Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product)
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What does Mayur Kamat’s background and early career look like?
my probably most spectacular failure was I was the first PM on Hangouts. We had thousands of people working for me. We had entire power of Google. We had Larry literally sitting with us saying we can do anything we want Chrome to do. And we still didn't manage to build a great messaging product. The main kind of learnings from that is don't take on projects that are gonna be six months, a year, because you just generally don't have control over the macro. The challenge with being a product manager is everybody thinks they can do their job. Anybody who uses the product thinks they have ideas. So at some point in time you're like, What is my discipline? Like what is my science? The moment you build experimentation, you're now made it science.
defect.
A lot of new people in their career are like, oh I just wanna think about strategy. I'm gonna think about the big picture.
Strategy is a little bit overrated for product. For most product managers your strategy should be how fast can I go from hypothesis to data.
Today my guest is Maiur Comet. Maiur is Chief Product Officer at N26, one of the most successful fintech startups in the world, and which in my research came in amongst the top five companies in the world who are hiring and producing the best product managers. Prior to N26, Maiur was global head of product at Binance, VP of product at Agoda, which is over a hundred billion dollar company based in Thailand, and a PM at Google and Microsoft. In our wide-ranging conversation, Mayur shares what he's learned about hiring and developing great product managers, what he learned from his time working at Binance, which, as you'll soon hear, was one of the wildest and most unique ways of working, what he learned from the failure of Google's early attempts at Hangouts, where he was the first PM.
Also, the pros and cons of working in Asia versus Europe versus the US, and why you should be starting your career on the West Coast of the US. Also, why Comp early in your career does not matter. And so much more, this episode is so full of golden nuggets and advice for product people throughout every stage of their career. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of amazing products, including Superhuman, Notion, Linear Perplexity, Granola, and more. Check it out at Lenny's. newsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you my your comments.
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Integrations are mission critical for AI for two reasons.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What does Mayur Kamat’s background and early career look like?
0:00–14:50
2
How did Mayur describe the unique culture and scale at Binance?
14:50–29:53
3
What career‑advancement advice does he give to product managers?
29:53–42:50
4
Which PM career paths are most effective for long‑term growth?
42:50–57:02
5
Why are fintech customers especially demanding for product teams?
57:02–1:10:47
6
How does Mayur suggest you discover and leverage your strengths?
1:10:47–1:25:25
7
What practices create a high‑velocity experimentation culture?
1:25:25–1:37:31
8
How does N26 hire, develop, and retain top product talent?
1:37:31–1:37:52
Speakers
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