Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

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

June 23, 2024

AI Summary

5 min read

Ami Vora, CPO at Faire and former product leader across Meta's Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, shares her operating principles for product work, leadership, and career decisions. Drawing from experiences like launching Facebook's developer platform and ads on Instagram and WhatsApp, she stresses curiosity, emotional fit in choices, metaphors for alignment, execution focus, and handling senior-level tradeoffs.

Career Decisions and Emotional Fit

Vora chooses roles based on feeling "at home," where trust enables risk-taking and creativity, rather than spreadsheets projecting five-year outcomes. She tests this by "putting on the coat of the job"—imagining daily commutes, lunches, and problems—to gauge if she'll feel lucky and excited. This emotional response has consistently led to her best work, overriding analytical grids that rarely predict performance.

Curiosity Over Ego in Disagreements

To prioritize outcomes, Vora sublimates the ego-driven urge to be right, responding to strong disagreements with "fascinating, tell me more why you think that." This genuine curiosity uncovers others' unique information, tears down walls, and creates positive feedback loops where teams learn and improve together. She pauses to reframe visceral reactions as learning opportunities, assuming differing views stem from unseen context rather than threats.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:02:06) **Authenticity and career without a plan**
2 (00:10:18) **Curiosity over being right (Boz endorsement)**
3 (00:17:31) **Product reviews: dinosaur brain and recommendations**
4 (00:26:55) **Metaphors for alignment: hill climb, emulators, WhatsApp**
5 (00:37:35) **Execution eats strategy for breakfast**
6 (00:45:12) **Becoming strategic: build customer emulators**
7 (00:56:27) **Goals and incentives: avoid toddler soccer**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Ami Vora is the Chief Product Officer of Faire, which connects independent retailers and brands around the world. Before Faire, Ami spent over 15 years at Meta, including as VP of Product and Design for WhatsApp (2B+ users), VP of Product for Facebook’s ads system (now $130B of annual revenue), and director at Instagram. She began her career working on developer tools at Microsoft. In our conversation, we discuss:

• Why execution eats strategy for breakfast

• Using metaphor to rally teams around one shared goal

• How to build cross-functional relationships

• “Dinosaur brain,” “Toddler soccer,” and the “hill climbing” metaphors

• A tactic for handling disagreement

• Tips for working well with product-minded founders as a product leader

• The story of Ami’s incredible 15-year journey from temp to VP at Meta

• Much more

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Brought to you by:

• Sidebar—Accelerate your career by surrounding yourself with extraordinary peers.

• Anvil—The fastest way to build software for documents.

• User Testing—Human understanding. Human experiences.

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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/authenticity-and-curiosity-ami-vora

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Where to find Ami Vora:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amvora/

• Substack: https://amivora.substack.com/

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Ami’s background

(02:00) The myth of perfection in success

(07:55) Emotionally connecting with the job

(09:55) Embracing curiosity in moments of challenge

(13:16) Thinking in feedback loops

(17:17) The “dinosaur brain” metaphor in product reviews

(20:20) Strategies for conducting effective product reviews

(26:33) Using metaphors and imagery to communicate your vision

(29:35) The power of having a shared narrative

(31:55) WhatsApp: an example of metaphor in action

(34:44) Emulating people that inspire you

(36:19) WhatsApp video cal