Mina Rad was Uber’s 20th employee and their inaugural Head of Product. Her resume extends from Goldman Sachs to 500 Startups and Google. She’s now moved down under to start her own property management service, Different. 

1. Why is the most important question, ‘make sure you can answer it yourself’?

When you’re working on a feature, or assigned to a project, especially as you’re starting your career, it can be easy to continue what’s in place. But especially in Product, where a big part of your role is to drive the product towards launch, you need to know why what you’re doing is the right thing to do. If you can’t defend why what you’re doing is right to anyone and everyone, it’s important to figure out why. Without asking this question, I don’t think you can truly be prepared to create the best possible product that really solves the problem.

2. Find the right way to say no.

Especially in Product, so much of what we need to do is ruthlessly prioritise. And that, unfortunately, means saying no to lots of requests from lots of people. The single most important skill you can learn to be successful in Product is to be able to say no and still make people feel good about it (and you!). 

3. Be the advocate for whoever is not in the room.

When someone’s not in the room, we still need to give them a voice, whether that means representing engineering in a design meeting, hiring and recruiting, or a product strategy meeting. Teams, companies, technology are communities and strong communities are systems of support. Each person plays a role in creating that community and they only grow stronger when we give voice to the person who isn’t there, because invariably, at some point, you’ll want others to do that for you.

Mina will be sharing with you the magic of marketplaces and how you can build a successful one at StartCon! Grab your tickets below!

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