Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26)

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 going to 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 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 Comet. 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 a $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 you.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 connotations, 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, like 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, Nick, 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 PM 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 to use. 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 where 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.

This idea of a flat structure, yeah, it's interesting because I imagine that'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 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. And so that's a little bit of balance. They were there is 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, the screen, and we care about them. So you would need to know, like, hey, well, you would get question that, like, why is the, the driver's license acceptance rate in Kenya falling suddenly?

Right.

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 100 different versions of the flow across 100 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 downside, 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 is 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 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 calling Urs who was the head of infrastructure at Google, and he's like, sure, I slipped the 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 less 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, your 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 they know they would be taken care of. And three, there's some mission-driven companies 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 be inflated because of things beyond my control. So everyone having come from these kind of a lot of our employees 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? Like it's, 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, 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. 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? 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.