I kind of wrote like a half-pager about how I'm looking at my career at LinkedIn, what am I passionate about? And these things that I'm passionate about needs to continue to be ingredients in my journey. And then I wrote like, okay, short term micro-transformations that I want to go through. And then like, longer term, what is the macro transformation that I want to experience? And that macro transformation was, I want to lead as an engineering leader.
Or maybe even a product leader, a line of business. Hello and welcome to the Engineering Leadership Podcast brought to you by ELC, the Engineering Leadership Community. I'm Jerry Lee, founder of ELC, and I'm Patrick Gallagher, and we're your host. Our show shares the most critical perspectives, habits and examples of great software engineering leaders to help evolve leadership in the tech industry.
Joining us on the podcast today is Prashanthi Padmanabhan, head of engineering at LinkedIn Premium and Global Women in Tech Lead at LinkedIn.
Most often, our career decisions only make sense in retrospect, but Prashanthi introduces us to several different approaches that really challenge that notion, like her approach to creating a half-pager to visualize your career path, or by her practices to build and validate your leadership or business thesis before transitioning to lead an entire business unit.
Prashanthi also shares many of the most pivotal moments from her career journey in the critical skills she needed to build in order to expand her leadership. Let me introduce you to Prashanthi. Prashanthi leads engineering for LinkedIn Premium, building a world-class subscription platform, helping deliver customer value for millions of members and growing LinkedIn's online subscription business line.
Prior to joining LinkedIn, she led engineering for large-scale consumer products at Yahoo and Verizon Media. Prashanthi also leads the Global Women in Tech Community at LinkedIn, and routinely mentors emerging women leaders inside and outside LinkedIn. Enjoy our conversation with Prashanthi Padmanabhan. To begin our conversation, I just wanted to say welcome, Prashanthi. Thank you so much for joining us on this Friday. How are you doing? What's going on?
Friday is a special day in the calendar because I always block some time on Friday afternoons. As you know, we all struggle a lot with calendar time. My mentor told me very early on, like, don't become a slave to your calendar. Don't let the calendar rule you. You got to rule the calendar. And so blocking this thinking time, deep thinking, writing, heads down time has become harder and harder in our days.
And so Friday is one day where I typically block that time. Friday afternoons are very special for me. Like, when possible? At least a two hours block where I can set thing, reflect, write down, deep reviews, feedback. A lot of these things I actually tried to tackle on Friday afternoon. So, you know what? You are my special person today. My Friday, 90 minutes is for you.
Well, it is an honor to be able to serve as that moment of reflection. And for folks listening in, I'm really excited because we're kind of covering it all. You know, we get to talk sort of like this full stack of leadership topics from your career journey to the different leadership skills and capabilities that you've built to lead at your capacity.
And then we get to deconstruct some of the recent leadership lessons at play as well. So we've got a full sort of a full suite of things to uncover. So to begin, I was wondering if we could go back to the early days. And can you take us through your career story, specifically though, how you transitioned to doing what you're doing now and leading LinkedIn premium.
I know when we started brainstorming on this topic and what we would love to talk about all these things that we're going to sort of like come across today in our conversation are all topics very close to my heart. In my job as a leader, engineering leader, as well as my role in the company as leading the global women and tech group. I talk to a lot of people about career and career journey and how to think about it and how to make the most out of it.
So the topics we're going to be talking about today are very close to my heart. So first of thank you. Thank you, Patrick, for having me over in this conversation. So taking a step back, I've been with LinkedIn. I think I'm coming up on my fifth year anniversary with LinkedIn, which is amazing. My current role leading engineering for LinkedIn premium, line of business is my second stint at LinkedIn.
I started that LinkedIn in the LinkedIn marketing solutions business unit, which is our tech platform. Under that, I was leading Advertiser Experience Group. Even my decision to join that group was a very intentional and thought through way of getting there. Throughout my career journey, there has been a couple of things that have always influenced my decisions around where I want to work, what problem spaces I want to work.
The two things are purpose and people. When you think about purpose, LinkedIn's version is to create economic opportunities for every member of the global workforce.
You know, purpose cannot get more odd issues than that. Right. So even though I didn't know LinkedIn as a company very intimately at the time when I joined, when I researched more into the company, which you always do for the companies that you're interviewing with and you want to join, I was just like so inspired by what LinkedIn as a company was trying to do.
With that purpose, sort of like the backdrop, then you start thinking about like, okay, what businesses within LinkedIn, what roles like the intriguing in my career before LinkedIn have worked on a lot of consumer products, large-scale consumer products. So my journey has always been very close to consumers, building products for end users, understanding what the users want and solving the right problems.
And a lot of those products, the business model is typically based on ads and ad-based monetization. But I've never had an opportunity to go deeper into that tech space and understand how ads work like the complexities, the challenges, the customer experience, challenges and all of that.
So these two combinations of, hey, I wanted to really deeply understand how ad tech works and also shift from my experience of building consumer products to getting that exposure and experience of building enterprise products. Both of these were top of mind for me in terms of having an opportunity to get deeper into the space and learn. So both of those motivated me to come into this role as director of engineering for advertiser experience in LinkedIn marketing solutions.
During that time and as part of that stint, it gave me a really good opportunity to get deeper into that tech space. But also really think about who you're building the product for, every role and every career move I've made. The kind of questions that I've always intrigued me is like, who are we building these products for? Who's your audience? What problem are we trying to solve? What is the market opportunity here? Why now? Why do we have to build this product now?
So a lot of these questions I've always found myself attracted to because the last part of like how you build is where the technology part comes in. But before that, there are so many more intriguing questions to ask. I used to feel like sometimes it's like I need to really convince myself that these are the right products to build. You know, though it is not my job to decide that, but I always felt like even as an engineer, I'm like, why are we building this?
What are we trying to solve for? Who are we building this for? Like so I think these questions have always been top of mind. So I asked my career progressed. I just saw myself leaning more and more into those conversations, you know, working with like cross-functional partners to understand those questions and go deeper into those questions. So this opportunity with LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, same thing.
It gave me an opportunity to think about, hey, who are my first customers? These are the marketers, right? These are enterprise products. These are marketers using the products to run ad campaigns on our platform. So what are their needs? What are their pain points? Really understand that. And then if you take one step further, the end users who are the LinkedIn members, they are the ones who are really seeing that and engaging with that, right? So what matters for them?
So really thinking about these problems and making sure that I understand the space well, I understand the customers well, I understand their needs better, and slowly bringing that culture into the organization where you really, I mean, I call that the customer empathy driven culture, or user empathy driven culture, which I think is very important.
That role really gave me the opportunity to get to understand that segment of users and make sure we're building products well for that segment of users. I love so much the quote that you shared about the last part of building or the process of how you build is the technology and that so much of this quest was to go deeper and to understand what are the most powerful questions you can ask before you get to that point.
And I love almost like I can sort of see like the sense of skepticism of like, is this the right thing to build and like going on this mission to then uncover and gain certainty and validity around that? I think that's so powerful. What was the pivotal moment that then led to the realization to get more involved with LinkedIn premium? What was that moment like? So when you join a new company, you go through that process of onboarding, learning the new business, learning the new teams.
I remember I made trips to New York where most of our sales teams were, because I really wanted to understand from them, hey, how do our users like our products? Because our sales team and our customer support team are like the first line of support for our users, right, for our customers. So I would like pick their brains to really understand how are our products doing? How do our customers like our products? Right?
I did all that and I was really like, I felt like I was enjoying that process of getting to know how our customers perceive our products. What I realized is I really love working at this intersection of business, technology and people. I'm an engineer by Kraft, engineering leader is my role. But I also found myself drawn to the, what is a business here, right? What is a business model who are we serving? And what is the product strategy, the user experience aspects?
I was equally interested in these things. And so I realized I love roles that are kind of this intersection of these three, right? Business, technology and people. So during my first year in this role in LinkedIn marketing solutions, I kind of wrote like a half-pageer talking about reflections. We're like this half-pageer where I wrote about how I'm looking at my career at LinkedIn. I think I wrote like, what am I passionate about?
And these things that I'm passionate about needs to continue to be ingredients in my journey, right? Because I'm someone who once I commit to something, I give my 200% to that opportunity. And if I'm going to give my 200% to that opportunity, I should enjoy that, right? That's so important that I should enjoy that and it gives me joy. And I continue to have that passion towards it. So I wrote down like what are the ingredients that will continue to align with my passion?
And then I wrote like, okay, short term micro transformations that I want to go through. And then like longer term, what is the macro transformation that I want to experience? And that macro transformation was I want to lead as an engineering leader, or maybe even a product leader, a line of business. And the reason why I think that was very attractive was because again, going back to this intersection of business, technology and people, I wanted to be responsible.
I mean, I think I used to say like, I want the buck to stop with me. You know, I wanted to be responsible for growing a business, creating those opportunities, creating customer value. That responsibility felt very challenging and daunting, but also very exciting, right? Because it's going to force you to do so many things, learn so many things. So I think I wrote that down as my here is how I'm seeing my career kind of. I have major and I think I shared it with my manager, my leadership.
I think it's so powerful when you start to synthesize some of the ideas that are probably going on in your head, but having that moment of intention to sit down and try to put together the puzzle of that is so powerful. If somebody was going to try to apply that same practice like right now, do you have any advice or recommendations for as they kind of put together their own career, half-pager to start to synthesize and think about that next step? What would you recommend to do there?
I've actually read some anecdotes on this and I know some people have frameworks around this. I think what is really important here is first be true to yourself. First, write down what matters to you. There are thousands of jobs around and roles around whether it's inside your company, outside your company, but what matters to you? I mean, only you can identify that, right? So it's important to take a moment to sort of write like, what do you value?
Like, what do you want your career to offer you as opportunities? So it can be things that like things that you're passionate about or values that you care about. I think capturing those is very important. Career is going to be a journey. You're not going to go from zero to one overnight. So this is where differentiating those micro-transformations and micro-transformations are important, right? Because it is going to be a path to get you to that next logical state.
So understanding, okay, if I have to get to this macro-transformation, what is maybe some intermediary steps, the micro-transformations that you won't actually go through and realize? I think that will be very important. For example, when I wrote this down, a couple of the micro-transformation opportunities that I wrote down was I had a distributed team. I had teams in California and New York. So I wanted to make sure that I actually build a very strong, diverse distributed team.
I care a lot about diversity and inclusion. I wanted to make sure that the organization that I'm building really puts diversity and inclusion top of mind. I think of myself as a very compassionate leader. So the style of compassionate leadership was very important for me. So like both me practicing that as well as grooming my leaders to practice compassionate leadership was very important.
The factor that I touched upon, customer empathy centric product development, that is very important because I feel like as engineers and product builders, we really, really need to take the time to understand user needs and pain points and friction and really make sure that the solutions we are devising and designing really address those. And I think it's hard to think about empathy in the context of users because you don't see them. You don't interact with them.
So how do you actually develop empathy for your users, especially when it's millions of users that you're serving? How can you actually show empathy? To me, what that really means is, do you really understand the problems they are facing? Like do you have exposure to it? Do you have an intimate understanding of that? Figuring out ways to actually develop and nurture that empathy for your users? So that was very important for me.
So when I think about these things that were important for me and things that I value, I wanted to make sure as part of the micro transformation, I'm able to infuse those into the organization that I'm building and make sure that I'm grooming leaders who care about that, who care about that, who learn how to do that.
And then of course, building a good enterprise product, which is easy to use, it's intuitive, it's trustworthy, all of these product development principles, make sure that the products that I'm building reflect those, right? Because it's a new job and a new role, it's going to take me a bit to get there to make sure that these things that I value actually get materialized. I just identified those as some micro transformations that I wanted to realize.
And then of course, from there, this macro transformation opportunity, the way I think about this is reflect on values that I've bought and for you, things that gives you joy, things that you're passionate about, and make sure that your career opportunities give you opportunities for that. And then write down that intermediary phase or micro transformations you want to actually go through.
And then also have your behagged, have your longer term, this is sort of the next logical pivotal step I want to take. Because what that helps with this, you can sort of do a checkpoint to say, hey, the things that I'm doing in between, is that going to actually help me get there. That's just a framework that I use. I wanted to follow up about you identified, you wanted a practice compassionate leadership.
And so this whole concept of materializing your values into action or taking values into action, and they get so powerful. Because I think it's from a goal-sending perspective, and a career-sitting perspective, it's really easy to focus on the milestone or the title or the scope. But what I appreciated about what you shared was this focus on the behavioral values and leadership qualities that you wanted to embody. And then connecting that to how does that show up in your team?
Anybody listening in who wants to maybe go to this approach of like, I want to embody these certain values as a leader and bring those to action, how do you take that and make that more concrete to go from the intermediary step goal in that value to then how that shows up in your team on a day-to-day, everyday basis? I mean, there's not the whole thing around culture starts at the top.
As a leader, how do you walk your talk, and how do you show compassion in your conversations, you're sitting and having career conversations with people in your team? Like, how are you sort of like being receptive to their needs and helping them sort of like carve that path? Compassionate leadership is not just to your teams. Again, like I said, it's also compassion to the users that you're building products for. So then how do you materialize that?
Are you taking the time to understand your users' needs? I used to love like the customer feedback sessions and customer stories, because even though me or any engineer in the team cannot go and talk to hundreds and thousands of users, user research teams or your marketing teams or your customer support teams, when they synthesize that information and they are presenting to you, like, lean and understand, learn.
Every step of the way you as a leader demonstrating how these values matter to you and how you materialize that, even things like diversity and inclusion, like how are you bringing that into practice in the way you're building your organization and the way you're grooming talent, in the way you're supporting underrepresented groups in your teams, right? Like, how are you doing that as a leader and then how are you setting those same expectations for leaders under you?
When you're talking about having a strong distributed team like the etiquettes that come with it, when you have teams that are distributed, how are you conducting the meetings? How are you making space for people who are in the room and who are remote?
Every step of the way these things matter to you, it is important that you walk the talk and then you are being intentional about it and then you're stating it that these things are important for you as a leader because when you're stated, then it becomes like, okay, the leader of your organization cares about it. So now it's also important for us to learn. And if I role model that, then I have hope that my teams and my leaders will also like pick it up from me, right?
I think that's just one way to really think about it. And hopefully that resonates and then you start seeing that mimicry work, right? And then you see others in your team starting to model that. When you see that is probably the most gratifying part, when a leader in your organization also, hey, this is my goal, too. This is my objective, too, right? I want to be very conscious and intentional about it. The best gift for mimicry is when you see that happening.
You know, those values have been very important for me till date. The next couple of questions I have start to dive into more of like the leadership skills and capabilities to lead at this scale of an entire line of business. Before you accept the role, one of the things that you know, I had mentioned talked about a little bit beforehand was you'd wrote a thesis on what needs to happen with LinkedIn Premium, which is a preemptive like pre-transitioned behavior that I had never heard of.
And so I thought that was a really incredible practice. So I wanted to dive in deeper like, can you bring us into the story behind this? Like, and what was the process to form this? And how did it impact then the approach to the role? Yeah, I think again, like I said earlier, a line of business and taking on that responsibility for it felt very daunting. It is an important business line.
And for me, what I had to convince myself was if I'm going to take that role, the outcome of that should be that I couldn't put a pin on it, whether it's going to be a year, two, years, three years, but at a reasonable time, I want to make sure that I'm creating more value for my customers, being served by the line of the service and the business is growing, right? That's a big goal. Like, how do you, how do you then like synthesize that into? If so, then what should I know?
What should I prepare for? Like, what should I learn? So I think just the process of preparing to lean into this role, or you know, even say, like, yes, I want to lean into this role, I had to first learn about the business, right? First thing was I had to, I mean, because it's a line of business, I sat in a few business review meetings, as just an audience, just to understand, okay, how is the leadership talking about this business and perceiving this business?
What does the next quarter's plans look like? Right? I also looked at like, previous quarters results and roadmap and such to see, okay, how has the business evolved? Like, what are the metrics looking like? What is the true north for the business? Who are we serving? Again, going back to the who and the why? Who's the target audience for this business? Who are we serving? How are we serving them? What does the metrics tell us? Right?
And so this was all like data that was available, obviously, that I could read. Right? This is a homework that I could do. But to me, even more important was that I put myself in the shoes of the customer. So me using the product, what are my sentiments? How do these features appeal to me as an end user? Because it's a consumer product, so I should be able to use it and feel it and reflect on it.
And then I think talking about reflection again, I sat and started writing down, like, okay, if I were running this, like, I would probably miss more in doing x, y and z, right? This is how I'll go about probably creating value for the customers. What matters? I'm a professional, so if I'm using this product, I would like these kinds of features, right? And then I wanted to make sure that I'm not crazy.
So, you know, that I'm just like not sitting in this isolated room and thinking about this business. I had to like use some sounding boards. So I think I'm fortunate to have a lot of leaders inside the company and even some mentors outside the company that I typically talk with about things, like, use them as my sounding boards to say, like, hey, does this make sense? Am I thinking about this right?
There are many leaders, product leaders, and engineering leaders within the company that I spoke to. And I said, hey, this is what I'm thinking about this. Does this make sense? Does this resonate? And to the mentors outside LinkedIn, like a couple of people that I typically work with, I just like, hey, this is going to be like a shift in my career, right? Am I thinking about this right? This is why I'm finding this role exciting. It's daunting, but exciting.
And I think it's going to help me learn these new things, new skills, which I'm excited about. So I sort of like went through that process, again, back to what I was telling you about. I had to convince myself that this is going to be impactful. I knew it's going to be a lot of hard work and learning journey in a different direction, right? So I sort of like went through that process. And then I said, okay, this is going to be very exciting. I'm going to learn a lot of new things.
And then, again, going back to my values, a lot of those values checked for me, right? This will be about, you know, making sure that I'm empathetic and compassionate towards the customers of my product. I will make sure that my team thinks about customer value all the time. I'll make sure that we build an organizational culture, which is like centered on customer empathy. I'll make sure that I'm building a team and a culture that values experimentation and learning, for example.
So a lot of like that value check list I had to do and say that, okay, it's going to check these boxes. You know, there'll be unknowns because I'm entering a new forest. But it was interesting and exciting. And I said, like, okay, I'm ready. You know, I'll take on this role. And, you know, it's been two years since I took on this role more than two years now. And it's been a fantastic learning experience. Like every day I'm learning, I always keep joking. There is no dull day ever.
It's learning and I learn from everyone. I learn from my team. I learn from my peers. I learn from the cross-functional partners. So I think that's very important that every meeting, every conversation could be a learning opportunity. The journeys so far has been like extremely gratifying and impactful. Well, I'm imagining like as folks listening into this who maybe have exclusively served in engineering leadership roles or capacity.
The perception of making the shift from, you know, more of a strict engineering leadership role into leading an entire line of business can probably be perceived as a pretty significant shift. I'm wondering like in your reflection in over the last few years, what have been some of the most important skills and capabilities to learn, to lead in the role? And how did you build those skills either in the last two years or before taking on the role?
I think just for context, the line of business is typically run by a cross-functional team, right? So there is a head of product, there is a head of engineering, there's like a leader for marketing and data and user experience. So it's not a job you do by yourself. You do with a cross-functional leadership team. That's how you run a line of business.
But what I realize in my experience so far for you to really excel as an engineering leader when you're leading a product line or a line of business, your skills cannot just stop with your technical chops. As an engineering leader, you're going to be really good with technology and technology roadmap and making those choices and decisions. That's a given.
Everyone's going to expect that from you if you are the head of engineering sitting at the table, like that's going to be expected from you, right? There is no two questions about it. But for you to really excel in a role where you are part of like this cross-functional team that is driving the business, you got to go beyond technology, right? You got to go beyond your engineering chops. You really need to develop business acumen, right?
Because at the end of the day, your job is to create customer value and grow the business. You have to develop a player for product experience because that's what you're doing, you're building products, right? User experience nuances. And you look at user experience back and tell that, hey, this doesn't look right, right? Like this might make it harder for our users to use a product.
Hey, this language could be better because it's going to be intuitive if you make the, you know, language in the product better, right? And then comes data and analytic skills, right? If you're part of running a business, you really need to stay on top of the metrics. How's your business doing? How are the customers doing? What is their feedback on the product? What is their behavior of using your product? How does all of that map to the metrics that you care about?
What is your true north for the business? Right? How is it trending? How are you marketing your product? What is it go to market strategy? But let me just also caution, you're not expected to be a master in all of this, right? No one person can master all of these functions. Like, that's why you have a team. That's why you have these different functional rules. But I think it's important that, I mean, I'm always think of it like a Venn diagram, right?
If you're the engineering leader, you're going to be really, really good at the engineering side of things. But then you need a slice of these other skills. And I think when you have that combination, like you are like the pro in one, and then you have enough understanding of these other functions, it gives you two things, right? One, the more you understand that, you can empathize with that function. You can empathize with the person doing that job.
You can empathize with the product leader to say, it's very hard to come up with a compelling strategy and product roadmap. You can empathize with the marketing leader and say like, you know what, marketing products is not easy, right? Like you've got to be so good at how you talk about it, how you position it. The more you understand that, you actually can empathize with that rule. Data analysis and skills, that's not easy either, right?
Like you've got to go really deep and answer these stuff questions about the trends and anomalies and all of that, forecasting how the business is going to do. The two benefits of this model is that one, the more you understand that, the more you can empathize, and actually it creates a good, strong cross-functional team, that way. And two, the more you understand those things, it's going to make you a better engineering leader, right? Because now you know better who you're serving.
You know better why you're solving this problem. You know better what the market opportunity is, and you can make these trade-off calls between time-to-market and craftsmanship, right? For example, as engineers, we all take pride in our craft. If just less to us, we will take good solid one year to build like the best product under the sun. But I keep telling my engineers, that's like the market is not going to wait for you to build like this beautiful product, right?
So then you understand the cost and the opportunity cost. The more you get deeper into the metrics, you can actually make stronger decisions. Hey, is this experiment working or not working? It's not working. Why is it not working, right? So there's like two big benefits to it. One is like this whole empathy for the different cross-functional leaders. And so that forms for a tighter cross-functional team. And two is, these skills are only going to make you a better engineering leader.
So I've realized doing this role now and with some of my previous experiences, it is I think it's vital for you to excel as an engineering leader that you just go a little beyond, beyond your forte of just engineering and technology and pick up these skills. The good thing, you can learn all of this on the job. Like you don't have to know all of this to come into the role. I mean, I'll also be very candid about that, right?
If I ask this question for myself, hey, can I be really good at all of this? Before I take on this role, I would have not taken the role, right? I was confident that my curiosity will kick in and I will be genuinely interested in learning these things and with that curiosity and you can just invest the time to learn, talk to the experts, build that knowledge.
And then once you have that knowledge, you can just use that to influence, you can influence the business strategy, you can influence the product roadmap, you can influence the metrics, decisions, you can influence the user experience, decisions. So just makes the job more fun, I would say. What I find really relieving is you sort of laid out the roadmap of like here are the things that you can learn.
But what's most important is like the prerequisite curiosity to want to learn the willingness to learn those things in order to become effective and impactful in that role. And I think as a follow up question, to continue to dive deeper into some of these elements, I mean, you had mentioned both from an empathy and an understanding perspective, like understanding the business model, the customers, the financial aspects and different cross-functional roles is really vital.
What challenges did you face? And do you have any examples or stories that maybe highlight the learning process that you went through? I think more than challenge is I would just say that it needed a lot of work, right? Again, curiosity is there, but just curiosity is not gonna give you the answers, right? For example, understanding what are the business dynamics and the metrics that we care about and the trends and things like that.
I picked the brain of our business operations team to say that, hey, help me understand these metrics better, help me understand these trends better, what matters, what does not matter. So it had to go through that learning journey with like different cross-function, talk to your finance team, talk to your business operations team, talk to your marketing team, talk to the user experience team, hey, what have we done in the past? What worked, what did not work, right?
So there is that iterations of learning process that one has to go through. And what is also interesting along the way that I realized is like, this is not something that just I need to know, right? It's important for my teams to know this too. Because at the end of the day, me or my counterpart on the product side, they are not going to be there in every meeting and every conversation. So then how do you impart this understanding to more people in the team?
I call this like you really want parts of your team, the different teams and different groups in your organization to start acting like many owners of their area, right? They should all work like, they're all business owners for their own area, like their own tracks, their own pillars. So then what is the right process to bring that knowledge to the broader organization? We used to run these sessions called as demystifying the business.
Because if you just look at a bunch of spreadsheets, your head is going to go crazy, right? Let's simplify those for people who are not close to the business, right? And engineers, like they need to understand. So those sessions were very useful because again, the whole goal here is the more you understand the why behind the decisions, who you're serving, what problems are you solving for, what does success look like? What are your true North metrics?
Like when you understand these things better, it I think empowers leaders in the organization, right? So even if you're not there, you're not making the decisions. More people in the team are equipped with that knowledge to make the decisions. You'll get some right, you won't get some right, and that's just a process. So we wanted to make sure that this business understanding and awareness is not just for leaders, but actually goes through the deeper levels of the organization as well.
And I think that has been a very beneficial process. And the second thing is, like I said, hearing from customers, right? Either directly or indirectly through your customer support team, we do those some of those sessions where the synthesis of customer sentiments and customer stories are presented to the team and the teams find it very inspiring to sort of listen to those. I remember not in this particular role, but the role before that.
After one of such sessions of the customer stories session, one of the engineers just went back right away and fixed a bug because like they could hear why that bug impacted users or what was like the cost of that bug in terms of friction. I honestly feel like customer stories and customer feedback are any day far more powerful than just requirements specs.
Like, it's like, if you can just visualize the pain of a user who's encountering this bug or the pain of the user who's going through a friction and the product, if you can just visualize that or hear it, hear that actual language used by the user, the verbatim, right? The verbatim is so powerful. What else can be more compelling than that? There's this like a requirements document or a design spec or a Gila ticket.
It's like, so I think it's super important for engineering teams to stay close to that customer sentiment. I love that insights so much. And just to further extend this sense of personalization, for me, how this shows up is, you know, a lot of people say like, oh, you know, Patrick, for our events, like you go up and you introduce these events and they kind of compliment on the public speaking element of it.
And what people don't see is like the element of personalization, like I will rehearse and practice with a photo of a person up in front of me. I will look and I will talk to them as if they are in the room. And so that's the level of maybe extra effort. But the idea of like, when you really think about a specific person, then it doesn't become about the spec or it doesn't become about the event introduction, but it becomes about the person in the message.
And it doesn't become about you as the public speaker or in this case, like the engineer trying to work through like a product spec, it becomes bigger than you. And then the work is easier. The friction of the work disappears. Yeah. And I think it's adopted practice to use personas for that reason, right?
You, when you talk about a product and use cases, you say, hey, Joe uses this product like this and you put like a picture of a person there because that makes you, you know, visualize why this user is going to use your product, what problems are you solving for? It makes it more human that you're actually building something to solve problems for humans. Like you're not like building some fiction based product. So I think that that really helps.
This next question sort of synthesizes or brings together sort of these two different threads that we've been exploring, both your career journey to LinkedIn premium and leading at a business unit level. And then the leadership skills and capabilities took grow and develop to do that effectively.
How all of these things sort of come together in some of the recent work that you all have been doing with the introduction of generative AI, you oversaw a lot of significant changes to the LinkedIn premium experience around the introduction of generative AI features. I'm super curious to know like, one, what gave you and the team the confidence to at the time reimagine the roadmap and what had to happen for all of this to come together in this moment?
Premium has been going through a lot of transformation and the last year plus. It's all like anchored on the true north for the product which is how are we going to add value to the customers using the product? And how are those value and features going to make it easier for our customers to achieve their goals on LinkedIn platform? And that is like the mission for the business and the goals are not changing. Though that's a constant because that can't change.
Now then the question becomes like, how do you achieve that? What does your roadmap look like in order to achieve that? And like I've said earlier, technology is a means to solve a problem. The excitement about a technology is really figuring out how to apply that to solve real problems. So essentially the what? Like what are you solving? Answering that question. And the how, which is like, are you building like simple, intuitive, trustworthy products, right?
The power of technology is actually in simplifying those things, right? It's not to add complexities to problem. It's not to make products look like it's heavy and hard to use. That's not the goal. So you use technology to make things easier for our customers to bring more value to the customers.
So I think from that perspective, with the advent of Generator AI, we had very good use cases in the product to say like we could use this technology to make it easier for our customers to get value out of our platform, whether it is making your profile enhancing your LinkedIn profile, whether it is making it easy for you to do outreach through LinkedIn messaging, to outreach to a recruiter, a hire, a potential client, right?
Or it's a test to really get deep insights from the content that you see on LinkedIn, right? All of these two assets fit for a job, figuring out a way to accelerate your career. If you really think about all of these use cases, they're all like such powerful use cases to bring value to our customers.
And so if a technology like Generator AI can actually help us make that process easier and make that value attainable and easily attainable and make the workflows more productive for our users, then that's exciting, right? So that's how we approach it. And obviously it is not just done by just the premium team, right? We work with teams across LinkedIn who are building this technology foundations and the platforms for it and work together and bring that value to our customers.
So it has been very exciting, talking about that and starting to do marketing campaigns to talk about these features with our customers has been an exciting journey. But we are still going through that process and like everything else, products go through a lot of iterations.
And because this is also a new technology, we are learning, we are learning through every iteration and making sure that we're continuing to take our learnings and enhance our products and continue to build products that are simple intuitive to use and trustworthy because that's very important for our users and customers.
So keeping that true north in mind and keeping customer value top of mind, the role of us as engineers and technologists is to make sure we take like the latest and greatest of the technical evolution and then apply it to these use cases and just deliver customer value. So it's been a very interesting learning process for the teams and then seeing that feedback and iterating based on that feedback has been a continuous journey.
I think what's so cool is, we started our conversation looking at the early career journey, the half-pager you were putting together of the type of leader that you wanted to become, the things that you wanted to learn. And in a lot of ways to see that initial work come together in some of the elements, the themes, the values of launching this new product and feature set.
What's wild is like, you know, oftentimes we get to see the launch and the launches are a moment, but rarely do we get to see the years of growth and effort from a leadership paradigm that lead to the building of those moments and those launches. And so I think it's been really special to dig in that story. We have some rapid fire questions. If you are ready to jump into them. Of course, let's do it. Let's do it. First question, what are you reading or listening to right now?
I've started listening to a lot since I've started back commuting to work, which is like a precious time to not lose, currently listening to a possible by Reid Hoffman. I think the beauty of that podcast is, while you hear a lot of things about what technology evolution can lead to, this podcast really focuses on the brightest future that technology can actually empower and the advancements in the industry.
So it's been like very inspiring to listen to that and like just listening to that on your way to work and make a really bright, a co-worker recommended it and hooked on. So it's been, it's a great podcast. Fantastic recommendation. Second question, what is a tool or methodology that's had a big impact on you? My framework has been all the decisions that I've done and my career focuses on purpose and people and it's been helping me for a very long time.
As long as my work has a meaningful purpose behind it and I enjoy working with people like I spot of that process, it's a good day, I would say. The purpose and people checks off. Purpose and people, I love it. What is a trend that you're seeing or following that's been interesting or hasn't hit the mainstream yet? I think it is hitting the mainstream.
It's been very interesting, I think, in the post-pandemic world to really start observing a lot about people connecting their career to purpose and what it means for their life holistically. The pandemic sort of put us in that mode and I think it's becoming more of a very intriguing question for folks and I think the good part there, at least the way I say it is, it's helping people make meaningful choices.
Choices that are right for them in terms of how they want to balance their career, balance their personal priorities. I think it will lead to everyone making intentional choices and when you make choices, whether it's your career or your family or other personal priorities, the more intentional you are, I think you'll have more conviction and your decisions will be more sound and probably you'll get more joy because you have been very thoughtful about it.
So I think that holistic way of looking at life and figuring out like healthy ways of balancing career and your personal priorities, I think it's a healthy trend and it's catching up and I think we're going to see good benefits coming from that. That one resonates a lot because my wife and I have been going through a couple of big decision making conversations in our life, one of them being like, you know, where to move.
And like right now, like that's, can be a very existential question of like, where in the world do you move and have to go through that whole process? But I agree like we introduced a couple key questions and so we then, you know, made that conversation intentional and as the result of it and the decision we made, we had a lot more conviction having gone through that shared process together.
So just reflecting on my own life like in that one small moment, like I totally see the power of being able to create conviction in that way. Last question, Prasanti, is there a quote or a mantra that you live by or a quote that's been resonating with you right now? I actually don't know if it's a quote or not, but something that resonates strongly with me is like, you got to build a great team before you build great products.
I focus a lot on organizational culture and you know, that ties back to my values as a leader and things that I believe in. When you do that and when you focus on people and culture and making sure that people actually grow talent development and talent growth is also part of your focus as a leader, I think you sort of like automatically build great products because they kind of go hand in hand. So great teams before building great products. Fantastic, a powerful way to close.
Prasanti, thank you so much for joining us, for sharing your story and some of the important lessons that have shaped the last few years in your leadership journey. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Patrick, for having me and it's been like my Friday afternoon reflection has been amazing. So thank you so much. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure that you click subscribe. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts or follow if you're listening on Spotify.
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