The Hard Parts of Growth

The full catalogue!

Ami Vora — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 15:02:20 GMT

After years of writing about product, leadership, and scaling, I’m sharing the full catalog of all my posts (ordered so you can read them straight through).

When I started writing these, it was mostly to clear out my brain by organizing the random info floating around in it.

But I also had an idea in the back of my mind: the career guide I never had. I longed for a little book of shortcuts where, whenever I had a problem, I could turn to the right page and get a quick recommendation and a reminder that everything would be fine.

I made a list of all the things I wished I’d realized earlier in my career, all the lessons that took me years (and way, way too much angst!) to learn.

I wrote them down as letters to myself so I could remember those lessons later, and shared them in case they were useful to other people too.

That list evolved into what you see here: The "Hard Parts of Growth" catalog. It includes career growth, managing people, product principles — everything I’ve written about over the years. You can read it end-to-end as an overall guide to growing in tech, or turn to specific tactics for a problem you’re facing right now.

My hope is that these lessons give you a few useful shortcuts for whatever you're facing, and (more importantly) a reminder that growth is supposed to feel hard and messy. That’s normal, and you've got this.

Now that I’ve worked through my initial list of lessons, I’ll probably slow down posting for a bit as my mind fills up with new things to write about. But I'm sure I'll be back soon with more stories and hot takes 🙂

Thank you for joining me on this journey! It means so much to me 🙏🏽♥️.

The entire Hard Parts of Growth series is totally free. Please share this catalog with anyone who might enjoy it!

Thank you for reading, and wishing you all the best! See you soon 🙂

The entire Hard Parts of Growth series is totally free. Please share this catalog with anyone who might enjoy it!

Optimize for feeling lucky

Ami Vora — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 16:04:10 GMT

When I’m deciding between big job choices (like whether to stay at my current role or take a new one), it feels like my whole career hangs in the balance. I convince myself I have to make the exact right choice or my career is over, and I think of all the ways the wrong decision will ruin my future. Sound familiar?

This is a privileged problem to have, of course, especially in a rapidly changing industry when it can be hard to find even one good opportunity. But when this choice does come up, I’ve learned a surprising way to ratchet down the pressure so I can make a calmer choice.

As you might expect, whenever this choice comes up I reflexively start building elaborate spreadsheets in my head, trying to weigh the importance of comp, culture, learning, title, and everything else. All the smart people around me reinforce this with very rational advice about choosing jobs that ladder into my “long-term goals” (even though I’ve never been good about having those!).

This makes sense, of course. As humans, we want to believe we have control. When I’m thinking about my next job, I find myself building elaborate plans: “I’ll take this job, then I’ll become an expert in this domain, then I’ll get promoted, then I’ll be asked to lead this project, then…” And they all end in a vague, dreamlike bright future.

Looking back at my actual career, though, I've been consistently wrong about which roles led to my growth. Early on, I never would have guessed that working in online advertising would be an inflection point for me. But when I joined a small but growing ads team just because it felt interesting, I felt supported enough to take risks — and that gave me space to learn about global economic trends, figure out how to scale an organization, make lifelong friends, and run product for what turned out to be a big business.

Meanwhile, the jobs I took because I expected them to turn into something better…didn’t. I walked away from them frustrated or stuck. In retrospect, this shouldn’t be surprising. If I’m walking into work every day thinking, “Okay, just 6 more months, then I’ll get my promo and I can get out of here,” then I’m not bringing my best energy. And in the meantime, reorgs, layoffs, or strategic changes can destroy the exact reason I took the job.

What has been working for me? Optimizing for feeling lucky. When I feel lucky in my work, I see more opportunities, take more risks, and am more creative. And because I’m enjoying my work, people are happier to work with me too. There’s also some research (pdf) to support the idea that when you feel lucky, you take actions that make you happier.

Here’s what’s helped me make these decisions with less anxiety:

Make the spreadsheet, then tear it up. I still create that mental spreadsheet of important factors. It’s helpful for ruling out clear mismatches. But even though it’s tempting to be hyper-rational about my choices, a spreadsheet is not great at helping me actually choose the right job. My intuition knows where I've been happy and successful before, and it has a much better track record than my rational mind at knowing where I’ll be happy again.
Try on the job like I’m putting on a coat. Before I make any big decisions, I do a test. I wake up in the morning and think: “Okay, now I’m waking up in potential role X. Here’s what I’m thinking about as I open my laptop. Here’s the first meeting I’ll have every day. Here’s who I eat lunch with.” That test drive of the job is the single best indicator of whether I’ll be happy in a role. If I feel boredom or distaste in that one day, would I really be happy full time?
Remind myself that all roles are imperfect, but most roles are pretty good. When I'm looking for a role, I often convince myself that the wrong choice means my career will be over. It feels like whatever decision I make is irrevocable. But that’s just not true! I will probably change jobs again in a few years, just like most people in the industry. And no matter what, I will learn things in any job that I'd never learn otherwise.

These exercises usually teach me that I could be happy in most of the jobs I'm lucky enough to be offered. That alone reduces the pressure to make "the absolute right choice" and lets me make a more intuitive decision about where I'll feel happiest.

The places I've grown the most haven't been characterized by a specific domain or function. Instead, they're the places where I walk in every day and think, "How lucky am I to get to do this today?" That feeling makes a job not just enjoyable, but somewhere I’m more likely to do great work.

Is it time to look for a new job? And how do I start?

Ami Vora — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 16:35:57 GMT

We all know the feeling — you’re feeling a little sluggish at work. Your slack pings with messages, and instead of feeling curious and energized, your mind just feels tired. You find yourself wondering if you’re really in the right place, if you’re really being valued the way you deserve, or if, just maybe, there’s something better out there for you. Sound familiar?

Of course it’s a luxury to have the choice of keeping a reliable job and considering moving to another one, especially in an industry where so much is in flux and jobs are changing overnight. But this is still one of the most frequent questions I get asked, so I wanted to share what has worked for me.

For years, this sort of job doubt was a regular pattern for me. It seemed to happen every summer — I’d get this sinking suspicion that maybe I wasn’t in the right role, or I wasn’t making as much progress as I wanted, and I’d feel weeks of swirling angst.

That limbo is one of the most insidious things I’ve felt at work. I have doubts about my current role so I’m not fully energized and committed, and yet I’m not really doing anything to find a new role. I’m just stuck. The longer I stay in a half-in, half-out state, the more tired I get, and the worse my performance gets.

It took me a while to break that pattern. The key for me? Channeling all that angst into a concrete plan to actually understand the jobs out there right now, instead of just imagining there’s something great for me. Then I can truly compare whether my current job is actually the best one for me. And having a clear plan snaps me out of limbo, and gives me a palpable sense of progress that re-energizes me overall.

What works for me?

Set a timeline. How long should I give myself before making a clear decision about my current job? I usually give myself 8 focused weeks to really understand what other roles are out there. If I don’t find the right thing by then, I’ll know my current job might be the best one for me right now. That gives me the freedom to mentally commit to staying for 6 more months, and I come back to my current job re-energized and more conscious of the value I get from this job.
Write a pitch about myself + get feedback. Early in my career, one company required me to present a deck about who I was, what I had built, and what I had learned. This turned into a great way to describe my values and get confident about the skills I bring. Now I try to do that same exercise for any job search. It helps me build clarity about my skills and confidence that they’re useful.

Putting together a pitch isn’t easy. It can be hard to even recognize everything you've done, and research says it's particularly hard for women to take credit for their accomplishments. What ended up working for me: getting friends, colleagues, and former managers to write a few sentences about my strengths and accomplishments, or pulling themes directly from past performance reviews. My supporters gave me far stronger and more positive words than I would have dreamed of using myself. I then repeat that narrative to myself until I internalize it.
Figure out what I’m optimizing for. There are so many rows in my mental spreadsheet I could prioritize: role, compensation, size of company, title, status, flexibility, etc. I have to decide which 1-2 factors I really care about in my next role. Then I can focus on jobs that fit those filters.
Prioritize + operationalize the time. My current job will naturally keep me too busy to look for another role. But a new job is my future — so I need to carve out enough time to do it justice. Setting aside dedicated time every week, like every Friday afternoon from 3-5pm, means that whenever I meet someone I’d like to talk to about a role, I can just say “how about if we meet this Friday afternoon?” And if I’m not meeting with someone, I use that time for outreach, research, or prep. It forces me to do some work on planning my future every week.
Be confident. I have to walk into every conversation convinced that the company would be lucky to have me, with a few reasons for exactly why. If I don't believe it, neither will they.
Find my honest fit. The recruiting process isn't about fooling an interviewer into giving me a job — it's about finding a match. I try to be my shiniest self during interviews, but still myself. I imagine that I've known the interviewers for years and am already friends with them. How would I act then? If the real me isn't a fit during the interview, I'm not going to be a fit later either.
Maintain the rhythms of my normal life. Any job search is stressful, and it’s tempting to put everything on hold until it's over. But especially given how unpredictable the process is, it helps to acknowledge that I’m going to be more stressed than usual, and keep trying to do what I would normally do — seeing friends, working out, adding new projects at work. Also having a few close colleagues I can confide in who understand what I’m going through has been invaluable.
Give myself time. Whenever I feel time pressure, I'm tempted to make compromises I don’t actually want. But I'll be in a new role for the long term. The right role for me might come up sooner or later than I want. Staying in my current job longer than I'd planned or keeping my ears open even when I'm happy at my job has helped me find what's right for me long-term.

My biggest unlock was to create a week-by-week roadmap. Getting really specific about what I need to do helps me track progress and feel good about what I’m learning. For example, I put together something like this, and then adapt it over time.

Week 1: Figure out what I’m looking for + start prep. Get comfortable with my pitch about what I bring, and put an up-to-date summary on LinkedIn. Figure out my “dream jobs” and “dream companies.” Start dusting off the skills I’ll need to demonstrate in an interview: check out the latest tools, walk through interview questions, etc.
Week 2-3: Fill the funnel + prep. Asking friends, recruiters, or investors “Can you intro me to any interesting companies?” doesn’t work. They don’t know what’s relevant to me and don’t have time to think about it. What works: “I’m interested in X role at Y company where I can offer Z skills. I see you’re connected with hiring manager A who’s leading a team there. Can you intro me to them? I’ve attached a short blurb you can forward.” Repeat.
Week 4-5: Narrow the search. Meet with the companies I’m interested in, and understand what the role looks like and what they’re looking for. I take lots of notes so I can keep everything straight, about what people say, what I think a company needs, how I'd feel working there.
Week 6-8: Interview. If I’ve discovered a role that really piques my interest, interviewing is the only way to know if I’m a match. It’s challenging to do these while working, since it requires context-switching and going deep on different problems simultaneously. But it's been good practice for increasing my capacity later. I’d also recommend this great post about job-hunting from Philip Su, including tactical info on preparing for interviews.

Afterward, no matter what, I try to celebrate going through the process. Even if I didn’t find the perfect role, I’ve learned a ton about myself. I learn what other companies value about me, what skills I want to build, and what motivates me right now — which makes it much easier to find those in my current role.

As someone who stayed at a single company for 15+ years, almost every time I’ve done this kind of search I’ve ended up staying where I am. But every search, whether or not it led to a new job, has been an inflection point — a chance to recommit with fresh energy or to step into something new. Either way, the process itself has always moved me forward, and helped me turn career angst into growth.

Writing a great parental leave plan

Ami Vora — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 15:56:06 GMT

The first time I went out on parental leave, I was so worried. How would my team get along without me for 3 months? And what kind of work would pile up during my absence that I’d have to face coming back, while also trying to juggle a brand new baby?

It’s important to acknowledge — this is a very lucky problem to have in the US, where parental leave is still a luxury. But even at great tech companies with industry-leading leave policies, I talk to a lot of parents-to-be who are worried about how to manage their leaves, especially in a time where work is shifting overall. How can I make sure that my team is doing well without me and give myself a good job to come back to?

Writing a solid parental leave plan that I could discuss with my manager and team helped me regain a sense of control. (I went on to have 2 more babies, so I got plenty of practice writing leave plans 🙂 )

What worked best for me?

Mentally reframe my parental leave plan as a way to build more team capacity. Instead of letting my team drag in “survival mode” while I’m out, could I make this a way for my team to operate better and set us up for more capacity when I get back? Could I match the open tasks with people who’d be excited about doing them, and empower them to run with problems? This meant that not only would people on the team grow, but that I’d come back to a job that I could uniquely do.
Figure out coverage for each major workstream.
1. For any workstream, who would make the decision? Could I divide all of them among my peers so that every item would have a clear owner but no single person would get too much added work?
2. Who would do 1:1s with my team? I usually alternated my manager and a peer doing biweekly 1:1s. That way, my manager could build a closer relationship directly with my team and help with career qs, and my peers could be an xfn mentor and supporter who could unblock anything tactical. Alternating meetings also reduced the time burden on any one person.
3. As a final check, I’d go through my calendar to make sure that each meeting or work-item had someone to participate on my behalf and own the meetings, or clarity that we’d pause or depri the area entirely.
Preparing for events in advance. What are the big events while I’m out (performance reviews, major external conferences, etc) and how will I interact with those? For performance reviews, I left feedback for peers before I went out on leave. For performance discussion sessions for my team, I’d either join from my leave or I’d prep my manager to represent in my absence.
Be clear about how I wanted to interact with the team while I was out. What decisions should they make without me? Which should they text me for, like major hiring decisions or org changes?
Arranging how I’d come back. It sounds small, but even something like returning on a Thursday rather than a Monday was helpful, giving me a bit more of a ramp as I tried to figure out childcare, commuting, breastfeeding, etc. Nowadays I see leave policies that offer 50% work for 2 weeks as people ramp back in, which has been really helpful for folks on my team to get reacclimated to work.

Of course, even though my written parental plan felt “organized”, it didn’t cover the hardest part — figuring out how I’d actually adapt to my job again with a new baby and an exhausted body.

I thought I’d come back to the same job with the same habits, just with a baby at home. Instead, I had to figure out how to be more ruthless with my time and clearer in my priorities. I had to figure out where I needed to take over work I had delegated versus where I had capacity to start new things. And over time, I had to fight the idea that work and parenthood are always in opposition, and keep in mind all the ways they work well together for me.

Writing a leave plan gave me a much-needed sense of control, but what made it all work was the support of all the folks around me. With their support and a clear leave plan, they could all happily stretch a little more without feeling overwhelmed. That gave me the space and flexibility to come back to a great job with plenty of room for growth.

The playbook I use to recruit a team

Ami Vora — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 16:14:02 GMT

The tools companies use to hire right now are changing dramatically, with AI-powered screeners, interviewing agents, and prototyping tests popping up everywhere.

But many fundamentals stay the same — finding candidates, setting up interviews, and closing people. I know many talented people who are working hard to find the right opportunity in a changing industry, and I wanted to share how I've hired in case that sheds light on the mechanics.

Adding great people to the team remains one of the most important jobs of a manager. Every person we add can be a multiplying force for the team, and it’s paid off to hire in a disciplined and fair way.

What’s helped me over the years:

Get specific about the role.
1. Ask: do I really need a new hire? When someone leaves a team or when I’m handed a new headcount, I reflexively try to fill it. But pausing to think about the overall team structure gives me a chance to understand whether the team can operate more effectively. Could we reallocate work around the existing team to give someone a growth opportunity? Could we automate repetitive tasks people are doing today so they could take on more of this role? This isn’t just a chance to do more with less, but to give people growth paths they’re excited about.
2. What am I looking for in a new hire? If I do need to add someone to the team, what are the most important skills we need? Do I need a creative problem-solver who can come up with fresh, occasionally outlandish ideas? Or a detail-oriented executor who can take an idea and turn it into an outcome? It’s tempting to look for a “unicorn” who can do it all, but they don’t exist. Instead, I need someone who can solve the job in front of us and keep growing. Given how fast our industry changes, I generally look for someone who has a track record of learning quickly. That means they’ll keep learning no matter what problem pops up.
3. Craft a tight pitch for the role. What impact will this job have? What are the downsides? What will this person learn? I practice actually saying it out loud. Many candidates will make a call on whether to interview and take a job based on me and my pitch.
Own the process.
1. As a hiring manager, I’m on the hook for finding and closing the right people. Even if I have an official recruiting partner, I’m ultimately responsible for identifying what I’m looking for, reaching out to candidates directly, making sure interviewers are prepped, and closing a great hire.
2. Invest the time. When my team is growing, I block time every day on my calendar for recruiting. I spend that time on outreach, exploratory conversations to convince people to come in for a full interview loop, interviews, or post-interview debriefs. Carving out the time isn’t easy, but when we close someone great, the 1 hour / day I spent recruiting turns into 8 hours / day of a new colleague being an expert at their job. What else gives that ROI?
3. Process and cadence are important. Just like with product execution, having clear goals, canonical docs, and regular tracking make the entire recruiting process more efficient. Even bumping a weekly recruiting check-in to twice weekly has been a good forcing function to see candidates twice as fast.
Build the pipeline.
1. Allot time to find the right person. It’s tempting to fill a role with the first qualified person I run across. But I’m building a team for the long term, so I need to see the best candidates across the board even if it takes a few weeks longer.
2. Fill the top of the funnel with great candidates. Great roles are a good way to attract people who might not normally interview with my team. Meeting these folks is an investment — it’s a small industry, and I’ll see those people again even if they don’t end up interviewing for this role. I’ve closed candidates for my team years after I had first talked with them about a different role.
  
  When I have a new role, I reach out to several extremely senior people who wouldn’t normally be interviewing and tell them, “I’m sure you’re happy where you are. Even if now is not the right time to move, I’d love to connect” (something I learned from the great Fidji Simo). Then I get a new connection for the long-term, and after learning about the role, the candidate might be interested after all.
3. Always have multiple candidates in the pipeline until the offer is closed. Otherwise I get too attached to a particular candidate without having all the info. I once got so excited about a candidate after an intro meeting that I found myself planning future projects around them only to hear that they didn’t pass the interview. And I once paused interviews after offering a job to someone great, only to have to restart the process again when that person declined the offer.
Execute the interview and decision process fast.
1. Build a consistent interview loop. I send the interviewers context on the role, and divide up the list of specific skills we’re looking for so each interviewer is assigned ~1-3 specific skills to get a sense of during the interview. That way we’re getting info on all the candidate skills we really need, without the interviewers repeating the same areas.
2. Debrief ASAP. I ask everyone to write down how the candidate did on the specific skills each interviewer was assigned to look for plus any other pros / cons within a few hours of the interview. Then I bring everyone together (within 24 hours if possible) to discuss the candidate in a structured way. If people use squishy words, I push for concrete details. If an interviewer says a candidate is “coachable”, can they point to examples of when the candidate took feedback real-time and changed their plan?
3. Hiring is always a judgment call. There’s no oracle who can guarantee a candidate will be a great fit. It’s often tempting to ask for endless follow-ups or more information, but I generally find that after a full interview loop, we have all the information we are likely to get and just need to make a call. I once dragged out a decision on a strong candidate because I was worried about one interviewer's lukewarm feedback. By the time we circled back for a follow-up conversation, the candidate had accepted another offer.
Close a great candidate.
1. Be honest about the job. I try to fast-forward to six months after the person joins, and share what I think that looks like. How will they feel? What will they be excited about, and what will they be frustrated by? It can be tempting to do anything I can to close a candidate since I’ve worked so hard to find someone good. If they ask for a higher level or a different title, why not just give it to them? But those exceptions slowly erode team morale as their colleagues lose trust in the system, and it doesn’t set up the candidate for success if they’re not prepared to deliver at that level.
2. Address concerns head-on. Instead of hoping a candidate’s concerns will go away, I try to surface them directly by asking,”What would prevent you from taking this job?” Is it compensation, scope, team dynamics? It can feel awkward for a candidate to ask questions about work-life balance, so can I proactively raise my experiences with balancing my family with work so they’ll understand the norms? Once I understand what's holding them back, I can either address it directly or help them think through whether it's actually a dealbreaker.
3. Become their partner as they plan their future. Once I’ve made an offer to a candidate, I put myself in the position of being their partner and coach as if they were already on my team. Can I help them plot out up front what their growth could look like on the team and how I’ll support them?
Onboard intentionally. After all the work to hire and close someone, now I need to make sure they ramp successfully. This past post has six tips that have helped me onboard new leaders.

Metrics, product launches, and quarterly goals are all important. But a manager’s underlying job is also to build the team that builds the product. No hiring approach is foolproof, but investing in a fair, disciplined process has been worth every hour that it takes. The joy of watching great people work together and grow (and getting to be part of their team!) is one of my favorite parts of every job I’ve had.

Running a clean reorg

Ami Vora — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 15:57:48 GMT

The word “reorg” makes people flinch. It smells like bureaucracy, PowerPoint slides, and nowadays sometimes raises the idea of layoffs (which are downright scary). But the best teams I’ve worked on have treated reorgs not as a theoretical “moving boxes in an org chart” exercise, but as a way to set up a team for success.

A good org setup makes it clear what problems we need to tackle and sets people up to own important problems. Like anything that affects people’s work, reorgs are sensitive. If they’re done carelessly, they create confusion and fear. But if they’re done well, they can help teams respond to changes in the market, let people on a team grow faster, and set a team up to build long-term. And they’re a normal part of work today, so it’s helped to have a system to think about them.

Here’s what I’ve learned from my share of reorgs.

Decide which problem we’re solving (and therefore which ones we’ll compromise on). Every reorg can only optimize for a handful of constraints, like:
1. customer: carving out a slice of the full stack (front-end, back-end, ops) to focus specifically on enterprise customers.
2. technology: combining all front-end teams to move faster on a single tech stack.
3. product: unifying all the teams needed to make a videoconferencing product take off.
4. leader: expanding scope for a high-trajectory leader who’s ready to take on bigger challenges
  
  When we optimize for one of these axes, we’re probably going to compromise on the others. If I’m prioritizing a specific product like videoconferencing, it’ll be harder to build the complete solutions enterprise customers need. And a vertical-first org focused on enterprise customers might slow down overall tech platform investments, which will limit us long-term. So we need to make sure up front that the cost of the reorg — the churn of people getting used to their new structure, the change management work to get it done, and the ongoing risk of the compromises — is worth it.
Provide clear direction. It can feel generous to ask people to “choose” their next team — after all, who doesn’t love a choice? But when I’m asking people to change roles, I want them to know I've thought carefully about why this works for them and the broader team. If they disagree, we’ll talk about why — but they should know the full picture and their best place in it, and should be assured that we’re not making changes casually.
Sequence matters. How and when people find out affects how they feel. People should hear either 1:1 from their manager or in a broader team setting, in order of who’s the most impacted.
1. First, the small # of people who have choices between different roles (often managers of the new teams). Their decisions will inform other parts of the reorg.
2. Then the people whose manager or scope is changing should hear 1:1 from their manager. If someone’s manager is changing, they should then talk with the new manager immediately.
3. Finally, everyone else — people whose job and manager stay the same, cross-functional teams, or the broader company. Each team can hear the updates together in a large meeting or email. That way everyone knows that they all have complete information.
Redraft messaging with fresh eyes before communicating it broadly. Inside a reorg, decision-making can get messy. But all my team will see is the final structure and how it will serve them. I need to let go of any baggage from the process and focus on the outcome — how this new structure helps them win.
Speed matters. If we’ve decided as a leadership team to pursue a reorg, we need to prioritize it and get it done. The longer it drags on, the higher the chance it’ll leak. Rumors don’t help anyone.
Manage a reorg like a product launch. Reorgs have a real impact on how we’re going to ship for our customers, so we need to give them the same rigor and respect. My reorg docs look like product launch docs, and generally include:
1. Goal of the reorg, including known compromises / tradeoffs
2. Outline of the org chart & updated charter of each team
3. Any structure or leadership choices that still need to be made
4. Timeline and plan for communicating with team members, including {person, new role, who’s talking with them}
5. Action items: people who have concerns who should talk with leadership that day or new feedback to address
6. Ongoing list of people who need to know, checking off when someone has been informed
7. Draft of announcement to be shared about the full reorg
  
  For a large reorg, I hold a daily standup with key leaders to check in on progress, and have a daily block on managers’ calendars so they can address any concerns with their teams immediately.
Listen and iterate. The job isn’t done when the reorg announcement goes out. We need to keep checking in with people and hear how they’re feeling, and if there’s any immediate finessing or information-sharing that needs to happen. What we work on and who we work are so core that there are always hiccups while everyone figures it out.

Reorgs will never be fun. They require people to change their routines, their relationships, and can even impact their sense of belonging. But if they’re done respectfully, they can also clear away noise and help teams focus on building the products our customers need for the future.

Respectful performance management

Ami Vora — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 18:23:48 GMT

(Context: This is a tough topic — stressful, emotional, and usually only discussed in whispers. I’m sharing my approach because it’s one of the most frequent questions I hear from both managers and employees going through it. My hope is to make the process feel more concrete, and offer a reminder that performance management is a normal part of work. It’s not a judgment of someone’s talent or a reflection of worth — just whether they fit a specific role today.)

Performance management is hard, no matter what side you’re on.

When you’re receiving feedback that you’re not meeting expectations, it can feel shocking, unfair, or overwhelming — especially when you’re worried about what losing a job could mean for the other parts of your life. When you’re the one giving feedback, you second-guess yourself and wonder if you’re doing the right thing. And for both sides, the process is isolating: it’s hard to even talk about, even though it’s one of the most emotional parts of work.

But the truth is, this process is normal. Every experienced manager has had to deliver tough performance feedback. Every experienced employee has had to hear it.

Here are 6 principles I keep in mind when I’m going through the process as a manager.

1. Focus on the role match. Performance management isn’t about deciding whether someone is “good” or “bad.” It’s about whether their strengths match the requirements of a particular role at a particular time. Part of my job as a manager is to do people the service of recognizing their strengths and whether they match up to the job today. Remembering this helps me deliver feedback that is clearer and more constructive while reflecting their strengths.

2. Gather complete information. If I have an inkling that someone is performing poorly, I can’t stop at my own general impression. I talk to close colleagues, past managers, and most importantly, the person themselves. I ask how they think they’re doing, make sure they’re hearing feedback directly from their peers, and share my concerns openly. Then we can work together on a plan to improve.

3. Own the judgment of how the person is performing. As a manager, I need to own the judgment call of what skills are needed in the job today and whether the person demonstrates them. It’s tempting to endlessly look for conclusive data — not just that the person isn't going to be successful today, but that they'll never be successful on the team. But I have to be clear about what the role requires right now, check for bias (is the feedback really about skills, or style?) and give the person a fair chance to show their skills.

4. Give clear feedback, and make sure their colleagues are too. Colleagues will often share negative feedback with a manager that they've never told the person directly, usually in an attempt to “be nice.” That’s the opposite of nice. It means people who are performing poorly won’t know how to get better or even know that there’s something wrong. And I have to do my part by being far more blunt than feels comfortable — for instance, writing in an email, “As we discussed, this performance is not what I’m looking for and we need to talk this week about whether this role is the right match for you.” Or I start a formal performance improvement plan. Anything else might be too vague to be useful.

5. Give the person a strong chance to show their skills. I give people 2 projects, one tactical and one strategic, to be done in the next ~4 weeks. I check in every week. In many cases, people just needed clearer feedback, and they turn out to be excellent at one or both of the projects. I love it when this happens.

6. Based on the evidence of the person’s skills, be courageous about the next step. If I’ve given the person the chance to show their skills, checked for bias, and it’s clear they’re not doing the job needed today, it’s better for everyone to make a change. Keeping someone in a role they can’t succeed in isn’t a kindness — they know they’re not performing well, the team feels frustrated, and performance slips all around.

Of course, looping in HR early has always helped me navigate these decisions fairly, whether I’m planning a formal performance management process or just at the beginning of giving hard feedback.

If you're going through these decisions, on either side of the process, I promise — you're not alone.

No part of this conversation is pleasant. But it's a normal part of work, and it doesn’t have to be cruel. Recognizing that the process is normal and okay, no matter which side I’m on, can help me be more constructive about how to handle it with clarity and respect.

Questioning my best instincts → more learning

Ami Vora — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 17:41:46 GMT

“I can think of ten reasons why this won’t work,” I said during a 1:1 with my manager a few years ago as we discussed a risky idea our team had pitched that day.

“Ami, you always think of ten reasons why something won’t work. Can you think of ten reasons it will work this time?” my manager replied.

“But I’m right!” I wanted to protest. My intuition, honed over years of identifying risks, made it seem so obvious that this project would fail — which means I didn’t even give it a chance to succeed.

That conversation was a wake-up call. My skill at spotting risks had accidentally become a reflex. It was a self-reinforcing cycle: I’d call out a risk, things would go well, so I’d call out even more. I stopped experimenting. And without new experiments, I had no data to see if my instincts were still right.

Even as I try to be proud of the intuition I’ve built up over the years, this realization reminded me to constantly pause and keep experimenting, even when it goes against my instinct. For instance:

I have a bias toward saying no. So when I see a moonshot proposal from a hungry team, I need to ask, “What would happen if it *did* work?”
I’m impatient. So when a product takes longer than I think it should, I should ask myself, “Is the quality we’re getting worth the tradeoff?”
I’m (often) diplomatic. So when I see an idea I absolutely disagree with, I wonder, “Should I go beyond asking leading questions and veto this?”

I even share this with my team. “You know my bias is to keep things simple. Can you help me call out where I’m oversimplifying?” Acknowledging the shadow side of my strengths and specifically questioning those has helped me become a more balanced leader.

I think it also helps me be more constructive with my team, and sometimes even a useful contrarian. The longer a team works together, the more likely we are to share the same experiences. We’ve seen the same experiments run, so we form similar intuitions about culture or products. This makes it harder to even notice that there are other ways to operate without looking for them.

Intuition is a hard-won strength. I don’t want to ignore it! But I know that being proud of a skill can naturally make me over-rely on it, even when it’s not the right answer. Questioning my skills every so often (and the reflexes they lead to) helps me keep learning.

A quick product simplicity test: remove all the explainers

Ami Vora — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 16:30:34 GMT

When I’m ready to launch a new product, one of the things I get excited about is the NUX, the New User Experience. After all, how else would people know how to use my great new product if I didn’t include in-depth education about it? I’ve created video walkthroughs describing which buttons to tap, multi-step tours that the user needs to click through, and banners advertising a new launch, all to make sure the user understands all the nuances of my amazing product.

But as a user, how many times have you opened an app just trying to pay a bill or send a message, and instead you have to click through a long “new product” tour, or try to figure out where your button went after it was covered by a new feature banner? I usually click through these as fast as possible, just to make sure I don’t lose track of the main thing I’m trying to do! And then I wonder what I missed.

An alternative way I’ve started thinking about the launch of a new product: what would happen if there was no NUX for my product at all? Could people figure it out without it being explained to them?

This is one of the best tests I know for whether a product is truly simple.

Sometimes an in-depth NUX is necessary. If I’m building a brand new product idea or system that people have never seen before, a NUX can help to orient them. Or if the product itself is locked but I can still update NUX content, that can provide the latest info. And a small, specific NUX can also be needed to draw attention to a new product or a navigation change — “Hey, this product now lives over here! Check it out.” NUXes can be necessary bridges between how the product operates and what a user needs to know.

But sometimes I get into the habit of using the NUX and other in-product education as a crutch. If I got feedback that a user wasn’t sure where to tap, I’d explain it rather than updating the product experience itself — the information architecture, visual design, product text, or iconography — to be clearer.

After all, people will only see the NUXes once, and have to go out of their way to look for more in-product education. But they’ll see the actual product every time they use it. If the product is self-explanatory, that’ll be far more effective than a temporary NUX.

Now, with each product launch, I do the mental exercise of “What would happen if there were *no* explainers or NUXes?” I can’t always execute that in reality, but the exercise of thinking through it always make the product more usable even when users fly past the NUX.

To build trust in complexity, offer small choices and fast feedback

Ami Vora — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 15:50:29 GMT

I strongly believe product simplicity and predictability are a superpower. They give the user a sense of control, which is a gift when the world feels so complicated.

But some things are legitimately complicated — regulated banking signups, shopping flows where the user needs to narrow the search based on specific preferences, error cases where something went wrong.

So what will give the user a sense of control when predictability is hard to come by?

My take: Giving the user a chance to participate in the process by laying out the steps, enabling them to make specific choices, and offering a clear feedback loop on each small decision. This may make the flow longer, but it gives users a chance to viscerally understand what’s happening. It turns helplessness into action.

For instance, a while ago I got an alarming privacy notification on an important app and was prompted to go through a privacy checkup and recovery flow. It was a moment of fear. What if my account was compromised? My mind started spiraling and I desperately wanted a sense of control.

But the product’s recovery flow calmed me down. Why? It:

Laid out all the steps I’d go through, giving me a clear roadmap for what to do.
Channeled my anxiety into actions, even if they were small. There were prompts like “Check whether password is compromised? Yes / No”. If I think about it, is that a necessary prompt? Who would say “no”? But in the moment, the ability to participate in the process of securing my account gave me a sense of control.
Gave me fast feedback on each choice by turning each step green on completion.

By the end of the now-green list, I felt a sense of relief. Realistically, that product could have taken all those actions without my input. But following along step-by-step and getting to participate in each step gave me a sense of control.

I saw the same thing with a new AI tool my team was working on. Our temptation was to take user input up front and magically come back with a solution. That’s the promise of AI, right? But we realized our customers didn’t yet trust the magic black box of AI recommendations. Instead, what helped was intentionally inserting more feedback steps where we would explain what we were considering and offer the user a chance to change direction at each step. It added more friction, but it built trust faster and got our users comfortable with the new AI toolset. Then over time, we could remove those interim feedback steps and automatically make decisions for the user.

Compare that to a customer service page where you type a question into a contact form and just get a message that says, “Thanks, we’ll take care of it.” You don’t really get an understanding of the overall process, a chance to make smaller decisions or updates, or any feedback on whether you made the right choices. I’m always stressed about whether I did it right!

I think this applies to people too. When I’m building a new relationship, like with a new manager or peer, I try to frequently outline what I’m doing and why, and give them a chance to redirect. After a few weeks, we know each others’ style and I can stop.

Action is the best antidote to fear. Especially when someone is stressed out and longing for control, it helps to ground them in a clear step-by-step process, give them a chance to participate in solving their problem, and letting them know the impact of each choice. That naturally creates some relief, and helps them channel their concern into action.

Making progress on controversial problems

Ami Vora — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 15:11:27 GMT

Have you ever been pulled into a controversial strategy or team problem — one where every person involved has an opinion, no one agrees, and no one has an actual solution? This could be “Should we shut down this big project that the CEO isn’t convinced about?” or “Should we expand into this new market right now?” or “Should we change our interview process?” At some point at any company, these thorny problems become inevitable.

When I first ran across these, I’d to try to convince the loudest stakeholders to agree with each other, so we could avoid conflict in our big decision meetings. Hint: that didn’t work! Each person was operating with different context and optimizing for different goals, so of course my attempt at persuasion was useless. And when senior leadership was involved, it felt even more high-stakes — I’d end up presenting a cautious middle-ground solution to my boss’s boss’s, while another exec chimed in with vocal disagreement. Fun, right? 🙂

But the more senior I became, the more of these I ran into. I needed a process that helped me stay calm, make progress, and get back to building.

Here's what works for me:

Understand where we are in the problem-solving process. Most problems are like a universe — they expand in size and complexity with every new piece of information I learn, and then contract as I winnow down potential solutions. That inflection point, when I suddenly can start seeing a path to an outcome, feels like magic.

Knowing the shape of the problem gives me a roadmap for what to do next. If I don’t have all the relevant information yet, it’s too early to name an answer. If I’m starting to hear repetitive info, I can stop searching for more context and shift to eliminating options and proposing solutions.

Knowing where I am also helps me stay calm. I know it’s normal to keep hearing more new opinions and ideas while I’m still in info-gathering mode, and I can mentally hold off on evaluating people’s proposed solutions until we’ve established a baseline of common info.
Use documents to get specific and share context. It’s often not until I write something down that I see the obvious questions. “What’s the main goal of this change? Is the primary problem here user experience, or is it perception?” It can feel remedial to write everything down — but that’s how I know everyone agrees on the core info and I’m not missing anything. It also means we can separate gathering information from jumping into solutions, rather than everything getting mixed up in real-time meetings. After all, if we can’t agree on the baseline facts, how could we agree on the solution?
Over-communicate the process and status. When everyone knows there’s a problem, they also want to know how they can participate and what the plan is. A regular update solves that. (“This week I’m going to talk with X, Y, and Z; Monday I’ll share a recommendation here; Wednesday I’ll share with leaders A, B, and C; please add any feedback on Monday/Tuesday.”) It also saves me time — if I get inbound questions, I can always respond with the existing written process.
Ask questions even if they're embarrassing. If I’m missing crucial info, like “actually, who is the most important audience for this?”, I find someone safe, ask directly, and write the answer in my list of facts. Usually someone else is missing that context too, and I’m doing them a service by sharing it.
Write an opinionated recommendation. I’m usually not the most important person in these discussions. But as the person who’s gathered the info and talked to everyone firsthand, I have unique context. The best service I can do is synthesize the info, understand options, and recommend one, complete with the tradeoffs and decision criteria, in a simple document.

My core proposal generally includes:
1. Summary: outline of the problem statement & the recommendation
2. Information learned: facts v. assumptions (both are important)
3. Goals and decision criteria
4. Options & pros / cons for each
5. Why this recommendation was chosen
6. Next steps if the recommendation is agreed on, including mitigating risks
7. Discussion / time to discuss other options
With that short outline, real-time discussions become much more effective because everyone is starting from the same complete base of information and has a skeleton of pros / cons to guide the discussion.
Don’t hold out for a perfect solution. By definition, if a problem is controversial, there’s no clear solution. That gives me permission to propose my imperfect solution, alongside the context and principles of why we’d make this decision.

I can’t remember the last time I came up with a perfect solution. But this process, simple as it is, has helped me tackle even the hardest problems. And it’s helped me figure out how to diagnose and manage disagreements rationally, so even when everyone disagrees, we can figure out what it takes to make progress together.

Owning my wins means learning to own my failures

Ami Vora — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 16:31:25 GMT

“I wouldn’t do it. But if you decide to, that’s on you.”

That’s what one of my best managers told me before the biggest presentation of my career so far.

I was preparing to speak in front of thousands of my peers, and wanted my manager’s take on my story. I was hoping they’d say, “Great idea!” or at least, “I support you!”

Instead, I got the line: “That’s on you.”

I was frustrated. Did that mean “don’t do it”? Should I follow my manager’s opinion and change my strategy? Or should I take the risk of pursuing my idea, and then have to own it if failed publicly?

At the time, my manager’s response was alarming and scary. What I wanted was comfort — someone saying, “whatever happens, I’ll protect you.” But in retrospect, what I got was better.

By sharing their opinion and trusting my judgment even if I disagreed with them, my manager gave me something even more powerful than approval: ownership.

Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how often I relied on my manager as a safety net. Of course I wanted a manager who’d always protect me and defend my decisions.

But if I only pursued ideas my manager supported, were they really my ideas? If my manager absorbed the consequences when something failed, didn’t that also mean they deserved the credit when things worked, not me?

For that presentation, I decided to take the risk of telling the story that I wanted. I prepared nervously, second-guessing right until I walked onstage. “Are you okay?” I remember one of my colleagues asking that morning, seeing the anxiety on my face. “You look exhausted!”

But it worked. It turned out to be one of the talks I’m proudest of — both because it landed well with the crowd, and also because I knew it was my ideas that drove it. Being prepared to own the risk of failure helped me own its success — a lesson I come back to all the time when I’m thinking about taking a new risk.

Use leadership reviews to get principles, not (just) answers

Ami Vora — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 17:01:52 GMT

How many times have you been in a brainstorm or jam session and heard someone say “Let’s take this idea to a leadership review! That way we’ll get the answer asap!”

And that makes sense! Leadership reviews are great for unblocking teams quickly. Especially in the early days of a product when we’re still finding product-market fit, hearing directly from the single leader in charge of the team or company is invaluable. It helps us make quick decisions across an entire product area that will feel consistent to customers, and means we can build and pivot fast.

But after we have product-market fit and generally know the path forward, relying on reviews for every decision can actually slow things down. Can’t you just feel how much the momentum slows down when you have to waste time scheduling and preparing for unnecessary meetings?

Instead, we can accelerate our pace by using those reviews to build principles. That way the team can make fast decisions without even needing a meeting next time.

That means asking questions in reviews like:

Is our principle here to optimize for Y users over Z users? Or B timeline instead of C timeline?
Should we default to always doing X unless it interferes with Y, like we’re doing here?
In the future, can we skip product review for this kind of problem? Or would you like us to come back for each decision?

This kind of calibration has helped our teams stay fast even as a product matures. Early on, I might run daily or weekly standups with the CEO to make sure we’re aligned and unblocked. But as the team builds confidence in what’s working for customers, we can align with leadership on a few core principles and let the team run. The team can make quick autonomous decisions themselves, and we can get more done across the entire team.

I’ve found this not only creates more capacity in teams, it also creates more leaders — because as our decision-making principles get clearer, we can empower more people to step up knowing that we’ll build consistently across the board. And of course, our customers get the benefit of quicker, faster improvements.

The 3 biggest mistakes leaders make when hiring their first PMs

Ami Vora — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 15:24:18 GMT

One of the most common questions I get asked by founders is: "What should I look for in my first PM?"

A lot of hiring PMs is just like hiring any great tech person — eg, create a tight pitch, outline expectations for 3-6 months, keep a pipeline of multiple candidates until you’ve got someone locked in. But across different stages of company growth, I’ve seen 3 big mistakes repeatedly come up when hiring PMs.

1. Hiring a PM who’s too senior. Founders in particular often get advice to hire the most senior person possible. And of course, that experience is really valuable! But senior PMs often expect to do senior work — hiring and managing teams, setting high-level strategy, and delegating execution.

That’s usually a mismatch with an early-stage startup, where most founders still carry the product vision in their heads. They need someone who can work with them to execute quickly, iterate fast, and stay close to users.

A senior PM may not be as excited about the hands-on, scrappy nature of an early-stage role. When I hire someone senior onto a small team, I design an interview including in-the-weeds work to check not just whether someone can do the work but whether they like doing it.

This is also often true in large companies too, where it’s tempting to bring in someone super-senior from the outside but often better to bet on someone internal who’s high-capacity and hungry to learn.

2. Looking for the “perfect” PM instead of the right one for the role. When hiring my first PM onto a team, it’s tempting to look for a unicorn who’s the best at everything. But while PMs tend to be generalists, every PM spikes on different strengths. Clarifying exactly what I need focuses the search and sourcing pipeline. Do I need someone who can look at dashboards and analyze metrics quickly, someone who is going to spend their day in Figma, or someone who needs to rapidly prototype their ideas themselves?

3. Valuing domain expertise over adaptability. Who wouldn't want to hire an expert who already knows the problem space inside and out? But the industry evolves so fast, any domain knowledge rapidly goes out of date. Instead, it’s most important to find someone who knows they need to stay sharp and constantly learn. I try to gauge this in interviews by asking people to talk about the pros / cons of their own ideas, how their weaknesses in one role were improved in the next, or how they keep themselves sharp in their current job. A pattern of growth and change from year to year signals they’re willing to try new things and learn.

It’s always tempting to hire for the team we want to be in 2-3 years. But I’ve found it’s usually better to hire for what we need right now, then add new skill sets as the company evolves. This also means I’m hiring people who have room for growth — keeping them engaged, motivated, and focused on building great products for our customers today.

The “red pen” trick to improving my writing

Ami Vora — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 17:28:36 GMT

I once had a manager who reviewed my work in an unusual (and honestly kind of frustrating!) way. They’d ask for a printout (?!), and then they’d take a red pen from behind their ear and cross out words, sentences, even entire paragraphs without mercy. No inline questions or happy faces — just lines through anything they thought was unnecessary.

Believe it or not, this was not particularly fun! I had to watch as all the creative thoughts I was so proud of were littered with red strikethroughs. But as it turned out, those brutal edits were the best thing that ever happened to my writing.

When my ideas were surrounded with filler, it was hard for the reader to know what the real point was. But when I distilled my message down to just a few, carefully chosen words, the ideas cut like a sharpened knife.

Most importantly, this process forced me to take a stance. As someone with a deep-seated fear of being wrong, I’d often hedge my ideas with a raft of data, alternate ideas, and softeners so every reader could choose their own takeaway and no one could criticize me. But these red pen cuts forced me to sharpen my own thinking until I built a message I had conviction in.

What worked for me?

Cutting too much and seeing what fails. If my writing still works when I remove a phrase, I don’t need it. I imagine I have a character count limit and delete words or entire paragraphs. It’s okay if I don’t answer every question — that’s what followups and appendices are for. It’s more important that the main points are undeniably clear.
Removing unnecessary “I” phrases. How often have you written “I think X happened” or “I think Y is not going well” just to make a difficult statement more palatable, when in fact it’s clear that “X happened” and “Y is not going well”? Not only does removing these sorts of phrases make writing cleaner, research says it makes the writer seem more powerful. Objective writing is easier to read, and it highlights what is truly an opinion that’s up for debate.
Making lists. If I don’t know where to start, lists are a great stepping stone. Each idea has a separate line, and each line is numbered. That forces me to clarify the priority of items both for myself and the reader. (This is a trick from Naomi Gleit, the GOAT of execution.) Now anyone can follow my thinking step-by-step or show me exactly what idea they disagree with.

In the end, those ruthless red pen edits transformed not just my writing but my thinking, and it gave me a tool to apply everywhere. For a new product, what features can I cut to clarify what the product is for? When I’m describing a team’s performance, what should I state as objectively true, versus something that’s open for debate?

I owe so much to that manager’s ruthless focus on clarity. What once felt like destruction turned into a powerful tool, not just for my writing but for helping me cut through noise and focus on what’s important across my life.

An introvert’s 3 secrets to networking

Ami Vora — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 18:25:41 GMT

I hate networking. The entire idea of it makes me shudder a little. I always imagine myself walking into a room full of people I don’t know, standing in the corner by myself, and looking uncomfortable as everyone else chats happily in tight little groups. (Can you tell I’m an extreme introvert?)

But building relationships with people around the industry has been an important part of succeeding in my career. How else could I learn about new opportunities, find the right people to hire, understand how other companies solve problems, and even just have people to vent to when things are weird?

As an introvert, a few tricks have helped me build a solid network.

Use common work tasks like recruiting to build relationships. Whenever I’m hiring for an amazing role, I reach out to lots of people saying, “I know you’re probably happy where you are, but it would be great to meet and get to know each other for the future.” After chatting, they might end up interested in the role, or in a future role down the line. In the process I meet a bunch of great people around the industry.

Or if someone incredible reaches out to me for a role I’m not interested in, I say, “I’m not looking for a new role right now, but I’ve heard great things about you and would love to build a relationship for the long-term.” Not everyone accepts, but it’s been surprising how many relationships have come out of this.

Cross-group collaborations are another great opportunity — it’s nice to take a pause and sit down with my counterpart on another team to build a “peacetime relationship”, even in the midst of difficult negotiations.
Set “talk with new people” goals for myself. If I’m feeling uncomfortable at an event, I’ll take a breath and think, “I’m going to talk with 12 new people before I leave.” This might sound corny or even forced, but it gives me a good push to start chatting with people, and usually I’ll get so caught up in conversations that I forget all about that goal. If I’m hosting a dinner, I’ll ask people to swap seats between courses so we can all meet more new people.
Excuse myself gracefully from conversations. It’s tempting to stay in a conversation forever once it’s rolling, but one goal of networking is to meet new people. So it’s been helpful to get comfortable excusing myself after a good chat with, “Great to meet you, I’m going to mingle a little.” Often someone else will respond, “Good idea, I’ll do the same.” After all, we're all there to meet new people.

The most important thing has been to think about networking differently — not something inauthentic and transactional, but a way to build relationships with people who are interested in the same things I am. Will every new connection turn into a meaningful work relationship or new close friend? Of course not. But some will, and I’ll definitely run into many of the same people again in my career — so why not make friends, and make work more enjoyable?

Unlocking simplicity: Customer empathy as a (not-so-secret) weapon

Ami Vora — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 16:48:20 GMT

My last couple posts have been about how simplicity in strategy and design is a competitive edge. But how do you decide what to simplify?

The best way I know? Spending time with the customer. This sounds easy, but it’s so hard!

If you’re like me, the hardest part is to be patient. Some part of my brain is always asking, “what’s the ROI on this 30-minute slot?” And I have to tell you — spending time with customers often does not feel high ROI in the short term. In fact, the most useful customer sessions feel like a punch in the gut. How many times have you watched someone use your product and thought — “But there’s a button right there! I built it just for you!!!” I get it! That feeling of frustration and the unpredictability of any specific customer session means it’s tempting to sacrifice customer time for more urgent tasks.

But I try to resist that. Even though being hands-on with customers can feel low ROI in the short term, it’s the highest ROI in the long term, because it gives me an intuition for how to build today and what to build next. Every time I feel confident that I’ve understood something important about my customers, I click into higher gear with my ideas and team.

My trick for speeding that up: Every couple weeks, I hold a recurring time slot in my calendar for “something customer-related”. This is a good Friday afternoon task, when (let’s be real) it’s hard to get big things done. Staring at that empty slot on my cal forces me to fill it.

My go-to exercises:

Use my product (surprising how educational this is!) and take notes + file bugs
Check out product reviews on Youtube, X, Facebook, Reddit, etc
Join UX research
Read support tickets
Watch hotjar recordings
Visit a customer

Visiting customers in person is my favorite. When I was at Faire (a marketplace for independent retailers), I could literally walk into stores in my neighborhood and ask where they get their products and how they felt about Faire — it was retail therapy disguised as customer research 🙂

One memorable customer was a nursing director at a hospital who also ran a gift shop in the labor & delivery ward. She said, “Faire changed my life. Now I can help new families can get what they need while they’re still in the hospital, so they have an easier time in their first few weeks.” As a mom of 3 difficult babies, I know exactly how meaningful that is. Whatever I built, I thought to myself, is this simple enough for Nancy to understand when she’s got 5 minutes between delivering babies?

That’s what I always look for — the kind of emotion that comes with someone saying “this product changed my life”, or even “this flow makes me so mad!” That deep emotion tells me what truly matters to our customers. It gives me a map for what to build, what to protect, and what’s getting in the way, and there’s no better way to find that insight than by spending time with the customer.

Simplify your product design — borrow familiar patterns

Ami Vora — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 16:24:13 GMT

Last week’s post was about how simplicity is a competitive advantage when the world feels so complicated. But what does it mean for a product to be “simple”?

Earlier in my career, I loved the idea of putting my mark on an app with something unique and exciting — maybe new gestures to open up functionality, or frequent updates that would engage the user.

But after working on products that are designed to be accessible to anyone, I’ve realized I need to be a lot more intentional about those choices. Individually, novel ideas and exploration are fun. But added up, they ask the user to learn a whole lot of new gestures and directions they’re not yet familiar with.

Instead of trying to invent a new design pattern for every single feature, what if we could make products feel familiar and usable by borrowing patterns the user already knows?

Simple products are immediately familiar and usable. When I pick up a knife or a cup, I never have to think to myself, “How do I use this?”, even if I’m at a friend’s and have never seen their tableware before.

That sense of familiarity is what we wanted for WhatsApp too. We wanted to make sure our users wouldn’t feel like they needed to learn how to use the app, but could just start calling and messaging.

We had to ask ourselves — what will make this product familiar to billions of very different people around the world?

Well, the only thing we really knew about all those potential WhatsApp users is that they had a phone. So we matched the patterns of the phone’s operating system, because that’s the one thing we knew that the user would already be familiar with.

If Android normally had an floating action button in the bottom right, that’s where WhatsApp would put its button. This meant WhatsApp would feel familiar even if you've never actually used the app before.

The question I always asked was “where would the user naturally put their thumb? Put the button there.” If you’re watching a Hotjar recording, you can see where someone pulls their mouse, or where someone’s eyes track in qualitative research. Users are telling us where they expect to find something — put the button there!

For another industry example of how familiar patterns make hard things feel easy, think about all the new genAI chat bots. This is wildly complicated frontier technology. How is it possible that hundreds of millions of consumers could pick it up overnight?

Because even though these AI systems are built on complex foundations, they borrow a messaging interface that we’ve all been using for decades. That familiar interface means that everyone can use this amazing tech without needing to learn anything new. The content is exciting, novel, and complex — but the interaction pattern is familiar.

One shortcut I always think of when designing a new product is: what other apps or physical products are my users likely to be using? Are there any patterns I can borrow from those to make a new product automatically intuitive? If a user normally swipes right to dismiss notifications, can swiping right dismiss new alerts inside my product instead of making the user find an “x” to tap on? Making these small gestures familiar can add up to making a whole product feel more simple and intuitive, instead of like yet another new thing to learn.

Another shortcut is to use design systems — a group of consistent, repeatable components you can use anywhere — which are explicitly meant to solve this problem. And as a bonus, design systems make it a lot faster and easier to create consistent products.

Of course, this adherence to consistency is really limiting in lots of ways! There are lots of interesting gestures and interaction patterns that people aren’t familiar with, but which could be a great addition to a product.

The takeaway isn’t to only ever use neutral, standard patterns. It’s to be intentional about new patterns, rather than assuming that novelty should be the default. Novelty creates excitement and engagement in the short term — but often, people are carrying so much cognitive load that simplicity actually leads to more engagement long-term.

Simplifying your product strategy is a competitive advantage

Ami Vora — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 16:34:14 GMT

One of my most important lessons from years of working on WhatsApp is that simplicity isn’t just a design choice — it’s a competitive advantage. Why? Because when the world feels so complicated, products that feel simple are a sanctuary.

Think about the products you use every day. A cup, a chair, a light switch? These are hugely successful products — because they are simple. Knives are my favorite example. They’ve been around for millions of years, there’s one in every home, and no one ever has to explain how to use them. And a knife only works because everything unnecessary has been removed — that’s literally the definition of sharpening a knife.

I think about simplifying a product strategy the same way — sharpening the main idea by removing everything unnecessary. For WhatsApp, simplicity was actually the key to making the app work for everyone. Our goal was to give anyone in the world the feeling of being with their friends and family, even when they’re separated by geography or circumstance. But if we added too many features that our users didn’t already understand, it could make them feel confused, or overwhelmed.

I get it! I build these products for a living, and I still get disoriented when one of my apps changes. It feels like someone moved the furniture around in my house and now I’m banging my knees on a couch in the middle of the night.

So for our users, we focused on: did my calls and messages go through, for free, every time? We had to resource that before anything else. Just like a knife, that simple focus cut through any confusion. No one had to wonder “what is this app for?” or “why should I use it?” And after we had established that value prop, we could add other features on top.

Another famous industry example is Burbn, an app launched 10 years ago that let you do lots of stuff: check in, make plans, earn points, share photos. But it didn’t take off until the founders chopped off everything but photo sharing. Now, of course, we know that app as Instagram.

My shortcut for simplifying a strategy: It’s not prioritization until it hurts. We sometimes think about prioritization as “cutting all the unnecessary work.” But if something were unnecessary, we’d already have cut it!

Prioritization means cutting things that are valuable so I can double down on what makes my product indispensable. That means users will know what my app is for and I’ll get data faster about whether my core value prop works for users. If I'm not disappointed by a few items on my product’s “cut” list, I’m not prioritizing deeply enough.

Of course, like everything, judgment matters. If you’re keeping planes in the air or medical devices humming, please, don’t cut anything! As a frequent flier, every edge case matters 🙂. But for most of us, the core question to ask is: What’s the 1 thing that makes my product indispensable? Can I get that right and then add everything else? That reduces pressure on us builders by giving us a clear focus, and reduces pressure on our users to learn everything all at once.

Happy (belated) new year! I’m wishing all of you all the best this year.

Seeing Yourself through Others’ Eyes (guest post by Deb Liu)

Ami Vora — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 17:00:10 GMT

Okay, this post is a little different. Deb Liu, the CEO of Ancestry and my longtime friend and colleague, writes an amazing blog called Perspectives. Today we decided to do a blog swap where we each wrote about something the other person was bad at. I wrote about "How to say no" for her blog (something Deb is notoriously bad at, as you can see from her never-ending list of accomplishments), and she wrote "How to take credit" for mine.

What I did not expect was for her to write an ode to how great I am :facepalm:. While I'm a little embarrassed to post this, I am so thankful to have a friend and partner like Deb — and I'm trying to learn the lessons she highlights in her post. Please check out her blog over on Perspectives for more of Deb’s lessons from tech, leadership, and parenthood!

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Let me tell you about my friend Ami Vora. She is an incredible product leader who balances visionary leadership with focused execution and is well-respected by everyone who has worked with her. Her two superpowers are her ability to challenge the status quo with respect and influence and her ability to change altitudes, going from high level into the details and back in any discussion.

Ami has done many incredible jobs in her storied career. She took Instagram Ads and Facebook’s native mobile apps to market. She was the head of product for Meta Ads, which was then Meta’s largest product team. She was the first external CPO of WhatsApp as they became the largest messaging app in the world and is currently Faire’s first ever CPO.

So, why am I telling you all these things about Ami? Well, for one thing, she is the actual author of this blog I’m guesting on. But the second reason is more important: Because she would never, ever tell you these things herself.

Fidji Simo, Deb, and Ami at the first Women in Product conference, hosted at Meta

Seeing yourself from the outside

Recently, two different leaders in the industry asked me separately about Ami, each for different reasons. I started talking about how amazing she was and about all of the interesting and impactful things she’s done. After I’d finished telling all my stories about her, one of them said, “I wish Ami could see herself like you see her.”

I was a little taken aback. I’ve always felt like I see Ami completely clearly. We worked alongside each other in many different capacities. As her close colleague for over a decade, I saw her crush job after job after job. When things were dicey for our first Women in Product Conference, she stepped in and landed it. She went onstage at seven months pregnant to give our keynote a couple years later.

I knew what Ami was capable of, and I was happy to share it with others. But I found myself wondering if she was willing to do the same for herself.

Studies of professors show that students rate female instructors lower across the board than male instructors. Some interventions, like encouraging students to be objective with their ratings, helped reduce this bias, but it continues to be a systemic issue in higher education.

In the workplace, I have also seen people assume women are less senior or qualified than their male counterparts. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been in a meeting with a male colleague, watching whoever was talking look straight at him the whole time even though I was the decision maker (or, in some cases, the more senior member of the team).

We are taught from a young age to be good girls. We’re told that we shouldn’t brag. That it’s unbecoming to be bossy. That we don't want to “oversell ourselves.” We are expected to be the helpers in the background. We’re supposed to support others without owning our contributions.

That is why I wish I could be the walking billboard for Ami. I wish I could broadcast to everyone how awesome she is, and that way they would instantly know. (Don’t tell Ami this, but the real reason I suggested we trade blog posts for each other’s newsletters was so I would have the chance to tell you the truth about who she really is!)

When hard work gets overlooked

As Adam Grant points out, studies show that women are often expected to do the “office housework”: subtle labor behind the scenes to help their teams be successful. If they're not willing to stay late to do it, they're punished, but even if they do the extra work, they're not rewarded. The opposite is true for men. Male managers are given credit if they stay late to help their teams, but they're not punished if they choose not to.

Throughout her career, Ami did so much for those around her. She helped quietly, moving things around to make other things happen. She coached and mentored. She cared and nurtured. But she never put herself out there and shared the quiet work she was always doing to make others successful. She was someone who worked behind the scenes to make sure the trains ran smoothly for everyone else.

I remember a time when I spoke to a group and asked about self-evaluations. It was review season, and it was time for everyone to assess their own performance. Somebody raised their hand and asked, “What if I'm bad at self-promotion?”

My answer was, “If you consider it self-promotion, you are definitely not going to do a good job at it.” That conversation makes me think about Ami. Nobody wants to be seen as arrogant or self-aggrandizing, but she was so subtle that others missed the incredible work she did.

Ami giving the keynote at Women in Product, 7 months pregnant. She joked, “I know what you’re thinking, I’m so committed to women in product that I’m going to give birth to one right now onstage”

Remembering and amplifying who you are

Ami is a hidden gem—and I bet you know a lot of hidden gems just like her in real life. You wish other people could see them the way you see them. You wish they could have a flashing neon sign above their heads like in “Free Guy” with a scoreboard proclaiming their excellence.

Maybe some of you even wish that for yourselves.

It can be hard to take ownership of your own success, especially for women, introverts, and other groups who are often told not to ask for too much or make too much of a fuss. Even if you’re not in one of those groups, you might still struggle to find a balance between amplifying your achievements and not “rubbing people the wrong way.” But you can’t assume that others will carry that neon sign for you. If you do, the world may miss out on all the amazing things you’ve done and have to offer.

I'm not saying that we should brag or oversell ourselves. Instead, we should have confidence and take ownership of the things we’ve done. Finding a way to authentically own our success is an important skill we too often overlook. If this is something you struggle with, try this exercise:

Ask three people to describe you for a referral. I would suggest a former manager, a close colleague, and a mentor. What do they say? What are the themes that emerge? Reflect on the patterns you notice and the achievements they highlight. These aren’t fibs or exaggerations—these are descriptions from people you respect and care about.
Have a friend who is a hiring manager or recruiter review your LinkedIn. It’s important to have this person be someone involved in hiring. Their job is to see what people amplify, and they make decisions based on the pictures people paint of themselves. What are their observations? Where are you not painting a full picture of yourself?
Do the superpower exercise. Reflect on the talents, traits, and interests you have that don’t come easily to others. Have others do the same. (I suggest asking people from your personal life, your social life, and your work life to get a full picture.) Review the data you’ve collected and look for common themes. What did you learn about yourself that you didn’t know? What do others see that you are missing?
Reflect on the things you tell yourself. Once you’ve collected all these outside opinions, take a moment to think about how you talk to yourself. The things we say to ourselves directly affect the ways we present ourselves to others. Are you selling yourself short?

There are people in your life who are advocating for you. They are mentioning your name as a candidate for a new opportunity or championing you at a networking event when someone asks. They are spreading the word in ways you can’t imagine. Your job is to understand what these people say behind your back and start to see yourself the way they do.

I never fail to be blown away by Ami’s accomplishments, talents, and dedication. I wanted to feature on her newsletter so I could share them with all of you—and encourage you to take ownership of your own superpowers.

Amplifying yourself isn’t easy. In the beginning, it can feel strange and uncomfortable. But the world deserves to know who you are and what you’re capable of. You don’t have to wait for others to share your greatness; you just have to learn to see the greatness in yourself.

Plug from Ami: Thank you, Deb, for an embarrassingly kind post. Go check out Deb’s blog at Perspectives for more lessons from her storied career!