Linda Leung

In every product leadership role I’ve taken, my key to success was spending as much time on recruiting as I did on product. Great teams build great products. I believe building teams deserves the same craft and intentionality as building the product itself. And with AI giving teams unprecedented leverage, teams that hire top talent faster will emerge as the winners. Given how much I value recruiting, it’s fitting that Paraform was the first investment I led at Felicis. Paraform is an AI-enabled, recruiter-first marketplace that helps companies hire 3x faster and helps recruiters earn 3x - 5x more than traditional recruiting roles. Their marketplace and tools give elite recruiters more speed, leverage, and time dedicated to helping companies hire their hardest-to-fill roles. The traction to date speaks for itself. Companies like Palantir, Ramp, Rippling, Cursor, Windsurf, and Decagon all rely on Paraform to help them hire the best people. Some recruiters have already earned $1M on their platform, and Paraform’s pace is accelerating. I’m so excited to partner with John Kim, Jeffrey Li, and the entire Paraform team on building the future of recruiting. Read more about why we invested here: https://lnkd.in/g6zb8ZrY

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We'll learn a lot more about today's outages over the next couple of days as we start to get post mortems from the different platforms that were impacted. But it was interesting to see that traffic on our PNIs to GCP were not impacted uniformly with big traffic drops in LAX, ORD, SEA, SJC and DFW, but increases in traffic in FRA and AMS as customer services failed over. This highlights the important of proper DR planning with a minimum of multi-region and ideally multi-cloud.

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I was CPO at Blend before their $4 billion IPO. We rejected the “forward deployed engineer” Palantir model that everyone is copying now. Here’s why: Blend could have followed the forward-deployed engineer approach. Both our CEO and CTO were early Palantir. They'd seen it work. Instead, we built a SaaS product with core components. Move fast, iterate, use data to learn. Not custom code for every client. That Palantir model is having a resurgence. Now Sierra, Decagon, and others are hiring forward-deployed engineers. But it’s not the right approach for every company. It’s fundamentally the wrong answer for Assembled’s customers. Here's what we understand about support teams and why we’re not going the forward deployed route: Customer Support teams are used to getting no resources and no support. On the surface, you'd think they'd be excited about engineers building custom solutions. "Finally, someone's offering us developers!" The reality is support teams are terrified of getting help they can't afford to keep. Support teams are wary because they know the math. They don't have budget for expensive, scarce resources. At some point the shoe drops. The engineers disappear when priorities shift. And custom solutions break. Support is left holding the bag with something they can't maintain. They're resource-starved by design. The idea of a dependency on resources they can't control is terrifying. So instead, the goal should be to give support teams the ability to manage, change, and solve their own problems. Not dependencies on engineers they can't keep. Smart, competent people who teach them to do it themselves. Palantir wasn't even a product company for years. They were a custom development shop with reusable components. Show up, build something bespoke, maybe extract learnings. That's not scalable for any but the largest support teams who need sustainability. Forward-deployed engineers are the new shiny object. I wasn’t a fan of it at Blend. And I’m not a fan today either. What I see in the customer support space is that teams need empowerment, not dependency. I want the teams we work with to be able to say: "I love that you’re partnering with me. And I love that I can do this myself too." That's the difference between building a product and building a consulting practice.

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I recently had the pleasure of a thoughtful and in-depth conversation with Sibel Bagcilar on all things Product Management. We talked through a few areas like the concept of "Balance". It's not about the compromises across various dimensions, it's about achieving the balance! We also covered a few other topics like honest and transparent conversations, building an open and transparent culture and being data driven without being data-blind. In true PM fashion, its an art and not an exact science :) A summary of the convo is here, and check out the detailed conversation in the link below! “PMs often get pulled in different directions, often with various dimensions involved. Sometimes, you may need to make a trade-off between immediate revenue, the long-term platform, and customer success. These are the sorts of things teams have to talk about all the time, and you have to make these calls. In most cases, these are thought of as compromises. It’s easy for a PM to get lost in this or fall into a trap. In my opinion, a stronger approach to take would be to think of this more as a balance. If you think about this as a balance and less of a compromise, that changes the mindset and approach that could be taken. The keyword here really is ‘balance’ — it can be across the many areas that PMs juggle daily. Balance can be across several dimensions like customer, product, business, or short-term revenue and long-term success, conflicting metrics at times, etc. The key is to balance these and find the best path. Another aspect of balance is in the linearity of decision, which is a fancy way of saying to achieve balance over time. For example, the PM can pick revenue as the goal now, and for the next feature, maybe the PM amplifies the customer experience. So, in this case, there is a balance over time. I would really encourage PMs to think about this balance.” Read the full interview here: https://lnkd.in/emhSAt7B #ProductLeadership #ProductManagement

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There is more than enough food in the world to feed everyone. Yet in the United States alone, 40% of food produced ends up in the waste stream. The economics of our food systems are fundamentally flawed, but as Now Go Build CTO Fellow @Ameesh Kapoor puts it: "there's a lot of room for technology to solve these problems." In the fourth episode of the new Now Go Build series, we focus on three Fellows doing exactly that. From using data analytics to predict food shortages to building volunteer platforms that enable food rescue, they show that technology can be a driving force for good locally and globally. Let this be a reminder: when organizations openly share their successes and failures, their MVPs and prototypes, we multiply our collective ability to solve hard problems. Whether you're building the next great tech company or working to feed families in need, innovation happens faster when we learn from each other. Watch the full episode now on All Things Distributed: https://lnkd.in/gHxdTVUF Alicia Morrison Ameesh Kapoor

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Excited to share my conversation with Marc Baselga and Ben Erez on the Supra Insider podcast. We went deep on one of the biggest shifts happening in product leadership right now: why many experienced PMs and product execs are returning to individual contributor (IC) roles in the AI era, and why that’s not a step back, but a strategic leap forward. Other topics we discussed: -- Why the leverage equation has changed—and how managing AI agents now rivals managing people -- The critical importance of hands-on credibility in AI-native companies -- Why great PMs in the future will blend product, design, analytics, and frontend execution -- What it takes to deliver real customer outcomes (not just launch features) -- How to evaluate breakout companies—and what founders often get wrong when hiring product leaders I also shared my thoughts on: -- Joining the right company: mission, trajectory, talent density, and founder courage -- Crushing it as a “super IC”: the power of speed, ownership, and infectious energy -- Transitioning from product leader to GM or founder with the right mindset If you’re navigating your next chapter in product (or just trying to stay sharp in the AI-native world), I hope you’ll find this useful. Episode links: Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gK48PFWK Apple: https://lnkd.in/gmT265BY YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gtr4RAKd Substack: https://lnkd.in/gM38FSWc

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The role of a Chief of Staff is often misunderstood. Looking at this framework from a16z, I’m reminded how rare it is to find someone who masters all six pillars. I’m fortunate to work with a CoS who does exactly that—serving as the connective tissue for our teams and providing the direction that allows everyone to stay focused. If you find someone who can design operating rhythms while driving initiatives to the finish line, you’ve found the engine of your execution. I’ve been thinking a lot about these leadership dynamics and how they impact product strategy. I dive deeper into these topics on my newsletter. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/gsMc2Vu6

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It was a pleasure sitting down with Sachi from Sierra and Leigh Marie & Josh Coyne from Kleiner Perkins to discuss what its like shipping AI at enterprise scale. We talk about the new product principles for AI-native products incl: - Why context complete workspaces are more important than raw AI capability - The impossibility of planning roadmaps in this market - Building user trust through UX - When you need (and don't need) Forward Deployed Engineers - Re-finding PMF every few months - And why vibes are sometimes all you need. Thanks for having me on Builders Ep 2, and hope this is a useful and practical guide for anyone building in AI. Full episode link here: https://lnkd.in/ejRvsUSs P.S. Recommend all podcasts provide Chick-Fil-A to their guests :)

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As I am coaching PMs, I often get the question on how I navigate alignment challenges between cross-functional partners. I spent many years at YouTube building products where safety and user value must coexist. Finding common ground when the stakes are high and opinions diverse felt draining but over time I’ve come to enjoy the process. There is both an art and science to aligning stakeholder. One of the key things I've learned is thinking of alignment at three levels - Problem, Principles, and Product. 1️⃣ Problem - Starting with the Right Question I can't tell you how many times I've been in a room where we've spent hours debating solutions only to realize we weren't even solving the same problem. I remember one particular project where our team had many meetings of increasingly tense discussion before someone finally asked, "Wait, what problem are we trying to solve here?" It was a weird question to ask and felt like we are going backwards. But in that moment we realized how misaligned we were on the problem itself. 2️⃣ Principles - Your North Star in Difficult Terrain Clear principles are non-negotiable, especially for products focused on Safety and Responsibility. They serve as guardrails when you hit those inevitable crossroads where all paths forward involve tough trade-offs. A good way to test whether the principles are written well is to see if they can help answer questions like "Do we delay launch to address this use case? Are we ok to miss the near term opportunity?" 3️⃣ Product - Where the Rubber Meets the Road This is where alignment gets really tested. In my experience, developing options is the secret weapon for driving alignment at the product level. I typically spend hours in 1-1’s trying to understand everyone's perspective before bringing the group together to review options. Something I learned listening to Lenny’s podcast with Ami Vora is that pushback often indicates the other person knows something you don't. So rather than getting defensive, try to approach disagreements as learning opportunities. In evaluating options, I've found that simple pros and cons lists don't help much. Every option will have pros and cons! Instead, I define a few key dimensions that matter based on our product principles and company priorities. Then I grade each option against these dimensions (e.g high/med/low impact). This approach leads to much richer trade-off discussions. It's very rare for one option to be "green" on all dimensions, and that's where the real alignment work happens - deciding what matters most to the company and what you're not willing to compromise on. 👉 Alignment isn't about getting everyone to agree with you. It's about creating a shared understanding of the problem, establishing clear principles, and facilitating informed decisions about the product. Thanks James Beser for coaching me on the art and science of driving Cross-Functional Alignment. Link to the detailed post in my comments.

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High-performing teams aren’t built through comfort. Like it or not, friction is the currency of building a talent-dense organization, especially one in hypergrowth. When I was at Coinbase, talent density was a constant focus. Now at Engine, I see how that same principle comes to life in new ways. Raising the bar isn’t just about better performance. It’s about creating a culture where peers, managers, and direct reports all push each other for more and better. That can feel uncomfortable, especially for people who haven’t worked in an environment where expectations keep rising. But that discomfort is what growth feels like. The right kind of friction shows who leans into challenge and who prefers comfort. I see it in hiring too. When there’s some friction in the process, you uncover grit and conviction. Discomfort isn’t the goal. It’s the natural result of ambition and accountability coming together. Friction is how talent density grows. And it’s how great cultures stay great. 💪

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