Maria Angelidou
speaker
134 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Maria Angelidou’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Maybe the one example I'll pick is from the time that actually changed my mind and I still use that insight from that debate. So it was earlier at Facebook when I was sure that I was going to promote this one person that I hired, I invested in him, I got them ready for the next level, all of this stuff. And I was really convinced that it was the right time to promote him.
And my manager said, mm-mm, He's not ready." We went back and forth. It was a pretty strong debate back and forth. I was at the point where I was like, okay, I'll just disagree and commit. She grabbed time with me and explained her rationale, which is she explained to me this idea that promotions need to be lagging, trailing, and not leading.
What she meant by that is you only promote people to the next level when they actually consistently already demonstrated that they can operate successfully at that level for a long period of time. If they haven't done that, don't promote them because actually promoting them when it's premature, it's worse for them.
Because at that next level, they will be calibrated, you know, just like compared to the group of people, the whole cohort of people who are already operating really well on the next level. And if you promote them prematurely, it's actually going to be really bad for them. They might actually churn from the company, right?
Because if they get promoted and they get a bad rating right away, that's a really tough position to recover from.
I think it's a mindset thing. I think like this goes back to when you asked me about, you know, what advice do you give to people to get promoted? I think you can absolutely start doing the work at the next level, taking the responsibility and showing that you can do the job.
two mistakes. One is they don't hire the right person. And so it could be either because they don't know what the role needs to be successful, or they don't know how to vet the person. They haven't seen what great looks like, and then they compromise really quickly. So that's one. And the second part is they don't know how to build a good product team from structure perspective.
What do I mean by that? If you look at every individual PM, they all make sense as individual hires. But if you put them all together as a product team, you're like, they're all junior and they're all high horsepower, high potential, but there's no one there to actually train them and get them to the next level and all of that stuff. So it's just like the structure sometimes doesn't get
build context as fast as possible, do a listening tour, build expertise in the company that you're joining, right? Like in the space that you're now gonna be building products for. Spend time with customers, spend time with your finance team to understand like all of the business behind it. And then at the same time, you know, start putting your points on the board.
Just make yourself valuable to your boss, to your team, to your peers. Like don't wait until you're an expert. I think you asked that question earlier and I think both of those are important.
Maybe I'll give you a couple. Well, I cannot not mention with everything that's going on in our industry, Satya and Microsoft and what he did with OpenAI and Infection AI. And I think he really saw that AI was like an all-in moment for Microsoft and actually the rest of tech and took a bet. And I think it's proving to be a pretty good bet. The other example I would maybe highlight is Instacart.
So Fiji is the CEO there and someone that I used to work with at Meta. And so I follow the company and I'm pretty impressed with what she's done with the company, right? Like she turned it around, made it profitable during difficult time. She brought in the high margin ads business. I think she is also taking this win-win mindset to all this approach.
I was reading about the deal that they made between Uber and Instacart. I think that's brilliant, both of them. It positioned them much better in restaurant delivery against players like DoorDash. She also is investing in healthy eating for low-income communities. So I think if you put all of that together, I think she's an incredible operator and it's been impressive to watch her.
Yeah, thank you for having me. It was fun.
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