Collecting my hats - by Anita Ilango - letters to Nobody

For the last 2+ years, I studied the craft of product building at Clay, helping grow a no-code spreadsheet into an increasingly popular lead generation tool. I joined a small team with around 10 customers and left a rambunctious group building for almost 1000. Working at a startup taught me a lot about human beings. To me, the job of a product person is one of translation and suggestion. Even at a tiny company, each person — customer, team member, founder — speaks a different language to express their unique needs. Doing meaningful product work requires positioning yourself at the center of the chorus to translate between parties and decode each person’s perspective. It also means doing the (often more difficult) work of understanding your own. As I write this, I find myself coming back to a quote from Babel, a novel I read last year about actual language translation: “That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your o

For the last 2+ years, I studied the craft of product building at Clay, helping grow a no-code spreadsheet into an increasingly popular lead generation tool. I joined a small team with around 10 customers and left a rambunctious group building for almost 1000. Working at a startup taught me a lot about human beings. To me, the job of a product person is one of translation and suggestion. Even at a tiny company, each person — customer, team member, founder — speaks a different language to express their unique needs. Doing meaningful product work requires positioning yourself at the center of th