Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact

Bangaly Kaba is a product and growth leader who has held roles at Facebook, Instagram, Instacart and YouTube, and previously worked in education and finance. In this conversation with Lenny Rachitsky he covers a framework for choosing where to work and what to work on, the idea of 'understand work' before execution, growth tactics like adjacent-user thinking and flywheels, and how to coach product teams and managers.

01Key learnings

• Optimize for impact rather than compensation, since pay and scope follow from the impact you deliver.
• Score your environment (manager, resources, scope, team, compensation, culture) quarterly to see which factor is limiting your impact and whether it can change.
• Your manager is the most powerful environment variable; if it's a bad fit, first try to understand what they optimize for before assuming you must leave.
• Build a stable of three or four mentors and ask trusted people who they'd recommend for a specific challenge rather than asking someone to mentor you outright.
• Schedule intentional 'understand work' in every planning cycle so teams first de-risk ideas and learn root causes, shifting toward more execution as understanding grows.
• Use each product's real job-to-be-done and experience each step as a new or adjacent user to uncover what's missing, rather than relying on the power-user view.
• Map the value proposition and flywheels at every interaction point to see where growth actually compounds, such as reorders or early social connections.
• Coach your team and build your leadership 'tree': your success is measured partly by the people you grow into bigger roles.

02Frameworks mentioned

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