PRODUCTEA with Leah, Growth & Senior Leadership

74: Ami Vora - Unconventional Lessons in Senior Leadership

Sep 8, 2024

Ami Vora, the Chief Product Officer at Faire, shares her wisdom on senior leadership and team dynamics. She emphasizes the importance of balancing authenticity with a sense of urgency in leadership roles. Vora dives into cultivating strong team connections and the significance of feedback loops as organizations grow. She discusses the challenges of managing weak performers and the value of skip-level meetings for career development. Generosity in leadership, focusing on nurturing others’ growth, is highlighted as a key trait for success.

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ADVICE

Invest In Your Future Bench

Invest in building your bench by developing strong performers for the future, not the past.
Continually ask where your career, company, and team's careers are headed and align investments to that vision.

INSIGHT

Anchor Decisions With Principles

Define explicit decision principles so you can make consistent, defensible choices at scale.
Consistent principles let you stay authentic while accepting that any decision will disappoint someone.

ADVICE

Shorten The Failure-Recovery Cycle

Recognize your mistake, feel the emotion briefly, then move to repair and prevention steps.
Shorten the cycle from wallowing to addressing so you can learn faster and recover sooner.

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Ami Vora, CPO at Faire, brilliantly lays out a lot of concepts about how she views senior leadership:

How to build a strong bench of performers, balancing authenticity and urgency. How do you make yourself care about boring topics and find joy in work?

Why feedback loops and building team connections become more important as an organization scales. How do we deal with weak performers, skip-level meetings, and when to invest in strong performers?

Why growing others is always paying dividends and make you more secure.

Takeaways

Balancing authenticity and urgency is a challenge in leadership, but it is important to be true to oneself while maintaining a sense of urgency.
Transitioning from an operative role to a product leadership role involves a shift in power dynamics and the need to build connections with team members.
Managing weak performers can be challenging, but it's important to depersonalize the conversation and focus on finding the right match for the role.
Skip-level meetings provide unique insights and opportunities for career development.
Generosity and supporting others in their growth are key qualities of a secure leader.

Sound Bites

"Invest in what you think the future looks like"
"Recognize and address mistakes, then move forward"
"What I do like is like calling everyone on the phone and saying like, 'How are you? What's going on with your career? What can I help with?'"

Chapters

00:00 Investing in the Future: Building a Strong Bench

06:03 Balancing Authenticity and Urgency in Leadership

08:19 Forgiving Oneself: Learning from Mistakes

18:13 Finding Motivation: Understanding Why

25:08 Building Connections: Fostering Unity in Scaled Organizations

26:03 Navigating the Shift in Power Dynamics

27:28 Building Connections through One-on-One Conversations

28:55 The Importance of a Growth Mindset and Feedback

31:20 Managing Weak Performers with Empathy

32:17 The Role of Skip-Level Meetings

34:07 Investing in Strong Performers for the Future

36:27 The Power of Generosity in Leadership

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