Fascinating, Tell Me More: Faire CPO Ami Vora on Disagreeing Well and Leading Imperfectly

Vora opens by saying her goal is to show that people can be messy and imperfect and still succeed. When she was coming up, successful women seemed to have everything figured out: instant email replies, no need for sleep, perfect outfits. She jokes that she was working from her bathroom, the room with the most doors between her and her three children during the pandemic.

She says she held herself back for years because she had no plan, but eventually accepted that she is not a person with one. What has consistently served her is doing what feels right, going to the place that feels like home and working with people who feel like friends. When she believes there is only one outcome she must reach, she says she is not at her best.

When choosing jobs she works through the spreadsheet of pros and cons and then tears it up. Instead she tries to put on the coat of the job: imagining the commute, the lunch companions and the problems she would solve that day. The emotional response tells her more than a five-year plan, and the key factor is trust, meaning whether people will let her take risks and have her back.

Host Lenny Rachitsky reads a quote from Meta CTO Boz, who said that when someone said something Vora thought was crazy wrong, she would respond with genuine curiosity. Vora says this did not come naturally. As a child her identity was built on being right, and she brought that into work until an old manager pointed out she was spending huge energy trying to be right alone and often missing information that others had.

What changed, she says, was deciding that getting to the outcome mattered more than being right, and that she selfishly likes learning. Assuming she already knew everything cut her off from what others were good at. Now she walks into meetings assuming everyone knows something she doesn't, which turns the meeting into a small act of discovery and keeps her from getting bored.

She treats growth as a battle with yourself and builds a positive feedback loop: she is curious, learns something, gets a better outcome and the other person feels better too. She still has the visceral reaction when she hears a bad idea, but reads it as a chance to learn, not a reason to shut things down. The practical key is to take a pause so the body calms and the response is not primal or protective.

Vora admits "fascinating" is almost her tagline. For a few years she had to be careful, because people heard it as a sign that she disagreed, so she expanded her vocabulary.

Teams come to product reviews stressed and tempted to show as much information as possible. Vora tells them to assume executives, herself included, have a tiny dinosaur brain that holds about three facts at a time. The most useful thing a team can do is make a recommendation, while the executive's breadth lets them pattern match and add company or industry context.

She links this to the phrase "my manager owns context, I own the recommendation." Expecting managers to reach the same conclusion from the same information is narrow, she says. Seeing them as complementary lets her learn from them and gives her more room to take accountability.

Vora argues reviews are often misused to obtain decisions when they should calibrate principles. A review with one decision should end with shared principles about trade-offs, who you are optimizing for, timeline and acceptable risk, so teams can decide alone next time. Otherwise you get fast decisions without increasing the organization's capacity to make good ones.

Her advice is to write what you need and then cut almost all of it, which forces an opinion instead of hiding behind analysis. She prefers few attendees, informal sessions and cross-functional representation. Where a working team presents without its managers, she says it takes implicit trust, and she sometimes shares a recording so others can see the principles.

Vora explains her hill-climb metaphor as the difference between a local and a global optimum. You stand on top of your own hill and see a bigger mountain in the distance, and reaching it means descending, crossing a chasm and climbing again. She cites companies that were great at desktop and could see the mobile mountain, and says the picture helps her recognize that a slog in the valley is expected and worth it.

She learned the habit from a former manager, Eric Antino, who would ask how a product should make people feel and when they last felt that way. As a team scales, a shared story carries weight: if everyone agrees the feeling is sitting in Dolores Park with friends on a sunny Saturday, designers and builders will avoid cold, corporate or flashy choices without being told.

At WhatsApp, the metaphor was face-to-face communication, which is the most universal form and requires no tool to learn. That meant the app stepping back and creating intimate spaces: group calls like a family kitchen table where people come and go, and disappearing messages for close friends. Small details such as the typing indicator and the two check marks add up to a feeling of being heard.

Vora also builds mental emulators of people she has worked with. Antino stands for story and analogy, Boz for principles and trade-offs, and Rob Goldman for looking at the dashboard. When stuck, she loads one of them to get a new lens.

Vora says execution eats strategy for breakfast was a common saying at Meta and a lesson she learned well. Strategy is fun, she says, but customers care about the product in their hands, not a five-year plan. A perfect strategy with poor execution never reaches the market and teaches you nothing, while a good-enough strategy with great execution lets you learn and update.

She thinks we have built a mythology around strategy being glamorous, while execution is nuts-and-bolts work like bringing the donuts, checking dashboards and rewriting the spec. She suggests spending perhaps 20% of your time on strategy and the rest confirming it works for customers and building a machine that improves it. Even senior leaders, in her view, should mostly be removing what slows people down and staying close to customers.

For strategy to be useful, it has to change behavior, such as different priorities or moving people to the most important work. Vora says she long held back because she lacked confidence declaring where the world is heading. She built that confidence by talking to customers, working through product iterations and surveying leadership, for example asking what share of revenue will come from small versus large businesses in three years.

Vora recalls that when she became head of product for Facebook ads she received stacked feedback that being the smartest person did not matter if people did not like her. She tried to be more likable by shrinking, being less opinionated and, as a joke she takes to an extreme, wearing earth tones for two years. It worked for a while, but when she had to lead, her team asked for her opinion and she had trained everyone not to expect one.

Looking back, she would not give that feedback to someone else the same way. She would say that you need to work with a broader range of people, and the way to do that is to add tools and keys without becoming less of who you are. Rachitsky connects this to Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer's argument that you don't have to be fully authentic at work.

On being a woman in tech, she says the feedback is often contradictory, with people asking her to be both more and less directive, and tends to focus on style. She says she chooses which feedback to act on and which trade-offs to own. She also pushes back on the standard advice that women must find a mentor and sponsor, saying it is another hoop and that she had many generous leaders even though she never felt she had one mentor.

Her advice to younger women is not to aim to be the next Ami but to be their own next selves. Never dampen your strengths, she says, just keep adding tools and never shrink yourself.

Vora says that telling everyone to chase revenue or GMV leads to what she calls toddler soccer: everyone runs to the same measurable surface, trips over each other and nobody makes contact with the ball. Her alternative is to map what customers need on their journey and give each team a distinct goal that ladders up to the whole customer outcome.

For GMV, she suggests setting goals per surface or on input metrics such as visits, conversions and reorders. She cautions that a metric must really connect to the output and solve a customer problem, not just make a team feel good.

Different teams and functions will always have different incentives and information, so disagreement is a sign of healthy tension. Vora says it stays healthy when people acknowledge it, assume good intent and agree on the outcome they are pursuing. If they disagree on the outcome itself, there is a structural problem that usually needs escalation.

Rachitsky shares advice he heard from Airbnb's head of product that there is no best org, only the best idea at the time with known imperfections. Vora says this is her view of leadership in general: as you get more senior, the problems that reach you are fundamentally unsolvable, since otherwise someone would have solved them earlier. All you can do is pick which suboptimal branch to put your name on and explain the principles and context.

She calls this a dark view and says she tells people that, as you get more senior, you get worse at everything because the problems get harder. She had expected that seniority meant everyone listens and things simply happen, and says that is not accurate. She prefers to normalize these hard truths so that they feel like part of the job rather than personal failure.

Early-career PMs, Rachitsky notes, often look at their CPO and founders and wonder why they make seemingly terrible decisions. Vora answers that you can optimize an org for the people, products, customers or technology you have, and each choice trades off the others. Rachitsky also mentions the monkeys-on-your-back article, where a leader should keep problems on other people's backs and help them feed their own.

Vora joined Faire after 15 years at Meta for the same reasons as elsewhere: she believed in the people and the mission, and part of her family in India is in wholesale and local retail. She says ramping up anywhere feels terrible for senior people because you expect to match your performance at the old job without years of accumulated context. She reminds herself to learn enough to change things 60, 90 or 120 days later.

Leaving also settled a deep-seated worry that she might only be good at Meta, and succeeding with a new business model and customers was affirming. She says she did not realize how crucial a good relationship with the CEO was until she worked with Max. In onboarding she wrote a list of observations and, once a quarter in the first year, a document of provocative hot takes, which Max and the executive team discussed seriously.

For founders hiring a head of product, she advises spending a day together to see if you can mind meld and have high trust. She also says founders should check whether they need a senior CPO at all, because often they already have the vision and need someone to build the product rather than scale systems.

Vora describes how she got into Facebook in 2007. She had quit her previous job and wanted to be part of Silicon Valley, so she traded a coffee for introductions to everyone in the office and told each person she would do whatever was needed. Only the head of PR called back, offering temp work reviewing press releases, and she moved to California, slept on couches and was eventually hired full time.

Asked for one piece of advice for people in product, she says to think about the customer, talk to them and advocate for them, because distractions pile up as organizations scale. Rachitsky raises the tension with moving business metrics. She replies that customer value and company value rarely differ over a long enough horizon, and that a business has to survive in order to create value, so metrics should reflect long-term customer impact.

In the lightning round she recommends Shonda Rhimes's *Year of Yes*, says she rewatches workplace comedies like The Office and 30 Rock, and loves her electric kettle. Her piece of advice comes from Chamath: "you can either have more energy or less ambition." She writes a Substack called The Hard Parts of Growth.