Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy)

**Jason Shah** (0:00)
Pushback is, I couldn't imagine a word more viscerally that makes you feel like you're sort of physically going against what somebody else wants. And it gears people into a mindset of then, well, how should I push back? It starts from a place of I need to disagree, I need to say no.
It's a very negative mindset purely based on the word that has come to label a behavior that alternatively could be about how do I shift the direction on something, or how do I help the business actually succeed when I disagree with somebody about something? And that's a very different mindset. And so the two things that I've seen be most successful would be, I think number one is actually understanding what a goal is or what somebody's kind of issue is with something and then actually aligning those things in some way.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:52)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today my guest is Jason Shah. I was lucky to work with Jason while I was at Airbnb, and when I started working on this podcast, I knew that I wanted to have Jason on. He was actually my very first guest on this podcast when I was pre-recording some episodes. But as you'll hear in our chat, we decided to take another crack at it for reasons you'll soon understand.
In this episode, we cover what it's like to be a PM in Web3 and how that's changed as Crypto Winter has returned, how to lead a team through ups and downs, which leaders in Web3 know all too well, including how to keep morale up and people focused when so much is changing around you. We also get into a ton of killer advice on leadership, hiring, pushing back on your CEO, working backwards, career advancement, and a lot more juicy stuff. Jason is a gem, and I am really excited to share this episode with you. With that, I bring you Jason Shah.
This episode is brought to you by Coda. Coda is an all-in-one doc that combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps in one place. I actually use Coda every single day. It's my home base for organizing my newsletter writing, it's where I plan my content calendar, capture my research, and write the first drafts of each and every post. It's also where I curate my private knowledge repository for paid newsletter subscribers, and it's also how I manage the workflow for this very podcast. Over the years, I've seen Coda evolve from being a tool that makes teams more productive to one that also helps bring the best practices across the tech industry to life with an incredibly rich collection of templates and guides in the Coda doc gallery, including resources for many guests on this podcast, including Shreyas, Gokul, and Shashir, the CEO of Coda. Some of the best teams out there, like Pinterest, Spotify, Square, and Uber, use Coda to run effectively and have published their templates for anyone to use. If you're ping-ponging between lots of documents and spreadsheets, make your life better and start using Coda. You can take advantage of a special limited-time offer just for startups. Head over to coda.io/lenny to sign up and get $1,000 credit on your first statement.
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I'm excited to chat with my friend John Cutler from podcast sponsor Amplitude. Hey, John.

**John Cutler** (3:35)
Hey, Lenny. Excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:37)
John, give us a behind the scenes at Amplitude. When most people think of Amplitude, they think of product analytics.
But now you're getting into experimentation and even just launched a CDP. What's the thought process there?

**John Cutler** (3:48)
Well, we've always thought of Amplitude as being about supporting the full product loop. Think collect data, inform bets, ship experiments and learn. That's the heart of growth to us.
So the big aha was seeing how many customers were using Amplitude to analyze experiments, use segments for outreach and send data to other destinations. Experiment and CDP came out of listening to and observing our customers.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:09)
And supporting growth and learning has always been Amplitude's core focus, right?

**John Cutler** (4:13)
Yeah. So Amplitude tries to meet customers where they are. We just launched starter templates and have a great scholarship program for startups. There's never been a more important time for growth.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:22)
Absolutely agree. Thanks for joining us, John, and head to amplitude.com to get started.