🎙 12 free interviews with 12 product & eng leaders from Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and more
Discussing career advancement, product strategy, designing technical systems for hyperscale, and beyond
Hi, and happy new year! The new year is always a great time to think about what skills you want to gain and how you want to grow your product management career over the coming 12 months and beyond.
That’s why we’re excited to share a new project we’ve just finished. We held fireside chats with 12 product and engineering leaders — including VPs, Directors, CPOs, and CVPs — to hear about the skills that helped them get to where they are today and some hard-fought lessons they’ve learned from selling startups, scaling up billion-dollar products, or growing and leading massive teams.
And we’re excited to be releasing all 12 videos for free to the product management community. That’s over 9 hours of content featuring leaders from Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Twitter, Coinbase, Adobe, and more. Plus, each interview dives deep into a specific area of product management or engineering, from experimentation to product strategy to distributed system design.
We hope you find these fireside chats insightful (and maybe even inspirational) as you chart out how you’re going to keep growing and evolving your product career. Let’s jump right in.
🎨 Adobe Director of Product Josh Haftel — Metrics
In this fireside chat, we sat down with Josh Haftel, who’s been a director at Adobe and LinkedIn and worked on Google+ way back in its early days. Hear Josh’s war stories and his thoughts on countermetrics, north-star metrics, and Adobe’s pivot to SaaS:
🟦 LinkedIn Sr. Director of Product James Raybould — Business Strategy
Here, we got to sit down with LinkedIn’s James Raybould and talk about not just business strategy but also his wide-ranging career spanning management consulting, marketing, go-to-market, data analytics, and (of course) product management.
(Also be sure to check out James’s newsletter, where he shares the key insights he’s gained from books he’s read!)
🐦 Twitter Director of Engineering Anand Mariappan — Hyperscale
Turning to the more technical side, we were fortunate to get to chat with Anand Mariappan. Before his current stint as a Director of Engineering at Twitter, he was a Senior Director of Engineering at Reddit and Principal Engineering Director at Microsoft. Anand has some great stories about how his teams managed to keep up with ever-growing user demand, how they recovered from outages, how they balanced scalability with complexity, and more.
♾ Meta VP of Product Nikhyl Singhal — Growth
In this fireside chat, we sat down with Nikhyl Singhal, who successfully exited two startups (including one that got sold to Google), was the CPO at Credit Karma, and is now a VP at Meta. Check out what he’s learned in his diverse career, his thoughts on operating in a mega-corp, and his sage advice for entrepreneurs and up-and-coming product leaders.
(Nikhyl shares practical and no-nonsense career advice for tech professionals on his excellent newsletter, so check that out too.)
🌥 Microsoft CVP of Engineering Igor Sakhnov — Distributed Systems
Igor Sakhnov is a real tech industry veteran — and he’s risen all the way up to the level of Corporate Vice President of Engineering at Microsoft (similar to SVP at other companies). We were thrilled to get to pick Igor’s brain about microservices, A/B testing, machine learning, designing for reliability, and building an engineering culture on a growing team.
💵 Coinbase VP of Product Sanchan Saxena — Product Strategy
In this fireside chat, we got to sit down with Sanchan Saxena, a VP of Product and GM at Coinbase and former PM and engineering management at Microsoft, Instagram, and Airbnb. Listen to his thoughts on product differentiation, business strategy, DeFi, and the future of crypto.
🧠 “Hooked” Author Nir Eyal — Sticky Products
What better way to dig into the famous “Hooked” model for building sticky products than to hear from the man who invented it? We were excited to have the chance to chat with Nir Eyal, the bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractable. In this chat, Nir shares his thoughts on how to apply the “Hooked” model to B2B products, which companies have applied the model most successfully, how to implement gamification most effectively, and more.
🛒 Amazon VP Dorion Carroll — Hyperscale
In this fireside chat, we spoke with Dorion Carroll, a VP of Customer Engagement Technologies at Amazon and former CIO at Zynga. Dorion is a self-described “data junkie,” so it’s energizing to hear his takes on red-hot data management companies like Snowflake and Databricks, how to design technical systems for hyperscale, and what he’s learned from his multiple experiences as VP of Engineering at startups.
📎 Microsoft VP of Product Amit Fulay — Growth
Amit Fulay has truly seen it all: he’s been a GPM at Google, a PM Director at Meta (formerly Facebook), and now a VP of Product at Microsoft. He even led the product team at a startup that got acquired by Google. In this insightful chat, Amit shares what he’s learned about metrics, economics, acquisitions, growth-hacking, and a lot more.
🏪 Amazon Director of Product Olivier Wellmann — Metrics
In this fireside chat, we wanted to dig deep into metrics and experimentation with Olivier Wellmann, a Director of Product Management at Amazon. He shared some great nuggets about the nuances of experimentation, including countermetrics, the pitfalls of A/B tests, and what “north star” metrics should really be about. We also chatted about how your target metrics should change as you move from IC to Director, which is a can’t-miss topic for up-and-coming product leaders.
☯️ Calm CPO Mads Johnsen — Product Strategy
We were delighted to sit down with Mads Johnsen, the Chief Product Officer at Calm and a former Senior Director of Product at Uber and head of Product Strategy at LinkedIn. Hear Mads talk about how he scaled multiple products to a multi-hundred-million-dollar run rate at Uber; how he finds and uses unorthodox growth levers; and how he thinks about his job as a CPO.
🛍 Walmart Director of Product Vijay Jayaraman — Product Strategy
Last but certainly not least is our fireside chat with Vijay Jayaraman, a Director of Product at Walmart’s eCommerce arm and the former Head of Product at the Home Depot. Listen to Vijay share his thoughts on combining 0-to-1 and 1-to-N innovation, beating Amazon at eCommerce, and building moats in a highly competitive industry.
We owe a huge thank-you to all these product and engineering leaders who took the time to help create this new resource for product builders who want to fast-forward their career growth. We certainly learned a great deal from their decades of expertise, and we think others in this community will benefit tremendously from their wisdom as well.
Feel free to share these resources with friends, colleagues, and teammates:
And if you’re new here, don’t miss out on future resources for product managers:
Thanks for reading!
— Neel Mehta, Adi Agashe, and Parth Detroja