Leading with curiosity and authenticity: lessons from Ami Vora

Executive overview

Most career advice assumes you need a plan, a mentor, and a polished exterior. Ami Vora built a career across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Faire by doing the opposite: following people she trusted, staying curious under pressure, and refusing to shrink herself.

The core discipline is sublimating ego in favour of outcome. When you disagree, get curious instead of defensive. When you review, bring a recommendation instead of data. When you strategise, keep execution primary.

Genuine curiosity — not performance — is the fastest path to better decisions, better products, and better teams.

Choosing roles without a plan

• Spreadsheets don't predict job success; emotional fit does.
• "Put on the coat of the job": imagine your commute, your lunch companions, the problems you'd solve.
• The signal that matters is whether you feel lucky to be there.
• Trust with colleagues is the unlock — it lets you take risks and do your best work.
• Ramping into a senior role feels terrible because you expect to perform at exit-level from day one; it takes 60–120 days to be effective somewhere new.

Curiosity as a disagreement tool

• Boz (CTO of Meta) described Ami responding to deep disagreement with "Fascinating — tell me more. Why do you think that?"
• This didn't come naturally: she identified herself as someone who needed to be right.
• The shift: prioritise the outcome over being right, and treat disagreement as an information gap, not a threat.
• Reframe the visceral "no" feeling as a signal to open up, not shut down.
• Take a pause — it breaks the primal protective reaction and gives space for a better response.
• The positive feedback loop reinforces itself: curiosity → new information → better outcome → less need to be right.

The dinosaur brain and product reviews

• Executives can hold roughly three facts at once — call it the dinosaur brain.
• The PM's job is to do the synthesis, not hand over raw data for the exec to process.
• Bring one recommendation with clear trade-offs, not a catalogue of information.
• Product reviews should calibrate on principles, not decide individual questions — so teams can keep deciding without coming back.
• Frame reviews around: what trade-offs did you make, who are you optimising for, what risk level is acceptable, what's the timeline?
• "My manager owns context; I own the recommendation."
• Fewer people in the room is usually better: less formal, faster, lowers the bar on polish.
• If managers can't attend, record the session so principles propagate.

Metaphors and imagery to align teams

• Shared metaphors replace hundreds of individual decisions — if a team agrees on a feeling, they naturally build consistently.
• WhatsApp's guiding metaphor: face-to-face communication — no friction, no learning curve, universal.
  • Typing indicators = someone about to speak; double ticks = eye contact showing you were heard.
  • Joinable calls modelled on family rooms, not conference calls.
• When building a metaphor: ask what you want users to feel, then ask when they last felt that way in real life.
• Build mental emulators for people whose thinking you admire — load them up when you're stuck.
  • Eric Antonow: how would this be described as an analogy?
  • Boz: what principles are we using, and what happens if we follow them consistently?
  • Rob Goldman: have you looked at the dashboard?

The hill climb: local vs global optimum

• Standing on a hill that works well feels good — but a distant mountain may offer far more.
• Getting to the mountain requires climbing down into an unknown valley first.
• Classic example: desktop-optimised companies facing mobile.
• The valley is supposed to feel hard — that's not failure, it's transit.
• What gets you through: remembering what the summit feels like.
• Applies to careers, relationships, and product strategy equally.

Execution beats strategy

• Strategy is glamorous; execution is what the customer actually experiences.
• Perfect strategy + poor execution = no learning (you can't tell which failed).
• Good-enough strategy + strong execution = a working feedback loop you can improve.
• Spend roughly 20% on strategy; spend the rest confirming it with customers and shipping.
• Even at senior levels, most time should be spent unblocking teams, reading feedback, and improving the system.
• For strategy to be useful, it must change team behaviour and produce different customer outcomes.
• To build strategic confidence: talk to specific customers until you can emulate their reaction; run leadership surveys to surface disagreement early.

Setting goals to avoid toddler soccer

• When everyone chases the same metric, they trip on each other — toddler soccer.
• Detangle the customer journey and assign each team a distinct metric that ladders into the company outcome.
• Goal on input metrics (visits, conversion, reorder rate) rather than the output alone.
• Each metric must be genuinely connected to customer impact, not invented to make a team feel good.
• Healthy tension between teams is normal and desirable — different incentives mean different information.
• Acknowledge tension explicitly: "Of course we disagree — you have information I don't."
• Align on the shared outcome; let the disagreement be about the best path to it.

Senior leadership realities

• As you get more senior, problems only reach you if they're unsolvable at lower levels.
• Your visible decisions are therefore always suboptimal — choosing the least-bad option.
• Early ICs watching senior people make "bad" decisions are seeing this dynamic, not incompetence.
• No org structure is optimal; every design trades off something else.
• The right response is to name the trade-offs, stay consistent with principles, and keep improving.

Being a woman in tech

• Women receive more personal, style-based feedback than substantive role feedback — often contradictory ("be more directive / less directive").
• Evaluate each piece of feedback: act on it exactly, find the theme and act differently, or acknowledge the trade-off and hold your ground.
• The advice to "find a mentor" can feel like another burden rather than a resource.
• Ami's reframe of critical feedback: expand your tools rather than shrink yourself.
  • Not "be less" — add new keys to unlock more kinds of doors.
• Advice to women starting out: don't dampen your strengths, just keep adding to them.

Joining Faire and working with a founder-CEO

• Chose Faire because of personal connection to wholesale and independent retail, and trust in the people.
• Onboarding move: write a themes document from early 1:1s, and a parallel "hot takes" document of provocative potential changes — once per quarter in year one.
• Max (CEO) engaging seriously with those documents built trust and a complementary relationship.
• Founders hiring a CPO often need a builder, not a strategist — confirm what you actually need before the seniority level.
• For CPOs evaluating a role: spend a full day with the CEO; test how they think and whether you have room to contribute.

Staying close to the customer

• The best shortcut in product: think about the customer, talk to the customer, be their advocate.
• Customer value and company value diverge only in the short term — on a long enough horizon they converge.
• As org complexity grows, the distance from the customer is the first thing to protect against.