What's the point of hard feedback?

Interview with Gabriel Cohen, Director of Product at Facebook Reality Labs

May 24, 2021

We’re digging into the stories of accomplished engineers, founders, and executives and find out how they got to where they are in their careers. Together, we’ll learn their greatest challenges, greatest passions, and the greatest lessons learned.

Today’s Guest - Gabriel Cohen, Director of Product at Facebook Reality Labs

Gabriel Cohen is a Director of Product at Facebook Reality Labs, who enjoys attempting to change the world and cooking.

After working as a Software Engineer at IBM for five years, he became a Product Manager at Google in 2007, where he, most notably, founded and built the Product Management team responsible for Android Operating System. He also served as a Head of product for Everyday Robot Project at X and Social Good at Facebook before joining the Facebook Reality Labs.

Why did you decide to go from Engineering to Product Management?

In short, someone made the mistake of telling me I couldn’t do it.

The long answer is this: My work on mainframe developer tools housed in modern IDEs raised a lot of questions about the customers and business model of what I was working on. For instance, a lot of mainframe developers were close to retirement and had never even used a mouse when writing code, much less an IDE. I had some limited interaction with a product manager in my job on this project. I found their role mysterious and removed from our day to day, yet a big source of influence on what we built. I wanted to pull on that thread.

I asked around internally about marketing and product management jobs within IBM, and my 2nd line manager at the time told me ‘You’re too young to be a product manager’.

I was pissed off and determined to prove him wrong. I started reading business books (the Personal MBA reading list) and thinking about business school. I prepped for and then very nearly aced the GMAT. But before I could apply to b school, I got a phone call from Google out in California. It turned out they were very happy to convert (young) Software Engineers to Product Managers. I did a flyout, passed the interviews, and moved to CA to begin my new career as a PM.

Tell us about your first job out of school.

I took a job with IBM in North Carolina when I graduated from school. I was originally working on mainframe terminal software, using Java applets in a web browser. After about 4 years in the role, I was serving as a Tech Lead for a small engineering team working on one of these developer tools.

One of the coolest things I got to do in my time in this job was taking a multi-month sabbatical to IBM in Silicon Valley to join a team authoring an IBM Redbook on Java Server Faces. I also got into filing patents and had a lot of lucrative fun filing and reviewing patents for the big blue patent machine that is IBM.

What's one thing you wish you had known when you got started?

Take time off between gigs.

When I took my product management job at Google, it was literally the monday after my last day at IBM. And then I stayed in that job without any substantive downtime for 11 years. Don’t be me. Time your last day to maximize health insurance coverage for the remainder of that month, pay COBRA for another month, and really take time to recharge.

What makes you excited about working in tech?

Friends and family getting to use the things I work on.

Once I got into consumer software, I got to experience the fun of going home for the holidays and having my family bombard me with questions, suggestions, and sometimes complaints about my projects. My nieces and my kids got to use Google Docs for school. All of my family members had Android personal phones at one point when I was on the project. Their experiences weren’t always great, but it was really motivating to have people you know well and care about giving you feedback. I remember how much fun it was when my kids got to interact with my robot at X, and when my mom put on a VR headset for the first time. Those are pretty cool moments. These experiences helped me distill how I think about quality. I used to tell my colleagues that our bar should be ‘you’d be willing to call up a family member and convince them to buy this. And then live with the consequences.

What are some challenges you’ve faced growing as a leader?

One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced growing into a leader is giving hard feedback to people who work for me. I still feel a spike of anxiety when I have to do this. What’s worked for me is to remember that

the point of giving hard feedback is to really help people grow, have more impact, and achieve their goals.

I incorporate this line of reasoning into my feedback, so that it feels less like I’m expressing my disappointment, and more that I’m trying to help them improve. And to let them know explicitly that I believe in their growth potential.

Oddly enough, on the flip side, I have often been called out for my lack of poker face. A former colleague once said to a manager who was considering hiring me, ‘you’ll know exactly what Gabe is thinking and when he’s thinking it by the look on his face.’ I still struggle with concealing an incredulous or exasperated reaction when I have one. Thank goodness for the camera mute button and remote work.