Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG)
Ami Vora, Chief Product Officer at FAIR and former Facebook/WhatsApp product leader, discusses authenticity in success, skillful disagreement, using metaphors to rally teams, and effective goal setting. She emphasizes execution over strategy and learning to embrace curiosity.
Deep Dive Analysis
16 Topic Outline
Embracing Authenticity and Imperfection in Success
Finding Career Fulfillment Through Emotional Connection
Cultivating Curiosity to Navigate Disagreement
The 'Dinosaur Brain' Metaphor in Product Reviews
Optimizing Product Reviews for Principles, Not Decisions
Leveraging Metaphors and Imagery for Team Alignment
WhatsApp's 'Face-to-Face' Communication Metaphor in Action
Execution Eats Strategy for Breakfast
Developing Strategic Thinking and Overcoming Imposter Syndrome
Navigating Feedback and Challenges as a Female Leader
Designing Goal Frameworks to Avoid 'Toddler Soccer'
The Reality of Leadership: Making Suboptimal Decisions
Transitioning to a New Role and Overcoming Insecurity
Building a High-Trust CPO/CEO Relationship
Ami Vora's Journey from Temp to VP at Meta
The Single Most Important Thing for Product Success
5 Key Concepts
Fascinating (as a response)
This is a genuine expression of profound curiosity used when encountering a deeply opposing viewpoint. It helps tear down walls between points of view by signaling a desire to understand the other person's perspective and underlying information, rather than reacting defensively.
Dinosaur Brain
This metaphor describes the limited capacity of executives to hold many facts simultaneously, suggesting they can only effectively process about three pieces of information at a time. It highlights that the best service a team can provide is to make a clear recommendation, rather than presenting an overwhelming amount of data.
Hill Climb Metaphor
This concept illustrates the difference between a local optimum (current success on a small hill) and a global optimum (a much higher, distant mountain). It implies that achieving the global optimum often requires a difficult descent into a 'valley' and a challenging climb, giving up current comfort for a potentially much greater reward.
Execution Eats Strategy for Breakfast
This philosophy asserts that strong execution is more critical than a perfect strategy. Even a flawless strategy will fail without effective implementation, while good execution with a 'good enough' strategy allows for learning, iteration, and continuous improvement of the strategy over time.
Toddler Soccer
This metaphor describes the inefficiency that arises when all internal teams within a company are given the same singular, high-level goal (e.g., revenue or GMV). It leads to teams 'tripping on each other' as they all converge on the same measurable areas, lacking coordination and broader customer impact.
8 Questions Answered
By reacting with genuine curiosity and asking 'fascinating, why do you think that?', one can prioritize the best outcome over being right. This approach helps tear down walls, fosters learning, and allows for better solutions by understanding different perspectives.
Keep product reviews simple, focused, and always include a clear recommendation. The goal should be to calibrate on principles for future decision-making, rather than seeking individual decisions for every single item, to build organizational capacity.
By creating a shared narrative and feeling (e.g., 'sitting in Dolores Park with friends'), teams naturally build products that are consistent with that shared vision. This reduces the need for individual decisions on every detail, as everyone understands the desired emotional outcome.
Perfect strategy with poor execution leads to no market impact and no learning, as the strategy never reaches customers. In contrast, good execution with a 'good enough' strategy allows for continuous learning, iteration, and eventual improvement of the strategy based on real-world feedback.
Overcome imposter syndrome by building confidence in your own opinion, which can be achieved by talking directly to customers, working through various product iterations, and actively seeking diverse opinions from the leadership team to inform your perspective.
Decouple goals so that each internal team has a different, measurable objective that ladders up to the overall customer and company outcome. This ensures comprehensive problem-solving across the entire customer journey without teams duplicating efforts or tripping over each other.
As a leader, you increasingly face problems that are fundamentally unsolvable, meaning you must choose between suboptimal options. The challenge is to recognize and acknowledge that your decisions will not be perfect, and instead focus on choosing the 'least bad' option that aligns with principles and context.
The most important thing is to stay close to the customer, talk to them, and be their advocate. This direct connection serves as a shortcut to creating value and achieving success, despite the many distractions that can arise as an organization scales.
27 Actionable Insights
1. Skillful Disagreement: Embrace Curiosity
When facing profound disagreement, respond with genuine curiosity by asking “fascinating, you have to tell me more, why do you think that?” This approach helps tear down walls between points of view and leads to better outcomes by incorporating diverse information.
2. Sublimate Ego for Better Outcomes
Prioritize the desired outcome over being “right” in discussions. By letting go of the need to be right, you open yourself to learning from others’ information and perspectives, leading to better collective decisions and personal growth.
3. Choose Work Based on Feeling
When evaluating job opportunities, prioritize emotional fit and trust over purely rational spreadsheet analysis. Ask yourself how you’d feel doing the job and if you’d feel “at home” and lucky to be there, as this leads to environments where you can take risks and do your best work.
4. Execution Eats Strategy
Prioritize execution over strategy, as customers care about the product in their hands, not fancy plans. Good execution, even with a “good enough” strategy, allows for continuous learning and iteration, ultimately leading to a better product and strategy over time.
5. Prioritize the Customer Above All
Despite numerous distractions as an organization scales, consistently think about, talk to, and advocate for the customer. This focus is a shortcut to success and helps ensure you’re creating fundamental value, aligning short-term metrics with long-term customer impact.
6. Use Metaphors to Rally Teams
Employ powerful metaphors and analogies to create a shared narrative and vision for your product or team. This allows people to naturally build consistent experiences without needing individual decisions, as they understand the desired feeling or outcome.
7. Embrace the Hill Climb
Recognize that achieving a “global optimum” often requires descending into a “valley” of hard work and uncertainty before climbing a new, higher “mountain.” Understand that this “slog” is normal and remember the feeling of the summit to stay motivated through difficult transitions.
8. Expand Your Toolsets, Don’t Shrink
Instead of dampening your strengths or shrinking who you are in response to feedback, focus on expanding your toolsets. Build new ways to work with different people and solve problems, which will make you more powerful and expansive, not less.
9. Decouple Goals for Teams
To prevent teams from “tripping on each other” by all chasing the same output metric, detangle company goals into distinct, measurable objectives for each team. This allows every team to have a clear lane, understand their contribution, and solve the customer problem end-to-end.
10. Product Reviews: Make Recommendation
When presenting in product reviews, do the work of making a clear recommendation rather than just cataloging information. Assume executives have a “dinosaur brain” and can only hold a few facts, so your role is to provide a concise, opinionated proposal.
11. Product Reviews: Calibrate Principles
Use product reviews to calibrate on principles for future decision-making, not just to get a single decision. Discuss “why” decisions were made, trade-offs, and optimization goals to empower teams to make consistent decisions independently later.
12. Pause Before Reacting
When you have a visceral reaction to a disagreement, take a pause. This allows your body to calm down and your mind to breathe, leading to a more thoughtful, open, and positive response rather than a primal, protective one.
13. Strategy Must Change Behavior
Ensure that any strategic exercise or plan actually translates into changed behavior for the team and creates better customer outcomes. If a strategy doesn’t alter how products are built, prioritized, or allocated, its purpose is diminished beyond making the team feel good.
14. Talk to Customers for Strategy
To gain confidence in your strategic opinions, regularly talk to specific customers. This unique knowledge allows you to build an “emulator” of a customer on your shoulder, helping you predict their reactions to products or strategies and making your opinions more grounded.
15. Build ‘Emulators’ for Leaders
Develop mental “emulators” of different leaders you admire by understanding their unique approaches and skill sets. When stumped, “load” an emulator into your head to gain a fresh perspective and access new toolkits for problem-solving.
16. Acknowledge Healthy Team Tension
Recognize that disagreements and different incentives among cross-functional teams are a sign of healthy tension and diverse knowledge, not necessarily something going wrong. Acknowledge these differences explicitly and agree on a shared outcome to frame discussions productively.
17. Interpret Feedback Strategically
When receiving feedback, don’t feel obligated to immediately act on all of it. Instead, take a step back to choose whether to act, look for themes, or decide if it’s part of who you are and you’ll simply provide more context for your choices.
18. Embrace Suboptimal Decisions
As you become more senior, recognize that you will increasingly face problems that are fundamentally unsolvable in an ideal way, meaning you’ll often choose the “least bad” option. Normalize this reality and focus on clearly articulating the principles and context behind your choices.
19. Senior Leaders: Still Execute
Even as a senior leader, most of your time should still be spent on execution, albeit in a different way. Focus on unblocking teams, understanding market changes, and gathering broad customer feedback to constantly improve the system and stay connected to the customer.
20. Ramping Up: Expect Learning Curve
When starting a new senior role, remind yourself that it will take time to ramp up and have an impact. Don’t expect to be as proficient as you were in your previous role immediately; prioritize learning the new context, culture, and people before trying to implement major changes.
21. CPOs: Mind Meld with CEO
As a CPO, ensure you have a strong “mind meld” and high-trust, complementary relationship with the CEO before taking the job. This involves spending time together to understand their thinking and operating style, ensuring you’ll have the necessary room to operate and make an impact.
22. Founders: Hire for Need
Founders should carefully assess if they truly need a highly senior CPO or VP of Product, or if they primarily need someone to build the product. Often, founders already possess the vision and knowledge, and what’s needed is execution capacity rather than another strategic leader.
23. Early Career: Bring Recommendations
For those earlier in their career, the most important service is to bring clear recommendations with conviction to discussions. Invest time in deeply understanding the material to build that conviction for yourself and confidently stand behind your opinions.
24. Product Reviews: Keep Small
For product reviews, invite fewer people to foster an informal atmosphere, which lowers the bar for completeness and allows for faster conversations. While cross-functional attendance is important, keeping the core room small can accelerate decision-making.
25. Product Reviews: Record for Context
To calibrate a broader audience on decision-making principles without expanding the core meeting, record or broadcast product reviews. This allows others to observe the discussions and understand the rationale, even if they aren’t directly participating.
26. Don’t Over-Glamorize Strategy
Avoid getting caught up in the “glamour” of strategy and vision work, which can be fun but doesn’t directly serve customers. Instead, embrace the “nuts and bolts” of execution as this is the work that directly impacts customer outcomes.
27. Balance Energy and Ambition
Remember the advice: “You can either have more energy or less ambition.” If you desire significant impact, you must be willing to put in the work, try new things, and embrace discomfort; if not, don’t expect the impact.
6 Key Quotes
Working with Ami, she could have the most profound disagreement in the world, and she would respond, fascinating. You have to tell me more. Why do you think that?
Boz (CTO of Meta)
The thing that gets me through the valley is remembering what the summit feels like.
Ami Vora
It's more important to get to the outcome than to be right.
Ami Vora
Customers don't care about your fancy strategies and like your five-year plan. They care about the product that's in their hands.
Ami Vora
For strategy to be useful, it actually has to change our behavior as a team to create better customer outcomes.
Ami Vora
You can either have more energy or less ambition.
Ami Vora