Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
You were early growth PM at Facebook, you were head of growth at Instagram, you were VPR product at Instacart, you're now director of product management at YouTube, and I've heard that you've had a lot of impact on a lot of different cultures.

**Bangaly Kaba** (0:09)
I found this framework travels with me. It's got like these five components to it, vision, skills, incentives, resources, action plan, and you need all of those to have change. And then within those buckets, you've got to figure out what are the right levers that you need to pull, what are the things that are missing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:26)
You're really big on something you call understand work.

**Bangaly Kaba** (0:29)
What I call the anti-paren of what we want to do. Someone says, hey, you know what? This would be great to build. And you go pull data to go justify why that would be great to build, call that identify, justify, execute. First, you have to really understand from first principles, what is actually going on. So understand, identify, execute.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:45)
You wrote this legendary blog post called how to choose where to work and what to work on.

**Bangaly Kaba** (0:50)
There's impact that you're really trying to drive and the impact is only achievable by looking at set of variables related to the environment, the set of variables related to your skills.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:02)
Today's guest is Bangaly Kaba. Bangaly was an early growth PM at Facebook, where he was responsible for how people make friends on Facebook. He was head of growth at Instagram, where he helped scale the platform to over 1 billion users. He was also VP of product at Instacart. He's also worked with tons of amazing startups as a growth advisor, including Twitter. He's now director of product management at YouTube, where from what I hear, he's already made a huge dent. This conversation went long because there was so much gold to be extracted from Bangaly's head, and I could not stop myself from learning everything I could in our time together. This episode is for anyone looking to level up their product and growth chops, or also just do better in your career.
We dig into his framework for how to choose where to work and what to work on, the importance of spending time on something he calls understand work, his adjacent user theory and how it can help you drive growth, a bunch of advice for coaching, product managers, and managers of managers, tons of lessons and stories from his time at Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Bangaly Kaba.
Bangaly, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Bangaly Kaba** (2:22)
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:24)
So many previous guests have recommended that I get you on this podcast, which I already knew.
Funny story, when I first launched this podcast, I asked you to be on it, you're like, sure. And I included you on my launch poster of all the guests that are gonna be on the podcast. And then you decided to take on a very hard work and jobs that kept you from having time. And so I'm really excited that we're finally doing this.

**Bangaly Kaba** (2:47)
I'm glad we're finally making a reality. Sorry about that, Lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:50)
You actually mentioned to me that somebody came up to you in Zurich and is like, I'm excited for you on Lenny's podcast.

**Bangaly Kaba** (2:57)
Yeah, it was crazy. I was like, you know, visiting a team that I managed there, about to get back on the plane to go back to SFO.
And just standing there, you know, doing some work, minding my business. And I get on the plane, I'm talking to a colleague and someone comes up to me, I don't think I've ever seen them before and said, hey, sorry to interrupt you. I am so excited for your podcast with Lenny. Like I can't wait for it. And then just walks away. And I was like, what is going on right now?
Lenny is a big deal. I don't even know how this person knows me. It's like, and that's how I knew Lenny that I had to reschedule with you. Because I was like, if people are coming up to me and telling me that they're excited, I was like, there is a lot of anticipation. And Lenny, like the power of your reach now is like legit.