Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG)

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.