"She is not strategic enough" | Shelly Kalish (Head of Partner Product and Design, Ex-Meta)

Shelly built the product & design team focussed on Partners at Meta. We’ll definitely talk a lot of about how she went about building this team in the episode. Prior to Meta, Shelly spent sometime at American Express in a product leadership position building the consumer mobile app that had over 17M+ monthly active users.

Shelly recently started a 4 part blog series on LinkedIn sharing her thoughts on Product Strategy, Women in tech called You Belong Here. We explore some of those topics in this episode.

We touch on 4 key areas :

1. Talk a about building a team from scratch, and how Shelly built product and design team at Meta

2. Product Strategy definition, an example of how Shelly built product at Amex (prior to Meta)

3. Giving feedback about how you can be strategic. Shelly got feedback during her career about how she’s not strategic enough - without any real guidance on what that means and what the expectation was. This is a great section for managers to listen in.

4. Finally, talking about growth. contrary to conventional wisdom, Lateral growth is also career growth

    

   [00:00:00] Introduction

   [00:08:14] Benefits of Product and Design under one leader

   [00:10:00] How Shelly defined Product Strategy at Meta and Amex

   [00:12:29] An example of how Shelly shipped product at Amex

   [00:18:05] "She is not strategic enough"

   [00:22:00] What could leaders be doing better

   [00:28:33] Tips for Women in Product to level up

   [00:39:10] Preparing context for collaborative strategy excercise

   [00:41:25] Lateral growth is also career growth

   [00:43:58] Rapid Fire Questions

    

   Where to find Shelly

   Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/shellykalish/

    

   Where to find Naveen

   Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/naveenpitchandi/

   Twitter : https://twitter.com/numberlock11