Sanchan Saxena

Prioritize learning speed and hands-on experience over formal credentials when starting or pivoting into a product career.

"My advice to people is go get a job which will make you the fastest learner in the field of product management. That is what will help you a lot. No course, no degree, none of those things will help...."

Understand whether you thrive in 'starter' (0 to 1) or 'scaler' (1 to N) environments before choosing a new role.

"You got to figure out what are you optimizing for, what goes well with you. I've seen many successful leaders who will get choked up in a big company environment, and I've seen many big company succes..."

Use real-world work challenges instead of standard presentations to see a candidate's true problem-solving depth.

"We actually gave you a work challenge. We said, 'This is the problem you're facing. How are you going to solve it?' ... We want to see the depth of thinking. They don't know the right answer because t..."

Prioritize 'content' experts (those who know what to build and why) over 'process' experts when hiring for startups.

"Bring in people who know content and teach them process, as opposed to bringing in people who know process and trying to teach them content, because that's a bloody hard thing to do."

During downturns, shift team morale from metric-based goals to mission-based 'belief obsession' through storytelling.

"We had to get people from feature obsession, revenue obsession, to belief obsession. What is belief obsession? When we all believe that when coronavirus is over, people will want to travel. We all bel..."

Leading through layoffs requires extreme vulnerability and empathy, especially when conducted remotely.

"I had to let go of people over Zoom. I couldn't even meet them in-person. I still remember when I actually finished my speech and I told them, 'This is the last day,' now, I literally shed a tear in f..."

A DRI model prevents 'design by committee' by empowering one person to make the final call after hearing all cross-functional input.

"The idea that we have... is the idea of a directly responsible individual or DRI. For every project, we'll establish a DRI... DRI's job is to take all that input and make a decision. Not take all that..."

In high-stakes crises, abandon long-term roadmaps in favor of ultra-short, reactive planning cycles.

"From an operating principle, we went into two week planning mode. Greg Greeley, who was the president of Airbnb used to say, 'Look, can't plan for a year, can't plan for a quarter. We're going to plan..."

Operating in emerging technologies like Web3 requires the ability to filter out market noise and execute on core convictions.

"How do you build conviction in a highly noisy world? ... The thing that I would take with me everywhere is, how do you build in that noise? How do you stay focused and still build what you believe is..."

Product vision should be driven by intentionality—defining the desired world first—rather than just reacting to A/B test results.

"The thing that I learned from him was intentionality... You got to have intentionality. Where do you want to go? What is the world you want to create for your customers? And then create out A/B testin..."

Start the product design process by imagining a '15 out of 10' experience without any resource or technical constraints.

"What Brian taught us was think unconstrained first. Think about a 15 out of 10 experience, design the ideal end state first. In most companies, the designers and PM start by saying, 'Okay, 10 is perfe..."