Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart)

1. Evaluate Career Impact Equation

Assess your career impact using the formula: Impact = Environment x Skills. Annually score six environmental variables (manager, resources, scope, team, compensation, culture) and five skill areas (communication, influence, leadership, strategic thinking, execution) to identify areas for improvement and maximize your impact.

2. Prioritize ‘Understand Work’

Intentionally allocate dedicated time in your roadmaps and sprints for ‘understand work’ to de-risk projects and learn. This shifts from an ‘identify, justify, execute’ anti-pattern to ‘understand, identify, execute,’ leading to a higher win rate and faster long-term velocity.

3. Apply Adjacent User Theory

Identify who your ‘adjacent user’ is – the next user who could be using your product but isn’t – and understand their needs. Use the product as this adjacent user (e.g., with a new account) to uncover missed opportunities and pain points that current power users might overlook.

4. Diagnose Team Change Challenges

Use the ‘Vision, Skills, Incentives, Resources, Action Plan’ framework to diagnose why teams struggle with change. Identify which component is missing (e.g., lack of vision leads to confusion, missing incentives to resistance) to focus your efforts on the right levers for improvement.

5. Leverage Your Manager

Recognize your manager as the most critical variable in your work environment, as they have the power to influence resources, scope, and team dynamics. Clearly and dispassionately articulate challenges, tying them back to how they impact your work, to collaborate on solutions.

6. Cultivate a Stable of Mentors

Instead of one mentor, build a ‘stable’ of three to four mentors, meeting each on a different Friday of the month. This ensures continuous access to advice and diverse perspectives, even if one mentor is unavailable.

7. Source Mentors Strategically

When seeking a mentor, share your specific challenges or opportunities with trusted contacts and ask if they know someone who has relevant experience or good thinking on that topic. This ’triad’ approach increases the likelihood of a meaningful connection and mutual benefit.

8. Learn by Observing Others

Actively observe how other product managers and leaders hone their craft, lead teams, and communicate. ‘Steal’ their effective techniques and integrate them into your own toolkit by sitting in on their team or leadership meetings.

9. Coach Using Bloom’s Taxonomy

When coaching product managers, use Bloom’s Taxonomy (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation) to diagnose where they are struggling. This helps you meet them where they are and provide targeted support to build their skills effectively.

10. Build a Leadership Tree

As a product leader, take pride in developing and coaching your team members to achieve their next roles and successes. View their growth as a reflection of your own leadership and a contribution to your ’leadership tree.’

11. Design Compounding Growth Loops

Beyond single acquisition channels, build multiple growth engines (e.g., invitations, celebrity partnerships, SEO, paid media) that compound and magnify each other’s impact. This creates a supercharged engine for acquiring and retaining users.

12. Dogfood from First Principles

Don’t assume your product works as intended for new or adjacent users; actively use it yourself from their perspective (e.g., create a new account). This helps uncover fundamental issues and missed opportunities in the user experience.

13. Prioritize Onboarding & Habit Building

Focus on optimizing the onboarding and initial habit-building experience to ensure new users find value and retain. A strong top-of-funnel is ineffective if users don’t stay, so prioritize the first few months of the user journey.

14. Listen and Learn in First 90 Days

In a new leadership role, dedicate the first 90 days to listening and learning. Sit in team meetings, talk to all cross-functional partners, and get to know them by name and story (professional and personal) before sharing your own thoughts, building trust and investment.

15. Interview with Stack Ranking

When interviewing, ask candidates to stack rank 4-5 critical job skills from strongest to weakest. This reveals their self-awareness, contextual understanding of the role, and helps calibrate if their skills align with the team’s needs.

16. Research Jobs with Former Employees

When evaluating a new job opportunity, speak not only with current employees but also with those who have left the company. Their perspectives can offer a raw and different view, helping you triangulate information for a more objective decision.

17. Focus on Systems, Not Just Goals

Adopt the motto: ‘People and teams don’t reach their goals; they fall to the level of their systems.’ Apply this to both personal life and team management, recognizing that robust systems and processes are key to consistent achievement.

18. Embrace Diverse Voices

To build world-class, hyper-growth products that scale globally, cultivate the skill of acknowledging, learning from, and living in tension with diverse voices and cultural contexts. This inclusivity is crucial for broad product adoption.

19. Be a Voracious Reader

Continuously build your product toolkit by being a voracious reader of blogs, podcasts, and thought leaders. This helps you acquire new frameworks and mental models to apply at the right time.

20. Understand Manager’s Optimization

Take time to understand what your manager is optimizing for, as there can be a disconnect between your discrete area and their broader priorities. This understanding can help you identify synergies and take on adjacent responsibilities that align with their goals.