Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity

Ami Vora, Chief Product Officer at Faire and a former long-tenured product leader at Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, discusses how to disagree productively through curiosity, how to run product reviews around principles rather than one-off decisions, and how to use metaphors and narratives to align teams. The conversation also covers the primacy of execution, goal design across teams, and her candid reflections on feedback, gender dynamics, and transitioning into a new company.

01Key learnings

• Sublimate your ego: prioritize reaching the right outcome over being right, since others often hold information you lack.
• Respond to disagreement with curiosity by asking the other person to explain their reasoning, and pause before reacting to avoid a defensive response.
• Keep product reviews short, bring a clear recommendation, and use them to calibrate on reusable principles rather than to approve every individual decision.
• Use the 'manager owns context, I own the recommendation' split so your team complements you instead of mirroring your conclusions.
• Use metaphors and narratives tied to how you want users to feel so teams can make consistent design decisions without micromanagement.
• Execution matters more than strategy because customers only experience shipped work; keep strategy grounded in ongoing customer feedback and changing behavior.
• Break company goals into team-level input metrics that ladder up to the shared outcome, avoiding 'toddler soccer' where everyone chases the same metric.
• Expect senior decisions to be suboptimal trade-offs; state the principles and context behind your choice rather than seeking a perfect answer.

02Frameworks mentioned

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