Manage Your Career Like a Product: Deb Liu on Resilience, Introversion and Big Swings

Asked for one piece of career advice, Deb Liu says to always be learning. In school you can score a perfect 100 or a 4.0, but careers have no such ceiling: there is always someone better at speaking, strategy or execution. Someone who keeps learning from the best and seeking feedback will outpace the person who is merely the expert today.

Liu says she rarely qualified for the jobs she took, so each one made her a student again until she mastered it. She tries to balance learning and impact, because the job you know best gives the most impact but no learning, while constant learning means less impact. Moving back and forth lets you bring what you used to know into the next thing.

Her entry into product management was accidental. At a 2002 recruiting table she met the PayPal recruiter, who offered her a job in either product or marketing, and she picked product without knowing what it was. In interviews she relied on her experience as an avid PayPal and eBay user to give detailed product feedback. Her VP, Amy Clement, then showed her the ropes, and Liu credits her lack of a fixed playbook, plus curiosity, for making her a good PM.

For people trying to break into product, Liu warns that she is not recommending faking competence. You do not need to know how to write a spec or run data analysis, but passion for the product, the use case and the customer shows. The key is to fall in love with the problem rather than the product, and she calls that the most important skill for a product leader.

Liu has coached many people and managed large teams, and she says the most successful were not those who lived charmed lives and were promoted every cycle. They were the ones who took hard feedback, or watched a product fail, and came back stronger. She uses the image of a tree that grows tall because it is bent by wind and tested by cold.

She shares a personal example from Facebook. There was one job she never got to do, and she told Mark Zuckerberg she wanted to be considered when it opened. When it opened again and went to someone else, he told her she would never have that job at the company. He was not harsh, but the message was clear that he did not see her in that role.

Liu decided to turn the job she had into the job she wanted rather than leave or sulk. She calls it a humbling reminder that you are not right for every job even when you think you are, and that you can take the raw materials you have and shape them into what you want. The role she wanted was running a more established business, whereas she had always been the person who built new things.

Liu clarifies that she did not build Facebook's whole ads platform; she built its first direct response ad product. She says her opportunity at Facebook was to zig when others zagged: while other teams worked on feed, photos and video, she started on payments, built the games business, and created Facebook Credits, which became the payment system. Game companies she knew from that work told her that the shift to mobile was their biggest challenge and asked for a mobile acquisition engine.

That mobile ad product for the feed became a billion-dollar business in about 18 months, but the road was messy. The team tested five or six versions before one took off, was on the verge of death multiple times, and Liu even went back to run payments while continuing to work on it. In a large company, she says, new bets get attention but not resources, and she prefers to work out of the limelight with minimal resources and the freedom to fail.

The key ingredient for leaders is patience, treating new products as a portfolio. She tells new PMs that core product work, growing a metric 3 to 5 percent every six months, is a respectable and valuable career. A strong set of new products has about a 50% hit rate, so half of the people building new things will be in a different job a year later and must have the resilience for that.

Whether it is a good career move depends on personality, she says, and early in a career it is high risk. Liu recommends learning core skills first in a stable, growing product. Later, take a two-to-three-year big swing, because big swings are what you write career stories about, and you can always return to core products if it fails.

Liu says many of the greatest PMs are the worst PMs of their own careers. They obsess over customer research, metrics, plans and timelines for their products but have none of that for themselves. She asks coaching clients where they want to be in five years, and half have no idea. She suggests writing a spec for your career with milestones, skills and a definition of success.

She walks through her own path as an example of unplanned drift. She ran PayPal's product relationship with eBay while barely qualified, moved to corporate strategy after having a baby, nearly left tech, then led buyer experience at eBay and finally landed at Facebook in product marketing through a friend's call. Looking back it seems to have worked out, but she says it had almost no intentionality and she was extremely lucky.

Lenny notes he followed a similar no-plan path, but Liu points to hindsight bias: we only hear from those who drifted successfully. If you aim in the right direction you can shape your learning and roles toward where you want to go. Because job offers arrive one at a time under time pressure, a long-term goal gives you a measuring stick for whether an opportunity brings you closer or further away.

She gives the example of a founder she knows who wants a seat on a Fortune 100 board. Liu told her it would probably take ten years and offered to introduce her to a current board member so she could learn the first steps. Liu admires that the woman chose the destination and took the first step, believing she would be happier for the journey even if she never arrived.

Liu wrote about a bias she says no one discusses: workplaces favor people who speak up. She describes an excellent PM on her team who struggled in promotion calibrations because peers did not see her contribution. The woman told Liu she is a processor, and that by the time she has processed a question the conversation has moved on.

Liu uses a metaphor: this PM made lots of light bulbs and lit up houses, but she did not market the light. Is that fair? Absolutely not, Liu says, but it is the world we live in. For individuals the lesson is that you are your own best marketer, and for leaders it is to change workplaces so everyone can succeed.

One of her changes is to have leadership teams vote offline in a document, with a number and comments, so everyone has an equal voice before extroverts speak first. She also goes around the circle in meetings and asks each business leader what they would do, including her chief legal officer, who cannot simply say what legal advises. Nobody gets to take a backseat in decision making.

Liu also says introverts do themselves a disservice by calling speaking up something they are bad at, because it is a learnable skill. If your product would be cut unless you convinced executives to keep it, you would find a way to defend it. Every day you are building credibility, resources and momentum for your team, so it is a skill you must practice even if you are never comfortable with it.

When someone in an employee group said she was bad at self-promotion ahead of self-reviews, Liu suggested calling it educating your manager about your team's great work, or helping people see why the team deserves more resources. The reframing changes the question from bragging to helping the team. She tells a similar story about a PM she mentors who avoided LinkedIn because he feared sounding like people with nothing behind their posts, though Liu knows he has plenty of substance.

What got Liu herself writing was a contract with her new manager Bos, now Meta's CTO, after a conflict-filled relationship. Alongside her promises about supporting his team, he asked her to write and publish something every month. His tip was to write down anything you repeat, so you can hand it over the next time someone asks.

She published internally first and kept the monthly habit for years, then went public and eventually wrote a book. Part of the value was accountability, since she felt Bos was watching. She notes that a friend, Ami Vora, now shares her writing externally too, and Liu's group created a small accountability circle to ask each other whether the monthly post was done.

Liu pushes back on the idea that growth needs a magic bullet. Moving things 1% faster every week compounds, and you can reach 3X one small step at a time. She recalls a story that one of the biggest growth drivers for Facebook ads was simply adding a visible link to create an ad, because people did not know how to reach the ads flow.

On payments, ads and Marketplace growth teams she kept a list of around a hundred hypotheses and worked through them ten at a time in sprint cycles. It is fine if 80% fail. A team that ships twenty things at a 20% success rate gets as much output as one that ships four, and also learns what does not work, and raising the rate to 30% yields six wins instead of four.

Liu treats growth like product marketing, as an augmentation of a core product that already works. At Ancestry the core is search and hints and the work of getting people to build family trees, and growth teams optimize the flows and interfaces around that engine. She calls it the cherry on top, making the product more accessible and usable every day, and Lenny adds that Airbnb has at least a hundred people just working on pricing.

Liu created her 30-60-90-day plan when she joined Ancestry, having not started a real new job in 11 years. She wrote about what she would do, how it worked and the mistakes she made, and the plan is for anyone joining a company. It focuses on listening and learning first and doing later, because without understanding the language and culture you can make huge mistakes.

In her first 30 days she held a listening tour, speaking with over 60 people, and then summarized the state of the union and wishlists. One person's five-item wishlist took until year two to finish, and she sent him a note when the last item shipped. She advises asking every new team what one thing you can do to help them this week, building a reciprocal relationship.

If a boss wants you to ship right away, Liu suggests aligning on the plan with your manager and carving out about 20% of your time for listening, for example nine to ten each morning. You get a new person card for a month or two, and after that every problem is yours, so diagnose before you treat. Lenny summarizes the structure as learning in the first 30 days, aligning on vision in the second and executing in the third.

Liu adds that a plan keeps you from rushing to deliver impact you are not ready for, and that reflecting back what you heard is one of the most valuable things a new leader can do. She likens joining a team to joining a dance where a mistake can trip others up. Lenny adds that people will not assume they should trust you, so the first months are about building trust.

When asked for a contrarian belief, Liu says the most important career decision is who you marry. She met her husband in her first weekend of college, and says her career works because home life is in balance, like a yin and a yang. She urges people to ask whether a partner lifts them up or pushes them back, and to think about how that plays out 20 or 30 years later.

She also shares a quote from Chuck Swindoll: life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it. You do not choose everything that happens, but you choose a way forward. People who respond to a missed job by finding another path, Liu says, have the most successful and satisfying careers.

Liu admits she once saw failure as catastrophic. She was the kid who always got an A, and she took every piece of feedback as proof she was a terrible person. Leadership coaching helped her see that feedback is a gift: for years she heard that she was transactional and not warm, and she eventually understood people were asking for connection, not rejecting her. She also calls perfectionism a curse, because it reflects a lack of trust in your ability to bounce back.

On finding a coach, she notes that coaching is expensive and not every company provides it. Her husband works at Sounding Board to make it more accessible, and she recommends peer coaching circles such as Lean In groups or YPO. Peer groups work well early in a career when you see the same mistakes repeated, while an individual coach becomes more useful with seniority because situations are more unique.