struggle for us to manage both work and life. When I talked to Agoda, I had never heard of the company. And the, the only reason I ended up taking the job was like, Hey, Bangkok's a hot place. I mean, my daughter might not have asthma there and we might have some help in the house. So we could probably balance some of the things that are really not adding value to our life right now.

Right.

And that was the hypothesis there that we would be, I can do a lot more on work because I was literally not able to focus as much on it. with everything else that was happening. And as I said, everything got an experimentation. We just hit a home run on all the hypothesis. My daughter, like the heat cured her asthma. My just having like a support structure allowed us just as a family to spend a lot more time with each other and allowed me a lot more time to work and be on my career when I'm not doing dishes and not doing laundry and not throwing out the trash and not mowing the lawn. There's just so much hours that show up in the day that you could be doing things that you're great at and kind of add to your career. And then Agora just turned out to be just a, almost like a bootcamp for understanding how an experimentation-based product culture might work. Because before that, I worked at Google, I worked at startups. My homes, fame to fame was like, building big stuff. And what I just taught me, a lot of the growth comes with incredibly small things done faster. So it's part of booking holdings. So if you heard of booking.com, it's a $170 billion company. And what's interesting is that 10 years ago, it was a $10 billion company, which sold flights, hotels, and cars. Like 10 years later, it still sells flights, hotels, and cars. It's a $170 billion company.

Oh, wow.

It's an incredible growth story. And that tells you, like, you really don't need from a strategy perspective to do something completely different if you can truly compound your growth by optimizing every single thing really, really well. So there are the pros that come with, as I said, when you move, most of the time you're building products that are global, especially if you're based in the US. very few times you're building product that just work in the US. Now, that's not true for a lot of the countries, like in India, a lot of products are only designed for Indian market, a lot of products in China only designed for Chinese market. But in the US, you're designing product for the world and a lot of the times you don't experience the same constraints or you don't empathize with the user at the same level because you just haven't lived just haven't lived that user's life. So in terms of just being able to calibrate yourself on what a global product might look like, being able to live in different places and understanding some of these constraints firsthand, definitely a pro. You get to, as I said, especially if you have built that early reputation, you get to work at some of the best companies when you go abroad. And so that's, there's a hit to compensation, at least initially for sure. Nobody pays anywhere close, especially here in Europe. But as I said before, don't optimize for compensation early in your career or even middle part of your career. So if you follow that advice, it will not matter because you will have kind of a, something unique to offer, even if you come back to the US later. Having kind of worked in different, having understanding, especially if you're in FinTech where the actual laws are different in different countries. And that one you truly do not appreciate working in the US. Even at Google and stuff, when we would launch products, I would be like, oh, the lawyers, they're just making life difficult. But the many of now have a true appreciation of how different the world truly is. It just makes you a better stakeholder when you talk to the legal team, when you talk to compliance team, when you talk to marketing. So I think those are all the pros. The compensation could be the con. The other big con is that, like today, if you're in Silicon Valley, like I spent 15 years in Seattle, I worked at four companies. I could change jobs and stay in Seattle, right? Because there's enough companies there. You're not going to run a ceiling. at some point, Bay Area, there's no ceiling, right? You can keep growing. The challenge now is that if I'm in Bangkok and I'm working at Agoda, at some point I need to find a new job or because let's say I'm at the CPO level, I want to be CEO now. Agoda already has a CEO, right? So I need to find a CEO somewhere else. Guess what? That company is not going to be in Bangkok, right? Now I have to move and move my whole family, right? To Singapore, which I did. Then you hit somewhere over there, or then you hit another ceiling. Now you need to move back or go somewhere else to Thailand, which I did. And then you're like, oh, maybe there's a great opportunity in Europe, which will give you a whole different scale. Then you need to move to Spain, which I did. So at some point, your family's like, what's happening? It turned out to be one step to go from A to B is now just a every year journey. And so that's something to calibrate, especially later in your career, that it's extremely hard if you like the job and don't like the location or vice versa, because they usually come as a package deal now. You see this in Bangkok now where there's not that many great tech companies. And if you're at Agoda and you're doing really well, but it's just one company. you just don't have options. And if, especially if you love Bangkok, which is a great city, probably my vote for the best place to live in the world. That's a struggle. You love the city, but you, if you need to move your pro, your career ahead, you need to go somewhere else.

So interesting. I feel like Thailand is very popular right now with White Lotus. Just, I think White Lotus had, like, the most views of any show or some crazy. That's some. That was very popular. I feel like there's a lot of tourism coming to Thailand more than they've had. Yes. Yes. I want to come back to one piece of advice that we were chatting about before we started recording that I think might be helpful to people, which is, and this is kind of in a different direction, but I want to make sure we touch on it, is Shreya Doshi's point about leverage. I know this is something that you think a lot about. He has this really good advice and will point to the episode if people want to dig deeper. around finding the highest leverage opportunities for you to work on as a PM. Can you just share that advice for folks that haven't heard this before?

This is true for no matter what part, what level of career you are in, but you have a finite amount of time and largely you have more problems than you have time to solve them. The question is which ones you work on. And this becomes even harder. Let's say you're a CPO now. because all of them are important, right? Otherwise they would not come to you in the first place. The question is, which one do you work on? And the principle is simple. You work on problems that have a 10x positive or a negative impact. I mean, the number can be 10, 5, 300, depending on Binance, it would be 100. Some companies might be three. And in most fintech companies, one of two problems, it's a growth problem or a compliance problem. 'cause both of them can have a negative or positive 10x impact. And that's what you focus on, right? That's what you spend bulk of your time. What was interesting for me, my first executive role, so I was Google, I was a product manager. I joined what was white pages back then as a VP of product. It was my first kind of, and white pages, Alex Algard, Seattle founding legend, three companies, all unicorns now, incredible, very good personal friend and mentor. What was truly interesting when I joined it, they're like, okay, this is your desk, this is the product area. So we had two offices. This is when everybody worked in office five days a week, right? And I'm like, okay, where does Alex sit? And he's like, oh, he's sitting with accounting, right? And I'm like, I didn't think about it because I thought his office is near accounting. Then I find out he doesn't have an office. He has like a floating desk. So it's all the other desks were like fixed, but he had a movable desk, right? And he would move his desk to one of the departments which he think had the highest leverage opportunity. And he would sit there at that desk in that department till that either problem was solved or the opportunity was realized. And then he would literally move his desk and then go to product or tag or finance. And that was his way of, like you could literally visualize him working on the highest leverage problem by his desk moving.

And.

I think that combines that with what we talked before about details. And a little bit, I think I didn't mention it, about the humility that you need to have to be work in the detail. A lot of the times, especially later in your career, you are like, Hey, this is above, this is beyond me, this is below me. why do I need to do that? I have so many PMs or data analysts or somebody who should do it. Why would I do it? That was again, just a quick story there. I remember we were trying to figure out our growth channels and we found out that hey, we are really tapping out on paid, on social, on referrals. But SEO was something we just hadn't worked on for a while. We're building a caller ID app, and what we wanted to do was when somebody types a phone number in Google, we want to be the first link to say, Hey, is this a spam call or not? Or is this whose number it is? And if we could, then we could get them to download our app, right? That was the hypothesis. So I presented the executive team meeting to Alex, like, Hey, I want to have a team. I want to hire a product manager, focus purely on SEO. and because I think that's like one of our highest leverage areas right now. And Alex is like, hey, the whole white pages I built based on SEO, because people who type people's name, and the first name used to be a white pages link. I'm like one of the best people in the world to work on SEO. I'm like, yeah, so he's like, let me run this product. And I'm like, okay, what do you mean? He's like, no, no, I will be the product manager for this for however long you need it. And I'm like, how's your going? I said, don't worry about it. Just tell me about the engineers. So again, he moved his desk to where that product team sat. And for the next three months, he was the product manager on that Scrum. So he would come to my product team meetings, give his update on what's happening with the SEO Scrum. And then an hour later, I would be in the leadership meeting giving my update to him. And truly, he was operating it saying, this is high leverage area for the company. high leverage for my years should be high leverage for me. I'm the best person to do it. I'm going to be in the details and do it. CZ same at Binance, like there were a lot of products that he would just sit on himself. There were very few people at Binance who would say no to CZ, but one of my lead PMs who worked on the products that CZ worked on, he would tell them no all the time. It would just baffle all the other executives. Like how is he saying no to CZ and none of us are doing it? because, hey, that was his product area that CZ was working on. And there was that mutual respect there that, hey, we know this thing and he's going to say no to me because probably not a good idea.

Right.

So that that humility and attention to detail is required to work on the high leverage problems. A lot of the high leverage problems are not, as I said, not strategy decisions. They are not like which markets to go after and stuff. A lot of them are like, why is this thing not working as well as it needs to be? A lot of time the devil is in the details and you need to be over there. So combining that, knowing what is high leverage or not, and two, both having the humility and the patience to be able to go dig deeper and solve that. And some of them are like quick ones. Like if I'm looking today at, let's say, how many of our signed up users convert into a long-term, long-term monthly daily active user, right? That could be something I focus on for a month because we're running a lot of experiments on early onboarding screens, early rewards, early incentives, early loyalty program. And at some point, it might be like, oh, the team's got it. I've given all my, what I could do there. It's functioning. We have great CLMs. I can, I trust their execution on this. Let me just go focus on some of the compliance challenges that we have or fraud issues that we have in France. Those kind of being able to kind of the, the only way that works for me is I, I keep a very free calendar because you cannot do this without that. If you have hundreds of meetings, hundreds of one-on-ones daily standard, like a lot of, like, recurring meetings, you just can't find time to go work on high leverage problems. So that would be my kind of other stuff is like, keep your, you should have plenty of open spaces on your calendar. A full calendar is a badge of shame, not a badge of honor.

These are awesome stories. Just the metaphor of the moving desk is so good. Like that's the epitome of, like what you're describing is what people now call founder mode, where the founder just goes in in the details working on the problem. Brian Chesky actually did this at Airbnb while I was there. He took on a new product and was the mini CEO, essentially. I don't know if he'd call himself the product manager because I don't think he loved product managers. He famously got rid of product managers, which he didn't actually, but yeah, he did that very much. And he sat with the team, created a whole space for the team that he was in. These are awesome stories and a really good example of a founder using their power to unblock and finding the highest leverage opportunities. To start to close off our conversation, I'm going to take you to a couple recurring themes on this podcast, recurring segments on this podcast. First, we're going to visit AI Corner. In AI Corner, I ask, what's a way that you have found to use AI in AI tool, a bunch of AI tools in your work? to work more efficiently, to work to create better quality work?

I still haven't found a game changer for me personally. It's something that I use right now and I'm a little bit not sure that am I not doing something right, what other people are, or I'm a little bit too jaded for it. But the, so we have a lot of, we have Gemini across the work. So for meeting notes and stuff works great. especially for folks who don't meet it. We use a tool called Rytr for our copywriting and UX teams, especially because we are operating in Europe across several languages. So being able to generate that very quickly, especially for illustrations and in-app messages and stuff, that's been a, there are several tools now, but Rytr just has kind of, like the copywriting market is really well done over there. If you ask me across N26, but even when we did this at Binance or at Agoda, there are three areas where AI is complete game change. One is on coding. Again, you can use whatever latest tool for prototyping or not. Most value, especially for the companies I have worked at, which are fairly large companies, very large code bases. having some sort of co-pilot that's integrated with your repositories. Rough data, maybe somewhere between 18 to 25% productivity boost for a developer, which is fairly massive, right? So that's one category, game changer. Customer support, game changer. Whether we should do it at scale or not, that's a different kind of more ethical slash human question to ask there. But for solving the bottom 70 percentile problems, why is my card declined? Why is there a hold on my card? What happened to the replacement card I shipped? Why is it not arrived? Basic questions, AI automating now almost 60-70% of that customer is getting that real feedback game changer. And the last one is on just on fraud. and being able to just understand patterns better on real customers versus not. And Binance, we had this product where users could exchange crypto with each other. I could pay you Bitcoin and get Thai Baht in return. Huge amount of fraud. And they're using AI just to understand language patterns of fraudsters versus not fraudsters. Massive. So again, as a company level, there is an incredible set of advancements across these three areas, developer productivity, customer support and fraud. But for me personally, like I'm like, what would I use that suddenly makes me a better CPO? I'm still struggling a little bit over there. But it's, it's, it's not really, I don't think we need something at that level because largely what still remains the the domain of humans is decision making and taking the brunt of the impact of what decisions you make. Because I would love to blame AI for some of my bad decisions. That's not why they did it.

You can still do that. You can still do that even if it's not.

Yes, yes. So, but again, hopeful to, it's generally not a big fan of the thing I call a little bit jaded. You have tools now that you write few things and they make like a long essay for it. And then you have tools that compress long essays into few words. You could have just said few words in the first place, right? And saved the whole round trip. It's like a reverse zip. Remember when we had zip and it was a game changer? But there was a big file, you needed to send over slow networks. So you compressed it and sent it and then expanded it. We're doing the reverse now, right? We have a small thing, we make it big and then send it over and somebody's making it small. But on these three areas, if you're at all scale companies, like if you don't have a great tool for developing productivity, you're not looking at essential basic LLM bots for deflecting customer service and you're not looking at patterns around user transactions or user communications to detect fraud, that's the first area I would focus on.

Okay, I'm going to take us to another recurring segment on the podcast. It's called Fail Corner. And the idea here is folks like you come on this podcast, there's all these wins, killing it, a CPA, this and that, and just moving to Thailand. It worked out incredibly. What a win all the time. In reality, that's not how things go. So the question to you here is just what's the story of a failure in your career when things didn't go well and it was a big deal for you. And then what you learned from that experience, how that actually impacted you. Yeah.

So from a product side, like my, probably the most spectacular failure was, I was the first PM on Hangouts. And if you ask Nikhil, he will probably say he was my boss then. It was an effort the size I've never seen before in or after in my career. We had thousands of people working for me. We had entire power room Google. We had Larry literally sitting with us saying we can do anything we want Chrome to do. and we still didn't manage to build a great messaging product. So when I look at pure product sense, product decision making, there are several reasons now. I had luxury of 15 years to analyze that on solving for the wrong audience, solving for the wrong DNA of the company. I have this is that certain companies can never succeed at certain type of products, right? Like Microsoft with mobile or Google with social or Facebook with enterprise, right? It's just the DNA of the founder actively acts against you succeeding there. I would have said Google with enterprise as well, but then Sundar came and Larry was no longer the CEO and that's when the enterprise took off. They literally had to change the CEO to kind of win in certain segments. but more and then again, I worked in Nagoda during COVID So travel company during COVID Binance during its probably most tumultuous area of compliance and government scrutiny. So a lot of missteps there around externalities. I think one of the main kind of learnings from that is just don't take on projects that are gonna be six months, a year, because you just generally don't have control over the macro. Things just move way more faster. And that's probably cemented my kind of now product philosophy of just doing small things very quickly, spending most of the time doing that. You still launch big products, but even over there we try and kind of get early signals as soon as possible. but because Ragoda, one of the big projects we launched was we wanted to control the payments infrastructure for all the hotels. And we thought if we had that device in the hotel's desk, so not only for bookings made online, but for everything that happens at the hotel, if we control that infrastructure, not only would we make money, but we had a touch point with the users that went beyond booking the travel. Travel, as you know, is not a high frequency activity. You book once, then you book six months later. And most of the time, people would not come to Agoda. They would just go to Google and go to some other website. So we wanted that touch point that stayed with them and thought payments would be a great avenue to do that because that's something you do every day. And again, we did it in the Agoda style. So we did the experiment. We started very small and literally went to the mall and bought these $50 Android devices where we ran our software. that people could just scan the credit card by a camera and charge it. It was incredible. We had thousands of hotels use it and then COVID hits and then there's literally nobody going to hotels anymore. But it took us like six, nine months because of the licenses and so to launch it and in hindsight probably, I mean, you couldn't have thought of COVID with it seems, but still the amount of time it took to launch the product was something we could have done better. So learnings for most of it is don't take too long to launch, don't take too long to validate your hypothesis.

The Hangout story is amazing. It's like a classic product people now make fun of, just Google, why can't you get this right? And it's been changed, names have changed 100 times. Interestingly, Meet ended up being really good, like Google Meet.

That's the last thing I did when I left Google.

Okay.

Was, I was like after we built the Hangouts, they're like, okay, this is not going anywhere. We're gonna start this new product called Allo, right? Which also didn't work.

One of the many names.

Yeah, but then I said, you know what? Like we should still, 'cause I used to work for Android enterprise team before. I'm like, what if we just made it an enterprise product? Let me at least write the spec for it. on, hey, what would we do differently for, I still called it Hangouts for Enterprise, so they rebranded it later. But that was my salvaging moment for, but from the sense, I mean, we, the Hangouts team invented WebRTC, right? Now every single communication in the world happens on WebRTC. So if you think from the cultural and technological impact that the Hangouts team had is insane. Right, like every this tool we are using, every single meeting product, every single WhatsApp voice calling, video calling, like every zoom, everything runs on WebRTC. So from a technology side, I think that was a pretty massive win that the team came up with that.

That's the power of having Chrome, having a browser also. Just introducing technologies.

Yeah, I mean, yes, absolutely.

Final question before we get to our very exciting lightning round. Is there anything else that you want to leave listeners with or maybe a point you want to double down on just to kind of leave a little last little nugget before we get to the lightning round?

I mean, to summarize, it depends on the audience. A lot of the folks who probably listen to it are coming at it from a perspective of, like, hey, how does this help me be better at my job tomorrow than I was today? And for them, I would say again, like, if you're truly working in areas where you think you're you're optimizing your strengths and having fun, just keep doing it. And just keep that as your kind of north star as you look at new pieces. When you talk to new companies, try and evaluate the overlap of superpowers. What is your superpower? What is the company's superpower? Will they feed each other? If you get a very strong resonance there, I think that would be a great career step. irrespective of whether it's in Bangkok or Spain or however the compensation is going to be. Because truly you will find that you grow much faster because it's a kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy at that point. But just keep looking for overlapping superpowers all the time. And not just in professional life, like in even the concepts beyond maybe even for relationships and stuff, like folks who are extremely complementing strengths and whose superpowers feed each other, make for great life partners. So there's maybe that analogy can be extended beyond your career.

Wow, that's a powerful point right there. What a cool way to end that. Well, with that, Mayur, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?

Yeah, let's do it.

What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

The one that I read most recently, so I'm generally don't read a lot of books because I read a lot of content, like small content, tweets, and tweets and Substacks and discords and WhatsApp messages. And so, book takes a mind share shift for me to go read a book. the one I read most recently, which I thought was pretty amazing and a lot of overlap with what I said today, the Five Kinds of Wealth. That one was very well articulated, especially the last point I made very early, like one of the potential paths is you just do well on your job and then you find meaning elsewhere. This book is probably an incredible structured way of thinking around it. What is your wealth in terms of your health, your physical health, your mental health, your relationship health, your community, and your wealth that you're generating financial wealth? How do you think holistically? Because at the end of the day, you are what you optimize for. If you optimize for financial wealth, you will become wealthy. But you might not be wealthy in a full spectrum manner. The Strengths Finder 2.0, I said very early on, Still an interesting book to just think about how you would think about your strengths. But again, if you don't want to read the book, I would just do one of these kind of online quizzes for it. But the Five Kinds of Wealth and Strength Finder 2.0 would be maybe what I would suggest. The first book is by Sahil Bloom.

Friend of the podcast, willing to all this stuff. I forgot to mention the story briefly about the Strengths Finder stuff. So actually, when I was leaving Airbnb and looking for my next thing and even thinking about leaving, I took a strengths test and I was working with executive coach and I saw the results and she's like, what do you see in these results? What are these results telling you? I'm like, I don't know. She's like, this tells me you should start your own company and work on your own. All the strengths that are popping up here are things that you as a founder need. And that really helped me.

What's your one person data point on that? Was it a good one?

What is a good decision you mean?

Yes. Oh, like relying on that strength test to make a career.

I am such a huge fan of Strengths Finder and, and, and any kind of strengths test. And interestingly, people may be afraid of taking them because they'd be like, here's what I suck at. It just, it always makes you feel good. It's like, here's the stuff you're good at. And it's not like, here's what you're bad at. It's just, here's the stuff you're best at. And it's always positive. It's never like, you suck at this stuff. It's just not your strength. So it was a huge win for me. I highly recommend it, especially if you're trying to make a career move. So yeah, fully aligned. Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed?

The one I saw that kind of, like TV shows usually I watch to kind of give a downtime. So usually I watch just periodic shows, the House or Big Bang Theory and stuff. The one that saw recently that kind of shook me a little bit was adolscence. Again, it's a tough topic. around teenage mental health and violence in schools and just the way it was shot. Like I would see the first episode even if it's not your genre, 'cause it's shot in a single camera motion and the whole episode for an hour, there's no cut. The camera just keeps moving and it just makes like a bizarre feel. We feel a little different watching it. irrespective of this topic, which is also pretty intense, just visually you feel different. And if you're motion sick like me, like you really feel different.

Yeah. Sounds wonderful. It sounds like.

Like what a. I would watch that. I need to watch the white Lotus because everybody keeps bringing it every time I tell them I'm from Thailand and I haven't seen it yet. So I'm. I'm behind on my. On my mean, mean culture a little bit.

Yeah, you are. It's like you and no one else has not seen it. I think you're the only person left.

Yes, I'm the only one.

Okay. Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love?

So, products. So, I spend most of my time using banking and trading products. And I would give a plug here. If you're in Europe, try N26 or even Revolut, incredible product. If you're in the US, Robinhood, just there. the motion design they have done and the onboarding is just a joy to use, whether you use it for banking or trading or just for their card. I just find the product design and motion, especially as you touch and swipe, incredibly done. Anything that Nikita Beard launches. So I just downloaded Bible Study or Bible Chat yesterday.

I saw him tweet about that. It's in the top 10 of all social apps.

Yeah, it's like a Bible study. And I can tell why, like I have got three messages right now to take my anxiety by reading Bible today. And one of the time I was feeling slightly anxious. So maybe there's some magic there. But the one app that I would just like for personal, so I used to write, like in Hindi, I used to write poems growing up as a kid. And that was just now this app suno.com, I can make songs from them and they are incredible songs. At least I think so. Nobody else thinks it so far. But just the fact that you can write something and now you have a song is just magical. The first time that AI, I saw a use case, again, I said it's nothing so far that makes me a better CPO right now, but as an artist or at least the bathroom artist, It's just incredible that you can think of something, put it down there and you can actually see what would a professional singer and a band and a musician, if they were to compose it, what it would look like. So that's probably the most wild I have been by technology in the recent times, the suno.com, their onboarding flow socks and their growth product is If I were the PM on Suno, I would do things a lot differently, but the core tech is magical.

I'm a huge fan. One of my favorite things to do at Suno, I think it's suno.ai also, is just ask it to make a song in the style of a sea shanty. It's so fun. And they give you a few options, so you could be like, here's this version, that version. Yes. Okay, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find.

Useful in work or in life? One kind of relates to the things we talked about is there's no right or wrong decision. They're just slow and fast decisions. Now there are some extreme caveats to that around if you're doing something that might kill your user, like healthcare or military or even compliance, which can kill your company. Don't use it. But everywhere else in generally goes back to the strategy thing we talked about as well. A lot of the times, if you make a wrong decision, if you make it fast enough, you would know it was wrong and you would correct it, and you would still do it faster than thinking months for the right decision. So for anything that's reversible, anything that's not gonna get you in jail or kill your company, no right or wrong decisions, just slow or fast decisions.

Final question. You've lived in a bunch of places. You've lived in Spain, Thailand, Mumbai, Seattle, I think Texas even for some period for school.

Yeah, college.

Okay. There's probably other places which has the best food.

Bangkok, no question. Barcelona comes closer for some, but Bangkok, you can have a three Michelin star, one of the top five restaurants in the world, spend $500 a meal, or you can have a $1 street food, stir-fried pork and rice with basil. Incredible. the spectrum of entire, from the cheapest food you can think of, the most expensive food you can think of, in that same one kilometer walkable area, having thousands of these, literally just the density of food, no one comes closer. Barcelona has incredible restaurant, the best restaurant in the world is like a block away from here. It's called the Sputnik. Takes like two years to get on the on the wait list there, but it's on one end of the spectrum. Barcelona probably comes close second, but that cheap get down 2 a.m., walk down and have an incredible meal for a dollar, like nothing comes closer to to Bangkok.

This episode's a great ad for Thailand. Let's go. And you definitely got to watch White Lotus. Myure, this was awesome. We covered so much ground. I feel like I got to know you so well. We covered so many Thank you so much. The vibes of all of this. Yeah, we're not done yet. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online? If they want to reach out, maybe check out if there's roles at N26. And then how can listeners be useful to you?

Finally, this one of the things being old is I was one of the first users of LinkedIn. So linkedin.com/mayur, the early basis of Facebook. So facebook.com/kamath or n26.com, mk@n26.com. Like if you're especially curious about how we do stuff here, We are hiring, we are growing really fast. As I said, banking is a great business to be in. We're not going to go out of flavor for the next few thousand years. So if you're thinking of a career, you're thinking about Spain, or thinking about Berlin, it's just a whole different interesting lifestyle and different kind of product thinking. Please reach out on any of those channels. if you're in Europe, download our Try N26. We go by the motto, Love youe Bank. Our founders say that people would rather go to a dentist than to a bank branch. And that's why we build this. We truly feel like for an everyday banking, you use the app and you feel like, I want to use my banking app every day. There's some bit of magic which I didn't have that much contribution yet. I made it a little bit simple and seamless, but the magic was there before. And so if you're in Europe, you are looking for a new bank account, n26.com There we go.

Mahir, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you. Thank you, Lenny, and thank you, 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 at lenniespodcast.com. see you in the next episode.