Takeaways

1. To advance your career, focus on creating impact: impact = skills x environment.
   1. Environment enables you to do great work outside your direct control, including manager, resources, team, scope, compensation, and culture.
   2. Skills are things that are within your direct control that enable your success: communication (the most impactful), influence/leadership, strategic thinking, and execution.
2. Understanding “adjacent users”
   1. It can be a key to unlocking new stages of growth.
   2. Adjacent users are potential customers who are interested in your product but are not converting and retaining as expected.
   3. Identify these users by looking for cohorts displaying signals that your product is almost a fit (e.g., signing up) but not quite working (e.g., churning at high rates).
   4. Initially, Instacart catered to office admins ordering food for their staff, but also had moms of four ordering groceries. To grow, Instacart needed to address the needs of the moms of four and expand into this new segment.
3. Bangaly views product management as analogous to coaching a sports team.
   1. In sports, not everyone needs to be a star player, but everyone plays a crucial role in achieving success.
   2. Similarly, the success of individual team members reflects on the leader.
   3. Investing time and effort into coaching and developing team members benefits them and enhances the leader’s effectiveness in their role.
4. Understand work
   1. Before executing a product idea, do “understand work” to truly understand:
      1. pain points,
      2. alternatives, and, ultimately
      3. the best opportunities
   2. Teams often rush into execution after justifying ideas with data, leading to failed experiments.
   3. Instead, invest time upfront in understanding what is happening through data instrumentation, analysis, or talking to users.
   4. "Going slow to go fast" means that the initial investment will raise experiment win rates, especially as lessons accumulate over time.
5. Use the “Managing Complex Change” framework to diagnose and solve barriers to change in a given team or area. The framework lays out five things a team needs to change:
   1. Vision
   2. Skills
   3. Incentives
   4. Resources
   5. Action plan

If any of these elements are missing, you'll experience a different negative result instead of the desired change.
For example, lacking vision leads to confusion and lacking the right incentives causes resistance.
These negative outcomes can be observed in the team, allowing you to identify and address their cause to enable change.

source:

• https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/frameworks-for-growing-your-career-bangaly-kaba
• https://youtu.be/Ub9UkWByFIQ