Bangaly Kaba

Build a 'stable' of multiple mentors to ensure consistent support and diverse perspectives even if one is unavailable.

"It's actually better to have a stable of mentors. You want to have three or four. And ideally, what you do is you meet with each one of them once a month on a different Friday of the month."

When choosing a role, optimize for impact by evaluating the quality of the environment and how it leverages your specific skills.

"The framework is really that there's impact that you're really trying to drive and that is the thing that is the most important. And the impact is only achievable by looking at two sets of variables,..."

Organizational change requires alignment across five pillars; missing any one leads to specific failure modes like confusion, anxiety, or resistance.

"I found this framework... called managing complex change. It's got these five components to it, vision, skills, incentives, resources, action plan, and you need all of those to have change."

Supercharge growth by layering multiple acquisition engines (e.g., invites, SEO, partnerships) so they compound each other.

"Really figuring out how do you build compounding growth loops where it's not just one way of acquiring people, but you're building two and three and four ways that layer onto each other that help you..."

Retention is driven by early social validation; ensure new users connect with real-world friends rather than just high-profile accounts.

"It turned out that what was happening anecdotally is that people were revving up Instagram, following a bunch of people, following a lot of celebrities... and then when they actually went to make thei..."

Forcing candidates to stack-rank their skills reveals self-awareness and allows for a deeper conversation about their specific strengths and weaknesses.

"I'm going to give you five skills and I want you to stack-rank them for me. One to five. So one being the one you're strongest at and five being the one you're relatively weakest at."

A leader's long-term impact is measured by their 'coaching tree'—the career progression and success of their former reports.

"I like to think about this as well, because I think it's really important for product leaders, think about what is their leadership tree. Who have you helped to build up and help to grow and help to g..."

Effective managing up requires understanding your manager's broader objectives and showing how your work supports those goals.

"A lot of times I think there is a big disconnect between an IC focusing on their discrete area and try to optimize for local maxima, versus understanding, okay, my manager's thinking about these thing..."

The guest discusses specific educational frameworks like Bloom's Taxonomy to diagnose and level up PM skills, which is distinct from general team culture.

"Bloom Taxonomy describes what's the different levels or order of critical thinking you need in order to be a master of something... knowledge, and then it's comprehension, and then application, analys..."

Explicitly allocate time in the roadmap for 'understand work' to de-risk projects and increase the success rate of execution.

"First you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on. So understand, identify, execute. So when we talk about understand work, there's a few ways to think about it. One..."

Directly observing users in their own environment reveals cultural nuances and mental models that data cannot capture.

"We were literally on the ground in India every three months took a team of engineers with me. I'm talking like we're in Delhi in people's homes and Mumbai, and we went to go investigate what was going..."