Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more

Sanchan Saxena, VP of Product at Coinbase, is a veteran product leader who has worked at Microsoft (Hotmail), Instagram, and Airbnb, where he helped scale product management and navigated the COVID crisis. The conversation covers his career path, how Airbnb survived the pandemic, lessons from founders like Brian Chesky, Kevin Systrom, and Brian Armstrong, Coinbase's decision-making culture, and how to hire strong product leaders.

01Key learnings

• Careers rarely follow a plan; Sanchan advises taking little bets, learning fast, and pivoting rather than over-planning a five-year path.
• Choose a role that maximizes how fast you learn product management, and match the startup versus big-company choice to whether you thrive at zero-to-one or scaling.
• During a crisis, Airbnb replaced fixed teams with one company-wide team and two-week planning cycles, reacting to fast-changing data instead of long roadmaps.
• Leaders in turbulent times should be candid about uncertainty and rally people around shared beliefs about the future rather than invented certainty.
• Start product work with an unconstrained 'ideal end state' experience, then scope down to a concrete first version in one location and scale what works.
• Set intentionality and direction first, then use A/B tests to find the fastest path; don't ask tests to choose the destination.
• Coinbase uses a directly responsible individual (DRI) model with written inputs, so one person makes the call and others disagree and then champion it.
• When hiring, prioritize people who know the 'content' of what to build and when over those who only know process, and assess candidates by the specific role they played in past work.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.