Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product)
May 22, 2025
AI Summary
5 min readMayur Kamat, CPO at N26 and former head of product at Binance, shares lessons from high-growth environments like Binance, Google, and Agoda. He emphasizes execution in chaotic scale, career acceleration through fast-compounding learning, and product decisions grounded in rapid experimentation over abstract strategy.
Binance's Extreme Execution Culture
At Binance, which scaled to $400 billion valuation in five years with 2,000 employees, Kamat oversaw trillions in monthly trading volume. The company ran a flat structure with CZ having 55 direct reports and daily 11 PM leadership calls across time zones, ensuring no decision stalled over 24 hours. Urgent problems—like fixing KYC drop-offs from near-100% to 2% conversion across 200 countries—got "daily meetings": one owner rallied all-hands resources (e.g., scaling a 20-person team to 500), tracked details cell-by-cell in spreadsheets for every document-country combo, and reported nightly. This demanded extreme ownership, humility to dive into details, and no constraints except time, enabling massive pivots like securing 15 licenses in three months. Preconditions included hyper-growth, high compensation (bonuses up to 500%), and mission-driven financial inclusion for billions lacking stable currency.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (04:49) **Binance scale and explosive growth**
- 2 (06:35) **Binance extreme operating culture**
- 3 (10:55) **KYC onboarding war story at Binance**
- 4 (18:19) **Career acceleration for PMs**
- 5 (36:00) **Discovering PM strengths and experimentation culture**
- 6 (51:14) **N26's PM hiring/development edge**
- 7 (57:08) **Global career trade-offs**
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Mayur Kamat is the chief product officer at N26—a $9 billion neobank serving over 7 million customers in 25 countries—where he leads product, design, data, and research. Prior to N26, Mayur was Head of Product at Binance, growing the crypto exchange to a peak $400 billion valuation. Earlier in his career, he built and scaled products at Google (Gmail Mobile, Hangouts), Microsoft, and travel unicorn Agoda.
Learn:
1. How to find and focus on the highest-leverage problems
2. Why you shouldn’t optimize for compensation early in your career
3. Why you should optimize for strengths, not weaknesses
4. Why you need to decide if you truly want the C-suite path
5. Why working at a fintech company creates exceptional PMs
6. Strategy = hypothesis × experimentation velocity
7. Small, fast wins compound faster than big, slow bets
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Where to find Mayur Kamat:
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayur/
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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) Introduction and Mayur’s background
(04:49) Working at Binance: An inside look
(18:18) Career advice for product managers
(27:00) PM career paths
(33:58) Understanding fintech customers
(36:00) Understanding your strengths
(44:46) Creating a culture of experimentation
(51:14) Hiring and developing top talent
(54:50) Building a diverse product portfolio
(57:08) Working in high talent density areas
(59:43) Personal and professional balance
(01:06:32) High-leverage opportunities and decision making
(01:14:28) AI tools in the workplace
(01:19:14) Failure corner
(01:25:11) Lightning round and final thoughts
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Referenced:
• Binance: https://www.binance.us/
• Google: More from this podcast