Nikhyl Singhal
Nikhyl Singhal is VP of Product at Meta, overseeing teams building messaging, groups, stories, and the main Facebook feed. Before that, he served as the Chief Product Officer at Credit Karma and held various leadership roles at Google, leading teams on Google Photos and Google Hangouts. Nikhyl was also co-founder of three startups, including SayNow and Cast Iron Systems, which were acquired by Google and IBM, respectively. Alongside his successful career, he is passionate about coaching and mentoring, sharing his knowledge through the Skip podcast, newsletter and CPO community.
Career Skills
Promotion is a company-specific system for leveling, whereas a career is a long-term personal arc; don't conflate the two.
"I think that the biggest one in workplace is focusing career and promotion together. I think that there's perhaps a light connection between promotion and career addition, but I feel like too many peo..."
Failure to get promoted usually stems from one of four areas: lack of advocacy, lack of role availability, personal impatience, or unaddressed development gaps.
"I think that the answer of what you do is correlated with what's the real reason. And I think that there may be, I'll suggest four kind of common things I've seen that really hold people back... One i..."
Modern mentorship is evolving into peer communities that provide safety and shared experiences for 'lonely' leadership roles.
"I think that learning is changing... there's community, which I think whether it's within your company or outside of company, I think is the answer that we'll see more and more. I think community as a..."
Career transitions are critical 'forks in the road' where external coaching and objective advice are most impactful.
"I tend to help and coach hundreds of folks through transitions. So if they're in a moment where they're trying to decide between another job, if they're trying to decide to leave, if they're having so..."
Communication Skills
A leader's 'meeting operating system' is a product that requires intentional design and regular iteration.
"Sometimes I realize that at a scaled organization, the meeting operating system is as important as the products that we're building because it sort of speaks to how we scale and how we ensure we have..."
Growth Skills
Product-market fit is best identified by a natural 'sucking sound' or market pull rather than forced growth through capital and marketing.
"For me, it's always around this pull that sort of how much work do you have to do to basically generate pull?... I think that this sucking pull kind of concept feels like the most appropriate way to d..."
Leadership Skills
Effective delegation is about 'sharing the steering wheel' and acting as a counselor in the 'sidecar' rather than just letting go or micromanaging.
"Your challenge is going to be to share the steering wheel with the person or the set of people you are managing... I think it's more like the sidecar on the motorcycle, where person's driving the moto..."
Product Management Skills
Apply product development frameworks like 'working backwards' to design your long-term career path.
"Work backwards from your end state. Almost think of career as a product. So if you're building a good product, you think about, 'Well, here's what a great product would look like,' and then you break..."
To get 'ground truth' feedback, you must actively pull it from diverse sources and create psychological safety for the provider.
"You have to be great at pulling feedback, listening to it. You have to triangulate it from people that don't see you all the time, that do see you all the time, your peers. But you have to create an e..."