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

You were early growth PM at Facebook, you were head of growth at Instagram, you're a VP of product at Instacart, you're now director of product management at YouTube, and I've heard that you've had a lot of impact on a lot of different cultures. I found this framework travels with me. It's got like these five components to it vision, skill, incentives. Resources, action plan, and you need all of those to have change. And then within those buckets, you've got to figure out what are the right levers that you need to pull, what are the things that are missing. You're really big on something you call understand work. What I call the anti-partern of what we want to do. Someone says, Hey, you know what? This would be great to build. And you go pull data to go justify why that would be great. Call that identify justify execute. First, you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on. So understand identifying You wrote this legendary blog post called How to Choose Where to Work and What to Work On. There's impact that you're really trying to draw. And the impact is only achievable by looking at set of variables related to the environment, set of variables related to your skills.

Today's guest is Bengali Kaba. Bengali was an early growth PM at Facebook where he was responsible for how people make friends on Facebook. He was head of growth at Instagram, where he helped scale the platform to over one billion users. He was also VP of product at Instacart. He's also worked with tons of amazing startups as a growth advisor, including Twitter. He's now director of product management at YouTube, where from what I hear he's already made a huge dent. This conversation went long because there was so much gold to be extracted from Bing Gali's head, and I could not stop myself from learning everything I could in our time together.

This episode is for anyone looking to level up their product and growth chops, or also just do better in your career. We dig into his framework for how to choose where to work and what to work on. The importance of spending time On something he called understand work. His adjacent user theory and how it can help you drive growth.

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