Bangaly Kaba on Why Most Teams Skip the Work That Actually Matters

The Anti-Pattern Killing Your Metrics

You've been there. The team ships something everyone's excited about. You celebrate at dinner. The next morning, you check the metrics and they're completely flat.

Bangaly Kaba calls this the "identify, justify, execute" trap. Someone says "this would be great to build," you pull data to justify it, then sink months into execution. But you never actually understood the problem from first principles.

Someone says, hey, you know what, this would be great to build. Then you go pull data to go justify why that would be great to build. Call that identify, justify, execute. First, you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on. So understand, identify, execute.

— Bangaly Kaba

At Instagram, Kaba's teams ran 12 to 20 experiments per quarter with a 60-70% ship rate. That's not luck. That's what happens when you build "understand work" into your operating system.

What Understand Work Actually Means

Understand work isn't user research you squeeze in between sprints. It's an intentional affordance in your execution—meaning you actually assign it to people and track it like any other deliverable.

The mechanic is simple: every sprint or roadmap period, you run two parallel tracks. One track executes on high-conviction ideas. The other does understand work to de-risk future bets.

Examples from Instagram's growth team: pulling funnels to understand what makes a good connection, instrumenting logging to fill data gaps, prototyping to test core assumptions about how people use the product.

The forcing function is cultural. When someone pitches an idea, the team is empowered to say: "Good idea, but we don't understand these three things yet. Let's do understand work first." Over time, you ship less garbage and your velocity compounds.

Your Manager Is the Highest-Leverage Variable

Kaba wrote a post years ago about choosing where to work that people still reference. The framework: Impact = Environment × Skills. Most people obsess over skills and ignore environment.

Within environment, there are six variables: your manager, resources, scope, team quality, compensation, and company culture. Kaba scores each on a 0-2 scale every year to understand what's limiting his impact.

A great manager who is empathetic, who is aware of what's going on, who is a great communicator, has the ability to move the chess pieces around and to fix some of these for you either immediately or in time. There's no one other than your manager who can really help to increase your scope.

— Bangaly Kaba

If your manager score is low, nothing else matters. They control scope, resources, team composition, and cultural issues. The goal isn't to like your manager—it's to respect them and learn from them. If you can't do either, find a new one.

The Scope Trap at Facebook

At Facebook, Kaba ran people recommendations with 30 engineers—15 machine learning, 15 frontend and backend. Massive team, tons of scope. Too much scope, actually.

He was burning out trying to deliver on everything without enough structure. Then he went through multiple manager changes at once. The confluence of too much scope plus no stable manager made the environment untenable, so he left for Instagram.

Communication Beats Execution (Unfortunately)

Kaba breaks skills into five areas: communication, influence, leadership, strategic thinking, and execution. Communication is the most important by far.

You've seen this. People who can't execute but tell a great story keep rising. When you look under the hood, there's no substance. But communication is the forcing function for everything else.

One tactic: find a stable of 3-4 mentors, not just one. Meet with each once a month on different weeks. If one cancels, you still have others. If you only have one mentor and they're busy, you lose two months of learning.

The best way to find mentors? Don't ask "will you be my mentor?" Tell people what you're working on and ask: "Do you know someone who's solved this problem or has good thinking on this?" The introduction creates a triad—you, the recommender, and the mentor—with clear mutual benefit.

Watch How the Best PMs Actually Work

Reading frameworks is table stakes. If you want to level up execution, you need to watch great PMs in action.

Early at Instagram, Kaba watched George Lee, one of the first growth PMs. Lee had a specific skill: he'd listen to a meeting, recap what was said, name people's contributions, and crystallize action items in a way that built trust and buy-in in real time.

You can't just be a student of theory. You've got to be a student of practice too. Meaning you're going and you're like, hey, I'd love to sit in your team meetings. Can I come watch?

— Bangaly Kaba

This isn't hard. Ask to sit in other PMs' meetings. Watch how they run standups, deliver bad news, land a new strategy. Steal what works. Product management is both art and science—you learn the art by watching practitioners, not reading blog posts.