Shiva Rajaraman, VP of Product and Engineering at Facebook, sat down with Product School CEO Carlos González de Villaumbrosia to discuss challenges of being an exceptional product manager.
Shiva held positions at many high-caliber companies - Google, Youtube, Spotify, WeWork, Apple, and Facebook. In his discussion with Carlos, Shiva reflects on his philosophy of product management, and how his experiences developed his view of the world.
Shiva begins by admitting that he does his best work in the family garage. He emphasizes the impact that your environment has on your ego, which is why he chooses the space for thoughtful work. Next, Shiva introduces product as an emerging profession, evolving at high speed. He takes us back in time to the start of his product journey, working on models for displaying proteins in various forms on the web. He had a neat idea - what if the user could upload their own protein sequences, and the model could display them in 3D? So he shipped it. He continued working on those types of efforts, excited by how transactional and simple the web was. This, he learned later, was product.
He worked in analytics and studied P&L of various companies. He learned what makes someone a disruptor, and fell in love with that aspect of product.
Shiva went on to accept a role at Google and then Youtube shortly after the acquisition. He says the next 8 years were “glorious” and that he learned how to scale product teams and moved into a manager role.
Seeking a change, Shiva wanted to live somewhere different. The recruiting team at Spotify offered him a role, and he moved to Sweden for his next endeavor. He mentions “it was a different set of product chops” because its product is existential to the company, and is threatened by two of the largest incumbents in the world who were also launching music services. Shiva thought hard about growth, differentiation, and how to give more value to users who spend more time in the product. He hints on the exciting journey helping Spotify transition from a utility to a trusted, personalized service.
He then fell in love with buyer / seller ecosystems, economics, and supply / demand challenges. After a short stay at Apple, Shiva took an opportunity at WeWork, and after that, Facebook, where he now works on commerce.
“If Facebook as a platform connects people with so many forms of engagement and discovery, can we also be the home for businesses to make that connection more satisfying, have longer term relationships, ultimately introducing people to products they love, often from businesses they’ve never heard about…That becomes an exciting play.”
Taking a step back, Shiva resurfaces some of his learnings from Youtube to help form his perspective. He claims, in the world we are in right now, artists are all about the Web3 economy and creating NFTs, because artists see disproportionate economics. Good they are really good at creating, and marketplaces that make them more discoverable. And community ethos. Even though artists and patrons have had a relationship for years, its never come online in a democratized, global way.
“Maybe instead of fearing my IP being dissolved, for the first time embrace fan art because it enriches my community, and if I canonicalize that fan art, maybe everyone in the system can make some money off that and we can create kind of new ecosystems.”
Shiva thinks about three questions:
Shiva says, “I like to look at the world this way.”
Carlos then asks Shiva how to remain agile in a large company. Shiva responds by first suggesting compartmentalization and insulated budgeting towards an effort in order to maximize chances of succeeding, and secondly goals.
“You need goals. Those goals need to elevate to top level company initiative. That’s very important. It may require escalations and tradeoff decisions.”
In addition to goals, user empathy is critical. Shiva has multiple client calls every week, and spends time with brands, often small, up-and-coming ones. He notes how every level of brand has unique needs. Some bet heavily on social media to gain customers. Some benefit from gifting or group buying. The challenge with understanding users is that as the company becomes more mature, it creates more distance between you and your users. User research teams and partner teams should bring in customers for discussions, otherwise you get more isolated, and things become too internal.
Shiva recommends spending time being curious. Look at retention graphs, shoppers over time, and GMV over time. However, he adds “I’m a big believer that some of the best stories are in the anomalies and anecdotes of success.”
It’s important to turn trend lines into stories, and be curious - asking “which brands are doing well, why do they have that trajectory, and what is so special here?” This curiosity can fuel discovery.
Lastly, Shiva makes a powerful distinction between good and great PMs. “A good PM falls in love with an idea. A great PM falls in love with the company objectives, and is not afraid to stand up and say that’s not working, we really need to tweak it materially, or we need to find a new bet. Or place several bets in parallel, because we don’t know what’s going to work.”
Alas, the hallmark of a great PM… being scrappy.
